The Prodigy: Fanning the flames

The Prodigy’s Liam Howlett tells Ed Power of his rage against the commercial makeover of their genre

IN LATE 1992, The Prodigy’s Liam Howlett stood on stage in Glasgow, bored out of his wits. “I remember looking out over the crowd thinking ‘I’m not interested in rave any more. It’s become a parody of itself’. It was so different from the scene we’d got into. A few weeks afterwards, we went to Los Angeles to shoot a video and I heard Rage Against The Machine’s first album and Dr Dre’s The Chronic. I thought ‘Wow - this is my missing link’. They were angry, they had a groove.”

He is reflecting on the origins of Music For A Jilted Generation, the dance behemoth’s landmark 2004 LP — a record that was one of the most influential electronic albums of the 1990s. The Prodigy’s place in the pantheon has been much on the musician’s mind of late; with his group’s harsh, yammering sound rivalled by the slicker beats of Avicii, Deadmau5 and others.