Choose Life, Choose Lager

Underworld's "cry for help" became a rave anthem, a Trainspotting closer, and — without their permission — a Quilmes commercial about Argentine football passion. Thirty years on, Fred again.. brought them back on stage.

"Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television..." Renton's opening monologue in Trainspotting runs through everything there is to reject before rejecting all of it for heroin — and the whole film closes on Underworld's "Born Slippy .NUXX," playing under the final shot as he walks off with the money. That needle-drop is the reason most people know the song at all.

What most people don't know is that it isn't a party song. Karl Hyde wrote the lyrics on a drunken night out in Soho and recorded the vocal in one take. When he lost his place, he just repeated the last line — that's the entire reason the chorus is "lager lager lager lager." He's said it plainly: "The first time we played it live, people raised their lager cans and I was horrified because I was still deep into alcoholism. It was never meant to be a drinking anthem; it was a cry for help." The crowd heard a chant. He was describing rock bottom.

Argentina has its own chapter in this. In 1997, Quilmes lifted the melody without asking, rewrote it as "Gol, gol, gol, en tu cabeza hay un gol" for a World Cup-year ad, and ran it as the sound of national football passion. Underworld never authorized it, and Hyde has said publicly — Clarín, Rolling Stone — that he hated it. A song about drowning got turned into a beer jingle for a country that drowns loudest for fútbol.

Which is the context for what happened at Alexandra Palace this February: night two of Fred again..'s residency, and he brought Underworld out to play "Born Slippy" live, thirty years after Trainspotting made it inescapable. Karl Hyde and Rick Smith, on a stage built by someone who wasn't alive when they wrote it — the rave generation handing the song to whoever's actually running the room now. Underworld also just repressed it: "Nuxx Thirty," a real 30th-anniversary vinyl, new remaster on the A-side, a live '25 cut on the B-side, straight from their own store.

Found via DJ Mag.