Interview mit The Prodigy
Carl Spörri - Als einziges Online-Medium der Schweiz, und nebst Blick am Abend der einzige Schweizer Pressevertreter, hatte Students.ch die Grosse Ehre, mit einem der Pioniere der elektronischen Musik, dem englischen Trio The Prodigy, auf Tuchfühlung zu gehen und über deren neues Album Invad...
Students.ch: Hi guys, first of all, congrats to your first place in the Swiss Album Charts.
Maxim: Thanks man. It’s amazing, really.
Students.ch: And you’re number one in England as well, or not?
Liam: Yeah, at least we were, I think U2 might have nicked the place for themselves now. We were number one for a week. We’re number two now, which is one less than one. (smiles)
Maxim: Well, number two is actually two number ones.
Keith: (smirks) Yeah, so it’s better than number one.
Students.ch: Leaving mathematics behind us, your new album Invaders Must Die, how is it different from any previous Prodigy albums?
Liam: It’s much more of a band album, it’s all three of us putting a lot of energy into the album, whereas the last album (Always Outnumbered Never Outgunned) was, I guess, more of a solo record for me. This was never intended, but people seem to see it like this. Even The Fat Of The Land, which had a few vocal tracks on it, was less of a band album than this one. We wanted to make an album that we could play live from beginning to end. Whether we ever will play it through live, I don’t know, but that was our intention. We also wanted it to be more melodic and I guess people have also picked up on the influences from the first two albums (The Prodigy Experience and Music For The Jilted Generation). But we don’t see this as an old school thing, a retro thing – it’s just kind of sucking up of what we did in the past, of who we really are and bringing it into now.
Students.ch: Did you feel any pressure when making the album in the sense of what people might be expecting of you?
Liam: Yeah always, because we’re passionate. If we wouldn’t care about it, we wouldn’t be here.
Maxim: Yeah, in the first couple of months of the record, you know, we really felt this. You’ve got all sorts of ideas, but anything below the Prodigy standard is just not going to go for us.
Liam: I suppose if we didn’t care, we could’ve been on album number eight or nine by now, just knocking out any old shit. We really think about what we’re doing, so it does take long for Prodigy albums to come round, because a lot of work goes into them.
Maxim: We have to be honest with each other – I mean, if you don’t have the bomb lyrics, then it’s just not going to do. It can’t just be “alright”, it’s got to be killer!
Students.ch: Talking about the lyrics, a lot of your stuff still has this rebellious vibe to them…
Liam: I guess that’s just how our heads work, at least to some extent. Like if you take Colours for instance, Colours is more about coming together, really. That isn’t particular rebellious though. Take Me To The Hospital is unhinged, a good collaboration between the three of us, probably the best representation of all three of us coming together on a record.
Maxim: A lot of the lyrics represent the power of the track, if you know what I mean…
Keith, Maxim und Liam im Interview mit Students.ch
Students.ch: How did the album name Invaders Must Die come to be?
Liam: I think that more than anything, the title of this album was almost biographical of the last 8 years of the Prodigy. You know, we want through some kind of bad times in 2002 and 2003…Keith and I weren’t particularly talking to each other during that time….and we worked through those problems and basically came out of that again. So I guess it kind of describes personal thoughts, personal demons. And there were a lot of people around us during that time that did nothing to build us back together again. So we refer to this time as a good description of Invaders Must Die – it’s kind of dispelling all the shit, you know. That’s like the personal meaning of the title, but on a basic, straight-up, street-level, Invaders Must Die is a good abrasive Prodigy title for an album. It gets your mind thinking, like “What the fuck is that all about??” It’s probably the most important album title to us we’ve ever had.
Maxim: Individually, it means so much different things to each of us. It’s the opposite of the paranoia in our own heads of maybe not being able to leave all the bad things which have been holding us back behind.
Keith: The album’s got a kind of journey, even through the artwork, which makes everything interlinked and which I personally really like.
Students.ch: Two of my favourite tracks on the album are Take Me To The Hospital and Omen Reprise. Do you have any tracks which you like a little bit more than others?
Keith: My favourite track is Take Me To The Hospital…but as soon as that becomes the favourite, we kind of move on to the next one…tell you what, just doing all the new tracks on stage, getting the reaction, feeling the energy…it’s funny, thinking about other interviews with people talking about past tracks as being the big tracks and comparing how much these tracks actually stand up against them, what a challenge that is.
Liam: I mean, every band wants to write their next classic tune and I really believe that this album as some classic Prodigy tunes on it, which is fucking great.
Students.ch: I’ve read what other critics say about your new album – a lot saying it’s all retro and nothing new – and frankly, I don’t quite understand them. It’s bullshit. I mean, this is your sound, has always been, will always be. This is what the Prodigy is.
Liam: So true.
Maxim: Yeah exactly….you’re actually the first journalist ever to say that.
Keith: That’s exactly it. We all understand it the same way…I’ve heard Liam or Maxim say it in other words, but, you don’t get into a band thinking, like “I’ll get into Rage Against The Machine because I reckon in ten years time they’re going to write the best Country and Western album out there”…You know what I mean…and if Rage do decide to do this kind of thing, this “Prod-Rock”, this homage to fucking Cheese Greatman, I am for the first time going to get on the fucking internet and dis them and say like “You’ve let me down. What the fuck are you doing?!”
Liam: I think journalists focus on Warriors’ Dance because it’s got a nod back to the start, but it’s not retro. We’re not in to retro. We just kind of brought that kind of Prodigy sound back to now…
Keith: It had good reason. The roots of that happening had good reason and that was writing Warriors’ Dance as a live track, as the Prodigy would write a live track for a gig. It was twenty years of acid house, we knew we weren’t involved in acid house and we wanted to get involved in that because we were doing Gatecrasher, a massive festival in England, and so we went back to our roots, which led to Warriors’ Dance. Now obviously, going into that way of thinking, going through the old records and Liam’s was of writing the tune, which started out kind of samply-like and then got stripped down to become a Prodigy tune – all of that, that cut and paste, fucking bedroom thing, kind of stirred something up in us and we said “hey hang on, this is where we’re from.”
Liam: I think before that experience, like the first six months of writing the record, we were really bogged down, we’d write some lyrics, try to figure out what cords would fit on the guitar, until finally we though “Hang on a minute, what are we doing? We’re not the Arctic Monkeys, we’ve got to remember what we’re best”. As soon as we did that, all the pieces kind of fit nicely into each other.
Maxim: I mean, we tried to go at it from a different angle, but it ended up with just doing what we’re best at, which is how it should be.
Students.ch: If people would ask me how I would define the Prodigy sound, I would say its electronic music without any compromises. How would you describe the Prodigy sound?
Liam: Yeah, like abrasive, in your face….I mean it’s hard…(smiles) we’ll let you figure that out…
Keith: I mean every band doesn’t want to be pigeonholed and stuff, but the fact is, we don’t know what we are ourselves. There’s this freedom to the Prodigy, the freedom in the fact that Maxim and I don’t appear on every track, the freedom that not every track has the same tempo, that the tracks don’t always have to have guitar samples on them…
Liam: We really still value the kind of DJ-background the music comes from, like what Keith mentioned before, the bedroom cut and paste feeling. And that’s really important and we should never lose that. I mean we look at other bands, such as Pendulum…I mean we love Pendulum, but we look at these bands and think they’re going to get to a point where they are kind of minimizing what they’re actually about. I think we’ve been able to keep a balance, which is good.
Maxim: I think it’s also a reflection of us as individuals, because we’re not the type of people who are just fixed on a particular style or something.
Keith: Yeah, I mean if we get into some kind of confrontational situation, such as where one would say “You can’t do that” , “You shouldn’t do that” or “Don’t go there”, we turn right around and do it, even in our own lives. That’s us, we can’t put restrictions on ourselves. And that’s not an artistic freedom, it’s a personal freedom.
Liam: When we did Music For The Jilted Generation, a lot of people labeled us as a Techno group. And we said, no, we’re not Techno. We know what Techno is, we know were it comes from and who really does this kind of music, and we’re not that. We got a lot of credit from Techno purists and us knowing what Techno is, it would’ve been disrespectful to say we were a Techno group.
Invaders Must Die Tour - crashing in on the Maag Event Hall in Zürich
Students.ch: So when you guys are on tour, how do you prepare for your shows?
Liam: (laughs) We come readily prepared, man.
Maxim: What you see is what you get.
Liam: We’re taking it back to the roots on this tour. We’ve been touring in a tour bus the whole time and it’s been cool just hanging out with the other guys. So we actually see more of each other than if we just went away to a festival.
Keith: Yeah, I really enjoy the tour bus…
Liam: (smiles) Yeah, apart from that last night though….we drove through a storm and it was like fucking brutal.
Keith: (grins) Fucking hell yeah. Honestly, another ten minutes in that snow storm and I would’ve strapped some dogs to the front of the bus, put on me fucking hood and been the coachman from hell. (does a small coachman from hell performance, whip and all – everyone laughs hard)
Students.ch: So how would you describe the feeling when you’re on stage?
Keith: Fucking amazing. What I enjoy the most is not thinking, just being in this unrehearsed fucking sonic dimension. Watching people let off, you know what I mean, it’s indescribable. You know when you buy a new CD of a band you’re in to and you’ve got your mates around and you’re like “Check this out, check this shit out”. You put it on and crank it up and they all go “Fuck yeah, what’s this shit?” They’re like all in your bedroom just going off to the fucking beats.
Students.ch: So basically, the concert hall is like your own bedroom?
Keith: Yeah man, yeah it really is.
Students.ch: What’s your opinion of the electronic music scene today? Is it stagnating or is there a lot of new innovative stuff around?
Liam: I think it’s pretty good at the moment. I mean we’re not really in the middle of it, we’re kind of riding it. The real electronic music scene is the underground, led by the DJs. In England it feels as if people are kind of edging away from Rock and coming closer to electronic music again. Even the rock bands are tampering in electronic tunes, so it’s all kind of exciting.
Students.ch: The concert tonight is sold-out. What can your fans expect to see from the live show?
Keith: It’s difficult to say. Our job is to go out there and give 110 percent and deliver our music. It’s been like that since day one. I mean, I honestly don’t consider myself any different to anyone standing out there in the crowed. All there of us know how it is to get a ticket to see a band you really like. You pay a lot of money, you find the time to go. So for us it means, don’t ever get up on that stage and just think “yeah, well, here I am”. Just don’t ever. It’s all or nothing.
Liam: Yeah, we want to play these new tunes with conviction. After all, they are a part of us.
Students.ch: Well guys, thanks a lot for the interview, it’s been an honor.
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