The Prodigy are an English electronic dance music group formed by Liam Howlett in 1990 in Braintree, Essex. Along with Fatboy Slim, The Chemical Brothers, and other acts, The Prodigy have been credited as pioneers of the big beat genre, which achieved mainstream popularity in the 1990s and 2000s. They have sold over 25 million records worldwide. The group has won numerous music awards throughout their career, including two Brit Awards—winning Best British Dance Act twice, three MTV Video Music Awards, two Kerrang! Awards, five MTV Europe Music Awards, and have twice been nominated for Grammy Awards.

The group's brand of music makes use of various styles ranging from rave, hardcore techno, industrial, and breakbeat in the early 1990s to big beat and electronic rock with punk vocal elements in later times. The current members include Liam Howlett (keyboardist and composer), Keith Flint (dancer and vocalist), and Maxim (MC and vocalist). Leeroy Thornhill (dancer and very rarely a live keyboardist) was a member of the band from 1990 to 2000, as was a female dancer and vocalist called Sharky who left the group during their early period. The Prodigy first emerged on the underground rave scene in the early 1990s, and have since then achieved immense popularity and worldwide renown.

History [link]

Beginnings and first appearances (1990–1991) [link]

Liam Howlett created an initial 10-track demo, put together on a Roland W-30 music workstation in Essex, England. XL Recordings picked up the demo after Howlett played several tracks to XL boss Nick Halkes in a meeting, and an initial 12" pressing of "What Evil Lurks" was released in February 1991. The Prodigy's name was chosen by Liam as a tribute to his first analogue synthesiser, the Moog Prodigy.

The Prodigy's first public performance, with Howlett augmented by dancers Keith Flint and Leeroy Thornhill, was at the Four Aces in Dalston, London, then home to "Club Labyrinth".

"Charly", released six months later, became a huge hit in the rave scene at the time. The release reached number 3 in the UK Singles Chart, catapulting the band into the wider public attention. The ''Kaos Theory'' compilation series featured "G Force (Energy Flow)", from their third single, "Everybody in the Place".

After the release of the successful single "Charly", the charts included various "hardcore" rave tracks, to which speed and ecstasy-fuelled clubbers would dance to, but which did not appeal to reviewers from publications at the time. Examples were tracks such as Urban Hype's "A Trip to Trumpton" and Smart E's (as in Ecstasy) "Sesame's Treet", instigating death-by-publicity to the underground "hardcore rave" scene, according to a number of critics associated with the scene.

Experience (1992–1993) [link]

After ''Experience'' and the run of singles that accompanied it, The Prodigy moved to distance themselves from the "kiddie rave" reputation that now dogged them. The rave scene was beginning to move on from its hardcore phase, with the Criminal Justice Act's "anti-rave" legislation on the horizon, calling rave music "repetitive beats". The Prodigy responded to the bill by writing "Their Law".

''Music for the Jilted Generation'' (1993–1995) [link]

The album was nominated for a Mercury Music Prize, although Howlett had reaffirmed his dedication to making The Prodigy a 'hard dance band', commercially successful but without compromise. The band managed to continue to prevent over-exposure in the media by refusing to appear on ''Top of the Pops'' or other television shows in the UK. To date, their only studio appearance on British television came when they appeared on the BBC2 series ''Dance Energy'' in 1991, performing "Everybody in the Place". In the ensuing years, their videos received a strong level of support by MTV Europe, which boosted their popularity across the continent. Keith Flint himself hosted an episode of the MTV show ''120 Minutes'' in 1995.

Following the international success of ''Music for the Jilted Generation'', the band augmented their line-up with guitarist Jim Davies (a live band member who later joined the group Pitchshifter) in 1995 for tracks such as "Their Law", "Break and Enter 95", and various live-only interludes and versions. He was soon to be replaced by Gizz Butt of the band Janus Stark, who remained with the band for the next three years.

''The Fat of the Land'' and controversies (1996–2002) [link]

The long-awaited third Prodigy album, ''The Fat of the Land'', was released in 1997, just as the band headlined the Glastonbury Festival on its opening night.

The Prodigy were getting considerable airplay on rock stations with their controversial track "Smack My Bitch Up"—and also a negative backlash for the song. The National Organization for Women (NOW) criticized the song and its music video. The song's lyrics consist entirely of the repeated phrase "Change my pitch up, smack my bitch up", which NOW stated are a "dangerous and offensive message advocating violence against women". Howlett responded to the criticism by stating that the meaning of the song and its lyrics were being misinterpreted, and the phrase meant "doing anything intensely, like being on stage – going for extreme manic energy". The band did not actually write the lyric, but rather, sampled it from the hip hop Ultramagnetic MCs' track "Give the Drummer Some" which also appears on the ''Dirtchamber Sessions''; they had also sampled another Ultramagnetic MCs song "Critical Beatdown" on their earlier "Out of Space" single. The National Organization for Women also believed that the lyrics are in reference to administering heroin (smack) to another person. Several radio stations limited the song's airplay to nighttime hours. In September 1997, The Prodigy performed "Breathe" at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards, and won the Viewer's Choice Award.

The music video for "Smack My Bitch Up", directed by Jonas Åkerlund, featured a first-person point of view of someone going clubbing and indulging in large amounts of drugs and alcohol. Other content shown includes the protagonist getting into fist fights with men, abusing women, vomiting repeatedly, and picking up a lap dancer (played by British glamour model Teresa May) and having sex with her. Much of the aforementioned is depicted fairly explicitly. At the end of the video, the camera pans over to a mirror, revealing the subject to be a woman. MTV only aired the video between 1 and 5 a.m due to the offensive material. After one week, the very same television network banned the music video at NOW's request. The director got the inspiration for the contents of the video after a night of drinking and partying in Copenhagen.

During a performance at the Reading Festival on 29 August 1998, The Prodigy and the Beastie Boys had an onstage disagreement over the track, with the Beastie Boys requesting the song should be pulled from their set as it could be considered offensive to those who had suffered domestic abuse. Choosing to ignore the Beastie Boys plea, Maxim introduced "Smack My Bitch Up" with the declaration "They didn't want us to play this fucking tune. But the way things go, I do what the fuck I want".

Wal-Mart and Kmart later announced they would pull ''The Fat of the Land'' off their shelves. Despite the fact that the LP had resided on their store shelves for over 20 weeks, and the fact that they had sold 150,000 copies of the album in total, the two stores found the marketing campaign for the new single release "offensive". At the 1998 MTV Video Music Awards in Los Angeles, "Smack My Bitch Up" won two awards; Best Dance Video and Breakthrough Video.

1999 saw the release of The Prodigy's ''The Dirtchamber Sessions Volume One'', a DJ mix album by Howlett, produced as an official record of a successful guest appearance on the British Radio 1. In June of the same year, when the band had arguably reached their commercial peak, they parted company with guitarist Gizz Butt.

Following 1999, Thornhill departed from the group while he divorced Sara Cox due to the risk of nervous breakdown, resulting in the band's website being replaced with their logo and the words "We will be back" set against a black background, a stint that it'd remain until 2002.

Reunion (2002–2004) [link]

This year also saw the marriage of Howlett and All Saints' Natalie Appleton on 6 June. Their son, Ace Billy, was born on 2 March 2004.

''Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned'' (2004–2008) [link]

The Prodigy's fourth studio album, ''Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned'', was released on 23 August 2004, and 14 September 2004 in the USA. A precursory and experimental single, "Memphis Bells", was released in very limited numbers, followed by the traditional release of the single "Girls". The U.S. version of the studio album contained a bonus track; a remix of "Girls", entitled "More Girls". The album, which topped the UK Album Charts on its debut week, was promoted by a 2-year-long tour.

5,000 digital copies of "Memphis Bells" were sold over the Internet. Each copy was a combination of customer-chosen instrumental, rhythmic, and melodic options, of which 39,600 choices were available. Five mixes were sold in three file formats, WAV, two audio mixes in MP3, and a 5.1 DTS surround sound mix, and all were free of digital rights management.

In 2005, they released a compilation, ''Their Law: The Singles 1990-2005'', which spawned a single containing new remixes of the songs "Out of Space" (the "Audio Bullys Remix") and "Voodoo People" (the "Pendulum Remix"). The artwork represented drawn versions of the front covers of the "Out of Space" and "Voodoo People" single releases. The latter was also followed by a music video filmed in Romford Market, Essex, which featured on the DVD release of the compilation. Sharky, the group's only female member, is shown running and winning the race depicted in the video.

The Prodigy's first two albums, 1992's ''Experience'' and 1994's ''Music for the Jilted Generation'', were re-released in expanded, deluxe editions on 4 August 2008. As well as being remastered, the new packages featured a bonus disc including mixes, rarities, and live tracks. The two albums also featured expanded artwork in addition to the new musical content.

When asked about the idea, Howlett responded that they were getting ready to make a new album:

No, we're all done with that [those albums] now, all the old material. We didn't actually want to do the ''Greatest Hits'', we were ready to start our new record—until the record company pointed out that it was in the contract. But then we got into it, and tried to be creative with it as much as [we could]. And, you know, we ended up being really proud of it. You have to have a different brain when you're doing a record like that. It's more about [saying] "this is your achievement"; I could hold in one hand all the records we've released, so that was cool. We're moving on now, and getting on with the new record.

''Invaders Must Die'' (2008–2010) [link]

On 5 November 2008, it was announced that the band's fifth studio album would be called ''Invaders Must Die'' and would be released on the band's new label, Take Me to the Hospital. It was released in the US on 3 March 2009, and was the first Prodigy album since 1997's ''The Fat of the Land'' to feature all three members of the band.

The album featured drummer Dave Grohl on drums for "Run with the Wolves". The top five hit "Omen" and "Invaders Must Die" were co-produced with Does It Offend You, Yeah? frontman James Rushent. The band said that the album would go back to their "old-school but cutting edge" roots. The album was released as a CD, CD-DVD set, double vinyl, digital download, and a luxury 7-inch vinyl box set including five 7-inches, CD-DVD, bonus CD, poster, stickers, and stencils.

''Invaders Must Die'' was released on 21 February 2009 in Australia and in Europe on 23 February 2009, charting at number one in the UK with week one sales of over 97,000 – a higher figure than for either ''Always Outnumbered'' or their singles collection. The album also reached the top five in Germany and Australia and top 10 in Norway and several other European countries.

To coincide with the release of the album, the band embarked on a nine-date UK arena tour, with support from Dizzee Rascal, Noisia, Herve, and DJ Kissy Sell Out. The single "Omen" debuted at number 1 on the Canadian Singles Chart the week of 25 February 2009 and won the Kerrang! Award for Best Single. Initial critical response to ''Invaders Must Die'' was somewhat mixed. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 60, based on 20 reviews. However, the album was well received by the fans, who welcomed it in a positive light compared to ''Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned''. Two singles followed, "Warrior's Dance" and "Take Me to the Hospital", which were released on 11 May and 31 August 2009 respectively. The former song peaked at number 9 on the UK Singles Chart, while the latter included a VHS-filmed music video that premiered on VidZone.

A fourth single, "Invaders Must Die (Liam H Reamped Version)", from the Special Edition of the album, was released.

In an interview with Rob Swire of Pendulum, he revealed that The Prodigy were collaborating on Pendulum's third album, ''Immersion''. Howlett was a co-producer of the song ''Immunize''. They also played at Glastonbury Music Festival in 2008.

New album (2010–present) [link]

On March 18, 2010, The Prodigy announced through their website and mailing list a showing of ''World's on Fire'', a film made mostly from footage of the Warrior's Dance festival from July 2010, for one night only in selected cinemas across Europe. Recorded before 65,000 fans, ''World's on Fire'' is the debut live film of The Prodigy, documenting their biggest concert to date. The CD, DVD, and Blu-ray of ''World's on Fire'' was released on 23 May 2011.

On 6 August 2011, The Prodigy headlined Przystanek Woodstock (Poland) playing to a crowd of over 700,000 fans, though the police declared the band's role at the festival unsafe. At their two final shows of 2011 (in Brazil), The Prodigy played two new tracks: "A.W.O.L" and "Dogbite". On 18 November, The Prodigy were announced as a headliner for Download Festival 2012, and will be closing the main stage on Friday 8 June with songs from their new album, to be released later in 2012. Liam Howlett has confirmed this album will not be Dubstep, they have no plans to alter their sound but also mentioned the new album will still feel "Fresh".

Members [link]

; Current members

; Live members

; Former members

; Former live members

Discography [link]

; Studio albums

; Live album

References [link]

External links [link]

Category:English dance music groups Category:British electronic music groups Category:British techno music groups Category:Hardcore techno music groups Category:Breakbeat musicians Category:Drum and bass music groups Category:Brit Award winners Category:Kerrang! Awards winners Category:Musical groups established in 1990 Category:Music in Essex Category:People from Braintree, Essex Category:Elektra Records artists Category:Maverick Records artists Category:XL Recordings artists Category:1990 establishments in England