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Тема: Статья \"We\'re animals. We have to stay hungry\" в guardian.co.uk (6 февраля 2009) (Просмотрено 754 раз)
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minaton
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Статья \"We\'re animals. We have to stay hungry\" в guardian.co.uk (6 февраля 2009)
# 06 февраля 2009, 18:15:10
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We're animals. We have to stay hungry
From stadium-filling domination to haunted studios, bike crashes and near-breakups - a resurgent Prodigy tell Angus Batey what they had to do to restart the creative fire
Автор: Angus Batey
Опубликовано: The Guardian, 6 февраля 2009
The Rock-Bottom Moment: any band who've been around a bit have had one. What separates groups who last from those who don't is how they deal with theirs when it arrives. For the Prodigy, the Essex rave/rock outfit who seem to relish having their backs against the wall, down times are a creative spur. But their Rock-Bottom Moment - well, that was different.
It was late 2002, going on 2003. Liam Howlett, the group's producer, main writer and musical mastermind, called his two remaining bandmates, Keith Flint and Keith "Maxim Reality" Palmer, to a studio space he was renting in a Victorian warehouse in east London. Recording for the long-awaited follow-up to 1997's multimillion-selling album The Fat of the Land (which went to No 1 in 23 countries) was not going well. Flint and Palmer had been ringing Howlett throughout the summer, asking what was happening with the new tracks. "They're a load of fuckin' shit," he barked finally, "and I've thrown 'em away."
On stage was always where they felt most at home, and the Prodigy had become a hugely popular draw on the global festival circuit, but a somewhat stilted Reading performance that summer had been their last gig, and there were no further dates scheduled. Flint and Maxim only receive songwriting credits - and hence the publishing royalties that are the main way musicians make money from recording - for tracks they sing on, and the Prodigy don't release albums very often; there might not be another one along for four or five years. With no gigs planned, and no records out, Flint and Maxim had a direct financial stake in what Howlett was about to reveal in his plans for the next LP.
Howlett played them two almost completed tracks, and part of a third. Flint and Maxim were impressed, and enthusiastic. This was the kind of forward-looking twist they need to reinvent the band. Then Liam dropped the bombshell.
Their last single, Baby's Got a Temper, had - Howlett felt - been Prodigy-by-numbers; it sounded too much like a band with a lead singer. "It felt like Maxim and Keith were the only options available to me," he would explain later. "I just had to break the mould."
So he watched Flint's and Maxim's reactions, studied the faces of the friends he's been closer to than family for more than a decade; then he looked each of them in the eye and told them, bluntly: "You're not gonna be on the album."
"This is what I know now," says Howlett purposefully, today. "Success and happiness makes you lazy and slows you down. That's why we feel triumphant on this new album, because it's come out of, like, a really down time for us. We feel like we've really had to fight."
Across the table from him this afternoon in the upstairs room of a west London pub, Flint and Maxim nod their agreement. The trio, back with their new fifth album, Invaders Must Die, are a study in relaxed amiability, very much all friends again. That Rock-Bottom Moment, when Howlett decided that what became the Prodigy's last album, 2004's Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, would not involve the other two, feels like a long time ago. But while the wounds may have healed, the scars are still painful.
Raise the question of how the band's finances have worked for the past five years, and the three of them begin looking at their shoes. "You're goin' deep there!" laughs Maxim, while Howlett just smiles in rueful embarrassment. It is Keith Flint, the dancer-turned-vocalist whose ripped jumper, made-up eyes and spiky hair saw him popularly regarded as the band's frontman at their late-90s peak, who first tackles the issue.
"I'll just say that there's nothing financial involved with the Prodigy that overtakes the fact that it has to be what it has to be," he begins, speaking carefully but emphatically. "From day one, the band has always worked in a non-traditional way. If you had to do something legal between us, the lawyers would go, 'How does that work?' First and foremost, on every agenda, is the reality of the band: the belief in the music and the ethic behind the band. Finance comes second."
"We understand it now," says the phlegmatic Maxim. "Once you're on top, complacency settles in, and where do you go from there? You have to break it down to basics and realise where your hunger is."
"A lot of people maybe think we split up," says Howlett, who concedes that it almost came to that. "But as I meet other bands and talk to other bands, we realise we are quite unique in our setup, in the way we have come through since we started."
(продолжение в следующем посте)
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minaton
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Статья \"We\'re animals. We have to stay hungry\" в guardian.co.uk (6 февраля 2009)
Ответ #1 06 февраля 2009, 18:15:49
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When Flint and Maxim first met Howlett, in the late 1980s, they had to convince him that the tracks he was making at home were worth playing to others. With a fourth member, Leeroy Thornhill, the Prodigy became the first act to put a face on the music of the post-acid house rave scene. The roles were unusual, but clearly defined: Maxim was the MC, Thornhill and Flint were dancers, and Howlett wrote and produced the music.
They signed to the XL label in October 1990 and had hits from the off, but it was their second album, 1994's Music for the Jilted Generation, that began to hint that they were more than just another bunch of techno also-rans. Hailed as a rave-era There's a Riot Goin' On, the record found Howlett delving into his love of hip-hop and collaborating with Pop Will Eat Itself.
Their 1995 Glastonbury appearance helped them cross over from dance to rock crowds without alienating either. Firestarter, the first Prodigy song to feature Flint on vocals (he still stands by 1997 comments that with the song Howlett had "made me like myself for the first time"), and Breathe both topped the UK singles chart before The Fat of the Land - a timely fusion of their rave, rap and rock roots - took them to a global level of superstardom few acts ever attain.
They stayed on the road until 2002, playing to their strengths but putting off the inevitable, while the bonds of friendship became strained. "We toured for almost seven years straight," Maxim reflects, "and we were in each other's space for so long we needed to get away from that and have some different thoughts." Thornhill left in 2000, partly because his legs weren't up to it any more; Flint and Maxim embarked on sputtering solo careers.
Howlett, meanwhile, bought a country house in his native Essex and built the studio he'd always dreamed of, full of state-of-the-art gear and decorated in moody black. He married the former All Saints singer Natalie Appleton, became a father, and through Nat's sister, Nicole, counted Liam Gallagher as his brother-in-law. Yet he had begun to resemble the sort of pop establishment figure every fibre in his being wanted to rebel against: with the band off the road and barely speaking, he fractiously tinkered with new music he didn't like, hunkered down in a studio he came to feel might be haunted. (The house had previously belonged to a businessman who died when his McLaren F1 crashed into a tree; when the news had broken of a unnamed Essex man killed in an F1 crash, Howlett, who also owned one of the rare cars, was briefly feared dead by his own father.)
While Howlett eventually found a way out of his writers' block, shuttering the home studio and working with cheap software on his laptop, the enforced hiatus wasn't easy on Flint.
"I had no creative outlet at all," he admits. "It really screwed me up, and I screwed myself up. I'm quite self-destructive, so it's easy for me to kind of implode in that sort of environment. I'm quite open, but it's very easy to sound like you're trying to create this kind of rock'n'roll disaster, which I think is really uncool. That's for the real professionals, like Pete Doherty - he does it properly. I waded in, and I waded in deep - but so does everyone."
For a while he substituted the adrenalin rush he got from the band with a stint in a Ducati-sponsored motorbike racing team, before "quite a bad accident" made him realise the risks were no longer worth taking. And despite his status as rave's Johnny Rotten, he was never tempted by reality TV. "Absolutely all" of the celebrity reality shows have approached Flint, but his antipathy to them is so well known within the Prodigy organisation that requests are routinely turned down without being referred to him.
"Even if this [the band] didn't exist any more, I will die skint rather than do that," he says, referring to former Sex Pistol John Lydon's stint on I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here. "I wasn't a Pistols fan, but I know people who were. They're middle-aged now, but they still have the attitude, because the real true punks can't let go of that way of thinking. So when I saw Lydon doing that, I just thought, 'Fuckin' 'ell, you've let all those people down.' He doesn't mean fuck to me; he's a joke. But I was angry for them."
All three now agree that the trauma surrounding Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned was necessary.
"It took that for us to realise what the band was about," says Maxim. "I did my solo stuff, and, yeah, it's cool writing a couple of tunes in the studio or whatever, but my heart is in the band. In hindsight, us not being on the album was definitely the best move."
"I'd written about 90% of Always Outnumbered by then [the time of that meeting]," says Liam, "and to have just had a token track with the guys on there, that would've been ridiculous."
"The band's always done what the band's done, and the outcome has always been for the best," agrees Flint. "We've been really complacent about our relationships, but now we're rock solid."
That solidity has taken a while to cement: touring resumed in 2005, to accompany a best-of album, and got the trio back on course.
"Off the back of Always Outnumbered we ... I think the word is 'salvaged' the live show," Howlett offers. "We went back on the road and that was the repair time. There were lots of four-in-the-morning talks with me an' Flinty, just basically repairing our friendship."
Bridges mended, the band accepted a booking for the Gatecrasher festival last year, and felt they needed something new to play alongside their ageing hits.
"It was the anniversary of 20 years of acid house and the rave scene," Flint explains, "and we were a genuine part of that - a really significant British youth culture movement. That realisation freed us up. We wanted to write something like a bootleg-type retrospective track that represented that, just to play live. It wasn't meant as the start of an album."
The track Howlett came up with was Warriors Dance: built around a vocal sample from the 1991 techno anthem Take Me Away by True Faith and a treated burst of minor-key oboe, it was the catalyst to get them working together again. Invaders Must Die opens with a bass throbbing like a heartbeat and closes with Stand Up, a track Howlett describes as "that one last tune the DJ plays at the end of a night that's like a warm blanket, that puts its arm around you and says, 'It's all right - it's time to go home.'" In between, wall-punching ferocity tussles with the sound of a band getting back to their roots.
Some will question the relevance of a record that comes across like a decade-late follow-up to The Fat of the Land. Yet the sound they pioneered has rarely seemed more du jour: "nu-rave" bands like Klaxons and Does It Offend You, Yeah? have helped keep the Prodigy vibe in fashion, while outfits such as Justice and Pendulum are quick to acknowledge Howlett and co's profound influence. They are back in their preferred position - that of a yapping underdog, applauded by some but an irritant to others, with plenty left to prove.
"This might sound a bit Mystic Meg, but we're animals, and you have to be hungry," Flint says. "That makes you dangerous, makes you on the edge, and I think as animals you're at your best when you're like that."
Suggest that these three married, middle-aged men might be starting to look ridiculous playing up-tempo electro-punk rebel music, and the underdog snarls a little louder.
"We all listen to music, and we know what rocks," Maxim says. "We're not kidding ourselves: we know we're the fuckin' bollocks!"
"Whenever the age question comes up, it's kind of hard," Keith muses. "You don't wanna defend it, because you know there's nothing cool about being too old and doing something you shouldn't be doin'. I'm not Mr Super-Secure, but I honestly believe I fuckin' rule every stage I go on, and I don't believe anyone's as good as me. And I know I'm in the best band in the world, with the best arsenal behind me, which is our sound. People want to see us because they think it's gonna be a disaster, but instead they're gonna see fuckin' mayhem! They'll be like, 'Them cunts're better than they've ever been!' And it's true!"
• Invaders Must Die is released on 23 February. A single, Omen, is out on 16 February. A UK tour, with support from Dizzee Rascal, begins on 5 April at the International Arena in Cardiff
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orangefox
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ыыы. кто возьмется переводить?
UPD: ок, тогда я возьмусь.
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