With Invaders Must Die, are you trying to re-kindle the rave flame or are you moving in a new direction?
I think any band who are on their fourth album; third album even wants to progress, wants to kind of, you know, move on. So we wanted to maintain what we were about. Same ethics. You know, I wouldn’t want to hear Rage against the Machine play anything but loud, brisk music. Our job was purely to make the songs good, to work on, like, making it be more melodic. I think with this record we wanted to re-establish the band. It’s been a long while since The Prodigy as three people have made a record together. The last time that happened was Fat of the Land. I think we had a lot to prove to ourselves. We’re coming back and saying, “Here we are.” It’s very very different in America. Most of our audience in England, they’re young. But we love to come to America. It feels like we don’t ever get any ground here, we go out to tour. But we love actively doing that, we like coming here.
The Prodigy have often been at the line between the underground scene, and just at the forefront of breaking through into the mainstream. For example, “Firestarter” was played on MTV, and you were approached by David Bowie and U2 for collaborations, but you rejected that. Is there a specific idea you want fans to have when listening to your music?
We all totally understand what The Prodigy is, and what it needs to do to exist in that form. And when we move away from that form, we won’t be The Prodigy anymore. So we’re trying not to change. As far as working with other people, I’ll just keep it real man. I’ve got no interest in selling out our sound, and those bands that you mentioned to me before, none of those artists meant anything to me when I was younger and that’s the reason I didn’t work with any of those people. Even if people came to me now, I can only be real and I can only work with people who meant something to me I think. I just wouldn’t be the right reasons, you know what I mean?
Absolutely
I would say, “The music is ours.” That’s always been the belief of the band. As a producer, I kind of look forward to working with other bands, other new bands. That’s kind of my next kind of thing, producing some bands and putting them out on our own label.
You collaborated with Dave Grohl on the track “Run With the Wolves”. He’s kind of known as being in a very different musical realm – rock and alternative rock, and then more mainstream rock I suppose. Why did you go with him?
I’ve known Dave for about ten years, Dave came to me actually. I just nearly finished the record, had like one more month to go. He just finished touring, and emailed me. He said, “What you up to? I’ve finished the Foo Fighters tour; I’m heading home.” I think his wife was having a baby pretty soon, so he was just getting ready to wind down. Then he said that he’ll go into the studio for a few weeks, and send you loads of drums; we hope that it might inspire you to do some stuff. He was aware I was doing an album at that stage. And I thought, even if it’s a different genre, I don’t give a fuck. If Dave Grohl is on those drums I want to hear those drums. To have them play without hearing guitars and bass on top, I felt kind of privileged to hear that. So I got the drums part, and unlike the other track, this one starts with the drums up. It came together very quickly, and we vocal-ed it, and send it back to Dave; he re-drummed it. It was the only real kind of collaboration on the record I guess. But me and Dave, we’ve been very careful not to flag that as a selling point for the record. If anything, we don’t mention it even. It’s there for people to discover, but I guess journalists pick up on that stuff, because they want to sell or record off the back of having Dave on the track.
On Warrior’s Dance, there’s a female voice in there. Was that collaboration or something else?
We were in the studio for possible four, five months. We were recording in a large stadium, not really getting anywhere, quite a frustrating time, lots of partying going on, lots of drinking. Laying down maybe twenty ideas but not finished tracks. We had this gig coming up, which was a rave in England. And they wanted us to play a track, but of course we didn’t have anything. So Keith (Flint) suggested, “Let’s just forget about the album for a minute, and just write a tune to play at this show.” At that time there was a 20th anniversary of Acid House thing going on in England, so we used that as a goal post. So I write “Warrior’s Dance”, which is almost a tribute to that scene. And I wrote it in such a way that was quite different than the way I had been working for previous four months. It was a very cut-and-paste kind of old school way I used to write. I finished the tune, and it felt really fresh to me. At the same time we moved out of our studio into a very small almost teenagers bedroom-sized kind of studio upstairs in the same building. And the thing started to come together. We used the energy we had with that track to carry on with the album. If anything, that track wasn’t even meant to be on the album, it was only meant to be played twice. Then about two months later, we played it again, and it kicked off so big on YouTube. It had like about 800,000 hits, in about a month; everybody seemed to be going mad for this track. It just kind of chose itself really, it became an important part of the album. We feel very privileged where we’re in a situation where we don’t have to have one track be led by Keith or Maxim Reality all the time. We can release a soulful track, then a vocal track, or an instrumental track. We like the fact that we’re able to do that.
Where do you draw influences from?
We were inspired by the energy of the early rave records. Bands talk about the punk movement, the ska movement, and all these important movements that have great records. But the early rave movement always seems to get looked over. But we were a part of that, we were in it. So we feel like we’re probably one of the only bands that can stand up and say, “We were there, we own it, and these are our sounds.” We’re suing sounds that we created in the beginning. We’re not trying to get on any revival trip or make retro music. We’re just trying to make what is part of British culture but deliver it in a current, kind of now. To remind people about that.
Is this album and tour a beginning of a new pathway for the group?
We’ve come from hating each other. Me and Keith kind of falling out, not speaking to each other for two years back in 2003, back to being able to work together and get some good results. We don’t know about what will happen in the future we’re just doing this right now. We’re doing it to the maximum that we can. As far as a master plan, we’ve never had a master plan.
What do you want the audience at tomorrow’s show and the Chicago show to feel and think when it’s done?
We want people to be less shell-shocked. But we want them to leave having had the chance to let off some aggression. I’ve got no interest in people getting bogged down in politics and stuff like that. Public Enemy and Rage against the Machine are great bands that can do that. We’re not that kind of band. Prodigy works on a real primal level. It’s an attack on the senses, that’s what we want it to be. The music is meant to be dumb. It’s dumb and it’s cleaver at the same time, but we want it to be dumb. Like, “Fuck you, here it comes.” We’re not trying to be intelligent, that just doesn’t work for us.
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