The Prodigy (RIP Keith Flint)

[in chronological order of release, not of me writing them)

The Prodigy
Charly EP
XL Recordings
(for eMusic, Rave Dozen, 2007)

by Simon Reynolds

The Prodigy’s career could be Exhibit A in the case claiming that rave, far from being anti-rock (like its precursor sounds techno and house) was in fact a futurised reinvention of rock. From ‘ardkore classics like “Everybody in the Place” and “Out of Space” to the digi-punk and Oi!-tronica of “Firestarter” and “Breathe”, the core essence of Prodigy is a teen rampage spirit of bring-the-noise mayhem. Producer Liam Howlett is a riff-master on a par with AC/DC’s Angus Young, while his grasp of tension-and-release, build-and-breakdown dynamics is as consummate as genius pulp hitmakers Chinn & Chapman (the team who wrote and produced most of the classic glam smashes for The Sweet). Yet his pre-rave past as a Public Enemy-loving British B-boy ensured a level of bass-knowledge and breakbeat-science that made the Prodigy sound utterly contemporary.

Only the group’s second single (the first, “What Evil Lurks” b/w Android”, has never been reissued for some reason) “Charly” was a Top 3 hit in the UK in August 1991. It singlehandedly spawned the hardcore subgenre of toytown rave, tunes that sampled children’s TV shows (especially where some kind of Ecstasy-pun or druggy double-entendre could be made out of the show’s name or a fragment of dialogue). In ‘Charly’”, the sample is a little boy from a Public Information Film advising children how to avoid getting lost or abducted. “Charley says, always tell your mummy before you go off somewhere,” the kid says, translating the words of a cartoon cat, Charly, whose miauow is transformed by Howlett into the tune’s killer riff. The joke here is the idea of UK teenagers sneaking off to raves where they get up to things that would make their mums blanch. The original version of “Charly” sounds slightly restrained, so the one to go for is the “Alley Cat” mix, its swirly Belgian-style techno-riff expertly simulating the timbre of the cat’s miaouw but turning it into a spine-tingling MDMA-activating noise. In between the two ‘Charlys” you’ll find two other terrific tunes, “Pandemonium”and “Your Love”

You are also recommended--nay, urged--nay, instructed--to check out The Prodigy’s debut album Experience, especially in the Expanded reissue version with its bonus disc of back-in-the-day remixes, B-sides and rarities. 

THE PRODIGY

Experience: Expanded

(for Spin I think; 2001)

by Simon Reynolds

1997's "Firestarter" might have been their US breakthrough, but in Britain The Prodigy were massive almost from the git-go. Their second single "Charley" was a #5 pop hit in the summer of 1991, and the follow-up "Everybody In the Place" was only kept off the top spot by the re-released "Bohemian Rhapsody."  Back then the Prodigy were pop ambassadors for hardcore, staple sound of England's early Nineties rave scene and the hip hop/techno mutant that eventually evolved into drum'n'bass. All convulsively strobing keyboard vamps, frenzied breakbeats, and bruising bass, hardcore always was the "the new rock'n'roll". It's just that Liam Howlett had to add guitars, punk-snarl vocals, and videogenic hair-rebel shapethrowing before the non-rave world was convinced that Prodigy rocked.

Experience: Expanded is a reissue of Prodigy's 1992 debut album with an extra disc of remixes and B-sides. Sounds slightly dubious, I know, but actually it's a radical enhancement of an already bona fide classic. The B-sides offer ruff proto-jungle bizness, and the remixes are the absolute killer versions that slayed 'em on the ravefloor in 1991-92 (then reappeared in slightly-inferior remixed form on the original Experience). So this retrospectively "corrected" Experience now includes the definitive "Alley Cat Remix" incarnation of "Charly", with its cartoon feline's miaouw smearing into the miasmic churn of the distorto-synth riff, and the superior "Fairground Remix" of "Everybody In the Place," a dementedly whirling dervish-machine that was actually popular on rollercoaster sound systems.

Experience is all about speed--not just the synergy-rush of E's and whizz (UK slang for amphetamine) with exponentially-soaring b.p.m rates, but an entire emergent culture of hyperkinetic thrills, from videogames to snowboarding. And in 1992 that gave The Prodigy and their hardcore rave brethren real resonance for Brit-kids languishing under Tory tyranny: when your culture is all about blockage and stagnation, reaching escape-velocity becomes  paramount. Things haven't improved a whole heap since, which might be one reason Experience still packs such a mighty buzz.   

The Prodigy interview, circa Music for the Jilted Generation

Melody Maker, July 16th 1994

by Simon Reynolds

"So I've decided to take my work back underground... to stop it falling into the wrong hands."

So begins Music For The Jilted Generation, The Prodigy's fab second LP. See, seven consecutive hits and a gold debut album aren't enough for 23-year-old whizz kid Liam Howlett. He's sick and tired of his public image: peerless purveyor of hyper-hyper bubblegum nuttercore for E'd up popkids. Liam wants to be taken seriously; more to the point, he wants to be taken seriously by you, the alternative rock fan. So that's why he's used rock guitar in a couple of tracks on the album, and that's why Jilted is a sort of semi-concept album, with a ‘heavy’ political statement.

"The Jilted Generation, it's all the kids who've grown up on this supposedly corrupt dance music," says Liam, in between hacking his lungs out (he's run down by endless remixing and a recent tour of Australia). "The government are trying to make out the whole scene is bad, and they want to stop everyone going out and having a good time."

On the album's inner sleeve, a painting depicts an allegory of this confrontation, as a police force and a ragged army of ravers glare at each other across a ravine, with the rave-tribe's chieftain about to slash the ropes of the bridge. The chorus of ‘Their Law’ – a surprisingly effective metal-riff propelled collaboration with Pop Will Shite itself – articulates this defiance: "Fuck 'em and their law". What's riled Liam isn't just the Criminal Justice Bill, but the unofficial clampdown on legal raves.

"The police can control the sound levels at raves. Basically, there aren't going to be big outdoors raves anymore. They're not giving them licenses in the first place now cos of the alleged disturbance and noise pollution, and all the drugs. And cos of that, the punters have lost faith a bit. A year ago, you'd get 20,000 at a big event, no worries. Now you'd be lucky to get 10,000. Events happen up until the last minute and then they get cancelled, and so people stop bothering. The Obsession rave, a big three-dayer on the beach, was cancelled, and that was going to be the only major event this year. The Prodigy haven't suffered from it at all, we're still packing out shows and selling records. But it does annoy me, the government telling young kids what they can do."

Because of the clampdown, rave culture's gone into the clubs and it's fragmented into factions: scenes like techno, jungle, progressive house, garage, et al. Liam admits to being nostalgic for the golden days of rave's bygone unity.

"I think a lot of people are. That's why the housey progressive scene is so popular, cos even though it's not as mental and sweaty, it's still got the love vibe. On the hardcore scene, the DJs won't mix up different styles of music, they just wanna play the brand new 'dubpates' that no one can get hold of, cos they only printed ten copies."

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The Prodigy emerged from  the early hardcore scene (what's now evolved into jungle). Along with Altern-8, they were the principal ambassadors for 'ardkore in the Top Ten. The Prodigy's Top Three hits ‘Charly’ and ‘Everybody In The Place’ were classic breakbeat tracks, and the debut LP Experience was ruff jungle bizness, albeit with a commerical sheen and Liam's poptastic choonfulness well to the fore. But ever since a dance mag accused The Prodigy's ‘Charly’ of instigating "the death of rave" (because it inspired a rash of lame bubblecore tracks with kids' TV samples, like ‘Sesame's Treet’), an embarrassed Liam has struggled to distance himself from hardcore.

"It's the 180 bpm breakbeats I've moved away from. The new album is as hardcore as anything I've written, but hard in a different way, a German techno way. But I still use breakbeats, cos I've always been into hip-hop and that side of me will always be there."

It's all a bit ironic, given jungle's creative renaissance in '93 and its long overdue return to hipness in '94. (The dance mag in question just leapt on the bandwagon along with every other rag in town).

Admits Liam, "There's loads of quality jungle tracks around. The problem was that a lot of people thought it was so easy to make hardcore that they just knocked out white labels and flooded the market with crap. But this year there's been a lot of intelligent jungle. Moving Shadow are the leading label."

But Liam still doesn't like the attitude and moody atmosphere that so often surrounds jungle '94, and which is so different from the nutty, luv'd up vibe of 'ardkore '92.

"The reason I got into rave was that hip-hop had gotten too much into attitude. To me, the jungle scene now is really confused. One minute they'll play something really uplifting and the next it's dark and gloomy. Also, that music's lost a bit of energy. Because it's so fast, people don't dance to the 160 bpm drums, they lock into the reggae baseline, which is half speed. So you dance really slow. With techno, you dance to the full-on beat. The stuff I really rate is European, like CJ Bolland and a lot of the German artists."

When I suggest that The Prodigy are the last representatives in the charts for the old rave spirit, Liam frowns. What he really wants is to get back his underground credibility – something as difficult and arguably futile as attempting to recover your virginity.

"We actually do everything we can to stay off the telly and out of Smash Hits and the pop media," he stresses. "We only do interviews that I feel are credible. It is a battle, a constant battle to get the correct press."

Hence his flirtation with alternative music and deployment of rock guitar on Jilted. He's been listening to Led Zep and Pearl Jam, and he might be producing Skinny Puppy's debut for Rick Rubin's American label. He tells me how much he like Senser's "energy" (they were actually first choice before Pop Will Eat itself, but were too busy). As well as ‘Their Low’, grunge guitar features on the killer next single, ‘Voodoo People’.

But Howlett doesn't need to latch misguidedly onto that dodo ‘alternative rock’ for cred; his own roots – in electro and early hip-hop – are solid enough. I always thought his thang was like a hyperkinetic version of Mantronix's breakbeats-and-samples collage aesthetic, and sho'nuff, it turns out he was a big fan. His old-school hip-hop background comes through in the funky, fusiony ‘3Kilos’, which is part of the LP's ‘Narcotic Suite’ – songs meant to evoke different drug atmospheres.

Back to the present, to Generation J, the kids who live for dance and drugs… Are they going to fight back against repression, or are they just going to languish at home, get despondent, get wasted?

"At the end of the day I don't think there's anything anyone can do. But as long as people can still go to clubs, it'll survive. They'll never kill the whole thing off completely. Why are the government so threatened? I don't know. We live in Essex and there's a massive Farmers festival every year at the Showground. They block up the whole f***ing road and it's totally disruptive. But they won't have a rave there. It's the same with football matches – there's loads of drugs at football now, people taking E’s. So it's one rule for us, one rule for them."

                                                          

The Prodigy: The Fat of the Land

Village Voice, July 8th 1997

by Simon Reynolds

Some say the Prodigy have betrayed the bright promise of the "electronica revolution", resulting in a techno-rock hybrid that's not so much kick-ass as half-assed. But the Prodigy have always been a rave 'n' roll band rather than ‘proper’ techno. The crucial distinction to grasp here is that techno and rave are not synonymous, and that in some respects rave has more in common with rock than with club culture.

In the USA, rave is regarded as the epitome of fashion-plate Europhile trendiness, but in Britain dance music is the mainstream of pop culture, and rave specifically has a decidedly lumpen, un-cool aura. "Raves were mass, teenage, one didn't go to them," is how a veteran of London's 1988 acid house club Shoom explained it to me recently. Purists, who believe the music is properly experienced in clubs, where DJs play long, varied, ‘educational’ sets to an allegedly discriminating audience, see raves as alarming close to arena rock concerts. Ravers' rowdy rituals of abandon and joyous uniformity of attire suggest the very ‘herd mentality’ that clubbers define themselves against.

By 1990, huge-scale one-off raves were transforming house and techno into bombastic spectacles full of lights and lasers, fun-fair attractions, and stellar DJ lineups. Where a club might have one or two DJs, raves featured ten DJs playing a bare hour each, sometimes less. To avoid being blown away by the other jocks, the DJs played crowd-pleasing anthems with their turntables cranked up to plus-8. Then DJ-producers started making music to fit this full-on tempest. Detroit techno was ‘debased’, or so the official history goes, into the hyperkinetic drug-noise called 'ardkore (which was when my ears pricked up).

And by 1991, the UK had a massive circuit of commercial, fully licensed raves, with promoters booking rave bands as well as DJs. Alongside N-Joi, Bizarre Inc, and Shades of Rhythm, the Prodigy were the most popular hardcore rave act. Musically, the Prodigy fit techno's standard syndrome – the boffin (Liam Howlett) knob twiddling alone in his studio lab. But live and on video, the Prodigy were always a band, with three other members – MC Maxim Reality, and dancers Keith Flint and Leeroy – taking up the visual slack.

At the height of this golden age of rave, the Prodigy encapsulated the contradictions of 'ardkore: this music was simultaneously an underground phenomenon and solidly pop. Apart from their first, every Prodigy single released to date has made the top 15; their second, ‘Charley’, got to Number Three in the summer of '91, while the follow-up, ‘Everybody in the Place’, was kept off the Number One spot only by Queen's ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. All the more remarkable since these brilliant early singles offer an only slightly more polished version of breakbeat hardcore, the music that evolved into jungle. Techno purists sniffed, but I always saw it as the new garage punk: riffs, noise, amphetamine-frenzy freakbeats, a sort of aggressive euphoria – the spirit of 1966 and 1977 channeled through the body of hip hop. When the Prodigy stepped onstage at Irving Plaza a month ago, they were introduced as something "for all you punk rockers, hip hoppers, and pill poppers." No mention of techno headz or house bods; indeed, Liam Howlett has been proclaiming in interviews that he never liked Kraftwerk, the sacred source for Detroit techno.

Starting with 1994's sophomore album Music for the Jilted Generation, the Prodigy repositioned themselves as rock, partly by using electric guitar on a couple of tracks, and partly by the vague conceptual/protest angle to the album. The jilted generation, explained Howlett, was kids who'd grown up under Thatcher, had little to live for but drugs and dance music, and now found even their weekend utopia threatened as authorities targeted raves. The UK equivalent, in other words, of the American grunge audience: Generation E.

All that remained was to bring the noise to America. Step One: turning dancer Keith Flint into the video-genic vocalist on ‘Firestarter’. OK, the promo is corny: Flint's Mohican and psycho-youth grimaces. But sonically, ‘Firestarter’ is a sampler-wielding cyber-Stooges, a Dionysian hymn to destruction. Appearing at the MTV Europe Awards to pick up a trophy for Best Dance Video, the Prodigy greeted EC youth with "Hold it down!" a vintage '92 rave rallying cry – as if to confirm 'ardkore's historical victory and vindication. No matter that out of the early rave bands only the Prodigy had survived the collapse of the 1990-92 circuit; the music had become what it had always secretly been – the new rock.

‘Firestarter’ looked like a dead cert as electronica's ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, but inexplicably stumbled at the threshold of the Billboard top 30. Maybe ‘Breathe’ – a jungle-punk duet between Flint and Maxim – will bust down the door, what with its abjection-chic video à la Tool and Marilyn Manson. Enjoyably reminiscent of Oi! bands like Angelic Upstarts, the song was a highlight of the Prodigy's otherwise patchy performance at Irving Plaza. There's rock, and then there's rawk; too often the Prodge crossed the line. When they dragged onstage a ‘real’ guitarist, nor only did he look like a ye olde punke relic from the King's Road, but the overall effect was a tad Rage Against the Machine. Sans politics, of course: the Prodigy's brand of vacant menace and quasi-insurrectionary mayhem slots into the illustrious plastic punk lineage that runs Alice Cooper/Sweet/Billy Idol/Adam and the Ants. (The Prodge even feature an insect in their logo.)

Keith Flint has described the Prodigy as "buzz music." The song titles are mostly self-reflexive, referring only to the music's own sensations: ‘Hyperspeed’, ‘Pandemonium’, ‘G-Force’, ‘Full Throttle’, ‘The Heat (The Energy)’. 'Ardkore always did belong to a burgeoning ‘rush culture’ that includes video games, roller-blading, extreme sports like snow-boarding (a hobby of the band's), and bungee jumping (a popular sideshow at raves), as well as the obvious illegal stimulants. The Fat of the Land is no departure: it's all teenage rampage, cheap thrills, and adrenalin OD.

Fat kicks off well with the boom-bastic ‘Smack My Bitch Up’. Shame about the obnoxious title/chorus – teenage boys hardly need any more excuses to strike pimp poses. In mitigation, it must be said that the Prodigy are not a group that repays close lyrical analysis; their forte isn't deep and meaningful, but the profoundly superficial (not a dis by any means). Howlett is a supreme organizer of dynamics, bridges, and breakdowns, tension and release. ‘Diesel Power’, a pumping midtempo collaboration with rapper Kool Keith, nods to Howlett's pre-rave past as a British B-boy. ‘Funky Shit’ – old-school 'ardkore, more or less – is one of the few non-vocal tracks. Fat's use of ‘real’ singers is an indication of the band's eagerness to meet post-grunge America halfway. But it means the Prodigy have to get around the fact that they have nothing much to say – "this is dangerous/open up your head/feel the shellshock" is typical – which didn't matter when the music was just breakbeats, riffs, and samples.

Ironically, given their desire to be taken as a futuristic rock band, the Prodigy's taste in yer actual contemporary guitar bands is poor. ‘Serial Thrilla’ samples Skunk Anansie; ‘Narayan’, a nine-minute collaboration with Crispian Mills of the god-awful Kula Shaker, is a poor man's ‘Setting Sun’ (the Chemical Brothers' Britpop/breakbeat merger). The L7 cover ‘Fuel My Fire’ would normally count as more bad taste by my lights, but I must admit it's an exciting finale, with a heavily distorted Flint tirade and Republica's Saffron providing baleful backing sneers. The song fits perfectly into the Prodigy's shtick: depoliticized punk offering youths a sort of aerobic workout for their frustration and aggression.

Fat packs enough big beats, bass-quake, and flechette-insidious hooks to do the required job (conquering America), but as an album-length experience it sags somewhat in the middle. In true punk tradition, the Prodigy are really a singles band, which is why the 1992 debut Experience (in effect a collection of greatest hits up to that point) remains their most consistently exciting album. But as opposed to ‘proper’ techno, where there's no brand loyalty and artists are only as good as their latest 12-inch. I'll keep faith with the Prodigy. They're a rave 'n' roll band, and I'm a fan.

Rob Haigh interview

ROB HAIGH interview

director's cut, The Wire, March 2018

by Simon Reynolds

A ripple runs through it.  The peal of piano - reflective or rhapsodic, elegiac or euphoric - is the lineament that marks almost all of Robert Haigh’s music across his nearly forty years of recording.  You hear it on his Eighties releases, when he aligned with the esoteric industrial underground but had more in common with Harold Budd. You hear it as a Morse signal summoning dancers to the ravefloor in the series of Omni Trio EPs recorded by Haigh for the jungle label Moving Shadow in the early Nineties, and again – but  now more serene and slinky -  on his cinematic drum and bass albums from later that decade. Finally, in the 21^st Century, you hear the piano naked and unadorned once more, with the flurry of albums Haigh recorded after parting ways with U.K. dance culture, culminating with the quiet triumph of Creatures of the Deep late last year.

At the risk of bringing Billy Joel into proceedings – possibly a first time appearance in the pages of this magazine - Haigh is truly the Piano Man.

When I enquire just what it is about the instrument that speaks to him so deeply and persistently, Haigh gathers his thoughts slowly over the phone from his home, a tiny town near Truro in Cornwall.  

“I think it’s just the fact that you can – on your own – make a really wide sort of sound with the piano. You can create chords and the basslines as well. What attracted me in the beginning was that I could do the whole thing myself.” Later, dissatisfied, Haigh returns with clarifications via email: “The piano is essentially a percussive instrument but it’s capable of the most fluid extended voices. It can produce thunderous bass tones alongside the most intimate and fragile top notes. I also like the fact of its self-containment and independence. This makes it a great tool for improvisation, which is the basis for most of my writing.”

As for initiating raptures that made him notice the instrument’s potential, Haigh mentions the title track of Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, featuring Mike Garson’s famously jagged, dissonant and somehow decadent solo, and the “strange discordant piano” on The Faust Tapes.  In his late fifties now, Haigh is old enough to have experienced that album as a real-time astonishment, thanks to his older sister, who bought Virgin Records’s 50p bargain only to be baffled by it, and passed it on to 14-year-old Rob. Beyond the piano element, Haigh attributes a profound formative impact to this early exposure to The Faust Tapes. “Initially I couldn’t make much sense of it either, but because I only owned two or three albums at that point, I persevered. If you listen to my stuff you wouldn’t immediately think ‘This guy’s influenced by Faust’. But there’s a seam of experiment in my music and it probably started with the way Faust’s music is all cut up and juxtaposed, with beautiful melodies next to atonal chaos.”

Haigh’s first hands-on encounter with the piano came much later, though, when he was a student at London’s Central School of Art.  “There was a room in back, with a piano in it, and I used to go in there sometimes and plonk about.  I never really thought  ‘this is what I wanna do’.  The piano was just something I kept being drawn to.”

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Before the piano, though, there was the electric guitar – and the voice.  Considering how camera-shy and publicity-averse Haigh has been during his career, it’s a jolt to learn that he once fronted a glam-rock group called Labyrinth. “It’s a cliché to say how much Bowie influenced your life, but my first single was actually ‘Starman’.”  More than a mere amateur band, Labyrinth gigged heavily in Yorkshire (Haigh grew up between Barnsley and Sheffield) and entertained serious hopes of being signed. “We got all sorts of promises, ‘oh yeah we’ll record you’”.

Nothing came of it, though, and Haigh headed down south to art school. But instead of painting, most of his creative energy got siphoned into the roiling ferment of postpunk. He formed the avant-funk outfit Truth Club (later renamed Fote) which bore the heavy imprint of the Pop Group and This Heat and would support groups like Clock DVA and Cabaret Voltaire. Haigh was still playing guitar at this point, but in an unorthodox fashion: using a dildo instead of a plectrum.  “I’d seen This Heat doing something similar,”  he laughs. Attracted both by the visual provocation and the possibilities for making strange sounds, Haigh procured his own plastic phallus and soon found that if he “put it near the pick-ups and just moved it an inch away, it made a buzzing tone. I even cut a little notch in the end of it and I could put that over a string, move that along the fretboard and that made a really cool sound.”

Postpunk contained an abundance of the same qualities Haigh had first thrilled to in Faust:  contrasts and collisions, discipline and disorder. “Such a music of possibilities,” is how he fondly remembers the 1979-81 period. “Instead of being based around chords, like rock was in the Sixties and then again in Britpop, postpunk was more like counterpoint: a more spacious way of composing. So with a band like PiL, there was a repetitive deep bassline and almost Steve Reich-like patterns played on a scratchy guitar.” 

By the early Eighties Haigh had quit art school and was working at a Virgin record shop on Oxford Street – not the famous Megastore but a branch further up the road. The basement became a hang-out for London’s industrial-aligned musicians. Former employee Jim Thirlwell would bring his Foetus releases, Nurse with Wound’s Steve Stapleton visited regularly and likewise came bearing strange sounds, and all of it got played on the big sound system.  After recording a solitary Truth Club / Fote single, Haigh had by this point launched Sema, a “dark ambient” solo project, which in rapid succession generated three albums (Notes from Underground, Theme from Hunger, Extract from Rosa Silber) during 1982-3,  all issued through his own Le Rey imprint. “Steve was into the Sema stuff. We would hang out at his graphics design office, just down the road from Virgin. Then he invited me to some Nurse With Wound sessions.” 

Haigh contributed to the Faustian frolics of mid-Eighties Nurse With Wound albums such as  The Sylvie And Babs Hi-Fi Companion and Spiral Insana.  Meanwhile, he put out the EPs Juliet Of The Spirits  and Music From The Ante Chamber via the Belgian label  L.A.Y.L.A.H., joining a roster of industrial luminaries that included Coil, Current 93, 23 Skidoo, Organum and Hafler Trio. In an echo of Throbbing Gristle’s “dis-concerts”, L.A.Y.L.A.H. talked about putting out “anti-records,” while the label’s name was an acronym for the Aleister Crowley dictum "Love Alway Yieldeth: Love Alway Hardeneth." But Haigh says he never had too much truck with the magick and ritual element in industrial culture, responding more to its cut-up and Dada side.

Besides, Haigh’s own music was steadily drifting away from the industrial zone. Sema started as disquieting abstract ambience sourced in various processed instrumental sounds, but the piano gradually emerged as the principal voice, and a calming one.  A pivotal release was 1984’s Three Seasons Only. Credited to Robert Haigh and Sema, the Haigh side was piano-only.  Satiesque sketches like “Two Feats of Klee” pointed ahead to Valentine Out of Season (released on United Dairies in 1987) and 1989’s A Waltz in Plain C. Both came out under his own name.

The Sema moniker was borrowed from an artists organisation co-founded by Paul Klee. “I was a Klee fan from my art school days and I think I just literally opened a book  on him, saw the word ‘Sema’ and thought ‘I’ll have that!”. Other homages include “Rosa Silber” (a reference to Klee’s painting “Vocal Fabric of the Singer Rosa Silber”) and “Concrete and the Klee” (presumably a play on “Concrete and Clay”, the 1965 hit for Unit Four Plus Two). “Some of Klee’s work is probably not far off a visual representation of Satie’s music,” Haigh says.  He relates the juxtaposition of “figurative and nonfigurative” in Klee’s work with the blurring between tonal and atonal that fascinates him in music. “When I’m doing a tonal piece I’m trying so hard to pollute it with wrong notes, notes that aren’t meant to be there, because I find that’s what makes the music stick. If it’s all tonally correct, I lose interest.”

Allusions to high culture pepper Haigh’s output of the Eighties (which was reissued several years ago by Vinyl on Demand as the box sets Time Will Say Nothing and Cold Pieces).   There’s the Fellini nod of “Juliet of the Spirits”, the Chopin reference of “Berceuse”, and the John Cage title pilfered for Valentine Out of Season, while “Empire of Signs”, from Three Seasons Only, is named after Roland Barthes book about Japan.  

“I was young then”, Haigh says with a self-deprecating chuckle.  True, the trying-a-bit-hard comes over slightly jejeune. What’s more striking, though, about all these serenely sad etudes for solo piano, and their highbrow framing, is how there’s minimal indication that within just a few years Robert Haigh will be making intensely rhythmic music at the pulsating heart of a working class drug culture.

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By the late Eighties, Haigh was still working at Virgin but he and his wife had moved out to Ware in Hertfordshire and were raising the first of three children. Increasingly frustrated by the commute and the way it cut into his parenting time, Haigh and his partner decided to start their own record store in nearby Hertford.  “She’d worked at Virgin too, so between us we knew the retail game inside out.”  

Or so they thought:  opened in 1989, Parliament Music’s first year proved to be a real struggle.

“Going into it, we had the attitude of, ‘we’ll make it work’. But it wasn’t working and it was a very depressing time. And then what came along and helped us make it work was this axis of rave music: the house and techno 12-inches that a certain faction of kids came into the store looking for. I realised that if we could get more of that stuff, we’d have the edge on the other, more mainstream record store in Hertford.  And then when I started to listen to that stuff, I found myself falling in love with it.” Haigh discovered not just sonic affinities with postpunk – rough-hewn DIY music released on tiny labels - but that figures from the scene in which he’d been so passionately involved were cropping up as significant players in the new movement. Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk, for instance, reappeared in Sweet Exorcist, leading lights of the Northern bleep ‘n’ bass sound. “Not only did rave save my business, it opened up a whole new way of thinking about music. Because my direction at that point had started to wane a bit.”

One thing that caught Haigh’s ear was the way this radically futuristic, insane-sounding music prominently featured – of all things - the piano. In 1989, a wave of Italo-house anthems built around rattlingly rhythmic piano breakdowns had conquered the UK scene and would permanently place the piano vamp at the core of hardcore’s sonic arsenal. “It’s that juxtaposition thing again:  tracks would have this tough beats-and-bass work-out, and then in would come the uplifting melodic piano. “

The oscillating flicker and rictus-like optimism of the piano vamp is synonymous with the sensations and emotions catalysed by MDMA. Amazingly, given the supremely Ecstasy-attuned records he would soon be making, Haigh never experienced that side of rave culture. “I got a taste of it, though, from certain days in the shops,” Haigh says, referring to Saturdays when local kids, still buzzing from the night before, would congregate to hear the latest white labels.  He says that his only vice really was alcohol. Besides, as a parent in his early thirties, he was a generation older than most everybody else involved in rave. Haigh recalls Andy C of “Valley of the Shadows” legend coming into the shop and realizing that the 16-year-old deejay / producer was young enough to be his son. 

Many leading rave labels started out of record shops (think Warp in Sheffield, or Romford’s Boogie Times, which spawned Suburban Base).  Retail awareness of what’s selling turns into an A&R instinct for where the music wants to go next; relationships develop between the staff and local deejays and producers.  So it was that Parliament Music became PM Recordings, as young customers started to show Haigh their own stabs at making techno. Blown away by the results achievable on an extremely basic set-up, Haigh invested  £300 in an Amiga 500 and got hold of the ultra-rudimentary ProTracker software.  “It was just 8 bit, whereas the minimum anyone would use nowadays is 16-bit.  And ProTracker just had four tracks, scrolling down the screen, into which you would drop events that would trigger a breakbeat or a sound. So it was very primitive indeed”.

Released on PM Recordings in 1992, the first of Haigh’s hardcore forays came out under the name Splice. They include the aptly named “Pianism,” the bonus track “7 Original Piano Breaks for DJ Use,” and numerous collaborations with a Parliament Music employee who went by the name Rhodes K. But Haigh would rather draw a discreet veil over this early phase. Indeed when I first interviewed him back in ’94  - a conversation conducted via the Royal Mail and written in capital letters, as if lower case would be too intimate – Haigh did not even mention Splice or PM Recordings. 



For sure, while tracks like Syko Mak’s “Recognise” or Splice’s “Falling (In Dub)” have the nutty, made-in-two-minute charm of the era, there’s no lost classics to be found here. Indeed there’s a palpable quantum leap with the first release as Omni Trio: the Mystic Steppers EP, initially released on the PM sub-label Candidate, and then, in refurbished form, as his debut record for Moving Shadow.

If piano is the instrument of Haigh’s life and remained a melodic signature through all his rave-era discography, he rapidly manifested two other forms of mastery: vocal science and breakbeat science. Haigh’s deployment of diva samples was inspired, his choices often locating emotional resonances that escaped the enclosure of rave (all  primary-colour explosions of E-lation and collective celebration) to connect with real-world feelings of anguish, self-doubt and fragility.  Case in point: “I know I’m not that strong enough”, the main vocal lick in the Mystic Steppers track “Stronger.”

Haigh attributes this to the advantage of working in a record store and accessing “a lot of a cappella albums that other people couldn’t get their hands on, import records...” . He also talks about using vocal samples as the starting point for his tracks, which he’d fashion around them (partly because of his obsession with everything being in key). But you can’t help thinking that being so much older than most of his producer peers – and a parent too – Haigh might also have had a deeper feeling for how challenging life can be. 

As for breakbeat science, Haigh’s rhythmic finesse first surfaced on “Mystic Stepper (Feel Good”) with its slip-and-slide drums (some psychedelically reversed for extra instability) and blossomed with the epochal “Renegade Snares”, the lead track on 1993’s Vol.3 EP.   “One of the things important to me was personalizing a break as much as I could. I think I was one of the first to chop up a break into its constituent parts.” Taking anywhere from a bar to four bars of a drum break, Haigh would slice it into sixteen components and essentially write them into new breaks. “Once you’ve chopped it, you can move any bit to any position – and that’s where the fun is because you can really mess about. For me it was all about owning the break.”

Heard on tracks like the “Roasted Rollin” mix of “Renegade Snares”, the result involved an inversion of standard musical priorities. Instead of a steady background foundation to the track,  the rhythm section became the focus of listening, grabbing the  ear with its baroque contortions, the ultra-crisp intricacy of the meshwork of snares, kicks, hats and shakers  complicated further by detonations of bass syncopating against the drum groove.  Meanwhile other elements in the track – piano motifs, synth pads, orchestrations  modeled on or sampled from film scores – might be childishly naive in their heart-tugging insistence.  




Drum patterns became primary hooks, the melodies that sang in your memory. Like the intro to Vol. 4’s “Original Soundtrack,” a vertigo-inducing beat-sequence that feels like a video loop of a swimmer plunging into a pool only to reverse out of the splashy surface and back onto the board. Or like the stiletto stitch-work of the breakdown in “Soul Freestyle” (off 1994’s Vol. 5), a ballet of exquisitely controlled violence.

As jungle crested to a peak of unexpected musicality in 1994 – only a year earlier it had been widely dismissed as sub-music, chaotic drug-noise for kids so pilled-up they’d lost any sense of discrimination - the genre achieved that oxymoronic coexistence of opposites that Haigh had always craved: frenzied and chilled, minimal and maximal, street and avant-garde.  Another paradox about the scene was that while it was accurately associated – both in terms of its imagery and its demographics – with the inner city, there was a surprisingly strong suburban contribution. Having grown up in that county myself, it always tickled me that Hertfordshire was such a major player: along with the Hertford-centered Parliament Music nexus, Moving Shadow was based out of Stevenage, while Source Direct and Photek hailed from St Albans.

As his series of EPs kept on intensifying the Omni soundclash of fierce and filmic, Haigh released The Deepest Cut Vol 1, one of the first drum-and-bass full-lengths, and still one of the finest ever. Then came a style switch. On 1995’s Vol. 6, Haigh bid farewell to the explosive mode (shredded Amen breaks, hypergasmic divas) that made his name with the dazzling B-Side track “Torn”, a play on the junglist superlative “tearing”. Meanwhile the A-side “Nu Birth of Cool” showcased a new direction: rolling, jazz-tinged, glistening with a sheen of luxuriance. Abandoning what he now deemed the Pavlovian pyrotechnics of the “Renegade Snares” era, Haigh sought a more “fat” sound, as he termed it, on the second Omni album Haunted Science. The shift paid dividends on “The Elemental,” a miracle of restraint, with a bassline as delicately poised as beads of condensation trickling down a blade of foliage in a rain forest, set against a second low-end pulse thudding like distant thunderclaps.  But later albums like Skeleton Keys and Byte Size Life steadily eased into background listening.

From being at the centre of jungle, Omni Trio had gradually slipped into the subgenre known as liquid funk, as had other leading Moving Shadow artists like EZ Rollers and Flytronix. Meanwhile, the genre’s mainstream had gone in the opposite direction: crowd-pleasing rampages of roaring bass and treadmill beats like an interminable chase-scene.  “The drums got pared down to a big heavy kick and a big heavy snare,” Haigh recalls of these disillusioning days at the turn of the millennium. “The beat became just a vehicle for the bassline, and those were getting more and more outlandish, verging on comical. But it worked on the dancefloor and deejays loved those tunes. That stuff would just fly out of our shop. Even a poor deejay could mix those tunes, ‘cos it was all the same beat and there were  no tricky, intricate rhythms.”

For a producer like Haigh, the ascendance of the two-step, bass-blast style of drum and bass “really narrowed down the possibilities...  you couldn’t really explore a musical phrase. I really felt like I couldn’t compete with producers doing that type of drum and bass, and I didn’t want to. I was being drawn into working in other areas. It was a wrench at the time but I just felt, ‘Go on, be brave’.  I had to have a little conversation with myself. “ He also had to have a conversation with his wife, for jettisoning the Omni Trio name would jeopardise their livelihood (the early albums especially having sold very well internationally). “But it had been building in me, and I felt I had to be honest and move into a different sphere. It wasn’t really a choice – I could continue and fake it, but that would have blotted the memory of something that people still talk about affectionately.”

Rogue Satellite, the final Omni album, came out in 2004, and its closing track bore the symbolic title “Suicide Loop”.  To this day he gets regular requests from old skool rave promoters asking him to do an Omni Trio PA (something he never did even in his heyday) but he always declines. “I don’t think I’ve cut up a break in over twelve years now.”  

^^^^^^^^^

Since closing that chapter of his life, music has been pouring out of Robert Haigh, with eight albums of solo piano in the past decade.  Creatures of The Deep, released towards the end of 2017 by experimental music label Unseen Worlds, is different from the sparse, piano-only watercolours of earlier albums like Written On the Water.  It would be a massive exaggeration to suggest there’s something faintly Omni-like about Creatures, but it does sound significantly more produced.  The backwards sounds on “From the Mystery” made me flash momentarily on the psychedelically-reversed beats of “Mystic Stepper”, while “Winter Ships” actually features a bassline of sorts. “It’s this simple motif that doesn’t quite repeat itself”, explains Haigh, “It’s shifting slightly as it moves along, almost forming a drone for the piano motifs to weave in and out of.”

“I Remember Phaedra” harks back further to Sema and that wintry postpunk / industrial vibe,  its hovering drones and indeterminately-ethnic woodwind vaguely reminding me of Eskimo by The Residents.  Overall, Creatures of the Deep teems with unidentifiable wafts of texture, subliminal smudges, and an intense attention to sculpting the ambience through subtle adjustments of reverb halo or stereo placement. “It’s like painting pictures,” says Haigh, referring to the compositional balance, the contrast, and the shaping of empty space in his pieces. “I don’t set out to be experimental but it always creeps in, because I’m always looking for a fresh way of doing something. I don’t know if I have a lot to say but I look for new ways of saying it.”

Entirely self-taught as a pianist, avoiding notation (except occasionally for his own self-devised diagrams), Haigh composes through a process of improvisation and editing.  He once said that it would be more accurate to say that he uncovers music rather than writes it.  “I’ll just play and play - and then I’ll come back to it. It’s like chipping away at something, rather than building it up.”

Haigh once argued that “all genuine music is to some extent autobiographical” . That’s an intriguing assertion, especially from someone who’s avoided the public eye and about whom most of his fans know very little. What is his lyric-less music telling us about Robert Haigh the man?  “I don’t think there is a narrative coming through, except perhaps on a subconscious level. But I do wonder sometimes what is attracting me to a Lydian-type scale that I seem to be drawn to, or a Dorian minor scale in some of the tunes.”

The closest Haigh has got to autobiographical music in the commonly understood sense was  2015 album The Silence of Ghosts.  That came out of a period of illness, the sort of perpetually sapping malaise that makes normal functions of life (eating in this case) difficult, and that in turn triggered a depression. “The last thing you wanna do when you’ve got some kind of ailment is obsess about it. But when it’s that sort of intimate ailment, you keep coming back to it. It coloured everything I did through that period.” Thankfully the condition eventually improved and Haigh’s equilibrium was restored.

More generally, though, there’s a feeling that runs through most of Haigh’s work –  the post-Sema records, the breakbeat era, the last decade’s run of solo piano – that was beautifully caught by Kodwo Eshun in his phrase “the kindness of Omni Trio”. A feeling of benediction and grace that shone through even when the beats were at their most frenetic.  And now the beats have been taken away, that cloudless blue-sky serenity is, as Haigh says, “more exposed now”.

Another factor that’s possibly brought this reflective and soul-soothing aspect to the fore is that Haigh has been practicing meditation for almost two decades now.  “I was a bit of a mess by the end of the Nineties”, he says, referring to the twin attrition of overwork and drinking to unwind. “I was turning into an anxious wreck. Because I was drinking in the evenings, my days were a bit foggy for a while. I was looking for an alternative to living like that and one day I just came across a book, in W.H. Smiths I think. A really cheesy, commercial book on meditation, but there was something in there about mindfulness of the breath. ‘Watching the breath’ – that caught my eye and I thought, ‘I’ll give that a go.’  And surprisingly on my first attempt, a little switch went off in my head.  So meditation is something I try to do to keep my spirits up.  And I’ve had varying degrees of success with it, but I’ve stuck with it for eighteen years. I do it practically every single morning.” 

He pauses. 

“Please don’t turn me into a bean bag hippy!”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Further Reading on Omni Trio and Robert Haigh

blog post on Haigh's pre-Moving Shadow pianocore tunes for PM Recordings

ambient jungle feature  from  September 1994 for The Wire (a/k/a Hardcore Continuum Series piece #2) including interview with Omni Trio

review of Moving Shadow rave Voodoo Magic in May 1994 at which Omni Trio supposedly performed +  the same '94 interview with Omni Trio repurposed for 1995 Melody Maker mini-profile

Incidentally, that short interview - conducted remotely via the post, 24 years ago - is the only other time I've profiled Haigh. So it was a great pleasure to speak with the man - one of my favorite artists of all time - earlier this year and finally do a full in-depth profile covering the entire span of his career, including the pre- and post-Omni activity.


BONUS BEATS, OR BONUS VAMPS: ROB HAIGH ON PIANO LICKS IN RAVE

SR: In rave anthems like Landlord's “I Like It (Blow Out Dub)”or Outlander's “The Vamp” or your old pals 2 Bad Mice's beyond-classic remix of Blame's "Music Takes You" - specifically at the break at 3.52 - what is happening on the piano? The effect is very euphoric and UP!!  – is that due to the kind of intervals used (they seem very simple,  major chord-y), or just the rattling-along propulsive nature of the riffs? Sometimes I hear what sounds like a double-chording, like the same chord being played very quickly in succession.  The timbre is also part of the bright optimistic feeling. They also have something of the quality of the player piano about  them. 

Robert Haigh:  In each case here the piano is a sample of a chord. That sample/chord is then laid out across the keyboard and triggered (simply with one finger) at various positions (so it’s always the same chord but played at various pitches.) 

On Landlord, we have a sample of a minor chord which is triggered at four points giving us the effect of G+m - D+m - F+m then C+minor.

With "Vamp", which sounds like the very same sample (maybe eq’d a little differently), the sample is triggered at five points giving the effect of C+m - D+m - Em - F+m then G+minor. 

The sound (which I agree is wonderful) appears to be doubled up and highly compressed and clipped - I suspect all this was in the original sampled chord (probably from a Deep House or Techno track - it’s got a bit of a Kevin Saunderson feel.)

Same deal with 2 Bad Mice. This sounds like a maj 7 chord and again the sample been laid across the keyboard and triggered at various pitches. 

Maybe it’s the artificially quantised nature of the notes/chords which give it the player piano quality.