Underworld's Karl Hyde and Rick Smith at Carriageworks, Photograph by Blake Houghton
A rave, typically, will be in the late late hours of the weekend, around the time that Saturday night becomes Sunday morning, and inhabited by the young and the rash – Mark Renton types, if you will.
In the middle of Sydney’s Carriageworks, however, a crowd has filled the place out on a very polite post-Christmas Monday night, with the even more polite curfew of 10:30pm, and said crowd is, for the most part, old enough to get the Mark Renton reference. If anyone can make it work, however, it’s Underworld. The evergreen UK partystarters have defied convention and continued to rave unto the joy fantastic for over 30 years – and besides, the last time they were in town, they were in the hallowed halls of the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, which is about as un-ravey as you can get.
A time and a place like this is small fry for a duo like Karl Hyde and Rick Smith, who are quick to get the room moving with the sprawling “Dark & Long (Dark Train)”. Hyde almost enters a fugue state as he incessantly chants the song’s lyrics, while Smith lets the song simmer to a boil before bringing up the synth line that’s sampled in one of the year’s biggest hits, PinkPantheress’ “Illegal”. The ensuing 80 minutes are a blitz of blinding strobe and cascading LED lights, accentuating the set’s hammering velocity with their presence, and placing the room into an eerie darkness during the free-falling ambient moments with their absence.
Curiously, Hyde – who spent most of Underworld’s Opera House shows in 2024 prowling the stage – largely confines himself behind Smith’s rig of synthesisers and mixers. It’s a confusing choice at first, almost making it feel as though the pair have barricaded themselves in against the audience. As the night progresses, however, it becomes apparent that Underworld are presenting a united front.
The pair are manning their own personal spaceship, firing proverbial lasers like the pulsating “Push Upstairs” and steering the course through the tense, breakbeat-heavy “Pearl’s Girl (Tin There)”. They give each other knowing glances and smiles while they’re flicking switches – as if to say, can you believe they’re still paying us to do this every night when we would have done it for free?
It all ends the same way every Underworld show has ended for the last 30 years: in the throes of the duo’s signature song, “Born Slippy (Nuxx)”. You often wonder how artists who have The Big Hit reckon with the obligation to perform it every time they’re on stage, and with a song like this, you have to assume what keeps it alive is the audience. Every night is someone’s first time experiencing it live. Every night, someone is reliving a crucial moment in their life soundtracked by it. Every night is thousands of new faces, shouting “lager, lager, lager, lager”.
Hyde and Smith look as pleased to be playing it as they would have been all those years ago – especially when Hyde finally emerges from the workstation and cuts loose. It’s a joy to behold, and truthfully there’s no better way imaginable to be spending a Monday night.
Underworld performed at Carriageworks, on Gadigal Country, on Monday 29 December.
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