Platinum breaks

RAVE ON The death of the scene hasn’t slowed the Prodigy’s momentum.

Photo: Paul Dugdale

The Prodigy has a knack for making headlines. There was the fuss over its controversial single “Smack My Bitch Up,” which had music outlets in the U.S. refusing to sell the group’s Grammy-nominated The Fat of the Land album from 1997. There are its now-legendary performances at Moscow’s Red Square and as Lollapalooza headliners that same year. There are the album sales that make the Prodigy one of the best-selling dance acts of all time. And just last week, it landed in the news again: At the BBC’s Radio 1 festival in Swindon, England, the Prodigy blew out its mixing board after its volume hit so far into the red it set off car alarms in the parking lot.

Since bursting out of the U.K. rave scene in the mid-’90s, the Prodigy has held one priority above all others: being hardcore. “We take things by the horns,” boasts frontman Liam Howlett, 37. We reached the group’s musical mastermind in his London studio, where he was taking a mini respite from a recently wrapped European arena tour. Flanking Howlett is the motley duo of vocalist Maxim Reality and Keith Flint, the band’s most visible member, whose distinctive double Mohawk, septum piercing and rows of spiked rings were a prominent feature in the music video for “Firestarter,” the band’s first major stateside hit.

The group’s punk-rock aesthetic extends to more than just the tattoos that cover each band member. While the Prodigy’s music is a cornerstone of electronica, it wouldn’t be the supergroup it is today without its rock & roll undertones. “Out of all the types of music, I’ve always been addicted to beats,” Howlett says. “So the punk-rock ethic isn’t so much in our sound, it’s more in the way things are delivered, behind the way we do things.”

The Prodigy’s blend of grinding breaks, speaker-rattling bass, tweaked-out trance synths and pyrotechnics-filled, rock & roll–style live shows has sold out stadiums the world over. An instant hit in the U.K., the 20-year-old group has racked up more than a dozen chart-topping singles there. “People forget that in our first five months of being together we were playing raves in front of 10,000 people,” Howlett says.

While many electronic-music acts are married to their studios, making the translation to live performances lackluster at best, the Prodigy has created a stage presence that rivals the best rock shows. “Obviously, MTV elevated us, along with the Chemical Brothers , for the whole electronica thing, but we were able to take it live where other bands couldn’t,” Howlett says. “They couldn’t stay on the same stages as rock bands, but we feel our music can be as powerful as that.”

In its fifth studio album, Invaders Must Die, the band shows as much intensity as always. Yet in proper rock-star fashion, the record involved a few booze-fueled missteps, like the band’s brief breakup before reconciling and heading back into the studio. “We were totally psyched to be writing a new record,” Howlett says. “We tried to let things happen naturally, but that just led to a whole lot of partying, a lot of drinking, and we didn’t really achieve a lot.”

Cramming himself and his equipment into a closet-size room above the studio, Howlett reconnected with earlier working methods. “I found that claustrophobic atmosphere more like what I was used to when I was doing the first couple records,” he says. “We’ve always stood by the rave movement since day one. To me personally, I didn’t want to change what we do. We really just wanted to make a record that we could play live.”

As the band continues to sell out shows ten years after raves fizzled into oblivion, the Prodigy proves it’s more than members of a movement; it’s a force in its own right.

The Prodigy plays Congress Theater Saturday 23.

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