Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons met in the history department at the University of Manchester in 1989. They started DJing together as the Dust Brothers at a night called Naked Under Leather, first at a club on Whitworth Street and then at Sankeys Soap on Beehive Mill in Ancoats — back when Sankeys was a grimy basement that smelled of damp and sweat and possibility.
Exit Planet Dust in 1995 was the debut — Chemical Beats, Leave Home, the kind of tracks that made big beat a genre before big beat became a punchline. Dig Your Own Hole in 1997 was the masterpiece. Block Rockin’ Beats, Setting Sun (with Noel Gallagher, naturally), The Private Psychedelic Reel — it was heavier and more psychedelic than almost anything else in electronic music at the time. Surrender followed in 1999 with Hey Boy Hey Girl and Let Forever Be.
The Manchester connection is specific: they were shaped by the city’s club culture, came up through residencies, and absorbed the anything-goes attitude that the Hacienda era left behind. They weren’t from Manchester — Rowlands is from Oxfordshire, Simons from London — but Manchester made them. The city’s late-80s and early-90s scene was the petri dish.
Their live show became enormous: Glastonbury headliners, worldwide arena tours, visuals that set the standard for electronic live performance. They moved to London eventually, as most do, but the roots are here. Sankeys closed in 2017. The warehouse spaces they played are mostly flats now. But the Chemical Brothers proved that two blokes with turntables and a sampler could be as exciting as any rock band. They proved it in Manchester first.