Electronic Sound May 2015 (Regular Edition) | Page 13

That family connection has remained ever since. A couple of
years back, Liam sponsored my son’s football team, which the
tabloids loved. Cue ‘Smack My Pitch Up’ headlines. When the
band toured Brazil soon afterwards, every interview started
with questions about football, a sport that Liam actually has
very little interest in.
My relationship with The Prodigy hasn’t all been oneway, mind.
I once advised Liam to buy ‘Two Pages’ by 4 Hero, a record he
hated (“I left it in me hotel room. Fucking shit, man”). I also
put the wheels in motion for his DJ session on Mary-Ann Hobbs’
Radio 1 show that eventually became the ‘The Dirtchamber
Sessions Volume One’ set. Does any of this impact on my
ability to remain impartial? Maybe. Has it affected my honesty?
Not at all. In fact, I’ve always been totally honest whenever
Liam’s invited me in to listen to a new track or a new album. 
When I first heard ‘Shoot Down’, his collaboration with Liam
Gallagher, I said I thought it sounded out of place and old
fashioned. When he called from the studio one night to play
me a version of ‘Memphis Bells’ (which at the time had this
deep south hip hop vibe, like a leftfield Timbaland), I raved
about it. Probably wisely, he ignored me and released the
Gallagher mash-up and a different version of ‘Memphis Bells’.
But I think he appreciated hearing my opinions. 
The only time I haven’t been completely truthful about a
Prodigy track was when Liam first played me ‘This Baby’s Got A
Temper’. What I wanted to say was that he’d lost all the tension
in his production, that he sounded like he was trying too hard
to be The Prodigy that everyone expected, that a really strong
song had become kind of mediocre, a parody of The Prodigy
rather than a brave new statement. Instead, I said it was
“fucking awesome, dude”. It later transpired that he knew it
wasn’t the track he’d intended it be. Maybe that was the time
above all others for honesty.
Liam Howlett is someone who is never afraid to speak his mind.
I like that. He has a loyalty to his friends that runs deep. I find
that admirable too. Every move he’s made has been with great
integrity and his music is created without any sense of cynical
calculation. Everything he produces (with the exception of ‘This
Baby’s Got A Temper’) is the result of an emotional toil that
is always underpinned by the exacting statement “If I’m not
feeling it, it won’t get released”. 
Why else would The Prodigy have taken seven years to follow
up ‘The Fat Of The Land’, dumping nearly an album’s worth of
recordings along the way? Many groups would have knocked
out a pale imitation and had done with it. Not a group led by
Liam Howlett. And if you want proof that his integrity remains
fully intact, check out The Prodigy’s latest album, ‘The Day Is
My Enemy’.

It’s why I find myself sitting in his studio in London’s King’s Cross
on a cold, drizzly afternoon, listening to the album and being
tempted out of retirement as a music critic. Not many artists
could get me to do this. But not many artists are like Liam
Howlett.
“Pull up something to sit on,” he says, speaking from the
captain’s chair where he steers his creative ship. I have the
choice of a drum stool or something that looks like Sweeney
Todd might have passed through the building at some point. I
choose the drum stool.
Starting with the release of ‘The Dirtchamber Sessions Volume
One’ mix album in 1999, the ritual of listening to each new
Prodigy release with Liam has become one of the most
enjoyable and interesting regular occurrences of my life. Back in
1999, my personal playback took place in his Essex countryside
home, a converted barn next door to a farmhouse where Keith
Flint lived. Since then I’ve been introduced to each new album
in a different location, each somehow fitting the moment.
I first heard 2002’s ‘This Baby’s Got A Temper’ single during
the final mixing stages at Rollover Studios in west London. The
record emerged at a time when both Prodigy fans and the band’s
label were looking for something new in the wake of the global
success of ‘The Fat Of The Land’.
‘Baby’s Got A Temper’ was only the second new track that Liam
completed in the five-year period between 1997 and 2002. The
other was a (still unreleased) collaboration with 3D from Massive
Attack called ‘No Souvenirs’. Drawing heavily on psychedelia
and described by Liam as “like The Beach Boys on acid”, ‘Baby’s
Got A Temper’ featured that leering, punch-drunk rebellion of
a chorus declaring, “He love Rohypnol / She got Rohypnol / We
take Rohypnol / Just forget it all”.
It was a lyric that was bound to bait the red tops, another
folk devil soundtrack to add to the list that already included
promoting arson (‘Firestarter’), violence against women (‘Smack
My Bitch Up’) and even Nazi ideology (the sleeve notes to
‘The Fat Of The Land’ appropriated one of Hermann Goering’s
speeches). And then there was the fact that Liam’s track with
3D had been recorded for the score to a porn movie featuring
zero gravity ejaculation as its USP. Mention of the date rape drug
seemed par for the course.
As I listened to ‘Baby’s Got A Temper’ with Liam, he seemed
obsessed by the finer nuances of the mix. He wandered
nervously from speaker to speaker, occasionally pressing buttons
on the mixing desk and asking the engineer to fine tune the
programming. His bleached mohican hairstyle was bedraggled,
his camouflage cords and white Ping Pong Bitches T-shirt
crumpled, his eyes bleary. Recording the single had, it seemed,
taken over his life.