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.