Electronic Sound May 2015 (Regular Edition) | Page 12

THE PRODIGY

I first met Liam Howlett at a Perception rave during the first
days of The Prodigy. I wasn’t a journalist, he wasn’t a pop
star. We were just ravers-in-kind and we bonded in a way that
everyone did back then. With a grin, a nod, a few words of
infinite wisdom, a shared bottle of water, a shared experience. 
Years later, we struck up a friendship thanks to a mutual love
of ‘Tomb Raider’ on the PS1. The unlikely vehicle for this
discovery was a Playstation league that I organised for Muzik
magazine. The league, which pitted the great and the good
of the dance music world against each other on pre-release
Playstation titles, had a number of surprising impacts on the
underground fraternity of 1997. 
Drum & bass lynchpins Reinforced and Metalheadz went to
war over topping the league, with Goldie regularly phoning my
home demanding early copies of the games before his rivals got
theirs. “I know where you live and I’m fucking coming round,”
he yelled down the line one night, having left me over 50
answerphone messages that day.
Liam Howlett seemed to be taking it as a bit of fun, until he
suddenly asked me to stop sending him games and let his
Prodigy bandmate Leeroy Thornhill take the job on instead.
“The record label are on my back about the album and I can’t
get on with it ‘cos I’m spending all my time on ‘Tomb Raider’,”
Liam told me. 
The album that the Muzik Playstation League was inadvertently
holding up? ‘The Fat Of The Land’.
‘Firestarter’, released in March 1996, had primed an excited
public for the follow-up to 1994’s epoch defining ‘Music For The
Jilted Generation’. It was only when someone from the band’s
then-label XL also mentioned they would rather I didn’t send
Liam any more gaming distractions that I realised how worried
they’d become. XL’s future would be built around the success
of ‘The Fat Of The Land’. No Prodigy? No Adele. The label’s
unofficial ban didn’t stop Liam arriving at Leeroy’s Braintree
home in a state of youthful excitement when I brought round
a development version of ‘Tomb Raider 2’ for them to demo,
though. But that’s another story.
My friendship with Liam has developed over the years and the
Prodigy family have become part of my everyday life. When
I was with them on a particularly memorable trip to Paris on
the ‘Fat Of The Land’ tour, they made sure I made it back to
the UK when my wife went into labour. That meant getting me
from the ganja-choked backstage area, where photographer
Pat Pope had set up an impromptu studio to create a series
of intense, X