Underworld – Dark & Long

A Romford train line, then a ten-minute mix

“Dark & Long” opens dubnobasswithmyheadman, the Underworld album released on 24 January 1994 by Junior Boy’s Own. Karl Hyde, Rick Smith, and Darren Emerson made that record between 1991 and 1993 at Lemonworld and The Strongroom in London. Hyde writes the words, often in a notebook, in pieces rather than as a finished lyric. Some lines go back to 1990, when the earlier version of the band had split and he was in Minneapolis. Others were written on a train toward the band’s studio in Romford. He has said the “what a laugh” in the song came from listening to the accent in East London, where they were based. Waitresses turn up in this lyric and in others from the same period. He said they mattered because they give you a place to stop.

Junior Boy’s Own released the single on 13 June 1994, after “Spikee” and before “Cowgirl.” The short version people heard on the radio was “Hall’s edit,” just over four minutes, credited to Hyde and Smith. The same release carried the mixes the clubs played. “Dark Train” runs about ten minutes. Emerson is on that one with Hyde and Smith. Other versions on the original 12-inches and CD stretch much further: “215 Miles” and “Thing in a Book” each run about twenty minutes, “Spoon Deep” about eighteen. The band wrote, mixed, and produced them. On 25 June 1994 the single entered the UK chart at No. 57 and was gone the next week.

On the album version you hear Hyde’s voice close to the beat, talking as much as singing, with a bass line that keeps moving and drums that do not rush. “Dark Train” takes most of the vocal away, lifts the speed, and leaves the rhythm to run. That mix, not the four-minute edit, is the one that crossed from smaller clubs into the bigger British rooms of the mid-1990s. The title on many later compilations still says “Dark Train.”