London’s Groucho Club in the early 1990s was the epicentre of Cool Britannia, the glorious backdrop to debauched goings-on amongst the Primrose Hill illuminati. Alas, a plethora of exclusive celebrity haunts, with even more forbidding door policies, emerged thereafter, and the Groucho became something of a shadow of its former self, a debased currency in London’s endless fame game. Christ - could there be anywhere more appropriate to interview The Prodigy’s Liam Howlett?

After all, The Prodigy had quite the courtship with celebrity themselves, but in recent years the worm has turned. As opposed to being portrayed as The Prodigy’s electro troubadour and creative force, the UK media are more likely to speak of Howlett now as Mr. Natalie Appleton (ex-All Saint). Indeed, Liam almost comes across as a caricatured celebrity, wearing his painfully hip shades and cravat (!), but get him talking about The Prodigy’s new record, Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, and his erstwhile creative self becomes apparent once more. Like The Groucho, there’s life in this boy yet.
After the resounding success of Fat Of The Land, the Essex boys took a well-deserved break, yet returned with a single, ‘Baby’s Got A Temper’, that seemed to blow their hard-won street cred. The music media had a field day upon its release, proclaiming that The Prodigy were pathetically stoking the embers of a once-illustrious career. Now, a full seven years after Fat Of The Land, Howlett has finally delivered the record he is happy with, and he has plenty to say about his recent jump from writer’s block to…well, block rockin’ beats.
“We toured for two years with Fat Of The Land,” he explains. “It was a very heavy schedule. The music suffered, touring overtook the music. I thought, ‘fuck it, I need time off’. They (the band) irritated me, and I didn’t want to see anyone for ages. I didn’t see Keith much that year (2000) and spent a lot of time hanging with friends, not doing anything.”
Halfway through 2001, Howlett felt the time was right to return to the studio. The results proved his instincts wrong.
“Unfortunately for me, I was still in Fat Of The Land mode,” he reflects. “One of the five tracks I laid down was ‘Baby’s Got A Temper’. The single came out and it was like a solid description of the band…a complete fucking mess. Sounds were mixed up, it was slow, it was a real downer for me.”
At this point, the question arises as to why The Prodigy felt the need to release a record they were clearly not happy with.
“At the time I was confused, I wanted to show people we were still out there, and at the time it felt like the right thing to do,” he reflects. “In a way, it was an important record to release because it showed me what not do to. It showed me the path I shouldn’t take, and made me think of a new path. I made something positive out of it and tried to move on. I went into my studio for four months, and was there totally blank, not knowing what to do. I was affected by the atmosphere of the studio, I was imagining the record company peering through the windows to see what I was doing. I felt really pressured, it had a good psychological affect.”
After four months in the studio, however, it seemed as though things were to get worse before they could get better for Howlett.
“Every time I went into this studio, it was a downer. The definition of madness, a friend told me, was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, and that was me at the time. I would go to bed and think, the next day is the day I’d be okay. When you’re in a mad situation it’s hard to see outside of it. Four months later, my mate was like, we’ve got to get out of the place. When I think about it, the record company were really good…a major label would have gotten rid of me four years ago.”
Fortunately for all concerned, the muse started to call, with Howlett finding creative inspiration in unlikely places.
“I wanted to be inspired by everyday shit,” he claims. “I would walk down the high street and listen to music in shops, and get ispired by general noise. I was in a Lebanese restaurant – it was romantic, candlelight, all that shit – and I heard this music coming from the kitchen. I went into the kitchen and asked them what the music is, so the guy writes it down, and it’s this Iranian singer. I went out to the next day to try to find the music, really going out to get inspired instead of hearing the usual shit. I think that’s how I got stale in the first place, listening to everyday stuff.”
Indeed, if the criticism of ‘Baby’s Got A Temper’ taught Howlett anything, it was that he needed to breathe new life into The Prodigy sound.
“I made a conscious decision not to put Keith and Maxim on the new record,” he explains. “I called them up and said, ‘don’t freak out, but I’m not putting you on the next record’. For The Prodigy to survive in 2004, it’s got to be unexpected. Maxim and Keith were very understanding, they wanted the band to carry on as much as everyone else, and this is the only way it could happen.”
As it goes, Howlett has ended up with some not entirely unlikely bedfellows on this album. In addition to Princess Superstar and Juliette Lewis, brother-in-law Liam Gallagher makes an appearance.
“I met Liam six years ago, and Liam’s a good friend,” he says. “Originally when I met him, he said to me, ‘My brother’s done a track with the Chemical Brothers, we should do a track that will blow it out of the water’. Finally we ended up doing it. He wanted it to be different to do what he does, he’s normally very melodic and he wanted do something repetitive that would do people’s heads in. It’s the sound of me and him, off it at four in the morning doing our thing. Liam’s been a good mate in the last few years, just a cool guy…one of the most real people I know.”
Although The Prodigy have often been classed as an electro act, Howlett seems imbued with a creative approach and mentality that is more influenced by hip-hop. He admits that the roots of the album’s title, Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, firmly lie in the genre.
“It’s like that hip-hop idea of having been away for seven years,” he muses. “No one has come and filled our shoes, now we’ve come back to tread on everyone else’s feet.”
The Prodigy always seemed, in their approach to celebrity at least, to have more in common with hip-hop acts than faceless dance acts, I reason.
“Exactly,” he exclaims. “I was always into the idea of hip hop, the idea that young kids stand up and say, ‘I did this’. I was more into that philosophy than a couple of guys with keyboards with their heads down. If you make music, you have to stand up and go, ‘We did it’. Otherwise, what’s the point of even going on stage, getting your picture taken?”
Ironically, Howlett seems anxious to shrug off this weight of celebrity, and it’s a sentiment that he admits was playing on his mind when they created the video for ‘Smack My Bitch Up’.
“Before that video, we’d been in the video for the last six times performing,” he recalls. “I remember the Police videos, fucking Stuart Copeland tapping his drumsticks off the wall. In the next video, he’d be tapping on the table. I was thinking, ‘Here we go again…Keith will stick his tongue out, Maxim will get in his contacts’, and I wanted to do something different, be a bit clever. When I saw (the video) first I hated it ‘cos it was so straight. I had to wait until the effects were put in.”
It’s an approach that Howlett is happy to take again with the video for upcoming single ‘Girls’.
“We’re not going to be in this video either, as we want people to be re-educated about The Prodigy,” he proclaims. “People who have only gotten interested in The Prodigy since ‘Firestarter’ think it’s all about Keith and Maxim. We’re still together as a band and it’s important to remind people that The Prodigy are about production and noise; that’s what makes the tunes have energy. Once we get that out of our system, we can bring Keith and Maxim back into vocals again.”
Thankfully, with the new phase of The Prodigy, Lima Howlett has become much more enlivened and focused about what he does.
“I’ve already recorded a track with Maxim,” he enthuses. “As far as the new video goes, it’ll be graphic based…an 80s trip through Miami. I wanted to bring a sexiness, a trashy feel to this album. Ultimately, I want people to go, ‘Who’s that?’ ‘The Prodigy.’ ‘Fuck, I didn’t recognise them.’”