Liam Howlett
Keith Flint
Leeroy Thornhill
Maxim Reality

The musical force behind the band is 24 year-old
Liam Howlett, from Braintree in Essex. His fascination with music began during
primary school, when he fell for Ska and Two Tone, after his father gave him a
copy of Ska's Greatest Hits . On moving up to secondary school, he was
immediately attracted to the new hip-hop culture, became fascinated by bands
like Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, and repeatedly watched the 1984
break-dancing film Beat Street .

Inevitably, Howlett wanted to perform
his own material and, a couple of years later, a holiday job on a building site
earned him enough cash to buy two cheap turntables. Soon after, he approached a
local hip-hop band called Cut To Kill, who took him on board as their second DJ.
For the next two years, Liam and Cut To Kill rehearsed hard, although they only
gigged sporadically. Aged 18, Liam passed his A-Level in graphic design and got
a job at a now-defunct London freebie magazine, Metropolitan , where he struck
up a friendship with the owner.

After playing him a tape of Cut To Kill,
Liam was offered £4,000 to record the band's debut album. Unfortunately, neither
the band nor their benefactor were at all experienced and so the whole budget
was mistakenly spent in the studio, leaving nothing for promotion or touring. To
compound matters, the rest of Cut To Kill then signed to Tam Tam Records behind
Liam's back. The deal excluded him, despite the fact that the band used one of
his tracks to win the contract. This betrayal coincided with Liam's dwindling
interest in hip-hop and, following an incident when a knife was pulled on him at
London's Subterania because he didn't fit in , he began to look for new musical
pastures. It was the summer of 1988.

While Liam was immersed in hip-hop,
his home country was on an altogether different trip - Acid House, which had
engulfed most of Essex in a tide of flares and ecstasy. The early tunes - like
Phuture's 1987 Acid Trax , and Derrick May and Juan Atkin's work - were
minimalistic musical hybrids, with mind-altering frequencies, relentless
rhythms, unconventional structures and weird, off-beat soundscapes.

While
pure house music tempered it's rhythmic obsession by incorporating more melodies
and harmonies, Acid House pursued rhythm to new extremes, using technology to
create beats that could never be simulated by human beings. Originating in
Chicago and Detroit, the music soon crossed the Atlantic, and took root via
massive illegal warehouse parties that formed the foundation for what became
known as rave. It was the era of the smart bars, the marathon dancing and a
recycled hippy mantra - the second Summer Of Love had arrived.

Liam's
first experience of rave culture was a party at the Barn in Rayne
(home to the
Shamen's Mr. C). He was immediately converted: I thought it was the bollocks,
such a different experience from what I had become used to. Hip-hop was such an
exclusivist, pretentious scene, and to a certain extent, it always excluded
white bands. Then to experience something like that first night at the Barn was
such a stark contrast, I really loved the music and the whole vibe. I had never
been into dancing that much, but it didn't matter, because you could enjoy it,
you didn't have to dance properly .

Within a couple of months, Liam had
started DJ-ing at these parties and become a well known face on the Essex scene.
However, he was still too shy to play any of the material he had secretly been
writing. Enter Leeroy Thornhill and Keith Flint. Leeroy, all 6'7 of him, was a
James Brown fanatic who had only taken to the rave scene after the monotone Acid
House had developed into something more sophisticated. With his height and
lightning-fast feet, he was the person to dance with at the Barn.

Keith
Flint had left school before his exams and taken up various jobs
(including one
as an investigative driller), before becoming a 'casual' and then a devotee of
biker culture, smoking dope and listening to 70's legends like Led Zeppelin and
Floyd. When rave arrived in the summer of '88, he was travelling around the
Middle East and Africa, but by the spring of 1989 he was back in Britain. On his
return, he was immediately thrown out of his house - one night he was sleeping
beside the pyramids in Cairo, the next he was kipping next to a river in
Braintree.

A friend of his, Ange, offered him some digs at her house. She
was a keen raver, and when she next went out to an acid house party, Keith
tagged along. After meeting each other at the Barn, Keith and Leeroy became
great friends, going out almost every night and rapidly becoming popular
characters at the circuit.

It was then at an outdoor rave that Keith
first met Liam. Keith was so impressed by the tunes Liam was playing that he
asked for a tape of his own mixes. Liam obliged and put four of his own songs on
the B-side. Keith and Leeroy played the tape late one night and after coming
back from a late night party and were stunned by Liam's work. As Leeroy adroitly
remembers: We were buzzing our tits off . The next time they saw Liam they
asked him to play his own material for them to dance along to. He agreed, and
after roping in a girlfriend, Sharky, the Prodigy was formed. Liam played the
keyboards, while Keith, Leeroy and Sharky danced.

Shortly after, they
booked their first P.A. at the Labyrinth in Dalston, East London, where the
promoter told them: I've only ever had two P.A.'s here before and they were
both bottled off after five minutes . Liam had felt that an MC was need for the
performance, and was put in touch with Maxim Reality
(aka Keeti Palmer), a
reggae MC, originally from Peterborough, who had spent the last three years in
Nottingham.

Maxim had got into MC-ing at the age of 14, by watching his
brother
(MC Starkey) MC-ing at various Peterborough sound systems. Once in
Nottingham, Maxim had strung up a fruitful musical partnership with a friend
called Ian Sherwood, and the two had christened themselves Maxim Reality and
Sheik Yan Groove. Unfortunately, their brand of unorthodox dance music was
highly unfashionable, and after three fruitless years they split up. Maxim had
enjoyed working with Sherwood, so he went travelling for three months to chill
out and ponder his future.

While he was away, he realised music was his
first passion, and so on his return to England, he moved to London. Shortly
afterwards, a mutual friend put him in touch with the Prodigy. Tapes were sent
back and forth but their debut gig in Dalston was at such short notice that the
first time Maxim actually met the band was on the night of the
show.

Maxim remembers it as an interesting experience: I just remember
being put on this stage in the middle of what was a dance scene with four people
I had just met, and I just stood at the back with a mic chatting a couple of
times. Meanwhile, the rest if the band were doing their shit and everybody was
going wild, it just went off. It all happened so quickly it was weird, but
really good. I thought it was really wicked but I didn't think anything more of
it than I wanted to do it again. Maxim did do it again - a few days later he
was asked to join the band permanently.

With this line-up, the Prodigy
started to do what few dance acts before them had done - they gigged. Bands like
N-JOI and Shades of Rhythm had built up a large fan base long before the
Prodigy's arrival, but it was the sheer weight of hard work that saw Howlett's
band leapfrog all of their peers within a matter of a few months. Their early
shows were sometimes ill-attended, like their fifth gig at Hatfield College
where there were only nine people in the crowd, including five staff.
Conversely, their twelfth gig was at Raindance, a massive rave attended by
12,000 people.

Infact, a feature of the acid house scene was that if
offered fledging bands the chance to play to thousands of people, in a way that
young rock acts could only dream of. What made the Prodigy even more exceptional
was that their show was live, unlike the DAT-reliant P.A.'s of their
contemporaries.

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 people dancing 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 back-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 raggae-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
festival reinforced 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, America, 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 breakbeats, and that could have lost
us all the previously followed us for the breakbeat element. In a way, the whole
scene at that point was confused and unsure, and it was splitting up into
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 incorporated the Jonny L mix,
which was more German techno with a touch of breakbeat, so it was still a hard
record. The whole EP was a strong sign that we wanted to do things differently.
I realised 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 that it was in fact their own latest offering. The ploy
had worked perfectly, as the track had single-handedly broken down many of the
preconceptions 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 experiment 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
straining at the leash, that he wanted to go deeper and heavier. Once he came
into the studio I realised 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 seedy underground 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
organised 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 breakbeats, jazz-funk
grooves, manical 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 Féile 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.11 and
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 Geffen in 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, Minefields 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.

Prodigy is a band among a small handful that can
claim to be a force in the music that is chasing commercial alternative music
out of the limelight. Like fellows Chemical Brothers, Orbital, Leftfield and a
few others, Prodigy has won every level of critical and popular success in their
homeland in the UK, while forging a juggernaut that will eventually dominate the
pop charts and minds at the Millenium.

Hailed by the mercurial music
press as the greatest rock and roll band in the world,
(a tired old saw) and
total sell-outs,
(a sure sign of success), Prodigy is the brainchild of Liam
Howlett. The classically trained Howlett is joined by wildman Keith Flint, 6
foot 7 raver Leeroy Thornhill and MC Maxim Reality
(Keeti Palmer).

With
roots in ska, hip-hop and the burgeoning rave scene of the late 1980's, Prodigy
burst on the British techno dance scene in scene in 1991 with their second
single 'Charly' which reached #1 in the UK Dance Charts. It was so hot, in fact,
that cynical music press savaged the track as a sell-out and proclaimed the
early demise of the rave scene. 2 singles later and an album, 'The Prodigy
Experience' in the Top 40 charts for over 6 months, found Prodigy touring
constantly worldwide and, after nearly a year, broke, exhausted and on the verge
of break-up.

To counter critical claims the they had, again, sold out,
the next single was released in the summer of 1993 as a white label to the DJ
circuit under the band name 'Earthbound', which happened to be the name of
Howlett's home-based studio. The single, 'One Love' defied efforts to categorize
the music and became a highly sought after item, rumored to have changed hands
for nearly $180 on occasion. It was only when 'One Love' had achieved massive
critical acclaim that Howlett took the credit publicly, paving the way for the
second album, 'Music For The Jilted Generation'. With numerous charting singles,
huge festival crowds throughout Europe and growing recognition in the US, '94
and '95 found The Prodigy nearly alone at the top of the techno world. Howlett
was at one point saddled as the modern-day Beethoven. There is nothing wrong
with Liam's hearing!

1996 found Prodigy touring in support of a yet-to-be
released album with a reportedly huge deal in the works with Geffen Records. The
first single 'Firestarter' received massive radio play in the UK and on
commercial alternative radio in the US in spite of its hard-core heart. The
second single, 'Breathe', released in December 1996 is a further harbinger of
the power about to unleash on humanity with the early '97 release of Prodigy's
third full-length.

Yet nothing can match the raw energy of Prodigy live.
And that's what brings us together here. Prodigy recorded during a recent
headline set in rural Washington State's Kitsap County. No holding back, no
excuses. Boys and girls, Prodigy!