"I think it's just the way we are," said Nick Hallam, the band's DJ and producer, in a telephone interview from a London recording studio last week. Hallam formed Stereo MCs with vocalist Rob Birch, who he has known since they were 7 years old, and the pair shot to fame in 1992 with the hit "Connected."
"I guess that a lot of dance music is fairly ambivalent, isn't it? It's just about making a banging kind of sound and having a party.
"I think all our music is political in a way, in just the fact that we're human beings and we live on the planet, and we're aware of what's going on around us and we're sensitive to that. So it's bound to have some kind of social context in our records, even if it's not obvious."
The Stereo MCs' most recent, sixth album, "Double Bubble," is more upbeat and danceable, but they still do not avoid serious subjects.
"We wanted to make a more sort of 'up' kind of feeling, a more dance kind of record this time, but I guess we still want to write songs [where we] try and get some kind of vibe over rather than just sort of...it's a total party record," said Hallam.
"Hopefully, it can be that, as well as having a slightly deeper edge to it."
"Double Bubble" contains a track called "Revolution," which offers up a critical commentary on the state of the British society, said Hallam.
The song is about how Britain has been "lulled into a false sense of prosperity" over the last 10 years, although he admitted things have changed somewhat after the financial crisis.
"Everybody's so interested in going shopping and getting new computers, all sitting at home and feeling happy and everything. But nobody is really bothered about doing anything about the state of the planet," he said, "Everybody's too sort of happy to have a revolution about anything!"
Few dance bands have lasted as long as Stereo MCs, and Hallam says that is because of the band's more cerebral approach to their work.
"We probably wanted to be a party group when we started, but I think our brains just can't let us do that," he said.
"We just can't go, 'Oh, let's make a party tune!'" he said. "That's why we could never just write a hit record. If anybody says, 'Write a hit record,' we couldn't just sit there and do it if it sounds stupid. We want to do what we feel."
Stereo MCs perform on Sun. at 9 p.m. at B1 Maximum, located at 11 Ulitsa Ordzhonikidze. M. Leninsky Prospekt. Tel. 648-6777.
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