Interview with The Prodigy

Without a doubt one of the best live shows I’ve ever seen was the rave/electro/punk onslaught that is The Prodigy a few years ago at Coachella. They’re back in the US to promote their new record Invaders Must Die, and I had a chance to interview founder/producer/lead songwriter Liam Howlett about the band’s creative process:

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Baron von Luxxury: For the new album, I understand that you decided to write in a completely different way, but then ended up throwing everything out and starting again from scratch.

Liam Howlett: Yeah, there was no way I could make a record without being excited about it, so we literally went in with nothing at first. We left it open, which was good and bad. We basically went in circles, trying to write songs without any proper beats or basslines. Usually I’m in the studio doing backing music for the guys to be excited about but this time we decided “lets attack it in a different way.” But it didn’t really work, to be honest! We ended up messing around for six months and we got a few things out of it – some vocals mostly.

BvL: Unlike a rock band that can get together and bash out a song as a group, it seems like with The Prodigy it needs to start with you bringing a relatively complete idea to the others. Is that true, do you need to bring (co-vocalists) Keith and Maxim ideas to kick things off or do you write together from scratch?

LH: We tried to write as a band, and thats what didn’t really work. I think it has to always come from me first, the foundation of the music. And then we work together once we have something solid, that’s how it works for us.

In any case, then the next thing that happened was we wanted a new track to play live for the Gatecrasher party. It was Keith’s idea, “lets not think about the album, lets just write a track for live, we know its gotta be, lets just do that.” That freed my mind up. The pressure to write an album is quite a lot, you want to get a couple of tracks under your belt, and six months in we hadn’t gotten anything! So it was kind of frustrating. So “Warriors Dance” got written that way, and it just shows how a good way of working is really quick, not thinking about it too much, just getting the idea down. That track wasn’t meant to be on the record, it was meant to be an isolated song for a live show. But we snapped out of it and rolled forward after that.

BvL: Take me through how “Warriors Dance” came together musically speaking, from the initial idea to the final mix.

LH: With that track it was really important for me to establish the real cut and paste style that I first had when writing the first Prodigy album. Throwing lots of ideas together, “no that doesnt work”, trying see what does. For this song I started inAbleton Live as usual because it’s very easy to manipulate stuff, and you need it cuz I knew it would be a sample based song. Initially there were more samples in but we ended up taking the unnecesary ones away and just leaving the main one, which is the vocal. On any Prodigy album I always throw loads of ideas on it and then you end up stripping it away and you’re left with the most important bits that work. With “Warriors Dance” I took a lot of samples out and left the bass and vocal are the most important thing.

Then I laid the beat in Ableton, then it was important to have a bassline that sounded very NOW, to give it that electro edge, so it wouldn’t feel like a total retro track!

BvL: Was that a soft synth or analog synth?

LH: I dont use soft synths at all, I’ve always used analog only. That’s a Moog going through distortion boxes and then processed in Logic afterwards.

BvL: So now you have your beat, your bass and your sample, what came next?

LH: It’s always good to have a good intro, most Prodigy songs have a building intro – it’s very rarely I jump straight into the beat. The sample was originally from an old record that was a bootleg, couldn’t find what it was! So I had to recreate it, my mate came in and redid that. Once we had the intro, the track as I was writing it I had a feeling for the arrangement, what should to happen next. So once i have the main vocal and beat its 90% there, and then we do what I call the icing – the chops, tweaks, drum rolls etc are usually the last thing, then to the final arrangement.

For the final mix, I want to know that it will work in the final mix. So as I’m going along, the final stage is just me either mixing in Logic or on the SSL in our studio. With “Warriors Dance” it was important to keep the cut and paste quality to it, so if you listen on headphones you’ll catch alot of the glitches, the clicks and stuff.

BvL: Besides Does it Offend You Yeah who are supporting some dates on your tour (and who were clearly influenced by you) what contemporary artists are you listening to now?

LH: I don’t tend to like specific bands, more like one off tracks. I went through a long stage early on with the Ed Banger stable, the early stuff. But in dance music one record comes out and everyone follows it. I think that people are like sheep when you’ve got one massive tune and everyone decides “oh thats the new sound”, and it becomes a craze. Sometimes its too bad people aren’t more original, you know?