Is this illegal? Pink Pantheress ushers Underworld back to the pop charts

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, or underneath a massive blancmange painted to look like a rock, you will have heard PinkPantheress’s hit single Illegal. which is currently meandering in the middle reaches of the UK singles chart.

It’s a chirpy garage pop number that has had its opening lines snipped for numerous TikTok lip sync videos, including an especially excruciatingly routine by former Labour leader Ed Miliband. Honestly, you politicians need to stay away from good things.

What brings the track to my attention is its sampling of Underworld’s Dark & Long (Dark Train), nearly 30 years after the track rose to fame on the original Trainspotting soundtrack. Underworld’s plump synth blaps are all over the Pantheress tune, and it works really, really well. 

I’m going to embed the video for the single here, and you had better darn well listen to it. I’m also going to include Nia Archives' hyper junglist remix because Nia Archives is the bees knees and/or wasps elbows and it'll blast the cobwebs from your cup-a-soup.

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Spending time (and space) with Jeff Mills

I recently caught up with visionary Detroit techno producer Jeff Mills. You can read the result of our meeting in issue 127 of Electronic Sound magazine.

Mills earned himself the nickname 'The Wizard' when he rose to prominence in the so-called "second wave" of Detroit techno. He co-founded the influential techno collective Underground Resistance, and he's been putting out stuff on his own Axis Records for well over 30 years,

He has produced techno scores for numerous old films, perhaps most notably for Fritz Lang's Metropolis. He's collaborated with NASA and made a black hole-themed cosmic opera. He's basically a spaceman. I interviewed a spaceman.

Mills was a lot of fun to interview. His pedigree is undeniable, so it was always going to be an easy interview. Lots to talk about. When he got onto metaphysics and telepathy, I felt my brain expanding. This is a guy who got into comic books at an early age, and he's been having wild visions ever since. So much fun.

It's always an honour to have a cover feature in Electronic Sound magazine. This now gives me extra privileges as a hotshot journalist. I can barge into any concert with the phrase "don't you know who I am". I get to ride around in one of those sedan chair things. And I get a chufty badge, which is a normal badge that I've scrawled "chufty" onto.

Other artists featured in this issue include M, as in the famous M who did Pop Muzik fame, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark collaborator Claudia Brücken, and the quite brilliant Rival Consoles. Oh and Children Of The Bong too, whose trippy bleeps I was obsessed with in the '90s.

Blatant plug: get your Electronic Sound fix here.

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