During Christmas 1990, Liam announced to the band that he had secretly signed a record deal with XL a few weeks previously, though he was continuing to work at "Metropolitan". At the time, he hadn't been too sure of how the other members of the band would take to their particular roles, so the news had been kept from them. But now, on the evidence of their recent gigs, he was convinced that the Prodigy was the right vehicle to take his music to a wider audience. However, for Sharky, the idea of even more band commitments was too much, and so she left at Christmas.
Now trimmed down to a four-piece, the Prodigy continued gigging non-stop to support the "What Evil Lurks" EP, issued in February 1991. They were rewarded by sales of 7,000 copies and massive underground airplay. It was an impressive start. In an attempt to tighten up their live show, the band met at Liam's house one afternoon to rehearse. However, away from the vibe and atmosphere of the shows, with hundreds or even thousands of peopledancing to their music, the band found the situation impossible. After 20 minutes of arguments and uncomfortable shufflings from Leeroy and Keith, they called it a day. The Prodigy have never rehearsed since.
At this time, Liam was in a habit of partying until late, then returning home and writing material while still in the party vibe. It was this method that produced the Prodigy's next single, "Charly". After seeing a 70's children's information film, featuring a strange tortoise-shell cat and his interpreting infant chum, Liam spriced the phrase: "Charly says: always tell your Mummy before you go off somewhere" onto a tough and innovative break-beat. "I thought it was so hilarious", Liam says. "It was the bollocks. I thought that if I put that to a really hard sound it would result in something totally new."
The group had been playing various reggae-style mixes of the track since their first gig at the Labyrinth, but it was Liam's hardest version (Alley Cat Mix) which encaptured the public's imagination. By the time it was released in August 1991, pre-orders were huge and the resulting rush of sales propelled "Charly" to number 3 in the national charts. The video was featured on "Top of the Pops" and "The Chart Show", and the band played to a massive 30,000 punters at the next perception rave. Soon after, Liam gave up his day job.
With the huge success of "Charly", the Prodigy rollercoaster really began to accelerate. Having already established themselves as the premier name to emerge from the rave scene, they were now in demand for live shows. Their third single, "Everybody in the Place", issued in December 1991, was accompanied by European and American dates, which were followed by the signing of the American label Elektra. At the same time, Liam's musical prowess was acknowledged by being asked to remix Art of Noise, Dream Frequency and Take That (he turned down Gary and chums).
All seemed to be going remarkably well - until, that is, the negative impact of a scurrilous press hatchet job knocked them back for a while. One dance magazine had claimed that "Charly" had opened the floodgates for so-called "kiddie rave", like Urban Hype's "Trip to Trumpton" and Smart E's "Sesame's Treet", which they argued, reduced this important sub-culture to a laughing stock.
Despite this irritating setback, the Prodigy continued to progress. The alternative rock market was increasingly taking notice of their music, and the band's blistering shows at Sheffield Sound City and XL's Vision festivalreinforced their reputation as one of the country's great live acts. The question was, could they repeat their success on an album level?
After their fourth single, "Fire", maintained their unbroken chart run, their debut double album proved the answer was "yes". "The Prodigy Experience", a playful echo of the legendary Jimi Hendrix experience, was comfortably the finest LP to come from the rave scene. As Nick Halkes of XL Records states: "I think it was pretty unique in context - other than the Prodigy there wasn't really an artist that came out of that movement that people really felt comfortable with, or excited about.There were no real reference points at all. I am not saying that the Prodigy reached an incredible pinnacle with "Experience" but it was innovative, it was exciting, and it showed there was more depth to the band, and that they could move forward".
With a 23-date tour to support the record, the group continued to gig relentlessly, and the combination of unique music and hard work rewarded them with a number 12 album, which stayed in the top 40 for six months (it soon went platinum). This period should have heralded their most productive spell yet, but by the time they had toured the album around Europe, Amer ica, Australia and Japan,they'd become deep in debt and were on the verge of splitting up. Kicking off with dates in Australia, the band's schedule allowed them only two days off in a month-and-a-half. To make matters worse, many shows were poorly promoted and the majority of American promoters failed to pay up.
Added to the poor touring conditions and unsuitable billings, the whole experience turned out to be a nightmare. Keith remembers: "We should have known because of the way that Leeroy reacted - he's so laid back, and you know that if he is unhappy and miserable with something then there is a very real problem. We said that we were never going to tour again after that, we were so pissed off, 70 gigs over Christmas and the New Year and yet we still came home in debt and very run down."
"At various points along the tour we all left the band", he continues. "Now we look back at the whole episode in retrospect and as a trial and a learning experience. Just because everything's not a bed of roses doesn't mean that you are not learning, and that's the best way of looking at things like that."
The final singles from the debut album were "Out of Space" and "Wind it Up" which, despite the band's mediocrity, continued the Prodigy's fine tradition of Top 20 hits. However, by the time that had started to recover from their American nightmare, Liam was wary that the band were in danger of being dragged down with the dying rave scene. Things had to change.
The problem was that, with the group's massive commercial success, many underground critics were writing them off as "sell-outs", and they experienced increasing difficulty getting their records played on the DJ circuit. So, in the summer of 1993, they released their new single as a white label under the pseudonym "Earthbound" (the name of Liam's home studio). The lysergic, anthemic minimalism of the track was a stark change, as Liam recalls "One Love was quite a big jump". It was more of a housey tune, less break-beats, and that could have lost us all the previously followed us for the break-beat element. In a way, the whole scene at that point was confused and unsure, and it was splitting upinto various categories, with one set of DJ's going one way and others going elsewhere.
"I didn't want to get involved in all the internal politics", he goes on. "That would have restricted me creatively, I would have been too limited. So "One Love" came from that. The B-Side inc orporated the Jonny L mix, which was more German techno with a touch of break-beat, so it was still a hard record. The whole EP was a strong sign that we wanted to do things differently. I realized that the band had to progress and evolve, that I had to get back to the music and evolve.
"One Love" received rave reviews and in the media and massive play on the DJ scene, with copies of the white label at one time changing hands for up to �120. The Prodigy waited for all the acclaim to roll in and then announced that it was in fact their own latest offering. The ploy had worked perfectly, as the track had single-h and edly broken down many of the preconception s surrounding the Prodigy and had opened up a whole new potential for Liam's work.
It was the pivotal turning point in the Prodigy's career. Vitally, it gave Liam a free licence to e xperiment on the second album, on which he started work in late 1993. Whilst working with Liam on this record, Neil McClellan noticed his unique writing approach. "I sense that Liam was strainingat the leash, that he wanted to go deeper and heavier. Once he came into the studio I realized very quickly that I was dealing with a unique writer. His approach is really bizarre, and I have never seen anyone write music in the same way that Liam does. He plays everything in manually, rather than looping sections all the time. It's amazing to watch, and can be so fast.There is nothing traditional about his work. The point to remember is this: it is really easy to write bad electronic music, because anyone can sit in front of a computer, but to write good electronic music is very, very difficult. Liam does that."
The release was preceded by the band's finest track so far, the hard 150bpm techno of "No Good (Start the Dance)", which was accompanied by a superb video of a seedyunderground party which earned the group extensive MTV exposure. Despite the continued singles success and ground swell of live support, no one could have imagined the response that greeted the Prodigy's second album, "Music for the Jilted Generation". It went straight in at Number 1 in the album charts, and went on to be a Mercury award nominee and sell over 1 million copies worldwide.
With the highly contemporary context of fighting the Criminal Justice Bill, this was a propulsive modern dance record, and other-worldly opus of with layer-upon-layer of fractious patterns, supremely organized hooks, neat arrangements, bridges and breakdowns all building into an immense pitch of tension and emotion. It was far more dynamic and dark than the linear tunes of the first album.
There were many heavy break-beats, jazz-funk grooves, maniacal guitars, a return to hip-hop (Poison) and a straight hard dance track (No Good Start the Dance). Throughout the record, the sampled dialogue and twisted snatches of voices helped evoke a range of moods and ideas, spliced with subtle, anti-social polemic, and a deceptive delicacy of production and writing. It was an expression of aural hedonism which informed one of the most notable dance records ever written.
The critics' response was as frenzied as the record-buying public's. NME called Liam a "modern-day Beethoven", and there was barely a bad review in sight. The album's success was bolstered by the fact that, on average, the Prodigy played a gig every three days in 1994, all over the world. They even played to a huge crowd in Iceland, and won "Best Dance Act" at the MTV awards.
They also started playing at the major festivals, including the F�ile festival in Ireland (attended by 35,000 people), and have since established themselves as one of the top festival bands in the country. With all four singles from the album going Top 15 ("Voodoo People" hit No.11and "Poison" got No.8), it was a period of universal success for the band, and with Maxim's vocals being used for the first time on "Poison", the musical possibilities for the band increased even more.
1995 was spent consolidating their reputation as "The Greatest Rock 'n' Roll band in the world" by playing numerous festivals and yet more gigs. (Their performance at Glastonbury 1995 was hailed as "The Greatest Show on Earth"). The first taste of new material from their third album came in March 1996 with the release of "Firestarter", a hardcore, industrial-strength techno white-out, on which dancer Keith Flint took the limelight with his sneering, manic vocals. Despite it's extreme nature, the radio play it received was enormous, and the track smashed in at Number 1 in the singles charts. When the video for the track was shown on "Top of the Pops", the BBC received sackfuls of complaints from angry parents saying that Keith was too scary for early evening viewing, despite the fact that no drugs, guns, violence, or swearing were featured in the video. One letter raged: "This young man is clearly in need of urgent medical attention." Despite, or more likely because of this, the record sold over 750,000 copies in less than six weeks, and was Number 1 in seven European countries.
With the band signing a huge deal with Geffenin America, the Prodigy are proof that the "no compromise" punk ethic lives on in their attitudes to business and their often-extreme music. Despite their achievements, the band continue to shun publicity, and avoid any trappings of the fame game.
They still control their own merchandise, and have absolute authority over record releases, tours, videos and virtually all aspects of their operation. With Liam having the capacity to write, engineer, produce and master an album in his own studio, the Prodigy have demystified and streamlined the process of making records. They are true "electronic punks".
Although a new single, "Mindfields" has recently been pulled (leaving rare test pressings and advance cassettes), their third album is scheduled for an autumn 1996 release. Liam is already clear about the ethos about it's inception. "We are not trying to be punk", he explains. "But that's just how it comes out. There are so many bands obsessed with guitars and drums and that doesn't necessarily mean that you are punk. We're into the band's energy, and at the moment in terms of that new record, punk just represents what the Prodigy is all about."
This text is COPYRIGHTED by Martin Roach, author of the Prodigy's biography, "Electronic Punks"(Independent Music Press 1995 - ISBN 1-897783-04-3)
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