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'Calvin Harris? That's just waffle. That isn't real'

• 15th November 2018
• Craig McLean

As their seventh album tops the charts, Liam Howlett, the brains behind dance gods The Prodigy, talks to Craig McLean about Ed Sheeran, the benefits of not sleeping and taking his son on tour with Keith Flint

Liam Howlett is showing me around the place where the magic happens. It doesn’t take long – The Prodigy’s studio in King’s Cross, north London, is a room the size of a cupboard, then another room the size of a smaller cupboard.

“You can imagine spending 17 hours a day in here,” puffs the band’s 47-year-old songwriter/producer. He did that for the best part of a year. And he did it largely alone, making the cacophonous electronic punk of No Tourists, the trio’s typically uncompromising seventh studio album – and their seventh No 1. No wonder he’s looking a little peaky.

Still, Howlett – messy bleached blond hair, bit of studio timber around the midriff, a doodle pad of tattoos on arms and neck – counts a year of recording dangerously loudly as a bonus. It could have taken a lot longer.

“Working after the gigs is one reason it was done so quickly,” says the leader of a band who, 28 years since a teenage Howlett formed them in Braintree, Essex, are almost as big a live draw as ever they were, an arena-level attraction in much of Europe.

“I find that after gigs, the train of thought is really tuned into what’s needed,” he continues. “I’d sometimes say [to our management], ‘Just put me in the nearest shit hotel to the venue, so I can get there quickly and write or record.’ Better that than waiting three days till I got back here. So because I was on the tour bus, I was on a good wavelength.”

That approach also worked for vocalist Keith Flint – though less so for vocalist Maxim. “We’re all different people, but Keith is in tune at the gig,” says Howlett. “He’s in that mode, so capturing his vocals when he comes offstage is a good moment. He’s pumped up – although, to be honest, he’s always pumped up. But he’s concentrating as well.”

‘Capturing Keith’s vocals when he comes offstage is a good moment. He’s pumped up – although, to be honest, he’s always pumped up’

That, he says, accounts for the power of album stand-out “Champions of London”, a slab of revved-up, pitched-up junglist hardcore. “It’s got a bite,” Howlett agrees. Not bad considering, “we did all the vocals in a hotel room in Belgium”.

And Maxim? “He’ll come into the studio after I’ve sent him the track. He’ll write a few things down, and he’ll come in a bit more prepared than Keith.”

Howlett tested himself, too, in this unnamed studio, his own version of a CIA black site. “I was trying to find the ultimate way to reach a creative headspace. So some days I’d not sleep. But you can only do that for a couple of days before you’re f**ked.”

Howlett nonetheless put himself on edge, the better to conjure the bug-eyed evil-rave of the title track and “Timebomb Zone”. “I can’t be doing three things at once,” he admits, “so I shut everything else down.”

What does his wife, Natalie Appleton of All Saints, say about that? “Well, I shut everything down apart from my family,” he smiles. “But Nat’s in a band, so she gets it. So she’s ultimately the best support I could have, really. It is intense but that’s just the way it is. I had just enough energy to do the music and be a good dad.”

Their son, Ace, is now 14 and old enough to be allowed to join his father on tour. Normally he travels with his mother. One imagines that, to a teenage boy, being on the road with The Prodigy would be a bit more exciting.

“Yeah, although he hasn’t done it yet. But they’re pretty rock’n’roll, All Saints, d’you know what I mean?” Howlett grins knowingly.

Thirty million record sales in, and 21 years since the release of their era-defining third album The Fat of the Land, The Prodigy are still hard at it. Howlett concedes that anger, or a version thereof, is an energy. “If you think I’m angry, then it’s me,” he states gnomically. “I can’t write any other way. I’m just constantly hungry for it, and dissatisfied with what we’ve done.”

He admits he can be contrary and had a three-week, tools-down huff after “some kind of management person” came in to the studio and had the temerity to say something along the lines of: “That could be a great single!”
Howlett sniffs. “I just went, ‘F**k you!’ My mind just went. I seem to rebel against myself. I can’t be told. It’s just the way I am,” he admits, smiling slightly, acknowledging how daft that is.

‘The only thing I’ll say about Brexit is, largely, I don’t care, but what makes me angry is leaving people up in the air. Do it, or don’t do it, but you’ve put everyone’s life on hold’

So, aside from encouraging noises from management, what else makes him angry? Brexit? The ubiquity of Ed Sheeran? “Ha, ha! The only thing I’ll say about Brexit is, largely, I don’t care, but what makes me angry is leaving people up in the air. Do it, or don’t do it, but you’ve put everyone’s life on hold.”

And Sheeran? “Never met him, looks all right. Things like that don’t even enter my space.” Not much in the way of other music does enter his space, unless it’s interesting on the “sonic, technical” side. What about the modern face of electronic music, Calvin Harris? “Mate, that’s just pop music. That’s just waffle. That isn’t real to me, that isn’t reality.”

As for rock bands, Howlett likes “not many. None of them are good enough.” Pushed, he comes up with Idles. “But actually Slaves are my favourite – their approach is good, and what comes out of the speakers on that new record is just the best. They’re supporting us on tour, and Laurie’s a good friend of mine,” he says gesticulating to a Basquiat-like artwork on the wall painted by the band’s gifted frontman, Laurie Vincent.

“He’s a tattoo artist as well. I keep asking him to do me, but he keeps saying no. But I’ll corner him on tour probably and get him to do it.”

At least The Prodigy now know how to tour properly. True to rigorous form, Howlett thinks it took the band until 2005 to work out how best to play their music live. And at least he’s content with his mix of No Tourists – he spent four months mixing the previous album, The Day is My Enemy, and still wasn’t happy with it.

It was the same with their three biggest hits: he ditched the mixes of “Smack My Bitch Up”, “Breathe” and “Firestarter” that were made on a “million-pound mixing desk” in Shoreditch and reverted to the demos he made in his house in Essex.

“I never want to think we’ve done great,” concludes this middle-aged man on a mission. “Because that means you’re taking your foot off the gas and relaxing. And being like that doesn’t make a good zone for being creative.
“I am a happy person!” he insists with a laugh. “But my attitude is: just wait till the next one.”

‘No Tourists’ is out now

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• Natalie Appleton
• No Tourists
• Gigs

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