Glastonbury, June 1995. It's getting dark, and the field in front of the NME stage is
heaving from front to back as searchlights sweep the crowd and discordant samples echo through the air.
Maxim strides to the edge of the stage, and stares into the night with crazy white eyes. He raises his
microphone. "Glastonbury ... Are you ready to rock ?" As the shattered glass breakbeats of Break And Enter
ring out at huge volume and thousands of dancing people turn the entire field into one enormous moshpit, the
crowd are greeted by the deranged spectacle of a flame haired Keith Flint rolling onto the stage in a massive
glass ball. There was no more room for doubt - The Prodigy's state-of-the-art fusion of dance energy, rock
power, and visual madness had arrived. Glastonbury must have seemed a universe away back in 1990, when
Liam Howlett arrived at the offices of XL Recordings with a demo cassette of ten tunes that he'd recorded in his
bedroom. After discovering the unity and excitement of the rave scene, Liam had moved on from his obsession
with hip-hop, abandoning his hip-hop band Cut To Kill in order to concentrate on his own hard dance music. He
was soon producing raw, edgy tracks, which took inspiration from the hard end of the underground dance scene
(Joey Beltram, Meat Beat Manifesto) and combined those sounds with speeded-up hip-hop breakbeats, and
which were innovative and exciting enough to secure him a record deal - and four of them were lifted direct from
the tape to make up The Prodigy's first single. WhatEvil Lurks was released on vinyl only in February 1991,
selling a respectable 7000 copies and gathering The Prodigy's first few mentions in the dance press at the
same time. It was a promising enough beginning, but the next single was a whole different story. Charly was the
record that propelled The Prodigy out of the underground rave scene and into the Top 3. It had been the buzz
record on the party scene for months before its commercial release, and it flew out of the shops as soon as it
was available. Looking back, past the dismal spate of cash-in kiddy techno records that followed in Charly
wake (Roobarb, The Magic Roundabout and Sesame Street all received the cheesy breakbeat treatment), it's
hard to remember just how important a tune it was for the time. It captured the euphoria, the energy, the sense of
humour, and the shared excitement of being part of a massive underground adventure - meeting at motorway
service stations to call up mobile phones and follow coded directions before dancing all night in bizarre
locations was a weekly ritual for thousands and thousands of people back then, and rave, which now sounds
like a dirty word, was the biggest and best thing to happen to British culture since punk rock. No band
opitomised the relentless energy of rave culture better than The Prodigy - with Charly causing whistle posse
madness around the country, there was no shortage of promoters willing to put on the band's frenetic live show,
and from the very beginning they toured incessantly. Leeroy's lurching grace, Maxim's incendiary mic style and
Keith's evident insanity were all part of the appeal without them, The Prodigy would have been just one more
faceless keyboard act, but with them they were an exhilarating whirl of on-stage madness. The band quickly built
up a devoted fanbase within the rave scene - and earned a reputation (which they have never relinquished) as
the best buzz going. These fans propelled Charly into the Top Ten when it was commercially released, and
exposed The Prodigy to the mainstream for the first time. Despite the snobbish derision that the dance press
started to direct towards the band because of their commercial success (Mixmag famously put a picture of
Liam pointing a gun at his head on the front cover, accompanied by the headline "Did Charly Kill Rave", the
rave crews remained loyal, and sent a succession of records - Everybody In The Place, Fire, Out Of Space, and
Wind It Up into the upper echelons of then charts. An album, Experience provided seventy minutes of mayhem,
and disproved the conventional wisdom of the time - which claimed that dance albums did not sell - by going
gold within weeks of its release and spending 25 weeks in the Top 40. Behind this seamless success, however,
a more complicated situation was developing. By the time that Wind It Up made Number 11 in March 1993, the
underground network of parties and events that gave birth to the band and carried it to national prominence had
started to fragment. The forces of progressive house and intelligent techno were on the march, mellowing out
the less committed rave kids, and driving the breakbeat diehards into the ever-faster, ever-darker maelstrom of
hardcore. At the same time, Liam had grown tired of the breakbeat-plus-sample-equals-rave-anthem school of
music making, and although Prodigy records continued to be successful, he no longer found them challenging to
make. Rave audiences, fuelled by ecstasy, were uncritical and undemanding - they made it too easy for him to
repeat himself. It was time for a change. Displaying the kind of courage and creativity rarely shown by
successful artists mining a lucrative musical niche, Liam began to take The Prodigy into uncharted territory.
Live, the band concentrated less on preaching to the converted, and began to put themselves in front of less
malleable audiences - they played students' unions, rock venues and festivals, increasingly excited by the more
aggressive mood of crowds where alcohol was the drug of choice. Liam started listening to the hard rock music
of Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, checking out the intense live energy of Rage
Against The Machine and Biohazard at festivals. Inevitably, Prodigy music started to reflect these new
influences, as well as the changes happening in dance music at the time. The transitional record was One Love,
which made its first appearance as an anonymous white label stamped "Earthbound". A tightly syncopated
mesh of tribal house music and distorted beats, the record was favourably received despite the fact that nobody
knew who had made it - and when it was properly released as a Prodigy record in the summer of 1993, it fared
just as well in the charts as the rave anthems that had preceded it. One Love was an important hurdle - the
band's fans were clearly prepared to follow them through daunting changes in direction, and knowing this gave
Liam the confidence to push against the boundaries of his music. From One Love onwards, Prodigy records
would become more and more challenging - and more and more successful. For twelve months after One Love,
the Prodigy were silent - Liam was busy in the studio, working on Music For The Jilted Generation, the band's
second album. When they broke silence, it was with their most effective record to date No Good (Start The
Dance). The single combined hammering, syncopated beats, an incredibly taut bassline and chunks of
screaming machine noise, all of which was barely concealed by the most immediate, radio-friendly vocal hook
of the band's career. The record spent seven weeks in the Top Ten, peaking at Number 4, and paving the way
for the release of the album. Music For The Jilted Generation was released in July 1994. It went straight into the
album charts at Number 1, going gold within a week of its release. And by this time the band had clearly won
over the critics as well as the public Music For The Jilted Generation was universally well received in the music
press, and was nominated later in the year for the prestigious Mercury Music Prize. Two more singles were
released from the album Voodoo People backed with a murderous mix from the then rapidly-emerging Dust
Brothers (soon to become the Chemical Brothers) , and Poison, a bruising, downtempo hip-hop instrumental
which remains one of the most extreme - and popular tracks the band have recorded. Both singles charted high
despite the fact that they were already available on the album Poison became the band's ninth consecutive Top
15 single. The Prodigy's Glastonbury appearance that summer marked them out as undeniably the most
exciting live band in the country - five years of practically incessant touring had clearly honed their abilities as
performers. Keith, sporting dyed and shaved hair, a pierced septum, and an increasingly exotic wardrobe had
become magnetically photogenic, and Maxim's cats-eye contact lenses, bare chest and daring selection of kilts
were not far behind. Emboldened by their success at the best festival in Europe, the band seemed determined
to play at all the others, and over the next twelve months their touring became even more relentless - Iceland,
Japan, Australia, America and even Macedonia all featured on an increasingly hectic schedule. Caught up in
the whirl of activity, Liam only managed occasional spells in the studio, but the time he spent there was
productive to say the least - the result was The Prodigy's most incendiary musical statement to date, and the
record that took them to a whole new level of success. In March 1996, Firestarter entered the UK charts at
Number 1. It was the band's first Number 1 single, and it stayed at the top for 3 weeks. A high-impact compound
of relentless sub-bass, eerily circling guitar samples and unmistakably punk vocals, it's the most extreme, noisy
and confrontational record ever to make it to the top spot - a fact not lost on the tabloids who began a witty,
intelligent and well-informed "Ban This Sick Record" campaign. The video, which somehow managed to match
the intensity of the music, brought Keith in all his glory to the nation for the first time, and, unsurprisingly,
provoked record numbers of complaints from Top Of The Pops viewers. As a statement of intent, it was as
uncompromising as it was successful. The summer of 1996 saw The Prodigy back on the festival circuit, playing
at Brighton, Phoenix, T In The Park and Reading in the UK and many more abroad. In all, The Prodigy did 70
gigs in 1996, playing to hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. Spiky-haired guitar terrorist Giz Butt
joined the live show, adding to the on-stage mayhem. With the band averaging a gig every five days, as well as
spending hours in airports and hotels, it's perhaps not surprising that the third album took so long to record. In
November, Breathe became the band's second single of the year, and their second Number 1. Keith and
Maxim growled their way through a ferocious call-and-response chorus, while Liam piled on the distortion and
pulled a few deft tricks with a moody acoustic guitar. Breathe quickly outsold even Firestarter, becoming The
Prodigy's first ever platinum single (over 750,000 copies sold in the UK) and establishing them once and for all
in the premier league of British bands. Abroad, the touring was evidently paying off - Breathe was a top 20 hit in
more than 20 countries, making it to Number 1 in 8 of them. The single has sold well over 1.5 million copies
worldwide. The start of 1997 saw Firestarter making its tenacious way up the US Billboard Top 100, and The
Prodigy putting the finishing touches to their third album. The Fat Of The Land is set for release on June 30th
1997. As well as Breathe and Firestarter, the album features Narayan, a collaboration with Crispian Mills from
Kula Shaker, and Diesel Power which features wayward lyrical madman Kool Keith, also known as Doctor
Octagon. It is without doubt the most eagerly awaited album of the band's career, and it looks set to be the most
successful as well.
A More up to date Bio is available on the Prodigy Web Site
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