A Q&A with the recently revitalized emperors of electronic dance, The Prodigy

The Prodigy have made a spectacular comeback. Some would argue they’ve never been away as they consistently tour, however, they’re now back at the top end of the UK charts and a new generation has embraced their rave-rock beat-blast.

The Prodigy were forged in the fires of the Essex rave scene when keyboard whizz Liam Howlett was encouraged by his friends Keith Flint and Leeroy Thornhill to form a group. They suggested he put a set together and they would perform, dancing onstage and hyping the crowd. Once they were joined by ragga MC Keith ‘Keety’ Palmer, better known as Maxim Reality, the line-up was complete.

Howlett’s natural pop ear ensured he created some sweaty classics from the era, such as ‘Your Love’ and ‘Out Of Space’, but with 1994’s ‘Music For The Jilted Generation’ the band embraced a tougher, leerier sound which bloomed into the guitar crossover album ‘Fat Of The Land’. In 1997 this briefly made them the biggest band on the planet, forever encapsulated in the popular consciousness by the cartoon punk videos for ‘Firestarter’ and ‘Breathe’ featuring Reality and Flint on snarling vocals. It was a feat they weren’t immediately inclined to top. Instead they retired from the limelight. Thornhill quit in 2000 and the band seemed to disappear, coming back with the limp ‘Baby’s Got A Temper’ single in 2002 and the album ‘Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned’ in 2004. The latter was the first Prodigy album to arrive without any sense of occasion, simply a just passable club-centric album featuring guest vocalists such as Juliette Lewis and Liam Gallagher (Howlett’s brother in law).

This year, however, with the single ‘Omen’ and the album ‘Invaders Must Die’, all on their own label Take Me To The Hospital (through Cooking Vinyl), The Prodigy rediscovered their rave roots, crashed them into the rock guitars of ‘Fat Of The Land’, and came howling back onto the stages and into the charts.

Thomas H Green caught up with them in London.

How is it being back on the promotional treadmill?

Liam: “I forgot we had to do it.”
Maxim: “The best buzz is being back on stage and that’s it for me.”
Keith: “What pisses me off is everything we do, we like to do it 100%. Now, if you talk to me, Liam or Maxim about what it was like to write the album we want to do it with the passion that’s on the album. But, if you’re the sixth or seventh person to interview us in a row…”
Liam: “…which you’re not…
Keith: “…we’d be, like [makes bored droning noise] and you’d be, like, ‘Fuckin’ ‘ell, these cunts don’t give a shit about their album. If they don’t want to tell me about it, I’ll go home’.”

You’ve made yourself a bit more media accessible for this album.

L: “Very slightly. The biggest [new] thing with us is the internet. Before, we were like, ‘Nah, fuck this shit.’ Now, you’re a fool if you ignore that. We don’t feel like we’ve compromised ourselves. We still don’t do TV. We feel the final untouched frontier is seeing a band play live – you can’t download live. If we go on TV, that’s just watering it down.”
M: “It’s not real to us, being onstage in front of 250 people cordoned into a studio, told when to dance, five girls put at the front – it’s not a real performance. People who are passionate about the music come to the gigs.”
K: “Our buzz is from the crowd. We suck off them and spit it back. They ignite and we’re the fuel and then they’re our fuel. Together we’re volatile and then there’s an explosion.”

I used to go to [long defunct sweaty north-east London rave Mecca] The Labyrinth in 1991-1992, which was where you did your first gig.

M: “I used to go there before it was The Labyrinth, when it was just the Dalston Four Aces Club so going there and meeting these guys, I went, ‘Oh, I know this place, I used to come here when I was 15-16’.”
L: “We just appeared in a DVD about it, the film covers the club’s whole history, from reggae sound systems to the Specials.”
K: “Crazy place – The Rat Pack, Billy Bunter…”
L: “…Evil Eddie Richards.”

How do you respond when an audience doesn’t react energetically?

L: “If they don’t give it, you get angry with them and it comes out as another energy.”
K: “Sometimes, back in the day, someone would put on a flaky rave, no one would turn up but we’d still put 100% into it, still always rock it, because we enjoy the music, we enjoy performing it.”

In those days, around 1993, you used to perform in matching pyjama-style outfits.

L: “They come up a lot in interviews. We can laugh at ourselves but I don’t think any of us are embarrassed by that.”
M: “We weren’t the only ones doing it, we were just the ones highlighted.”
K: “Who doesn’t look through photos from the last five or ten years and say, ‘Fucking hell, what was I wearing there?’.”

Do you have to go to a private space and warm up before you perform?

K: “We’ve done an interview minutes before we go on. I used to smoke a lot of weed – I don’t smoke weed anymore – people used to say, ‘You smoke all that before you go on – fuck, where do you get the energy from?’ That’s what we do, we walk out there and we’re fucking alive.”
M: “I don’t understand what you’re making a big deal about, it’s just the way we are.”
K: “If you were listening to your favourite song on your i-Pod at the bus stop, well, you wouldn’t be like, ‘Fuckin ‘ell,’ going mad [starts doing rave arm movements], doing a running man, wouldja? But when that track played in a club you’d be fuckin’ ‘avin’ it. It’s the same thing.”

You have one of the best-selling albums of the year so far in the UK – it must feel good to be back on top.

L: “I tell you what’s good is having that array of new tunes to play. Fuckin’ ‘ell, we’ve got too many now – what are we going to put in the set? That’s really exciting. We haven’t really ever gone off the road, we’ve always done gigs, it’s important for us, even when we’re writing a record.”
K: “There’s certain tracks that have become pinnacles of the set that I never thought would be on a par with ‘Smack My Bitch Up’, ‘Firestarter’ and ‘Breathe’. When we play ‘Take Me To The Hospital’ I can’t even describe it.”

On tour to promote the singles collection ‘Their Law’ were you growing a bit bored of the whole thing, a bit bored of playing live?

K: “In comparison to now, maybe, yeah…”
L: “Not bored, though, never bored. The singles tour we all enjoyed, we came off the back of it really energized. It was kind of weird because it was a no-brainer, all these records had already been out so there was no real challenge, people wanted to here the hits so they were going, ‘Here comes ‘Charlie’, here comes this’n’that’.”
M: “Doing that tour was when we saw a new younger crowd coming out to see us, which was inspiring.”
L: “It’s fair to say that the tour on the back of ‘Always Outnumbered’ we really weren’t together.”
K: “What I can say, with all sense of reality, is that if you saw us now, you’d say this is as good as I’ve ever seen this band. I sat with Liam at the front of the tour bus in Europe recently and said, ‘Am I kidding myself or has it never been this good, this exciting, this much camaraderie?’ That’s not even bravado.”
M: “We were good then but we’re better now.”

At the end of the new album, ‘Invaders Must Die’, there’s a funky horn-led number called ‘Stand Up’ which is very different to your usual style. Is this a new direction you’re heading into?

L: “Definitely not. When you’re out sometimes the DJ drops something slower at the end to take you on a different journey. I think I heard P.I.L.’s ‘Rise’ at a rave, dropped at the end of all this mad dancing. We liked that effect. ‘Stand Up’ was originally an instrumental, maybe for a collaborative record, but we decided halfway through that this was going to be more of a band album so all the collaborations were shelved. We all agreed that although half the people wouldn’t get it, it had a certain feel, an up feel, almost triumphant.”
K: “For someone listening to the album thinking, ‘Fucking Hell, this was worth the wait,’ that track is like a fist in the air – ‘Yeah, my boys are back’. It is triumphant for us and it’s the track we play as everyone’s leaving the venue, the same as at the end of a rave.”

‘Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned’ was almost a Liam Howlett solo album. The first time I thought that the full Prodigy experience might be back was when I heard the cover of The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’.

L: “I generally don’t tackle cover versions, not unless I can do something totally different. I feel strongly on this. I think anyone who covers a song exactly the same as the original is a complete fucking waste of time; it’s an exercise in going up your own arse. When Tricky covered [the Public Enemy song] ‘Black Steel [In The Hour Of Chaos]’, he took it in a totally different direction. We actually did ‘Ghost Town’ to play live and then it came out on the ‘War Child’ album.”

Did you used to go to The Barn Club in Braintree, Essex?

L: “The Barn was a great club, you know, it was in the top ten in the country at one stage. Everyone passed through that club – Mr C, Frankie Bones was resident DJ there. We formed in that club. I remember [ex-Prodigy member] Leeroy [Thornhill] had a discussion with Keith. I’d given Keith a demo. On one side were some tracks he’d asked for and on the other was my music. He and Leeroy had a discussion about it and approached me. That’s how the group began.”

House music, techno, all modern dance music seemed to bloom originally in America but find its home in the UK.

L: “Americans don’t know what to do with music, that’s the problem. Americans know they’ve got hip hop and country & western but if you take rock music, apart from Nirvana, all the best rock bands are English, all the best dance music comes from England, all the best electronic music.”
M: “They only come over here to get signed.”
L: “Kings Of Leon – [the Americans] don’t know what the fuck to do with them. White Stripes – they don’t know what to do with them. They only know how to do certain things; they don’t know how to nurture certain cultures.”
M: “America hasn’t got the melting pot coming through tying it all together.”
L: “Apart from hip hop.”
M: “Even hip hop’s not a melting pot of different cultures, it’s still segregated, black people doing their thing, Jewish people doing their thing, Hispanics doing their thing, not really mixing it up and creating a new style. London is a melting pot of different cultures – he’s got reggae, he’s got hip hop, he’s got something else, and then they make music together.”
L: “The dance scene in America was mainly a gay thing. When Americans started to learn about English rave culture they were like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ They didn’t know what was going on and they tried to adopt it back again, then it turned into something else.”

In Britain, when you first came through in the early ‘90s, there was already an element of the dance scene that rejected you, the Balearic old guard.

L: “We were always the punks who rode on the edge of it. In the beginning it was the Belgian style we were trying to push. When we got respect for the second album, we started to get tagged as techno, especially in Europe. Because we were experienced in techno and had a lot of respect for proper techno artists, we were like, ‘No, no, we aren’t techno, those guys are’.”

So how did the rock elements come in?

L: “We went to America. I remember going to LA and Keith bought a Rage Against The Machine album. I played it non-stop, that and [Dr Dre’s album] ‘The Chronic’. I went back [to the UK] and it was at a time when the rave scene was really taking a dive.”
M: “We were listening to mix-tapes, rave mix-tapes, not any other kinds of music, before going to America.”
L: “My head had gone off it. I remember standing in a rave in Scotland going, ‘Fuckin’ ‘ell, this is no good, I’m not into this at all anymore.’ I came back from LA wanting to write a tune with the funk and power of Rage Against The Machine. I didn’t even register it as rock music, just as another form of getting some noise across. It wasn’t even rock music [we made], it just had fucked up guitar on it. The closest we’ve come to making a rock record is ‘Their Law’.”

‘Their Law’ was adopted as an anthem by anti-road protesters in the mid-‘90s and you made a comment about being happy roads were being built to get you into London quicker. Have you changed your mind about that?

L: “Nah, I’m not a crusty, man, I’m a fucking B-boy.”

There was a painting on the inner sleeve of your second album, ‘Music For The Jilted Generation’ – an image of a long-haired bloke chopping a rope bridge to stop police reaching a rave…

L: “We didn’t want him to look new age but he came out a bit like that.”

Do you accept your music will sometimes be adopted by causes?

L: “We do accept that. It was when people were asking if we’d act as spokesmen, we were like, ‘Nah, it’s great when you’re into it but we don’t want to do that,’ so we kind of rebelled against that. We were angry that whole fucking period as we were getting attacked by everybody. People just didn’t understand where we were coming from.”

Do you get recognised when you pop to the shop for a pint of milk?

K: “Three days out of seven.”
M: “Now and again but… nah.”

Is it a hassle?

K: “No, that’s what you do as a job.”
M: “Most people who come up to me are just people who like the music. They give me a bit of respect and I like that. I prefer people to come up and give me respect than to just stare at me from a distance. What the fuck are they looking at? Do they think I’m going to get in a fight [with them]?”

On your old long-form video ‘Electronic Punks’ you do some mad dancing – did you used to practice?

K: “No, never, that’s just from loads of nights out. I wouldn’t call it dancing but thanks for the compliment. A number of years ago I jumped onstage with The Prodigy and never got kicked off.”

Your legs don’t move so fast anymore, though.

M: “You wanna come and fucking see him.”
K: “Yeah, they’re on fire.”
M: [Sings, “Legs on fire,” to the tune of The Prodigy’s ‘World’s On Fire’] “He’s still got it, man. If Keith didn’t have it we’d say so, and vice versa.”

I’m not saying you don’t project energy onstage, just that your legs don’t move as fast as, say, in the ‘Everybody In The Place’ video.

M: “Obviously the tunes were 170 BPM in those days. You can still carry that energy with slower tunes. We proved that with ‘Poison’.”
L: “After ‘Fat Of The Land’, after Leeroy left, we decided that was the end of that phase and that we enjoyed not doing that anymore. It’s come back a bit lately, though, but if someone asked me to do the dance for ‘Everybody In The Place’, I couldn’t do it.”

You’ve all come across in interviews over the years as obsessed with speed.

M: “I’m not obsessed with speed, I’m more obsessed with rollercoasters, the adrenalin rush.”
K: “I’m a proper hick. I love motor vehicles. I like driving anything, the faster and more edgy it can be, the better.”
L: “We went go-karting in Australia, we took our crew.”
K: “I was the daddy, I came third.”
M: “I came in twelfth out of 25, just to show you I’m not in that league, man. I was driving along like I was taking the kids to the beach.”
K: “Funnily enough, I once came alongside him coming out of London. He was in his car, I was on the bike and I thought, ‘Ah, it’s Keety,’ powered up to this roundabout and pulled alongside him. He was like, ‘Whaaat? Who’s this fucking geezer?’ He floored it and was off.”
M: “I didn’t realise it was him. He could see me but I couldn’t see him because of the helmet. All I could see was this guy pointing – what the fuck does he want? – I thought he was gonna go off on some road rage thing.”

Do you have any competitiveness with the Chemical Brothers?

K: “Not in the slightest.”
L: “Tom [Rowlands] and Ed [Simons] are friends of ours. I see Ed nearly every day when I’m in the studio. They mixed ‘Voodoo People’ when they were still The Dust Brothers and they made ‘Chemical Beats’ which is a classic.”
K: “Liam used to DJ sometimes on tour. I remember the Dust Brothers was something I pulled out of the box suggesting it should be played every time.”
L: “The thing about the dance scene is no one’s really doing the same thing as anyone else. Justice do their thing, we do our thing, Pendulum do their thing, everyone’s doing something different. It’s not like rock’n’roll where there seems to be a lot of imitators of every band around.”

What did it feel like to conquer America in 1997?

K: “That period of time, we didn’t assess anything other than we’re going to do a gig, we’re going to bang it, then move onto the next one, in fact, try not to look too far ahead, or you’d just see gig after gig flying at you like warp speed on ‘Star Wars’. Japan, Finland, Denmark, Austria, LA, New York, fucking South America – we never stopped to celebrate.”
L: “When that record was at No.1 in America everyone was going, ‘You have to go over there and do a three month tour.’ We were like, ‘Nah, we don’t want to do that, but we did six gigs in America during that mad time when we were No.1.”

Will you ever be too old for all this malarkey?

L: “We don’t think about the stage when we might be. We think we ain’t now and that’s good enough for me. I only ever live the moment, it’s the way I am.”
M: “We always have, from the first gig we’ve always lived the moment.”
K: “If you’re in a band that’s all you can do because that’s all you’ve got.”
M: “You can’t think about what happens when you’re 50 – what you thinking about that for? Live for now, enjoy now.”

You sound hungry again.

K: “100%.”

I mean obviously you’ve got money…

L: “I spent it all.”
K: “I spunked all mine – I’m Spenderella.”
M: “I got nothing.”

…so you really are hungry.

K: “Hungry? I’m fucking starving.”

The Prodigy’s new single ‘Warrior’s Dance’ is out 11th May on Take Me To The Hospital/Cooking Vinyl

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