Electronic Sound May 2015 (Regular Edition) | Page 14

THE PRODIGY

“To be honest, it never occurred to me that people would
be bothered about Keith’s words,” he told me later, when I
broached the inevitable criticism. “I loved the lyric when Keith
showed it to me and I just said, ‘I’m gonna do something with
this’.”
The track had started out as a demo for Flint, Keith Flint’s punk
group. Then called ‘NNNN (No Name No Number)’, it was a
blend of poppy punk and hardcore, with Flinty sneering like a
reality checked John Lydon. Liam might well have wished he’d
left it as a Flint track as it received short shrift and sent The
Prodigy to the controversy-courting has-beens corner.
It also led to disquiet in the band, with Leeroy Thornhill leaving
to put out his own music as Flightcrank, Maxim turning his
focus on a solo career, and Keith signing Flint to Interscope
Records. Following their headline appearance at the Reading
Festival in 2002, where there were rumours of a backstage
bust-up, The Prodigy seemed to be a thing of the past.
“That record was a mess,” Liam admitted later. “In fact, it was
as accurate a sonic description of us as a band at that time as
you could have got. We were hardly communicating. I suppose
we didn’t like each other very much really.”
Liam ditched the tracks from the album he’d been working on
and threw away the keys to his home studio. He decamped to
his bedroom with a bottle of wine, a James Bond movie and a
laptop, and started crafting an entirely new project. The result
was 2004’s ‘Always Outnumbered Never Outgunned’ album,
which I was invited to hear at Liam’s then-manager’s home in
Essex. Neither Keith nor Maxim appeared on the record. In their
place was an array of guests who were linked through a taste
for the wayward.
“I had to get back to what I was about,” said Liam. “This is
me writing tunes I can rock to and not thinking about other
people.”
As a whole, ‘Outnumbered’ is The Prodigy’s most expansive
album. True, there is nothing as zeitgeisty as ‘Firestarter’ and
nothing as influential as ‘Poison’, but Liam knew exactly what
he was trying to create. It may not have be the headlinegrabber that ‘The Fat Of The Land’ was, but as I listened to
the playback it was clear that it was the work of a man in love
with the idea of making music again.
The problem was, it would seem, fans of The Prodigy’s rocking
beats and guitar mash-ups weren’t ready for electro-funk, or
samples of ‘Thriller’, or female vocals from the likes of actresssinger Juliette Lewis and electroclash outfit Ping Pong Bitches.
‘The Fat Of The Land Part Two’ it wasn’t. But it did sow the
seeds for the albums that followed.

‘Their Law’, The Prodigy’s 2003 greatest hits package, was
a timely prompt of the band’s amazing output and it also
reintroduced the world to the greatest live show on earth. The
arena tour that followed brought Liam, Keith and Maxim back
together, reminding them just how much they vibed off each
other and how much they loved to rock live. They played
voodoo with their rave classics, reworking and rewiring their
smouldering best, and once again showed just what a potent
force they are.
The fusion of that positivity with Liam’s writing process became
clear to me in 2008, when I arrived at Trevor Horn’s Sarm West
Studio in Notting Hill to hear the band’s next album, ‘Invaders
Must Die’.
“We were all a bit paranoid and had to discover whether we
could be a unit again,” Liam told me at the time. “We felt other
people had started to infiltrate our band and they were having
a negative effect. We were talking and either Keith or Maxim
said, ‘Those fucking invaders must die’, and I was like, ‘That’s
the album title right there!’. It’s quite a personal title for us,
it’s about protecting what’s yours, about keeping things tight.”
Interestingly, the media weren’t hugely interested by the return
of the band – until ‘Invaders Must Die’ stormed to Number One
on the week of release. To date, the album has sold over 1.4
million copies globally.
“I love that we surprised people,” said Liam. “A lot of the music
press had written us off, they didn’t expect us to come back,
and now they’re eating their words. This is when we’re at
our best, when people don’t see us coming, when we’re the
underdogs.”
Which brings us back to this grey afternoon in King’s Cross
where I am about to hear ‘The Day Is My Enemy’, the followup to ‘Invaders Must Die’, for the first time. Liam Howlett’s
appearance has changed little in the intervening years. He still
sports that haphazardly home-cut bleached mullet hairdo. The
pallor of his skin still betrays too many nights in the studio. He
still talks with great passion and intensity about his music and
litters his conversation with laughter.
Despite looking like an office from the outside, Liam’s studio
offers a visual representation of both his personality and his
music. Scattered among the analogue equipment are humorous,
ironic artifacts that range from the kitsch to the downright
stupid. But even this isn’t as intensely packed with personality
as his previous studio in a tiny loft area at Sarm West. Every
inch of that space gave away clues to its inhabitant. Entering
the dark production lair felt like walking into Liam’s brain, filled
to the point of claustrophobia with kit, ideas, humour, stuff.