Surrender features guest vocalists
Noel Gallagher (
Oasis),
Hope Sandoval (
Mazzy Star),
Bernard Sumner (
New Order) and
Jonathan Donahue (
Mercury Rev). The album is more experimental than previous efforts. "Let Forever Be" is a clear tribute to
the Beatles' "
Tomorrow Never Knows". "Out of Control" is house influenced, and the breakout single "Hey Boy Hey Girl" has a rave sound. Of "The Sunshine Underground", Tom Rowlands said: "I think the title came from those psychedelic poster books. We wanted it to sound like a live band finding its feet. It was influenced by a live version of 'Angel Sigh' on
Spiritualized's
Fucked Up Inside. It went through a lot of versions and this one's a composite of a lot of different takes. I love the mad bit in the middle when it goes into hyperspace and turns into this huge, gurning monster." Many of the artists that the duo worked with on this album, they would work with again. The duo were quick to work again with
Bobby Gillespie, who appears on the third track and third single "Out of Control", providing backing vocals: they remixed Gillespie's
Primal Scream song "Swstk Ys" (as it was titled on the 1999 single release), which later appeared on the band's 2000 album
Xtrmntr.
Surrender was the first Chemical Brothers album not to feature an appearance by
Beth Orton, though she would appear on the following album
Come with Us, on the song "The State We're In".
Album cover The album and singles artwork were provided by London-based silkscreen artist and illustrator Kate Gibb, using screen prints of photographs found in the
Hulton Picture Library. Gibb also went on to illustrate the Chemical Brothers albums
Come with Us,
We Are the Night, and
Brotherhood. The cover image was a treatment of a photograph called
Jesus Amongst the Fans taken by
Richard Young at The Great British Music Festival at the
Kensington Olympia in 1976. The "Jesus" in question was a music fan called William Jellett, who had adopted the divine moniker and was often seen dancing ecstatically at concerts across the UK from the 1960s to the 1990s. His "miracles" were to give dried fruit and nuts to strangers. Ed Simons said of the album cover in
Q magazine, "We liked the idea of everyone else sitting down and being chilled out and just one person really getting it, like one of our gigs in the
Midwest, actually". The magazine stated, however, in February 1999 the duo were confronted with a novel problem: they had, in Simons' words "about two weeks" to sort out an album cover, plan a live show, and do endless promotional duties in Japan. At one point, the image that was used as the single cover for "
Out of Control", released later in 1999, was intended to be the album cover for
Surrender. == Release ==