Chemical questions, chemical answers, chemical twists and chemical now.

How is it now?

a. The new Chemical Brothers album Push The Button is, as it should be, the same as all their others, and totally different. It's a follow up to their first album, and a follow up to their last album, and a follow up to the ones in between. One or two of their previous albums are a follow up to this one.

b. The same, because it is the Chemical Brothers, and they do what they have always done, build beats that become lead sounds and which battle with noises that pile in from how they imagine pop history to be, what they believe pop to be, a thing you dance to, a thing you get in the way of, a thing that happens abruptly, a thing that happens to itself, a thing that drives you into the future. The same, because this is what they do, grab noise, break beat all over it, invite singers in to add language and merge attitude, get real emotional about the way music can make the world go round, fast, faster, fastest, with a little bit of slow, a touch of gentle, a push of contemplation, a feast of effect.

c. Different, because the Brothers are not what they were, where they were, who they were, who we thought they were, who they thought they were. Different, because the way they compile time, rhythm, words, beats, slang, pulse, voice isn't how they did it last time, or the time before, or the time before that, give or take the fact that they still like it loud, and they still like it heavy, and they still like to shriek, and they still like to locate a place where dream and reality meet at the slipping, sliding centre of sound.

d. It's what they do, thinking up tracks, and songs, and instrumentals that they would like to have had available as DJ's, sounds that sound like the sounds they would want to slip between something dead original and something that's simply fun, between something inspiring and something that, in many ways, is just insane. It's what they do, beginning an album with a warning, and then a threat, and then a promise, and then they get somewhere, and take it from there.

e. The way this track, or that track, with a title like Galvanize, or The Big Jump, or Shake Break Bounce builds up is supreme, perfectly done and impossible to imagine being done better.

f. The Chemical Brothers always did think for themselves.

Is the rest history?

a. Yes. It can be written up as history, as this leading to that, and that becoming this.

b. 1994. The Dust Brothers, the two industrious students from Manchester who'd drummed up Chemical Beats, became resident DJ's at the Albany pub in London's Great Portland Street. They were in one way just playing records they liked, but the way they displayed their love for music and their understanding of the way sound could fit together in novel, liberating ways was the equivalent of a band putting together their influences in the way they wrote and played music. Listeners, customers, musicians flocked. Rock met dance, dance met noise, noise met beat, and the illusory division between rock and dance was finally totally shattered.

c. The atmosphere was dense with haze, phase, and stunned dynamic. The Dust Brothers at this club in a pub basement during the summer and autumn of 1994, with the myth making name of Heavenly Sunday Social, has entered legend, and confirmed that it was in the world of dance where the most ground breaking and forward thinking ideas were being uncovered - by looking outside boundaries, and snobbery, and simply pursuing a thrilling musical idea as far as it would go before it spilled over the edge into obscurity and chaos.

d. Lawyers for the original Dust Brothers pointed out that this dancing town wasn't big enough for the both of the Dust Brothers, Rowland and Simons were compelled to change their name. Chemical Beats gave them their name, although Ed's grandmother favoured The Grit Brothers. The thing is, they were still brothers, despite the American lawyers, and word on the streets, and there was such a word, was so good, it really didn't matter that Dust had become Chemical. People wanted the sound, not the name.

f. 2005. Push The Button is the same and different, because there's no sense of following any of the fashions of the moment, no sense of turning to this style or that dynamic because it's in temporary favour, there's just a sense of following through on what has always appealed, a way of cracking together 23 Skidoo, Public Enemy and Traffic, or A Certain Ratio, Flaming Lips and Todd Rundgren, and sometimes this puts them ahead of the game, sometimes at the edge of the game, sometimes in a world of their own, which sometimes coincides with the world lots of other people inhabit.

g. 1995. The damned irresistible thing that the Chemicals had concocted, out of tradition and modernity, energy and tranquillity, volume and tension, hooks and pile driving fury, got christened - Big Beat - and an instant faithful following. The splintering, flailing, infectious music the brothers played in their Social club flipped over into the music on their debut album Exit Planet Dust. There was no loss of furious, looped energy between the dance floor and your hi-fi or the radio. World's collided like they do in your bedroom, or in a club, and now your iPod, a musical universe where everything can happen at once. Where speaker stomping tapped hip hop distortion can run into bulldozing slabs of punk guitar and smash through high walls of funk and flash at the edge of electronic distress and fight inside dark disco and race past titanic techno might.

h. The two brothers were a group without a lead singer, they were lead singers in a group that didn't have a lead singer. As much as anyone they developed the formula for using a variety of singers on an album - if only to ensure they weren't making purely instrumental music, and also because they got the chance to represent the vocal variety of some of the music they played as DJ's.

i. Edge said the album was his favourite of the year, Norman Cook was inspired to become a sort of dark, jolly cousin to the brothers, his well dusted Fatboy fantasy eating up piled up plates of sweetened, saucy Big Beat. The Chemical's dirty, lusty party starting debut album was a careering collage of heart hitting beats, funny, freaky samples, diabolical detours and sensational short cuts through the musical decades, which came shooting at you in deranged order. It was the kind of big time big success big change debut that meant that everything the Chemical Brothers now did would carry the expectancy of significance.

j. The years passed, and Ed and Tom would appear in photographs representing the Chemical Brothers, but really what you wanted was a photograph of the sound. The years passed, and they rode on top of the years, as they passed, into the cool, from bedroom to club to festival to stadium, into the heat, it was roller coaster, 1995, 1996, 1997, the years passed, and then the Chemical Brothers were million selling, Grammy winning, chart busting, pop star remixing, catch phrasing, thumping, soaring mainstream heroes.

k. However you defined the holy trinity of British rock-dance icons, The Chemical Brothers were an unshakeable part of it - New Order, Primal Scream, Chemical Brothers, or Underworld, Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, or The Orb, 808State and The Chemical Brothers. Exit Planet Dust would be named in top tens of the most important electronic albums of all time, alongside the follow up Dig Your Own Hole, alongside Eno, Kraftwerk, DJ Shadow, Massive Attack and Bjork.

l. When The Chemical Brothers are on top of their game, it is hard for anyone in their genre to touch them.

m. The Chemical Brothers would crash together Chemical Beats with the Beatles Tomorrow Never Knows as an encore during their live shows. Tomorrow Never was an example of the studio Beatles feeding on the conceptual thrust of electronic pioneer Stockhausen and the art movement Fluxus, distorting time and stretching sound to represent their state of mind and their surreal position at the centre of the universe. This Beatles, who came alive in the studio, which became for a while their refuge from the pop religion madness, fed directly into the brains of the brothers, and it became Setting Sun, 1996, with Noel Gallagher, not a sample of Tomorrow Never Knows but a sort of psycho-jazz, ghost modern repositioning, an infusion of tribute, update, rewrite, remix.

n. Gallagher played the role all guests tend to play on a Chemical Brothers track - cameos by Beth Orton, Tim Burgess, Richard Ashcroft, Mercury Rev's Jonathan Donahue, Bobby Gillespie, Bernard Sumner and Gallagher bring to the Brothers important news from other worlds. The Brothers use rock, pop, folk and cult singers, and the personal words and melodies that they bring with them, to give their fantastic, randomly enriched collages important, grounding elements of the song.

o. Push the Button is the same but different, because there's Tim Burgess, just where the Chemical Brothers like and want him, reminding us of something, but suggesting something else, and now here's Q-tip bagging a posse, showing off his figure, and here's Anwar Superstar wagging a finger, counting out the ways. The guest vocalists are honorary Chemical Brothers, even when they are sisters. The beats that are used are honorary brothers, or sisters, and occasionally, honorary Chemical Animals.

p. Setting Sun became one of the strangest, most deranged, and yet mesmerising number one pop hits of all time. The greatest pop hit of the year. From this particular biographers perch, the greatest thing Noel ever did, an imagined Beatles as subversive sonic tricksters replayed in the post-everything world, not simply a rewearing of the clothes, an adoption of the poses, a smirking of the riffs.

q. 1997. Block Rockin' Beats, as if they were now the Block Rockin' Brothers, at block rockin' number one again, identifying the enemy as the dull and the sentimental, organising themselves as an attack force on the obvious and the sanitised. One number one might have been a fluke: two was sheer strategy. The arch samplers found themselves, a little on the anonymous side, sampling pop fame.

r. The second album Dig Your Own Hole was, boom boom boom, a dance album, full of fun, fury and all those beats, laid out as a landscape of joy, and layered with layers of repetition and variation, slanted towards the definitely physical, but it was also an ingenious electronic album that used the studio, machines, programmes, plug ins, and accumulating experience to create a time shifting, space rocking, sense splitting surroundsound that ecstatically explored musical history. Hip hop could exist in the 60s, psychedelia was invented after De La Soul, computers had the blues, glam was from Mars, and punk only happened after Nine Inch Nails. You could move to it, like your dreams were on fire, and it was quite terrifically moving.

s. Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, of all fabulous people, said: "Chemical Brothers - man, I'm tellin' you, track five and track nine on Dig Your Own Hole. Those things are slayin' me. Plus there's just enough room for a greasy blues guitar - I think I know who could supply it." Yee-hah!

t. 1999. The third album Surrender was all their own work again, and this included handling all the celebrity guests, which tested the patience of some people, but not Blue Peter, who placed a copy of the CD inside their third time capsule, buried in January 2000, revealing themselves as unlikely supporters of hedonism and hybrid pop with a hard on. They must have thought it was a loveable record, and indeed underrated, and in many ways it was, the newer influence in the Brothers box being how they had absorbed the new indie music that was being made that was itself influenced by electronic music. (Some might suggest that Blue Peter actually buried their Millenium time capsule in 1998, and the cd inside was The Spice Girls, but what do they know.)

u. Push The Button is the same but different because it is influenced by many of the things the Chemicals music has itself influenced.

v. 2002. Their fourth album Come With Us. Beth's back, and Ashcroft. Fatboy mixes the Chemicals. The world keeps turning, and sounds as good as ever. The beat might not be as big, as braggy, but it's no less a mind turning occasion.

w. 2003. The Chemical Brothers are, more or less, ten years old. A collection of singles and so on is released, and displays the group - are they a group, or just a behind the scenes way of being in full view - as exactly the kind of operation - are they an operation, or simply timekeepers - that would remix both Mercury Rev and Kylie Minogue. A group - or a piece of mind - whose battles were electronic, whose intentions were spatial, whose dimensions were distinct, whose actions were bold.

x. 2005. Just when you thought they must be running out of energy . . .

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