Here’s a nice little short n’ sweet interview with Liam.
The interview is about India. Talking about the process of the new album. How the group has evolved with times. The live show and so on.
It’s a good read, enjoy.
Furiously energetic, British dance-electronica band, Prodigy, has a Delhi gig on January 15, as part of the first Eristoff Invasion Festival at the Huda Grounds in Gurgaon. The band’s founder-composer and lead vocalist Liam Howlett takes some questions from Shana Maria Verghis
A mixture of techno, rave, punk vocals and breakbeats, and you have Prodigy, made up of Keith Flint, a dancer/vocalist; Maxim is the eemcee/vocalist and Liam Howlett, the composer/keyboardist. Their videos have been playing back-to-back on VH1 these last few days. The band began as a fixture during the peak of rave scene in England, backing their live performance with dancers and catering to crowds smouldering on “trips”. But they soon backed off from that scene and refused to answer our questions about hints of misogyny and other naughty things in some songs like Smatch My Bitch Up. If anything else, they are dark, fast, edgy and brimming full of asha, like they leaked off influences from the British Asian underground scene. The band is working on a new album after four previous ones. The last was in 2009. If you haven’t caught their music yet, look out for the video Voodoo People where people walk along a promenade blindly walking into pillars and escaping being run over by cars.
Why did you think it good to come to India now?
It’s a place we’ve always wanted to come, y’know. We’d heard early on, maybe from ’97 that we had some fans there and we always try and get to every country where we think we have fans. The excitement is not knowing what to head with. We’ve played gigs in many countries and it seems like we’ve been everywhere apart from India so we’re just really looking forward to coming there
Tell us about the ingredients behind your newest album?
To be honest, we just started thinking about it, just started putting down ideas. It’s just brainstorming, we try to get as many ideas down as we can and in a month’s time, listen to what we got and see if there are any good ideas. If there’s one that stands out, then we keep working on that.
What will your show consist of?
We don’t use projections. We like to think that people will look at us. We’ll definitely have lights. We like to have our lighting rig and our sound has to be right. There’s no real special effects or anything. You can keep it real, keep it about the music, y’know. If you keep it quite clear, y’know.
How have you changed as a band and performers since early days in the 1990s rave scene?
I think the band has progressed. I mean, we’ve always put the music first. It has to be about the music and the live show. It could be more, to be honest, about writing music for the live show, y’know. Maybe in the early on, in the rave scene, in the early stages, into the second album, we used guitars, because the rave scene had disappeared. We all started to listen to Nirvana and Rage Against The Machine and we wanted to bring some of that energy into our music. So we kind of like tried to integrate some guitars with dance music. We try and evolve, we try and keep pushing it forward, but the basic elements are the same. People who want a new Prodigy album don’t want something slow, our fans would expect it to be exciting and fast, and that’s what the band is about. If we’re not making that type of music, then we’re not The Prodigy. I think, that even though we can grow and move forward and write different songs, the basic elements are the same.
Tell us about working with artistes like Shahin Badar?
Fans recognise our work with Shahin in the past, and if they listen to Smack My Bitch Up. A lot of tracks that have sort of Indian melodies and something different about that kind of notation, interests me, kind of like it has a certain magic about it, y’know what I mean? I have always been interested in that personally. I don’t know why, it’s just a natural thing that happened. Shahin, the vocalist, we knew her for ages and got her in to try something. It excited us and did not sound like anything we had heard before. We are always happy to try something that’s basically like, different for us. That is where it kind of started, with Smack My Bitch Up I guess. And then from then on, obviously we stayed friends with Shahin and well, just the whole (Indian) sound interested me.