Who Are The Prodigy?
Glastonbury, June 1995. It's getting dark, and the field in front of the NME stage is
heaving from front to back as searchlights sweep the crowd and discordant samples
echo through the air. Maxim strides to the edge of the stage, and stares into the night
with crazy white eyes. He raises his microphone. "Glastonbury ... Are you ready to rock
?" As the shattered glass breakbeats of Break And Enter ring out at huge volume and
thousands of dancing people turn the entire field into one enormous moshpit, the crowd
are greeted by the deranged spectacle of a flame haired Keith Flint rolling onto the
stage in a massive glass ball. There was no more room for doubt - The Prodigy's
state-of-the-art fusion of dance energy, rock power, and visual madness had arrived.
Glastonbury must have seemed a universe away back in 1990, when Liam Howlett
arrived at the offices of XL Recordings with a demo cassette of ten tunes that he'd
recorded in his bedroom. After discovering the unity and excitement of the rave scene,
Liam had moved on from his obsession with hip-hop, abandoning his hip-hop band Cut
To Kill in order to concentrate on his own hard dance music. He was soon producing
raw, edgy tracks, which took inspiration from the hard end of the underground dance
scene (Joey Beltram, Meat Beat Manifesto) and combined those sounds with
speeded-up hip-hop breakbeats, and which were innovative and exciting enough to
secure him a record deal - and four of them were lifted direct from the tape to make up
The Prodigy's first single. What Evil Lurks was released on vinyl only in February
1991, selling a respectable 7000 copies and gathering The Prodigy's first few mentions
in the dance press at the same time. It was a promising enough beginning, but the next
single was a whole different story.
Charly was the record that propelled The Prodigy out of the underground rave scene
and into the Top 3. It had been the buzz record on the party scene for months before its
commercial release, and it flew out of the shops as soon as it was available. Looking
back, past the dismal spate of cash-in kiddy techno records that followed in Charly's
wake (Roobarb, The Magic Roundabout and Sesame Street all received the cheesy
breakbeat treatment), it's hard to remember just how important a tune it was for the
time. It captured the euphoria, the energy, the sense of humour, and the shared
excitement of being part of a massive underground adventure - meeting at motorway
service stations to call up mobile phones and follow coded directions before dancing all
night in bizarre locations was a weekly ritual for thousands and thousands of people
back then, and rave, which now sounds like a dirty word, was the biggest and best thing
to happen to British culture since punk rock.
No band opitomised the relentless energy of rave culture better than The Prodigy - with
Charly causing whistle posse madness around the country, there was no shortage of
promoters willing to put on the band's frenetic live show, and from the very beginning
they toured incessantly. Leeroy's lurching grace, Maxim's incendiary mic style and
Keith's evident insanity were all part of the appeal without them, The Prodigy would
have been just one more faceless keyboard act, but with them they were an exhilarating
whirl of on-stage madness. The band quickly built up a devoted fanbase within the rave
scene - and earned a reputation (which they have never relinquished) as the best buzz
going. These fans propelled Charly into the Top Ten when it was commercially
released, and exposed The Prodigy to the mainstream for the first time. Despite the
snobbish derision that the dance press started to direct towards the band because of
their commercial success (Mixmag famously put a picture of Liam pointing a gun at his
head on the front cover, accompanied by the headline "Did Charly Kill Rave", the rave
crews remained loyal, and sent a succession of records - Everybody In The Place, Fire,
Out Of Space, and Wind It Up into the upper echelons of then charts. An album,
Experience provided seventy minutes of mayhem, and disproved the conventional
wisdom of the time - which claimed that dance albums did not sell - by going gold within
weeks of its release and spending 25 weeks in the Top 40.
Behind this seamless success, however, a more complicated situation was developing.
By the time that Wind It Up made Number 11 in March 1993, the underground network
of parties and events that gave birth to the band and carried it to national prominence
had started to fragment. The forces of progressive house and intelligent techno were on
the march, mellowing out the less committed rave kids, and driving the breakbeat
diehards into the ever-faster, ever-darker maelstrom of hardcore. At the same time,
Liam had grown tired of the breakbeat-plus-sample-equals-rave-anthem school of
music making, and although Prodigy records continued to be successful, he no longer
found them challenging to make. Rave audiences, fuelled by ecstasy, were uncritical
and undemanding - they made it too easy for him to repeat himself. It was time for a
change.
Displaying the kind of courage and creativity rarely shown by successful artists mining a
lucrative musical niche, Liam began to take The Prodigy into uncharted territory. Live,
the band concentrated less on preaching to the converted, and began to put themselves
in front of less malleable audiences - they played students' unions, rock venues and
festivals, increasingly excited by the more aggressive mood of crowds where alcohol
was the drug of choice. Liam started listening to the hard rock music of Nirvana,
Smashing Pumpkins and The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, checking out the intense live
energy of Rage Against The Machine and Biohazard at festivals. Inevitably, Prodigy
music started to reflect these new influences, as well as the changes happening in
dance music at the time.
The transitional record was One Love, which made its first appearance as an
anonymous white label stamped "Earthbound". A tightly syncopated mesh of tribal
house music and distorted beats, the record was favourably received despite the fact
that nobody knew who had made it - and when it was properly released as a Prodigy
record in the summer of 1993, it fared just as well in the charts as the rave anthems that
had preceded it. One Love was an important hurdle - the band's fans were clearly
prepared to follow them through daunting changes in direction, and knowing this gave
Liam the confidence to push against the boundaries of his music. From One Love
onwards, Prodigy records would become more and more challenging - and more and
more successful.
For twelve months after One Love, the Prodigy were silent - Liam was busy in the
studio, working on Music For The Jilted Generation, the band's second album. When
they broke silence, it was with their most effective record to date No Good (Start The
Dance). The single combined hammering, syncopated beats, an incredibly taut
bassline and chunks of screaming machine noise, all of which was barely concealed by
the most immediate, radio-friendly vocal hook of the band's career. The record spent
seven weeks in the Top Ten, peaking at Number 4, and paving the way for the release
of the album.
Music For The Jilted Generation was released in July 1994. It went straight into the
album charts at Number 1, going gold within a week of its release. And by this time the
band had clearly won over the critics as well as the public Music For The Jilted
Generation was universally well received in the music press, and was nominated later in
the year for the prestigious Mercury Music Prize. Two more singles were released from
the album Voodoo People backed with a murderous mix from the then
rapidly-emerging Dust Brothers (soon to become the Chemical Brothers) , and Poison,
a bruising, downtempo hip-hop instrumental which remains one of the most extreme -
and popular tracks the band have recorded. Both singles charted high despite the fact
that they were already available on the album Poison became the band's ninth
consecutive Top 15 single.
The Prodigy's Glastonbury appearance that summer marked them out as undeniably
the most exciting live band in the country - five years of practically incessant touring had
clearly honed their abilities as performers. Keith, sporting dyed and shaved hair, a
pierced septum, and an increasingly exotic wardrobe had become magnetically
photogenic, and Maxim's cats-eye contact lenses, bare chest and daring selection of
kilts were not far behind. Emboldened by their success at the best festival in Europe,
the band seemed determined to play at all the others, and over the next twelve months
their touring became even more relentless - Iceland, Japan, Australia, America and
even Macedonia all featured on an increasingly hectic schedule. Caught up in the whirl
of activity, Liam only managed occasional spells in the studio, but the time he spent
there was productive to say the least - the result was The Prodigy's most incendiary
musical statement to date, and the record that took them to a whole new level of
success.
In March 1996, Firestarter entered the UK charts at Number 1. It was the band's first
Number 1 single, and it stayed at the top for 3 weeks. A high-impact compound of
relentless sub-bass, eerily circling guitar samples and unmistakably punk vocals, it's the
most extreme, noisy and confrontational record ever to make it to the top spot - a fact
not lost on the tabloids who began a witty, intelligent and well-informed "Ban This Sick
Record" campaign. The video, which somehow managed to match the intensity of the
music, brought Keith in all his glory to the nation for the first time, and, unsurprisingly,
provoked record numbers of complaints from Top Of The Pops viewers. As a statement
of intent, it was as uncompromising as it was successful.
The summer of 1996 saw The Prodigy back on the festival circuit, playing at Brighton,
Phoenix, T In The Park and Reading in the UK and many more abroad. In all, The
Prodigy did 70 gigs in 1996, playing to hundreds of thousands of people all over the
world. Spiky-haired guitar terrorist Giz Butt joined the live show, adding to the on-stage
mayhem. With the band averaging a gig every five days, as well as spending hours in
airports and hotels, it's perhaps not surprising that the third album took so long to
record. In November, Breathe became the band's second single of the year, and their
second Number 1. Keith and Maxim growled their way through a ferocious
call-and-response chorus, while Liam piled on the distortion and pulled a few deft tricks
with a moody acoustic guitar. Breathe quickly outsold even Firestarter, becoming The
Prodigy's first ever platinum single (over 750,000 copies sold in the UK) and
establishing them once and for all in the premier league of British bands. Abroad, the
touring was evidently paying off - Breathe was a top 20 hit in more than 20 countries,
making it to Number 1 in 8 of them. The single has sold well over 1.5 million copies
worldwide.
The start of 1997 saw Firestarter making its tenacious way up the US Billboard Top
100, and The Prodigy putting the finishing touches to their third album. The Fat Of The
Land is set for release on June 30th 1997. As well as Breathe and Firestarter, the
album features Narayan, a collaboration with Crispian Mills from Kula Shaker, and
Diesel Power which features wayward lyrical madman Kool Keith, also known as
Doctor Octagon. It is without doubt the most eagerly awaited album of the band's
career, and it looks set to be the most successful as well.
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