Restarting the Prodigy fire

By MARTIN JAMES

Rollover Studios, London, March 2002. Liam Howlett wanders anxiously between two huge playback speakers, his head hanging slightly as his right hand tugs involuntarily at the skin around his Adam's apple. He is deep in thought, analysing every last nuance of the music. Every few minutes he goes to work on computers, mixing desk, effects, samplers, all the tricky paraphernalia of the modern studio, to make the kind of modifications only the music's creator can hear in the torrent of sound. It's a laborious process and it has obviously taken its toll. Every now and then, Howlett dives into an adjoining room to take out his frustrations on a drum kit.

Meanwhile his phone rings continuously. His record company wants details of the new track. They need him to check over some video treatments and he has to OK the artwork. And then there's the small matter of the media campaign to back up the single's release.

With barely a moment to clear his head, Howlett is back in the pressure-cooker atmosphere of the studio making his last tweaks. He clicks the computer mouse and the final mix of the track explodes from the speakers. The room is filled with thundering drums, thrashing guitars, yowling synthesizers and the adenoidal drawl of a vocalist declaring his love for the relaxant drug Rohypnol. The excitement in the room is almost palpable.

It's a scenario familiar to any musician working on his latest single. However, for Howlett, this process has a deeper resonance. This is to be the first all-new song by his band, Prodigy, since their hugely successful album The Fat of the Land back in 1997. That record hit the top spot in 23 countries, including the US.

Nevertheless, there is another atmosphere in the studio. Beneath the surface excitement there's the consensual knowledge that the single represents the sound of a band treading water rather than making the leap forward that had been hoped for. After a five-year sabbatical from recording, Prodigy have failed to develop at all and aesthetically speaking: with Baby's Got a Temper, Prodigy had turned into a parody of themselves.

This month - two years since that ill-conceived single and seven since The Fat of the Land - sees the release of the band's follow-up album, Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned. Gratifyingly, it represents a return to form, and a breathtaking one, although it's more than a year behind schedule and Prodigy's "group identity" has mutated almost out of recognition. But behind the chewed-over gossip about why it took so long for the band to make their move - "writer's block", "lost muse", "studio fatigue" and so on - there lies another, more interesting and complicated story, one which cuts to the heart of the way pop music works, which raises questions about the way we "see" music through the filter of the media and which, of course, explores the implosive power of international success.

Prodigy emerged from the underground world of electronic dance music and entered the global mainstream in 1996 when they released the last great slice of oppositional pop of the 20th century: Firestarter. Suddenly Prodigy were the new Sex Pistols.

But pop culture has a habit of extracting the teeth of its rebels. And Prodigy's Keith Flint - the adenoidal, Rohypnol-loving, horned Beelzebub himself - quickly found himself the inspiration for a Lucozade advert, in which one swig turned a geriatric Keith lookalike from docile granddad into a rampaging "twisted firestarter". At the time, Flint protested indignantly that people might assume that he was endorsing the drink. That his persona was being turned into a joke was apparently not a problem. Prodigy were on the verge of being transformed into a cartoon band.

Nevertheless, there is an intelligence behind their operations that has enabled them to snake their way out of such dead-end situations, not least through the studied avoidance of repetition. Take the release of the equally shocking single Smack My Bitch Up (1997), which on the surface at least comes off as an ode to misogyny. This time round there were no vocals by old Beelzebub himself and the video depicted not the band but, in a witty twist, a young woman on a hedonistic binge (drugs, alcohol, violence and lesbianism: all standard-issue mid-Nineties ladette obsessions). While it came in for criticism by the Beastie Boys and Moby, frat boys, jocks, rockers and ravers the world over lapped it up and Prodigy became the biggest live draw on the planet.

However, as the touring machine lumbered circuitously on, it became apparent that the only competitors posing a threat to the group's near-untouchable status were the band themselves. Gradually the surprise element that had been such a feature of their career evaporated. In performance, front men Keith Flint and Maxim indulged in self-parodying, expletive-ridden mid-song adlibs and pranced around in daft costumes. The Prodigy package had become all mouth and trousers.

Which brings us back to that single, the deliriously formulaic Baby's Got a Temper, in which Prodigy looked to have swallowed their hype whole and turned themselves into a caricature.

"That record was a mess," admits Liam Howlett now. "In fact it was as accurate a sonic description of us as a band as you could have got. At that time we were hardly communicating with each other - I suppose we didn't like each other very much really. The record company were on my back to put something out and I was completely hung up on this idea that we had to have a vocalist. But even as I was finishing the track, I had an uneasy feeling with it."

Over the course of the next two years, I spoke to Howlett regularly about the progress of Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned. I've known Howlett for almost nine years now, having first met him while covering a Prodigy live show for the now-defunct music paper, Melody Maker. In this time I've found him to be a man who, unlike most artists, revels in informed criticism. He respects honesty and detests the illusion of celebrity. He's fiercely loyal. In the parlance of hip-hop, he likes to "keep it real". And throughout the period that immediately followed Baby's Got a Temper, his conversation became increasingly flat. His enthusiasm for making music seemed to have deserted him.

It seemed as if the creative brain behind The Prodigy - the guy who did the work - was being held creative prisoner by the success of Firestarter. They had become yet another band unable to transcend its defining moment. More than that, though, The Prodigy were not only suffering from the weight of expectation, but also from that most rock'n'roll of all conflicts: the play of frustrated egos. Non-creative band members began to push for a greater involvement in the songwriting.

"I think the others were definitely getting more frustrated around 2000," says Howlett. "All I wanted to do was hang out with my friends and have fun. I just wasn't that interested in doing any more records."

But there's a particular irony to the way, in the light of their success, Prodigy experienced the kind of friction that every band goes through. Prodigy were never a band anyway, not in the traditional sense. This wasn't a group of teenagers who'd come together in a garage to recycle old riffs by the rock greats. And Howlett and co had certainly not been plucked from audition obscurity by some entertainment svengali looking for attractive puppets to manipulate.

Prodigy were a bunch of ravers who'd met in the wide-eyed and chemically enhanced meltdown of the late-Eighties free-party experience. The original idea had been that several of them would dance on stage to music that one of them had created. In fact, long before Keith Flint grabbed the microphone to utter his immortal arsonist's chant, Prodigy had consisted of two dancers (Flint and Leeroy Thornhill), an MC (Maxim) and one musician (Howlett).

"We fooled people into believing that we were a band," laughs Howlett.

But it would appear that it wasn't only the public who were fooled. Prodigy were kidding themselves too. They had come to think, feel and operate as "a band", presumably because that was what they thought was expected of them - with the result that they began to endure all the internecine trials associated with old-fashioned rock groups.

They've experienced their non-songwriting members pushing for a more creative position. They've done the shock departure thing (in April 2001 Leeroy's creative frustration overflowed and he jumped ship to relaunch himself as Flightcrank). And they've certainly jostled for position in the glare of the limelight, a testosteronal ruck which, no matter how matey it appears on the surface, is a traditional masculine-self-assertion strategy among old-world rock walruses (witness Flint and Maxim's increasingly aggressive on-stage microphone stand-offs).

Finally, as if reading directly from the rock'n'roll script, they've also done the solo project thing. In 2000, Maxim delivered the honest but flawed Hell's Kitchen. Meanwhile, Keith Flint kept his head down, learned to play guitar, wrote a few songs and formed a band called Flint.

So how come Howlett has endured such rock'n'roll-style ego shenanigans when the music - indeed the whole creative output of Prodigy - has always been his preserve, and his alone? The answer sits uncomfortably somewhere in between his enjoyment of the illusion of being in a band and his sense of loyalty.

That loyalty must have been tested by Flint's band. Although amounting to not much more than your average punk combo, Flint were nevertheless signed to the huge Interscope organisation and an album was immediately scheduled to coincide exactly with the original release date of Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, in the middle of last year. Very funny. Perhaps fortuitously for all concerned, the album never made it into the shops. Flint's leader and mainstay retreated to lick his wounds.

But there is, of course, another way of looking at this petty confrontationalism. It can be argued that Keith Flint has a right to a stake in Prodigy's musical future. After all it was his image and his vocals which had propelled the band into the global mainstream.

He is widely perceived to be Prodigy. Like it or not, and despite the fact that he has only ever appeared on five Prodigy tracks, Keith Flint is a pop-culture icon. Maxim also has a case for his own piece of the creative pie. He has long been formally established as the Prodigy's front man, delivering vocals live, and occasionally on record, to acclaim from fans and critics alike.

Yet the musical vision is, and always has been, Howlett's domain. "I never planned for Keith to become a singer," says Howlett. "I didn't even know he was capable of singing until he asked to have a go at Firestarter. Prodigy was always about me doing the beats and the others doing their thing on stage. Why would that change?"

Between August 2002 and March 2003, while work proceeded on the new album, Liam and I rarely spoke. On the few occasions that we did, he seemed close to despair over the work. "The problem is, everything I do sounds like me," he said at one point. Then, last year he declared that he had ditched all the new tracks. This was less an act of artistic petulance than a short cut to rediscovering his creative flow. All it had taken was for him to walk away from the suffocating surroundings of his studio and to start writing on a laptop in his bedroom. Bingo. He turned the Prodigy process into a completely private affair.

"I had to get back to what I was about," says Howlett, conceding that there's no reason why Flint and Maxim shouldn't appear on future Prodigy recordings. "This is me writing tunes that I can rock to ... and not thinking about other people."

And in so doing, Howlett created the space to deliver what might come to be seen as his finest work yet; a record he describes as his "pure vision, without anyone else diluting it". Call it manipulative, call it clever - either way his decisiveness has awakened Prodigy from the sleep of more than half a decade.

Prodigy, Liam says, is "still very much alive", with a world tour kicking off in October to prove it. It will be interesting to see how the dark-humoured Maxim and occasionally volatile Flint respond to the challenge. (It should be pointed out that, in a second act of comic timing, Keith Flint recently launched another "side-project", the dance music act Clever Brains Fryin'.)

"Just before we released Baby's Got a Temper we toured Australia," recalls Liam. "We'd not seen each other or even talked to each other for months and I was really nervous about how it was going to be. Ironically it was the best tour we've ever done. It's the same with this album.

"We may have had a few problems along the way but the others totally respect my decisions. We had a band meeting the other day and it was a really good vibe. We're all really excited about playing live again. At the end of the day this album may not have featured Keith and Maxim, but it is still 60 per cent a Prodigy album and only 40 per cent Liam Howlett."

Wanted: vocalist with attitude

- The Prodigy's usual voices Keith Flint and Maxim aren't to be heard on new album Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned but here's the roster of some of the many guests at the microphone.

- Actress turned punk rocker Juliette Lewis - whose band The Licks has just released its first album - sings on opening track Spitfire as well as Hotride. For earlier evidence of Lewis' singing, see the film Strange Days (1995) in which she plays a strung-out Los Angeles rocker named Faith who delivers a convincing version of PJ Harvey'sRid of Me.

- Outlandish American gal rapper Princess Superstar adds her distinctive whine to Memphis Bells.

- Fastmouthed American MC Twista provides the verbals on Get Up Get Off.

- Hip-hop veteran hip-hop rude guy Kool Keith - who was sampled for the Prodigy's notorious Smack My Bitch Up - figures on Wake Up Call.

- All-girl electro-punk group Ping Pong Bitches features on Girls.

- And at the end, Oasis brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher feature on vocals and bass respectively.




THE LOWDOWN

WHO: Liam Howlett, brains behind British electro-rock outfit Prodigy

KEY ALBUMS: Experience (1992), Music for the Jilted Generation (1994), The Fat of the Land (1997)

KEY TRACKS: Charly (1991), Poison (1995), Firestarter (1996), Breathe (1996), Smack My Bitch Up (1997), Baby's Got a Temper (2002)

NEW RELEASE: Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned (XL Recordings/Shock Records) Is out on Monday August 30


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