GQ Magazine

How Madonna helped The Prodigy conquer America

• 18th April 2020
• Richard Russell

In the mid-1990s, The Prodigy were huge in the UK, but struggling to make an impact across the Atlantic. Then they turned to an unlikely saviour

In 1992, a rave band named The Prodigy released their debut album Experience on XL Records. It was like nothing else and The Prodigy – comprising Liam Howlett, Maxim, Keith Flint and Leeroy Thornhill – took the UK by storm. It also helped establish the fledgling XL Records as a label to be taken seriously. However, even with the release of their next record and the support of major American label Elektra, US success continued to elude the band. Here, in an extract from his autobiography Liberation Through Hearing, XL Recordings founder Richard Russell recalls how the band finally broke through Stateside with “Firestarter” – and a little help from unexpected quarters.

Throughout the 1980s, UK indies would license artist albums to US majors with great success. The bigger American labels would typically be able to pay the UK indie an advance of somewhere between $75,000 and $150,000 per album. Beggars Banquet would have sunk without these substantial cash injections. Equally, these arrangements were often mired in difficulty. 

Everything is wonderful when you work with a large American entertainment company. At the start. Corporations tend to have two modes of behaviour: if you are someone they wish to seduce, or who makes them a lot of money, they will treat you splendidly and nothing is too much to ask. Everyone else (including you when you are no longer in one of the categories above) is dispensable. None of this is to complain. We knew what we were getting into and what we wanted. 

The Prodigy’s Experience album proved to be a tough sell for Elektra and they had been hoping for a hit. Having failed to deliver that success, we found ourselves no longer welcome in their Manhattan HQ. 

As we exited our first corporate US home, visionary UK producer and label boss Daniel Miller of Mute Records turned up. As an artist in the early 1980s, Daniel made the synth classic “Warm Leatherette” under the name The Normal, later covered by Grace Jones. Rather than following through on the promise he showed as an artist, he devoted his energies to running a record label, founding Mute to release the electronic music he loved. This all seemed familiar. 

He signed and produced Depeche Mode and he and they had achieved a weirdly similar holy grail to the one we were pursuing; an Essex electronic band gaining mainstream US success. Daniel clearly saw an opportunity to repeat some alchemy. From the success of Depeche Mode, Daniel had built his own US operation and suggested that we license the next Prodigy album to his label Mute in the US, rather than to a major. We were happy to accept his offer. No one else was interested. 

The follow up to Experience was called Music For The Jilted Generation and showed Liam honing his craft and making another classic long-player in a genre which was still dominated by singles. On Jilted Liam makes dance music, music from a scene, genre music. But he does it so much better that it actually bears little relation to anyone else’s work. His personality is expressed through the production: unshakable self-confidence in every note of every synth riff. The album was a huge success in most of the world and The Prodigy were becoming one of the most thrilling live acts on the planet – a feat that would have been unthinkable for an electronic act a year or two previously. The only thing that continued to elude us was proper Stateside success. 

Daniel Miller was a benevolent ally with excellent taste and Mute had kept all their promises. But we wanted more. Daniel understood that and we agreed to somehow bulk up our firepower going forward. 

Other British electronic artists, including the Chemical Brothers and Underworld, were also receiving unprecedented levels of US interest. The music industry had decided that “electronica” was going to be the next big thing. It was cringeworthy but I suspected it might be helpful nonetheless. We weren’t going to dilute any aspect of what we did, so if the media wanted to group together disparate artists under a weak heading, that wasn’t going to be our problem. 

I was focused on helping Liam complete the third album, the record I thought would be The Prodigy’s opportunity to reach the really wide audience to whom they were still unknown, and I didn’t want him to over-labour the process. While the music has to be right and that is always the priority, getting the timing perfect is connected to that. Don’t leave the cake in the oven too long. 

We released the “Firestarter” single on my 25th birthday in 1996 and it represented a successful attempt on Keith and Liam’s part to merge their two main musical loves – hip-hop, particularly of the type made by the Bomb Squad, and punk – and the real triumph was that Keith, up to this point still a dancer, provided the snarly and Lydon-indebted vocal. The Prodigy had gone from conceptually being a band to actually being a band, in terms that the uninitiated might understand. 

When the big-budget video we had commissioned for the song was delivered, Liam hated it. We started again, this time with director Walter Stern, who had previously shot the “No Good”, “Voodoo People” and “Poison” videos. On the way to the shoot, Keith jumped out of Liam’s car and into a second-hand clothes shop, returning with the stars and stripes jumper he wore to iconic effect in the video. 

If Keith’s spontaneous and unlikely adoption of American iconography would contribute subtly to the band’s crossover success in the US, his performance in the remade “Firestarter” video would make a seismic impact. Keith appeared unhinged and untethered and his performance spoke to people on some primal level. He was expressing something from deep within himself. Something dark. It was one of the great music video performances of all time.

Once “Firestarter” lodged itself at No1 the excitement around the band snowballed accordingly. We had chosen to release the single without having completed the album – a risky manoeuvre. To maintain the momentum, we needed to have another standalone No1 hit single. Seeing the band perform “Breathe” for the first time, featuring vocals from both Keith and Maxim over a surf guitar riff, I had suggested that we make it the next single. The “Breathe” video even managed to turn things up another notch. 

Liam had still looked young and innocent in the “Firestarter” video but now the whole band looked like rock stars. The single duly knocked early Simon Cowell protégés Robson and Jerome off the No1 spot and then kept Peter Andre at bay for a couple of weeks. We had advertised the fact that the forthcoming album, if completed in a timely fashion, was likely to be monstrously big and this fact could not be missed or mistaken by anyone, including Madonna. And why would the fact that a British rave group were likely to have a very successful album be of interest to the still reigning queen of pop? Because Madonna was not only enjoying enormous success at this time as an artist, having consummately reinvented herself for her second decade on the pop throne, but also enjoying even greater success with her label imprint Maverick. 

It had long been an age-old law of the music business that when an artist reached a certain level of mega-popularity, their fawning and supplicant record label did whatsoever they requested and so, along with the scented candles and floral arrangements, they received their own “boutique” (the word itself is a giveaway) record label. 

However, just as it is an age-old law of the music business that superstars get their own labels, the enterprise is usually not a resounding success. Historically, it did not seem to matter how talented the artist was. In fact, the more talented they were, the less likely the artist would eclipse their own success, and until they did that, the label is pure vanity. The Beatles’ Apple was perhaps the most famous artist-run disaster as record label. A fortune was lost, chaos descended, but we at least remember its name. 

Madonna’s Maverick, however, showed every sign of being the label that bucked this trend. She had not only her manager, former Michael Jackson consigliere Freddy DeMann running the show, but his protégé, a young and hungry Hollywood go-getter of Israeli descent called Guy Oseary. Freddy and Guy had a powerful combination of youth and experience. And with one of Guy’s very first signings, a Canadian singer-songwriter called Alanis Morissette, they had the single biggest-selling worldwide artist of the 1990s on their roster. 

There was a decision to be made. We went and did the meetings in New York and LA. Our joint delegation from XL and Mute met with Jimmy Iovine in his LA office at Interscope Records, the company he cofounded after engineering and producing albums for the likes of John Lennon and Patti Smith. Jimmy seemed the most musically intuitive person to operate a large US record label in the modern era. 

One of Daniel Miller’s staff mentioned how nice the bagels were and asked Jimmy where he got them. The mogul looked unimpressed and the atmosphere in the room changed. “Don’t you get it?” Jimmy said. “I don’t get the bagels.” 

The Mute employee looked crestfallen; it had been an innocent question and as a New Yorker he was genuinely impressed by the quality of this particular, specifically Jewish, baked good, normally an East Coast delicacy. But Jimmy was right. The Mute employee didn’t understand. Jimmy most certainly didn’t get the bagels. It was like the scene in Goodfellas where Joe Pesci’s character Tommy DeVito says, having been ribbed about his humble beginnings, “I don’t shine shoes no more.” 

Of all the executives who pursued us, the most doggedly determined was Maverick’s Guy Oseary, to the extent that, concerned that the deal wasn’t going his way, and that I hadn’t been proving receptive enough to his advances while on an exploratory US trip, he simply got on a Concorde, raced me back to London and turned up at the XL offices (then still in Wandsworth) unannounced, to ensure he got the audience he desired. It showed the kind of shamelessness that was the hallmark of a future mogul. We did the deal with Maverick and Madonna attended some meetings and appeared interested in what we were doing. 

As recording of the album was nearing completion, we got to collaborate directly with our Ultramagnetic hero Kool Keith, with the help of his DJ partner KutMasta Kurt. Keith was the only guest rapper on the album, featuring on the song “Diesel Power”. As well as recording this new performance, Kool Keith was present in sample form and this would prove more contentious. 

Side two of that Ultramagnetics 1987 classic Critical Beatdown contained the song “Give The Drummer Some”. When Kool Keith raps: “Switch up / Change my pitch up / Smack my bitch up, like a pimp”, he was tossing a violently misogynist line into his verse in a manner that was not unusual in hip-hop at this (or any) time. It was not characteristic of Kool Keith, but neither was it the type of thing that anyone would have remarked on at the time. Liam sampled the line to create the main hook of the song “Smack My Bitch Up” and with its extraordinarily powerful drum programming and synth riffs it had been a huge favourite in The Prodigy’s live sets for a while and was naturally going to be included on The Fat Of The Land. 

I never considered its questionable nature. The Sex Pistols had their swastika armbands. The Prodigy had this sample. Did anyone ever become a Nazi because of Sid Vicious? No. But were people entitled to be offended by the use of the armband or the sample? Yes. Is it insensitive to victims of abuse? Yes. Were we thinking about that? No. Was that thoughtless? Yes. Should The Prodigy have been censored in any way? I don’t think so. Is it pleasant? No. But is it art? Yes, just about and a great deal of art is not pleasant. Was any woman ever abused because of The Prodigy? My instinct is no. But how can I be sure? So, do I regret releasing a single on XL with the title “Smack My Bitch Up”? No. But I doubt that I would do it again. 

The Fat Of The Land was a global hit on release, No1 everywhere, including America. On the night we got that news, Liam turned up for our celebration in Soho wearing a pair of socks a fan had made him with a portrait of himself on them. When I queried this surprising sartorial choice, he flashed a gold-toothed grin and said, “No one can say shit to me now.” 

He had a point.

This is an edited extract from Liberation Through Hearing: Rap, Rave And The Rise Of XL Recordings by Richard Russell, available now.

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• Madonna
• Maverick Records

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