Always Loved a Film

Album: Barking (2010)
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Songfacts®:

  • This is the second single from English electronic group Underworld's eighth album, Barking. The digital single was released on August 31, 2010, with a physical release following on September 20th.
  • Rick Smith and Karl Hyde wrote all nine tunes for the album at their studio in Essex, then sent the unfinished album around to various guest artists well-known for their contributions to trance, drum and bass and dubstep. Their collaborators then added their own production work from there. In the case of this song, the duo teamed up with house music producers Mark Knight and D. Ramirez. Singer Karl Hyde told inthemix.com about the collaboration: "We knew about their sound from our collaboration with them on 'Downpipe' the year before. We knew them as good people; really straight-forward, positive people. No complications. They were the only people that we invited round to the studio and played them everything and said, 'Pick something you'd like to do'.
    They wanted to do 'Always Loved A Film' and while they were in the studio with Rick, he played them 'Between Stars' and they said, 'Can we have a go at that as well!'"
  • Hyde discussed the album with inthemix.com: "A lot of the sounds that are contemporary today were contemporary when the first Underworld album appeared. Someone said to me when I was writing last year, you should really listen to the Underneath The Radaralbum [Underworld's first record from 1988]. He said there are some cool sounds on that album that sound very contemporary. And that was an interesting bridge as a writer from where we came from to right now."
  • According to MTV, when Underworld performed this song on the October 26, 2010 edition of Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, it marked the first time an English electronic dance music act had performed live on late-night television.
  • Hyde told MTV News why they decided to record a collaboration record: "The whole collaboration thing on this album comes out of 20 years of having our work remixed, and you hear all these cool remixes, but it's too late to collaborate with those people. The album is out and you're on tour, but you're thinking, 'That guy did something fantastic!' and, 'If [only] we had that track on the album, instead of the one we had.' After 20 years of that, Rick was like, 'Enough is enough, and let's start jamming with these people!'"

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