OASIS: Be Here Now

 

(#577: 30 August 1997, 4 weeks; 4 October 1997, 1 week)

 

Track listing: D’You Know What I Mean?/My Big Mouth/Magic Pie/Stand By Me/I Hope, I Think, I Know/The Girl In The Dirty Shirt/Fade In-Out/Don’t Go Away/Be Here Now/All Around The World/It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!)/All Around The World (Reprise)

 

 

 

A lot of people have been waiting for this one. Well, a few. Perhaps two or three people; quality, not quantity. What was that last remark again?

 

I am fully aware of the forest of clichés surrounding the reception of the third Oasis album. Overblown, glutinous, simultaneously overhyped and under-publicised, impossible preconditions imposed by a thoroughly paranoid management which enabled the degrading of the British music press into a  willing mouth for advertisers, hysterically raving reviews composed out of fear, everything and everybody under the influence of that sneaky white powder, overconfidence, betrayal.

 

You know what? On the sunny morning of Thursday 21 August 1997 it felt exciting for everybody, including me (if not Laura). Tony Blair was newly in power and hadn’t yet screwed anything up. Everybody and everything felt good, and what a pop lark to buy the new Oasis album first thing in the morning, on a day of the week when records didn’t normally come out. Not that Be Here Now was a “normal” record. Oh no; it wouldn’t be here if it had been.

 

I was working at King’s College Hospital at the time and habitually bought my new albums from Woolworths on Denmark Hill. However, they didn’t have the album when I popped in on my way to work that shiny Thursday morning – they hadn’t already sold out of it; they just hadn’t received their delivery yet. So I crossed the road to what was then still Safeway in the little shopping centre whose name I can’t remember after nearly twenty-eight years. There wasn’t a queue or anything but they had the CD in stock all right, and the girl at the checkout smiled at me and gave me a thumbs-up. It felt good to be part of something bigger, and if the Alan Moore fan in the attic is going to sneer at that, then it’s a fundamental aspect of what it means to be a human being.

 

Yes, I was part of the “hype.” I joined in because I am not Peter Purist McRechabite who imagines himself on a higher plane than the plebs and doesn’t listen to any music with tunes. It was thrilling to go home to East Dulwich with the record and put it on and listen to it. Many others initially felt the same way; it is estimated that over 424,000 copies of the album were sold on that first day alone.

 

But, as the anaesthetic block of optimism wore off and people decided to become disappointed by Blair – and therefore also, by extension, by Oasis – the excitement filtered away pretty quickly, and we were encouraged to believe that we had been sold a gigantic bill of goods. The Music and Video Exchange shop on Notting Hill Gate had boxes full of recycled copies of Be Here Now in their basement down those impossible stairs and were declining to take any more (they had too many). Since then the record has been snorted at with raised eyebrows (not to be confused with all the snorting that was allegedly going on around the time of the record’s release). It was mixed too loudly. There are too many guitar overdubs. Too much of everything. Sniffy sniff sniff.

 

So I approached listening to the record again for Then Play Long with very serious and mindful ears. I admit that I haven’t listened to it too much – if at all – since the summer of 1997 but, as regular readers will not need to be reminded, other things got in my way. However, I knew that I had to get it right, that I had to approach the record with open ears and mind. So I’ve listened to it very carefully some eight times over the past week and am relieved that my reaction to the record now is fundamentally unchanged from what it had been when first I listened to it on that sunny Thursday evening.

 

I am floored. I am in awe. What an incredible fucking album this is. It is overwhelmingly brilliant.

 

The question I then had to address was – all those renowned critics who gave Be Here Now instant, turn-of-a-dime rave reviews in 1997 and allegedly besmirched their reputations by doing so…what if they had been right all along, and, moreover, what if Noel and Liam Gallagher and Bonehead and Guigsy and the brother of the drummer out of the Style Council actually knew exactly what they had been doing all the time?

 

Yes, Be Here Now is loud. In your face, oh Christ please turn it down/pass the paracetamol levels of in your head. Yes, few of its songs are content with five minutes when seven or nine will do. And I think that was absolutely deliberate. If Oasis wanted this to be the biggest-sounding album ever – and, pray, what would its point have been if it hadn’t? – then they had to go over the top. Almost Metal Machine Music levels of going over the top; indeed, some of these songs play as though MMM is running in the background (even the tape hiss on “Magic Pie”). Why, it’s almost as if the band had decided, well, you liked What’s The Story so much to make us this big, then we have the licence to run some SONIC EXPERIMENTS past and through you. Full credit to producer Owen Morris, who previously took care to excise the multiple overdubs from Oasis records but now, perhaps buoyed by his success with Ash, presumably felt encouraged to go for broke. If it’s fifty guitars you want, Noel, you have them – the album on occasion musically resembles a Maine Road variant of Rhys Chatham.

 

Be Here Now is rock ‘n’ roll in macroscopic close-up, every detail magnified and maximalised to the point of aural intolerance. Or maybe it’s yet another of those Creation records designed to persuade you to change the way you hear things.

 

 

It’s bloody obvious, isn’t it, yet in twenty-eight years I can’t think of one writer who’s spotted it. It runs right through the gigantism of “D’You Know What I Mean?,” the unearthly dynamism of “My Big Mouth,” which latter in August 1997 was enough to convince me that no “rock” band was playing better than this, and even through the shaky four-step ascents and descents in the bridge of “Magic Pie” and the many choruses of “Stand By Me” – Be Here Now is up to its eyes in hock to Loveless. It’s as if Noel Gallagher listened to that record and worked out ways in which to develop its implications and forward them to a far larger audience than the one which demoted it to number 24 in the November 1991 listings.

 

Most – not quite all – of Be Here Now is so big people missed its bigness, or were intimidated by it. Watching the Top Of The Pops performance of “D’You Know What I Mean?” - all seven-and-a-half minutes of it, closing credits included – only the wilfully blind or purist failed to recognise that this was a MOMENT. You know, those milestones by which we mark pop’s road. In this instance it was a case of WE DID IT, WE BROKE THROUGH WITH OUR TOP POP TROJAN HORSE.

 

(And throughout this album there are references to, well, we did this from nothing, why can’t or won’t you? That line from “It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!)” about building something, anything, it doesn’t matter, but build it and call it your home – “Even if it means nothing/You’ll never, ever feel like you’re alone”; that couplet might be the key to understanding why Oasis did what they did. Noel warns repeatedly about not taking what he has to say too seriously; like those other warring brothers [and major influence on Gallagher’s songwriting] the Bee Gees, fascination with words trumps any meaning. Do they fit in, do they sound right? “Maybe the songs that we sing are wrong” – well, who’s to say that they are the wrong songs? Who decides what’s wrong and right? Isn’t the “wrong” song sung with persuasive conviction always better than the “right” song handled so precisely the musicians might as well have utilised a forceps?)

 

But there are other factors to “D’You Know What I Mean?” which are easy to overlook, not least one of the most unapologetically experimental and elongated introductions to any number one single with the aircraft drone – my father served in the Royal Air Force so I know that’s no helicopter – or the repeated references to other song and album titles (and that also goes on throughout Be Here Now’s length, Beatles, Dylan and especially the Stone Roses alike, e.g. “But then they want to be adored” from “Magic Pie”) which would not have raised any fuss had this been sometime fellow Creation recording artists Saint Etienne – actually, in balancing a purposely patient pop procedural with opaque abstractions, the song is a bumptious second cousin to “Avenue.”

 

Yet what nearly nobody grasped in that song was that it is the most convincing number one single about domestic abuse, specifically the violent and drunken shit with which the Gallagher brothers had to put up from their father. Hence the reference in its second chorus to “All my people, right here, right now – THEY know what I mean”; i.e. if you grew up, not necessarily with us, but like us, then you’ll understand exactly what we’re saying here.

 

And the song’s moral? Not that far away from the Bill Fay of “Strange Stairway,” actually; “Get up off the floor and believe in life – no-one’s ever gonna ask you twice.” Get up off the floor, and believe in life. Who can possibly argue with that?

 

The rest of the album seems to be about endeavouring to believe in life, even to the point where it’s on the verge of being extinguished. Its best and most heartfelt song, “Don’t Go Away” – the record’s “Be My Wife,” its “Love Comes Quickly,” the one moment where the masks fall off and real emotion shines through – is about the Gallaghers’ mother and also about Bonehead’s grandmother, who had then recently passed away from cancer, and to whose memory the record is dedicated. “The Girl With The Dirty Shirt” is a simple and direct love song (to Meg Mathews) which perhaps illustrates that the album’s real musical star is electric pianist Mikey Rowe (who later worked with Bill Fay, and is still a member of Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds); he is always there, probing, illuminating – and the song is nicely undercut by the wink-wink snarly raised guitar eyebrow at its end. Even “Stand By Me,” which sounds like a non-committal tribute to the band’s fans, manages to get by its “All The Young Dudes” elements on sheer cheek and courage – can you top these repeated climaxes? Why do you not even try? Meanwhile, note how close “Magic Pie” sounds to “Karma Police” except Noel sounds like he’s having more fun with the Mellotron than Jonny Greenwood (two differing aspects of life; neither supersedes the other) in its wacky outro.

 

The only real dud for me on Be Here Now is “Fade In-Out,” the band’s Rattle And Hum moment, a fairly tedious and interminable slide blues jam (with obligatory celebrity guest) which seems to improvise on Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead Or Alive” and doesn’t really go anywhere until its closing moments, when the music suddenly becomes smudged and serrated, like a faulty photocopy of itself.

 

Otherwise, though, this is superlative guitar-based rock music. “I Hope, I Think, I Know” is not quite power pop but still worthy of Teenage Fanclub (or they of it). “Be Here Now,” the song, rolls along most agreeably with an earworm whistling refrain which makes me think, somebody must have heard Skee-Lo’s “I Wish” on late 1995 radio. “It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!)” might be for me the record’s most moving song because it sees the band reaching out to its listeners – “Say something…make it sort of mean something” (that “sort of” makes the song in itself) – and its final acknowledgement of the Beatles: “Hey, what was that you said to me?/Say the word and I’ll be free?,” “It’s calling out beyond the grave”; we can make that music, those beliefs, LIVE again. Its climactic calling-out – “You’ll never, ever feel that you’re alone” – doesn’t just remind me of “You’re Not Alone” by fellow Mancunians Olive, but more encyclopaedically of Bowie’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide”; you know what those words were, and how they resonated with so many.

 

Which leaves us with “All Around The World,” which (a) needs its eleven-and-a-half minutes and (b) seems to have been built for the purpose of being the last pop song ever sung. They begin in the gutter and slowly strive for the stars, and if it is supposed to be about nothing, then what was “Hey Jude” about (other than asking John’s lad to cheer up a bit)?

 

Actually “All Around The World” is about everything, and not just “We Are The World” (“We’re gonna make a better day”). Noel Gallagher says that he wrote the song when Oasis were just starting out but held back on recording it until he was able to afford to give it the big arrangement (via Nick Ingman) it deserved. It is epic, because it would be pointless as a strummed whimper – and it has to be listened to in the context of it being summer, Blair just having got rid of eighteen-plus years of Thatcherism (or so it was thought at the time) and the future suddenly having become good again. Hold on, the song seems to plea, we can pull together and make this rancid old fucker of a society mean something again. There are la-la-la singalongs – one of the “la-la-la”ers is, meaningfully and prophetically, an uncredited-for-contractual-reasons Richard Ashcroft – there are strings, a harmonica (Mark Feltham, who worked on allegedly uncommercial records by Talk Talk), echoes even of Julian Cope and the Teardrop Explodes. Oh, and of another band from Liverpool to whom I’ll be returning in a moment.

 

Yet what makes “All Around The World” sparkle and work is, not just the lovely little touches that could have come from no other pop group, e.g. the modest upward climb of guitar that bridges the song’s first chorus and second verse, the slowly-dawning realisation that it’s being sung as the actual world around it is collapsing. Hence those two key changes are maybe not a thing in themselves – it’s still less than half of what you get in “These Eyes” by the Guess Who or “Love On Top” by Beyoncé – but in timid late nineties Britain it stood as a giant declaration of intent; and you can feel Liam Gallagher’s near-hysterical cries of desperation as we prepare for the final key change – “IT’S GONNA BE OKAY!” he screams as the sky seems to fall around him, and us; the ship is sinking.

 

Then, after the bring-our-boys-home flag-waving singalong – don’t knock it; you could say the same about “What You Want” - of “It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!),” where you can briefly believe no band rocked harder or better or more happily, the instrumental backing track returns in time for the end credits roll, only Alan White’s drumming is more pronounced, there are now also trumpets (heralding an ascension to Heaven?) and eventually the entire planet collapses, everything mutates into shrieking distortion, leaving just one piano refrain, approaching footsteps, and a door calmly closed in our faces.

 

Or an airbag.

 

Or some not-so-poor people of Paris nine days after Be Here Now’s release who probably could have done with the judicious use of some airbags.

 

Or another ambitious album which had come out on Creation Records at another point in the nineties…

 

 

Over the past week, I’ve also been listening repeatedly to Giant Steps, the third album by the Boo Radleys. I listened to it quite a lot on cassette on my Walkman thirty-two years ago but never managed to keep it fully in focus except the last track which was a sort of campfire “Hey Jude”-type singalong (“Do you remember, do you remember” which inevitably makes me think of those other Liverpudlians the Scaffold). It was all over the place but to me at the time never quite found its place. In the meantime I wrote about the follow-up album on Then Play Long. But, swotting up on Be Here Now, something struck me. Not a blunt instrument, but a possible musical connection. That would have been the only possible connection between Oasis and the Boo Radleys, Alan McGee ordering both to write hits notwithstanding, since in the late David Cavanagh’s exhaustive and at times exhausting history of Creation Records, My Magic Pie Eyes Are Hungry For Those Other Pies, oh hang on a minute, Martin Carr says there was no talk about music, big or small, between the two parties. The Radleys would endeavour to initiate a discussion about the Beatles and all they got from Oasis in response was No Beatles Mad For It. As you would.

 

But, following a self-engendered lead, I’ve given Giant Steps several more listens this week. Holy “Skip” Spence, Batman, what an album! Recorded on what I’d estimate was a budget of as near as possible to zero, it nevertheless does not skimp on its ambitions. It begins with some ambient guitaring which wouldn’t been out of place on a Boards Of Canada record five years later, along with obligatory radio chatter – is it just a Liverpool thing to remind everybody just how important and influential a record Dazzle Ships was? – before drums and pining guitar kick in and “I Hang Suspended” immediately reveals itself as a glorious, upfront pop song which in some ways foreshadows Oasis, in other ways parallels Suede and Blur but in most ways anticipates what Ash would do a few years later (I’m looking at you, “Goldfinger”).

 

Sice has very rarely been an in-your-face singer of the Liam Gallagher variety; his is rather the voice of the introvert in the chair at the far end of the room where the party’s being held, or the humble office worker who never says anything because they know they’d be instantly drowned out by all the other natter and chatter. His is the voice of somebody who is never really offered the opportunity to speak; hence the earnestly-buried fury of “Wish I Was Skinny,” “Barney (…and Me)” and some of “I’ve Lost The Reason.”

 

But, much as Liam sings Noel’s words, Sice sings Martin Carr’s words. Occasionally, the two sing them together (“Butterfly McQueen”), but mostly it’s up to Sice to sing what Carr plays, or vice versa. “I Hang Suspended,” despite or perhaps because of its all-expense-spared literal-minded video – well, they look like they’re having a good time – is an awesome song, top five in any reasonable world.

 

The rest of Giant Steps is the sound of a band exploring, using anything they stumble across, in order to find itself. They approach dub (“Upon 9^th and Fairchild”) in a curiously chaste 1982 Peel session manner, which in 1993 was refreshing in itself, and they could do straight indie as well as anyone (“Wish I Was Skinny” – but how many straight indie bands would have dreamed of that police siren ending or the jumpcut into the post-Albini quiet-LOUDisms of “Leaves and Sand”?).

 

The overall inventiveness of Giant Steps does not fail to astound in 2025. “Thinking Of Ways” got me thinking of mid-to-late period Talk Talk with its pastoral brass and clarinet commentaries (great clarinet playing, incidentally, from one Jackie Toy, of whom I can find no mention elsewhere, either before or after this album – what became of JT?). Throughout, trumpeter Steve Kitchen, though never a freeform player as some of the album’s more excitable (and less knowledgeable) reviewers leapt to describe some of his playing, works as an indispensable foil to the band, much as Mikey Rowe does on Be Here Now.

 

Listening to “Barney (…and Me)” – and yes, the central riff sounds a bit New Order-y in places – one can only marvel at the abrupt yet natural transitions from monochrome folk to Technicolor lounge. “Best Lose The Fear” would be a fine pop ballad in any setting. In the brief “One Is For” I imagine I hear “Maggie’s gone” rather than “Man is God.”

 

But what does any of this have to do with Be Here Now? Well, there are four songs in particular which seem to point a fairly direct path towards what Oasis would do. Bear in mind that the album was originally conceived with the thought of Screamadelica, and the then-imminent prospect of Bobby and the boys coming back with some straight-down-the-line good-time get-down rock-and-rooooooll, in mind – and maybe also the notion that “well, if Bobby doesn’t want to push this any further, then perhaps we can?”

 

Nevertheless, the song “If You Want It, Take It” sounds like a virtual blueprint of where Oasis would go, from Sice’s relative vocal swagger to Carr’s just-the-right-side-of-dogmatic guitar commentary, while the cautiously-escalating pain of “I’ve Lost The Reason” can be repressed no further and Sice’s voice suddenly ROARS out of the speakers…as though he’s giving birth to Liam Gallagher.

 

Then there’s “The White Noise Revisited,” the aforementioned campfire singalong that concludes the album (with supplementary backing vocals from members of Moose and others) and actually cascades in a near-bipolar fashion between the verses’ hissing, treated threats and the plaintive choruses. It’s a low-key counterpart to “All Around The World”…but where does the large-scale counterpart come in?

 

It happens, of course, with “Lazarus,” where everything the Boo Radleys have been experimenting with on this album suddenly comes into focus. The opening reggae/dub section leads almost imperceptibly into the imperious trumpet-led main theme – and that trumpet is not played by Steve Kitchen, but by Chris Moore, once of Pigbag. Sice sings the relatively minimal lyric as though it were a prequel to “D’You Know What I Mean?” “I…you know I never go out/And you know that I start to forget things/But it’s okay, they weren’t essential anyway” – this could so easily be the younger Gallaghers, stuck in Burnage penance, who haven’t yet worked out how to get themselves up off the floor. Yet the song’s title implies that its singer will rise. One possible interpretation of Be Here Now would be as a sequel to Giant Steps, or Noel Gallagher’s revenge on those who would belittle its ambitions; these things you can’t have, we’ll get them for you. “All Around The World” is “Lazarus,” finally risen, and come good.

The PRODIGY: The Fat Of The Land

 

(#576: 12 July 1997, 6 weeks)

 

Track listing: Smack My Bitch Up (ft Shahin Badar)/Breathe/Diesel Power (ft Kool Keith)/Funky Shit/Serial Thrilla/Minefields/Narayan (ft Crispian Mills)/Firestarter/Climbatize/Fuel My Fire (ft Saffron)

 

 

 

 

 

My story about this record starts in East Dulwich because it was from the big Sainsbury's on Dog Kennel Hill that I bought the CD of The Fat Of The Land on the morning of Monday 30 June 1997. I had recently moved to London SE22 because I had changed jobs and for a number of reasons too tedious and personal to outline here, Laura and I had to get out of the flat she had on Becket Street, across the way from Oxford railway station.

We wanted to find another flat in Oxford to share, but it took six months to find one. In the meantime Laura had to move back in with her father so I could hardly come up and visit her. She came down to East Dulwich a couple of times, one of which was for Diana's funeral, but she didn't really like it and got shit said to her in the street so for the most part I was there by myself at weekends. It didn't feel like a trial separation except in a lot of ways it did.

 

Mine was a nice enough flat, set back from the train station and right next to the Dulwich Hamlet F.C. ground and the aforementioned Sainsbury's, as well as a small, slopy area of grass and seats (not Dog Kennel Hill Adventure Playground as pictured above, but I couldn't find any pictures of it online) which looked remarkably like the park in which the Teletubbies played.

 

What this all means is it was not unknown for me to stumble back home after an energetic evening of none-of-your-fucking-business, switch on the TV and gaze amazed at the early Sunday morning screening of Teletubbies – the BBC noticed the abnormally high ratings the programme was getting at that time before fieldwork revealed that not only tots and their parents were watching it, but also clubbers newly returned home, some (not us) still feeling Ecstatic; and the laughing baby sun, the primary colours, the nursery rhymes, the non-sequiturs and the generally disorientating sense of (non-)order in the programme made perfect sense to those coming down from the rave era.

Yet Teletubbies was about nothing if not innocence; designed specifically for 1-4 year old infants and toddlers, its gentle aim was to introduce its audience into the world by communicating with it on its own terms. Thus the camera shots which were always angled, widened and from the ground up to obviate any sense of perspective; no one really knew how big or small the white dome which housed the Teletubbies was, or the landscape in general, since they were the equivalent of toddlers, eagerly welcoming the opportunity to make (non)sense of this exciting new phenomenon called life. Pundits objected to the half-formed, largely consonant-free language which they spoke – “eh-oh” for “hello” – whereas those with direct, hands-on experience of raising very young children know that this is exactly how they communicate with others and learn to form what we know as language; similarly the persistent repetition in each episode – the films which emanated from their TV bellies were almost always shown twice, with extremely subtle differences – was criticised, but constant repetition is exactly how infants learn things, take things on, absorb things, ways of thinking, means of talking. The controversy over Tinky-Winky’s “handbag” was equally pointless and ignorant of the role playing and imitating of their forebears – and especially their mothers – in which young children naturally indulge, since this is another way of learning about how other humans live, react and interact. The Teletubbies were essentially asexual, and their behavioural patterns therefore interchangeable.

Furthermore, and absolutely crucially, the Teletubbies were never afraid of newness, or technology. Do those features – the seemingly imposing dome with its sliding doors, the periscopes which rise from the ground to issue Tannoy instructions, the paradisical living space which is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, the televisions themselves, actually grafted onto the Teletubbies as an integral part of their existence – remind you of something else from thirty years previously? As children the Teletubbies see everything as new and exciting and harness the technology for their own good; it has not yet become something to be feared and hated. True, Noo-Noo the self-reliant vacuum cleaner, sometimes gets a little bossy, but that is speedily resolved by a Benny Hill-style mass chase around the premises. Whereas, at the opposite end of life, The Prisoner represents what happens when you become a tired adult, too weary to accept newness, too ready to settle for voluntary confinement; we all become imprisoned by our former technological desires. No wonder that in order to get anything out of Number 6, Leo McKern finally has to resort to regressing him to infancy; less wonder still that once free of the Village, McGoohan, McKern and Kanner all immediately start to act like children (note the Ken Kesey sidelong reference in that truck on wheels with added “Dem Bones” on primetime mainstream television), happy and boundless.
 

The Prodigy were rave cartoon characters like the Teletubbies, and that is why they were so fervently loved. The Prodigy Experience was cartoon rave in the manner of Lancelot Link's Evolution Revolution and the KLF, and all the more precious for it. The second album was the serious one of which grown-up men approved.

 

And the third album is the one which went quintuple-platinum in Britain, topped the charts in most of the rest of the world, including the U.S.A., outsold OK Computer by eight-to-one at its peak and struck a nerve so raw you'd want to keep it well away from any microwave. The Fat Of The Land was, and is, one of the most sheerly successful examples of working-class music.

 

What even constituted (and still constitutes) working-class music in Britain? This was a question rhetorically asked by the late Tony Wilson at the Barbican on Wednesday 17 September 1997, in my presence - but more about that later. As far as post-war culture was concerned, working-class music in Britain has been...skiffle, country and western, bluebeat and ska, heavy metal, glam rock, Northern soul, disco, jazz-funk, Acid House, rave, jungle, line dancing, happy hardcore, 2step, grime and drill. Plus of course all the "charty" mainstream pop stuff you're too cool to confess liking.

 

(oh, and Oasis, whom middle-class music "lovers" positively detested - but one Liam at a time...)

 

The Fat Of The Land made no concessions to anybody, with the possible exception of potential American audiences. Though dressed in raving (mad, but who's the madman?) clothes, it is a pretty straight-down-the-line ROCK album with riffs and attitudes - very different from the pacifist utopia of the Chemical Brothers. It's all about challenging - come play our game, we'll test ya - its listeners.

 

The Prodigy took that challenge to its extremity in ways that are retrospectively more discomfiting than they felt at the time. What weasel words these are. Let's get to my point. I should loathe "Smack My Bitch Up." Loathe it thoroughly. Specifically I should loathe its explosive brilliance, its absolutist fuck-you-equivocating-liberal-hypocrite mindset, its dynamic construction, its fabulous propulsion, the way it assembles and jumbles up, yet still succeeds in summing up, every reason why I ought to be wrong. I despise how I played it over and over when it was new, how enthusiastically I danced to it in my head, how compelled I was to revisit it again and again in spite of fully knowing its nature.

 

"Smack My Bitch Up" is designed to irk people like me, piss me off something improper. There is no rational "defence" for it as I'm certain Liam Howlett knew in his bones. He deliberately put it at the beginning of the album to cause maximal rumpus. Punk rock wasn't meant to be polite, be anyone's friend. The line in question comes from "Give The Drummer Some," track eleven on Critical Beatdown by the Ultramagnetic MC's, which I bought and listened to in 1988 because it was better than the Wonder Stuff. Actually that's hindsight-engendered bollocks. I got my kicks from the record because I don't listen to lyrics even when I can't avoid listening to them. It inserted spark and light into my world.

 

The full couplet, as performed by Kool Keith, reads: "Switch up, change my pitch up/Smack my bitch up like a pimp/For any rapper who attempt to wear/Troops and step on my path." So you can interpret it as it was presumably intended, as a "I mean business and woe betide others if they don't" declaration. It doesn't make that second line right, at least not with a small "r."

 

I am absolutely aware that in 1997 this song, and possibly the album as a whole, acted as an aesthetic recruiting post for nascent incels. "Smack My Bitch Up" may have helped to pave the path towards the maleness inferno into which we are now all about to be thrust.

 

And yet, as a pop record it is absolutely fucking knockout fantastic. It's like the roof being opened and not just the windows. Everything music was too frightened to sound like in 1997 is here and maybe we all have to look into our selves and try to figure out why we, as humans, respond like this to clear custard pies of cold irrationalism. The magnetic attraction of the forbidden; see the second Top Of The Pops performance of "Doctorin' The Tardis," which is easily findable on YouTube, and damn yourself to hell as you realise that, fetid scumshite that he is, this is showbiz rock 'n' roll at its blasted peak.

 

Is that too much? The underlying post-"What Time Is Love?" quasi-Eastern chassis to this and many of The Fat Of The Land's other tracks depressed Bill Drummond so immensely that he knew the KLF had no chance of competing with them. So he got back together with Jimmy Cauty, hired Ken Campbell to direct and designed the worst and most pathetic - and most shortlived - comeback any pop group has ever attempted. And it was all deliberate. Be patient at the back, I'll be returning to that.

 

Coming back to "Smack My Bitch Up," however, I note how the song semi-cleverly subverts itself - not just in the video with its last-minute "reveal," as kids today call it, but also the fact that the record is genially or angrily disrupted by a wordless alap delivered by singer Shahin Badar, the Colchester-born and Kuwait/UAE-raised daughter of the great classical singer Zohra Ahmed. This alap was based on the gorgeous lullaby "Nana - The Dreaming" as performed by Sheila Chandra on 1992's Weaving My Ancestors' Voices, one of its decade's finest albums; Howlett was unable to clear the original sample in time, so hired Badar to re-record it. The infant is gently encouraged to sleep and dream. Furthermore, the underlying intentions of The Fat Of The Land can only be comprehended fully if one considers the ordering of its tracks - "Smack My Bitch Up" begins the record, but see how the record ends.

 

And so to "Breathe."  Well, for every prematurely wrinkled Robson and Jerome there is - or was - a Keith Flint to gob at us: “PSYCHOsomatic ADDICT inSANE!!" By 1996 The Prodigy were firmly on the rock(ist) trail, and “Breathe” is a virtually oxymoronic title for one of the most claustrophobic of number one singles; as with the decrepit, crocodile-infested apartment block featured in the song's rusted red video, its beats and throbs seem to press down upon the listener from a dangerously wet and close ceiling. The air of oppression – post-punk to the point of This Heat in many ways – is accentuated by the doomy post-Cure/Smashing Pumpkins guitar line - not sampled, but played live by the band's stage guitarist Jim Davies - which slithers its way through the song’s clogged pores. Through it all, Flint revels in his role as torturer/ringmaster: “Breathe the pressure! Come play my game, I’ll test ya!” he snarls, before converting the “Come play my game” into a long, authentic Lydon sneer-cum-howl (“You are the victim!”). It doubles back on itself and on the listener/spectator dozens of times over, Flint’s sarcastic barks of “Inhale!” and “Exhale!” becoming progressively less amenable to compliance.

 

I was worried that the album would now sound rather dated. That was until I listened to it on headphones at top volume. Goodness me it still rocks. "Diesel Power" has the actual Kool Keith on vocals - the sample on "Smack My Bitch Up" doesn't quite sound like the original, and worse now sounds a bit like my own voice - and chunders along splendidly ("Blows your mind drastically, fanTAStically"). "Funky Shit" picks up a nifty Beastie Boys sample ("Root Down" from Ill Communications) and sprints with it - and anybody thinking that this is a VERY long way from Radiohead should note how the track ends in precisely the same way as "Karma Police," with the machine slowly grinding down to rueful dust.

 

The juice continues to flow. "Serial Thrilla," based on a Skunk Anansie sample - "Selling Jesus" from Paranoid & Sunburnt (and there's also an element of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in the Prodigy track, if you listen closely enough) - confirms that by 1997 Keith Flint was a better John Lydon than Lydon (although by then Lydon had also progressed to a more intriguing place), sneering his Sherbet Fountain of spit like Christmas had come early whether anyone liked it or not. The police siren underscore stutters to NO SIGNAL and threads directly into "Minefields," which is more of the same but with Leeroy Thornhill up front - and yes, Diana hunting for landmines came to my immediate mind ("Open up your head filled with shell shock").

 

Over the nine minutes or so of "Narayan" you do have to put up with Crispian Mills, but he actually sounds more convincing and more comfortable here than he does with his own band and his hippie chanting isn't too annoying in this context - he also wrote the track's lyrics, so with the royalties I don't suppose he has to worry too much, if at all - and the track's overall comedown "vibe" (as I gather is the apposite term; dig Peregrine "who are those Pets Shops Boys?" Worsthorne here) is a relief from the intensity of the rest of the album.

 

Yet "Narayan"'s message is a little more sinister in its implications - "If you believe the Western sun/Is falling down on everyone...don't try to run...your time has come..." Yes, it's that end of the millennium paranoia; there was a lot of it about, much pre-apocalypse impatience about everything coming to a sudden and violent termination...

Unlike James Murphy, I was there, at the Barbican. So was Ben Watson but you can't see either of us because we weren't sitting anywhere near the cameras (too far to the left, ahem). I think I saw Iain Sinclair milling around in the bar as well.

 

Anyway, the idea, as I intimated above, was to pull off the worst comeback in pop history. Twenty-three minutes of inept miming, made-up old men in pyjamas and wheelchairs, Zodiac Mindwarp parading around the stage in an absurd gold lamé suit - no Billy Fury or Martin Fry, he - and vicar's collar, the Williams Fairley Brass Band, a male voice choir of hooded extras which had The League Of Gentlemen existed at the time could have come straight out of The League Of Gentlemen, striking Liverpool dockers running onstage, failed attempts to turn the entire Barbican into the ultimate punch-up, the mezzo-soprano Sally Bradshaw singing "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)," a song co-written by an old Liverpudlian socialist, the roadie with the megaphone ("What the fuck's going ON?") but it's all fun and what indeed is the point of life without fun?

 

The audience reception was at best indifferent. You can tell from their reaction at the end which of them was going to queue up and vote for Boris Johnson in 2019, if they made it that far. But the message was - yep, we want "it" NOW, even if "now" turns out to be the end of everything. I made it to London Bridge station and back to East Dulwich and home with my K2 goodie bag, the contents of which I still have around the house somewhere, and wondered if I'd dreamt what I just saw. Bob Stanley will tell you there was something optimistically unreal about the British pop (not Britpop, oh heavens no) of the period and what is Saint Etienne's I've Been Trying To Tell You album about if not that fulsomely-abandoned dream? You could take the train from Victoria to Denmark Hill, see all of London patiently unfold across the river and ponder over how much longer any of it would exist.

 

But er "Firestarter"...

 

Well, here's the boring music critic bit; skip the next five paragraphs and I'll see you on the other side. Up until the mid-nineties, The Prodigy existed as a group only in terms of live performances, since the other three served as rappers and/or dancers and/or MCs, while the music was entirely generated by Liam Howlett alone. By 1996, though, Howlett was looking to incorporate them more fully into The Prodigy’s music, possibly with the intent of making them look more like a group with an eye on potential American audiences. The rock element, too, gradually took greater prominence in the structuring of the music itself.

Suddenly Keith Flint, hitherto an excitable, mullet-sporting compere and master of ceremonies at gigs, turned bleached, spiky and even more virulently London. A minority viewed “Firestarter” as the beginnings of a sellout, even a betrayal of their rave roots (the magazine Mixmag openly asked whether the Prodigy had in fact killed rave; the same issue was ceremoniously burned in a subsequent video) but the million or so people who made it The Prodigy’s first number one single viewed it from the perspective of the most exciting fuck-you record since the days of the Sex Pistols a generation before.

Like the Clash, The Prodigy boycotted Top Of The Pops - really, they were literally too big for the show - compelling the producers to show their videos, and the video for “Firestarter,” shot in a deserted tunnel leading out of the then recently disused Aldwych tube station, received hundreds of complaints from shocked parents, even though it depicts little other than Flint repeatedly leering at the camera while the others stand moodily in the background. That there was more than an element of Arthur Brown-type showbiz is evident from the cover of the single itself (a winking, bespectacled, behatted grandmother holding a bomb at the camera) but the record itself caused Robson and Jerome spontaneously to combust (or should have done), made the Outhere Brothers look like the Chicago Black Lace they always were, threw the decisive grenade into the comfy armchairs of mainstream British pop which Britpop itself never really managed.

It also provided a handy lump sum for the beneficiaries of the samples used; principally Kim Deal and the Breeders, whose 1993 album track “S.O.S.” furnishes “Firestarter” with its central, sampled guitar riff, as well as the Art of Noise, whose “hey! hey! hey!” from “Close (To The Edit)” (and originally from the late Paula Yates - and yes, I am indeed sorely aware of the increased melancholy caused by the presence of what are now two premature ghosts; 1997 also saw the deaths of Michael Hutchence and Hughie Green) whips through the track's hardcore fairground. Over all of this – plus cut-up beats which slash like combine harvesters of tungsten – Flint pays open tribute to John Lydon in his schoolboy East End sneer (“I’m the bitch you hated! Filth infatuated!” he screams enthusiastically, topped off with a characteristically Lydon-esque “yeeeah!”).

“Firestarter” – which in sum comes across like the Shamen's “Ebeneezer Goode” gone very wrong indeed and somehow ending up back in 1977 – remains nine-tenths of a knockout record; I think I still prefer the cartoon subversion of the first run of Prodigy hits, since their threat is more securely imbued in the grain of the music, but as the beached octopus of an ending thrashes its way to a violently abrupt pile-up ending it seems to erase all of the dull complacency which typified most of its chart-topping contemporaries. If you have to have anger, the song suggests, it’s always better to look forward in it.

 

Thereafter, the album seems to wind down and take stock with the end credits sequence of the instrumental "Climbatize," winding its way out of a wavering string synthesiser line in the slight manner of an electronic My Bloody Valentine before in turn being engulfed by mysterious lines of virtual meditative saxophone (or memories of a saxophone à la Bowie's "Subterraneans"?). You realise that The Fat Of The Land's true 1997 home would be as the soundtrack to...Wipeout 2097, or other PlayStation games of your choice. Music for action.

 

Also, overwhelmingly, music for males; young and somewhat gruff ones who in some cases may "grow up" to become less than proud and never resign from the task of having a grudge about everything and everybody that isn't them. Yet the album which commenced with the painfully problematic "Smack My Bitch Up" concludes with...its response.

 

"Fuel My Fire" is ostensibly a cover of a song included on L7's 1994 album Hungry For Stink. That's another thing I like about Liam Howlett. He also doesn't give a fuck about cool. So The Prodigy Experience gets 4/10 in the NME for not being Screamadelica. Big deal. He'll buy and use whatever records he wants. How uncool were Kula Shaker in 1997? But he probably met Crispian at some festival somewhere and they got on great and his were the voice and words that were needed. What did you expect? The Milltown Brothers?

 

But is "Fuel My Fire" an L7 cover? Um, yes and no. The song's on the band's fourth album, right enough, but only the words belong to them. Donita Sparks unintentionally wrote new lyrics to a song entitled "Lost Cause," written and recorded by Melbourne punk band Cosmic Psychos and included on their second album, 1989's Go The Hack, which found an American release the following year on Sub Pop (which is how Sparks presumably got to know about it). The two parties sorted out any legal matters perfectly amicably.

 

Much as happened with Cyndi Lauper's retooling of "Girls Just Want To Have Fun," however, Sparks' lyric shits all over the original, which concerns itself with a guy leering over and/or sneering at a girl and deeming her a "lost cause" ("She's only nineteen/I'm a hasbeen"). Whereas L7's version, as reproduced here by the androgynous sandpaper tones of Keith Flint, is savagely angry, accusatory and filled with hooks of every sort ("You liAAAAAAAAAAR!"). There's a cool Hammond organ fill which seems to cock a Charlatan eye, and there is also Saffron Out Of Republica screaming echoes in the background. "Got a grudge, got a grudge," "People like you just BURN." It is as if The Prodigy are screaming demands for all walls to be torn down, along with their architects. Overthrowing the polite order which would otherwise destroy all of us. I look at 2025 and see how dreadfully that manual has been misinterpreted. But I do not think it was the intention of The Fat Of The Land to destroy the world. Perhaps raze the rubbish and clear some space for a better world, if you can accomplish a better job of wrestling with the record's contradictions than I have managed.

 

We found a flat on Binsey Lane and moved into it in December 1997. Long-awaited big hugs ensued.