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."

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

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.

The Prodigy - interview, 1994

THE PRODIGY
Melody Maker, 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 whiz-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 any more. They’re not giving them licences 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 dubplates that no one can get hold of, cos they only printed 10 copies.”

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 10. 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 180bpm 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 160bpm 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 likes Senser’s “energy” (they were actually first choice before Pop Will Eat Itself, but were too busy). As well as on"Their Law", 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 "3 Kilos", 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 fucking 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 Es. So it’s one rule for us, one rule for them.”

Hüsker Dü - Savage Young Dü

Hüsker Dü

Savage Young Dü

Numero Group 

The Wire, December 2017

by Simon Reynolds

Your memories may differ from mine, but as I recall, 1983 was when postpunk’s energies started to dwindle and the movement splintered into various fruitless and misguided directions. Suddenly it was slim pickings out there for the young music fiend. One coping mechanism to circumvent the excitement-deficit involved turning to the past: particularly, the gathering swarm of Sixties garage compilations.  Another resource was hardcore punk imports from America.  I vividly recall making expeditions to London to scour Rough Trade, Vinyl Solution, and shops on Camden High Street for volumes in the Mindrocker and Back to the Grave series, but also to scoop up LPs by Angry Samoans, Negative Approach, Flipper, and more.  These two kinds of punk will always be linked in my mind as vitalizing blasts of visceral release that helped sustain some of us through the doldrums of the mid-Eighties.

Some of the most galvanising imports gleaned on these trips were SST releases by Black Flag, Descendents, Meat Puppets, Minutemen... and Hüsker Dü.  The blizzard-blend of open-tuned guitar and open-hearted melody on the Metal Circus EP blossomed into the mature furore of Zen Arcade and Flip Your Wig. Dü, by this point, were my favorite group. And for a mid-decade moment,  Minneapolis – more precisely, the Twin Cities, given that two of the Dü  three came from St Paul – felt like the soul-center of Eighties alternative rock, since it had also given the world the wonderfully ragged and achingly tuneful band The Replacements.  Minnesota mystique encouraged certain fledgling music journalists (e.g. me) to overpraise local Hüsker-derivatives like Soul Asylum, who were originally named Loud Fast Rules and made their vinyl debut on the Barefoot and Pregnant comp released on Hüsker Dü’s tiny label Reflex.  

I think of Hüsker Dü and Replacements as core bands of an era that could be called “Years of Exile”. It’s a period bookended, at its 1983-84 start, by the re-election of Reagan and Thatcher, and at its other end by grunge’s breakthrough, Bill Clinton ending 14 years of Republican rule, and Tony Blair’s rise (which signaled if it didn’t yet achieve Labour’s return from the wilderness and pulled down the curtain on an interminable-seeming era of Conservative dominance). “Exile” captures the feeling of absolute alienation from both mainstream politics and mainstream pop culture (the former’s reflection) widespread among youth at that time.  The mood is hard to reconstruct now but you can get a sense of it from the emotional spectrum of alternative rock and indie.  Discernible in groups as diverse as The Smiths and R.E.M., Mekons and Dinosaur Jr, the palette was grey and glum for the most part: despondency, resignation,  blocked idealism, passive-aggressive withdrawal, futile flails of impotent rage, and here and there just the faintest inkling of “hope against hope” (the title of Band of Susans’s defining song). Hüsker Dü paved the way for grunge, but they were also - via intermediary My Bloody Valentine – ancestors of shoegaze, a genre whose dream-dazed sound and fey sighing vocals implicitly proposed an anti-politics of reverie rather than revolution.

In addition to the group’s widespread influence, the Dü-sound directly participated in the alt-rock crossover of the Nineties, through Sugar, the far more successful successor group formed by singer/guitarist Bob Mould (one of  Dü’s two gifted writers, the other being singer/drummer Grant Hart, who died two months ago). Back in the Eighties, though, it had seemed utterly inconceivable that noise-pop of the Hüsker Dü type could ever penetrate mass consciousness. Along with political discontent and personal-existential issues, the imploded anger in Eighties alternative rock stemmed partly from frustration: knowing you were making the crucial music of your time – the next step in the rock dialectic – but would never reach the ears and eyes of the wider public. This revolution would never be televised, even after Hüsker Dü – like some of their peers – signed to major labels. A woefully awkward appearance on the Joan Rivers show, finagled somehow by Warners, and findable on YouTube, demonstrates how ill-equipped the band were to navigate a mainstream governed by image and presentation.   “We don’t want to be stars,” Hart declared in their very first interview, for a 1980 edition of their local alt-weekly Sweet Potato.  As if they would ever have any choice in the matter!

Savage Young Dü skips the Warners era, which produced two superb albums, Candy Apple Grey and Warehouse: Songs and Stories, both essentially of a piece with the three preceding SST classics: Zen Arcade, New Day Rising, and Flip Your Wig.  But Numero’s box also steers clear of the SST phase. Instead it’s focused forensically on the first four years of Hüsker Dü’s existence, when they were still shaking off influences (Ramones being the formative one, but Public Image Ltd surprisingly strong circa their debut single “Statues”). Gathering demos, a practice session captured during sound-check, live recordings, a couple of early singles and one whole studio album, the box comes with an exhaustively detailed history and a wealth of cool illustrations:   photos catching  bassist Greg Norton in mid-leap levitating above the stage, flyers for scores of tour dates,  biro-scrawled inlays of cassettes taped by their live soundman.

Driven by a dedicated work ethic that was stoked further by a diet of low-grade speed, blessed with two fertile writing talents, Hüsker Dü wrote songs at a furious pace, then played them live at unflagging full-tilt velocity. The result is a ton of material that is indistinct stylistically (Hüsker Dü still some ways off achieving the “band-voice” detectable with any great group within seconds of hearing them) and muddied further by the production quality. Its loving restoration here only highlights its rudimentary-documentary nature (Dü generally favored a one-take approach). To be blunt, it does all rather merge into an undifferentiated blur of foaming guitar, pummeling bass, and hectic, tripping-over-themselves drum patterns.

Amidst the hoarse roar of songs like “Sore Eyes”, lyric shards leap out that illustrate Mould and Grant’s emerging knack for mundane yet quirky specificities - “I woke up in the middle of a wet dream”, “I read sex manuals in my room” – that make the confessions of loneliness and insecurity sting with a harsh reality that recalls prime Pete Shelley. Whether this vulnerability - radical in the context of hardcore - has something to do with Mould and Hart being (like the Buzzcock vocalist) gay and bi respectively is an intriguing if unanswerable question. Both Dü singer-songwriters grew up in households with abusive and emotionally dominating fathers, and that must surely have complicated their feelings about masculine character armour. Whatever the biographical sources, it’s this characteristic Hüsker aura of wounded frailty that makes you sure that “Diane” - Hart’s first great song, inspired by Twin Cities serial killings – involves identification with the victim rather than the victimizer. Whereas with other Eighties noise-core songs about girl-murder, you’re less confident that the psycho-dynamic is altogether wholesome.

More than personal experience or sexual politics, though, it was a growing infatuation with Sixties music that enabled Hüsker Du to slip past the regimenting strictures of hardcore (“loud fast rules” is meant to be a celebration, but it could also read as a set of regulations). Their cover of Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman” could have been a Dickies-like gesture (rampaging over a hippie dippy golden oldie for shits ‘n’ giggles) in another band’s hands. But for Dü it points ahead to their blistering revisions of “Ticket To Ride” and “Eight Miles High”.

The Byrds above all seemed to have opened up Dü’s music, emotionally and harmonically. Gradually the melodies start to soar rather than jabber percussively, ramalama-punk style, like they do on the earliest songs such as “Truth Hurts”. Backing vocals begin to appear.  Mould’s guitar develops a chiming style of jangle-riff that recalls nothing so much as Blue Öyster Cult’s own Byrds homage “Don’t Fear The Reaper”. I thought I was hallucinating the resemblance but in the booklet Mike Watt describes Dü ’s live album Land Speed Record (released on the Minutemen’s little label New Alliance) as striking them on first hearing as “like really fast Blue Öyster Cult.” And hey, the umlaut fetish clinches it, surely! Grant Hart himself talked about a “raga thing” emerging from within the haze of overtones and partials generated by his manic cymbal spray and Mould’s flayed V-neck. He also compared it to “free jazz”. But there are only hints in the early material collected here of the raging abstract majesty of “Reoccurring Dreams”, the 14 minute improvised instrumental that closes Zen Arcade.   

The hurtful truth – and I’ve been delaying saying it, because I love the band and respect the archival rationale – is that if the material in this box set was all Hüsker Dü had ever done, no one would be making a box set of their work. The legend is based on what came next. The box that’s really needed would start with the Metal Circus recording of “Real World” – as opposed to its gnarly prototype on Savage – and finish with the best tracks on Warehouse.  Fans will find things to love here, I’m sure. But Savage Young Dü  won’t be making any converts. 

Voodoo Magic

MOVING SHADOW present "VOODOO MAGIC"

Equinox, London

Melody Maker, May 1994

by Simon Reynolds

The host: Moving Shadow, the UK's leading "intelligent hardcore" label. The line-up: jungle's top DJs, including  the ubiquitous Randall, Grooverider, Ray Keith, Brockie and LTJ Bukem, plus PA's from Moving Shadow's three most popular artists, Foul Play, Omni Trio and Deep Blue. The venue: Equinox, a  slightly cheesy disco on Leicester Square usually full of tourists, whose balconies and upholstered alcoves provide welcome rest and respite for the combat-fatigued and shellshocked. 

For hardcore is warzone music; its jagged breakbeats are  treacherous, a simulation of the minefield that is modern life. Hardcore strafes the listener's body with percussion, so that dancing is like striding into a stream of machine-gun snares and ricocheting paradiddles, while bass-bombs send shockwaves through your intestines. But, with Moving Shadow's brand of hardcore, the danger-beats are incongruously swathed with soothing, silken tenderness: strings, harps, jazz-fusion chords, soul-diva sighs and gasps, plus the kind of woogly textures you'd usually hear from The Irresistible Force. 

This "ambient hardcore" sound was traiblazed on tracks like "Music" by LTJ Bukem (who plays a brilliant set, finding an extra five notches of volume to really detonate the night) and "Open Your Mind" by FOUL PLAY. Sadly, FP don't include this sublime song in their PA, but they do debut their fab new single ["Being With You"], all phuture-jazz synth-clusters and diva beseechings, while lazers scythe and slash the crowd. Foul Play also 'play' their remix of Hyper-On-Experience's "Lords Of the Null Lines", demonstrating how fluid the notion of  'authorship' is in this scene, where an anthem's life is prolonged by endless, drastically altered versions. 

After Bukem's set, Andy C keeps the music rollin'. Junglists and junglettes do a palsied version of 'steppers', originally a roots reggae dance that involves skipping on the spot like a manic jig'n'reel. But with jungle, it's like they're Morris-dancing on bullets. The crowd tonight mixes chic, style-conscious sophisticates (usually black or Asian) and dressed-down white kids who mostly look like they're well under the 18 age limit emblazoned on the flyer. There's all sorts here tonight, friendly luv'd up types who probably secretly mourn the days of "happy 'ardcore", and the moody, self-contained junglists into dark tunes, who despise the rave ethos with its Vicks, white gloves and gushing euphoria. 

OMNI TRIO hit the stage, or rather a proxy does, since the true creator behind this country's sublimest dance-pop is a 38 year old Can fan who prefers to remain an enigma. The stand-in pretends to knob-twiddle as Omni's classic "Renegade Snares" tears up the floor, with its soul-shocking cannonades of polyrhythm, hypergasmic chorus "c'mon, take me UP!" and sentimental verging on twee piano motif. Then the MC announces "the one 'n' only, the livin' legend", DEEP BLUE.  The latter is a unassuming bloke whose "The Helicopter Tune" is still massive after 6 months floor-life. Recently reissued with 4 remixes, it sold 22 thousand and became the first hardcore track to go Top 70 in years. Based around a geometric Latin beat cranked up like some crazed clockwork mechanism, "Helicopter" gets the crowd seething like a cauldron. 

A few hours later, we stumble bleary and squinting into a viciously crisp dawn, battered and bruised but still glowing with the beauty-terrorism of "Voodoo Magic."

bonus beats

FOUL PLAY

Suspected 
(Moving Shadow)
Melody Maker, 1995

by Simon Reynolds


With next to no media profile, Foul Play's John Morrow and Steve Bradshaw have quietly built up one of the finest back catalogues in drum & bass. As is the norm with jungle albums, the back-cat is basically what you get on "Suspected": this is Foul Play's greatest hits, reworked by the band plus a r-r-r-rollcall of famous remixers, and bulked up with a handful of new tracks. While this makes "Suspected" a superb introduction for the uninitiated, for fans who've been following the duo's career for a while, it's a tad disappointing (ditto the ratio of new to old material on Omni Trio's "Deepest Cut" and Goldie's "Timeless").

Still, fans will crave those remixes, which all add new dimensions to the beloved prototypes. "Re-Open Your Mind" remodels Foul Play's 1993 classic (possibly my fave drum & bass track of all time), retaining the goosepimply synth-ripple (still the ultimate aural analogue of a skin-tingling E-rush) but convoluting the beats and bass in accordance with 1995 specifications, and making the twilight-zone bridge passage even more ethereal. "Total Control" is rinsed and blow-dried by Desired State (one of several alter-egos used by top production team Andy C & Ant Miles), who toughen the beats and sub-bass and  curb the original's misguided sax solo (for which, many thanks).

Then come all four new tracks in a row. "Ignorance" sustains "Total"'s military-jazz vibe, with stabbing bass and almost be-bop hi-hats and cymbals, which are programmed with such glistening intricacy they tie your ears in knots. Less impressive is "Artifical Intelligence": E-Z listening jungle, its Mantovani strings and twinkling tinkles of cocktail piano conjuring up a rather obvious aura of  'heaven'. As does "Night Moves", a stab at downtempo hip hop graced by a keyboard motif uncomfortably close to Omni Trio's "Together". "Strung Out" is far better, living up to its paranoiac title with fidgety, feverish snares, a stalking B-line and an edgy, persecuted guitar-figure that sounds like it might be sampled from Santana or somesuch jazzbo fret-wanker.

The remainder of "Suspected"  reverts back to Foul Play's 'Club Classics, Vol 1'. "Cuttin' Loose" is a drastic revamp of the duo's contribution to Moving Shadow's experimental EP series "Two On One". Kickstarted with an unnerving Afro-futurist kazoo motif sampled from Herbie Hancock, the track unleashes a swarm of scuttling breaks, glassy percussion and furtive, sidling bass. "The Stepperemix" is even more militantly minimal, an endless tidal wave of rustling snares and metallic rim-shots, sheer digital gamelan. Hopa & Bones' evisceration of "Being With You" is the most brutal of the four  remixes this late '94 beauty has undergone, with a brand new drum & bass undercarriage and a spray-job to boot. Wiping the floor with the fusion-lite that dominated  'intelligent'  jungle in '95, "Being With You" is real phuture-jazz, its densely-clustered synth-chords verging on harmolodic dissonance. The CD version of "Suspected" adds Omni Trio's widescreen film-muzik reinterpretation of  "Music Is The Key" (beautiful, but the 'real' diva vocal is a tad Whitney) and the original version of "Total Control".

Hardcore Foul Play devotees, like myself, might be impatient for more new hints as to where the duo is headed next.. But as a summation of the story so far, "Suspected" is fabulous and undeniable.



OMNI TRIO

Melody Maker, 1995

by  Simon Reynolds

If anyone from the 'ambient jungle' scene deserves a wider audience, it's Omni Trio's Rob Haigh. Draping lush, movie-theme orchestration and explosively rapturous soul-diva vocals over strafing breakbeats, Haigh is a sampladelic sorcerer. Anybody who loved The Art Of Noise's "Moments In Love" or Saint Etienne's "London Belongs To Me" will swoon to the sheer pop genius of  "Renegade Snares" or "Thru The Vibe". Now here's Omni's debut LP "Vol 1: The Deepest Cut", sweeping up the best of Haigh's work to date and providing an unbeatable introduction for the uninitiated.

An enigmatic figure, Haigh's musical route to jungle was strange and winding. He grew up on left-field rock (Can, Faust, Pere Ubu,  PiL), jazz (Miles Davis' "Bitches Brew") and dub ( Lee Perry, King Tubby). In the early Eighties, he formed an "avant-funk band", The Truth Club, and supported the likes of Cabaret Voltaire and Clock DVA. Like many avant-funk veterans, Haigh was seduced into rave culture by the music of Derrick May and early Warp. But unusually, Haigh gravitated towards the hardcore scene rather than 'electronic listening music'.

"In '91, people started adding breakbeats to house, and it was a very exciting time," Haigh remembers. "When the backlash against hardcore occurred in late '92,  I couldn't abandon breaks and return to the 909 kick-and-hat rhythm, so I stuck with it."

 From early '93 onwards, Haigh released a series of brilliant EP's on Moving Shadow, which spawned monster tunes like "Mystic Stepper (Feel Better)" and "Renegade Snares". The latter is still going strong a full year after it's release, thanks first to Foul Play's turbo-boosted remix, and now to their electrifyingly intense 'VIP Re-Remix' on "The Deepest Cut".

Film soundtrack music is a major reference point for Omni tracks like "Living For The Future" (originally from the recent "Vol 5" EP, now revamped by FBD Project for the album).  "John Barry is a big influence," says Haigh. "I love the powerful, melodic, soaring strings!" But for all his brilliant arrangements, with their sentimental piano motifs, mellotronic strings and hypergasmic acappella vocals, Haigh's real forte is as a virtuoso orchestrator of rhythm. Where most jungle producers sample and loop whole breakbeats,  Haigh builds his breaks from scratch using "single shot" samples (kicks,  hi-hats, shakers, toms etc).

"The beat becomes mine," he says, "and is no more a sample than programming a drum machine."

Throughout his recent work,  Haigh's beats are so nuanced, so full of varied accents, that it's like listening to a real-time, hands-on drummer who's improvising around the groove.  Just check out the fierce-yet-gliding elegance of the snares on "Soul Freestyle" (from "Vol: 5")--it's like listening to a goddamn jazz drum solo! Haigh is the maestro of a rhythmic innovation in jungle he's dubbed "the soul step".

"The first and third beats are emphasised, giving the illusion that the track is running at 80 b.p.m. and 160 b.p.m. at the same time," he explains. "This gives the music room to breathe, and makes it easier to dance to."

 Although  Omni Trio firmly belongs in jungle's 'ambient/intelligent' camp, Haigh is wary about jungle's new smooth direction, and in particular the trend towards  incorporating so-called 'real' instrumentation.

"House and jungle is a sequenced music, created on computers and workstations. There is nothing worse than seeing house artists trying to get into that live muso vibe. The potential in fusing atmospheric ideas with drum & bass is unlimited. But although the music is getting more sophisticated, it must retain the ruffness of tearing drum & bass. This is the core of our music: to lose it would be like, say, rock music without guitar riffs!"