The Sunday Round-Up: 7th-13th July (Looking Back On The Prodigy's The Fat of the Land, and the Making of Muse's Black Holes and Revelations)

Plus, more music history featuring The Beatles, TLC, Lily Allen, Coldplay, and Cream

Looking Back On The Prodigy’sThe Fat of The Land (started a 5-week run at no.1 on the UK Albums Chart on 13th July 1997)

Non-confirmist and anti-establishment, The Prodigy burst on to the 90s music scene with a bold, otherworldly energy that set them apart from the Britpop, mainstream alternative rock, and popgroup culture that dominated the decade that brought us Blur, Oasis, Spice Girls, and Take That.

A breath of fresh air, The Prodigy already had two top 20 albums under their belt by the time The Fat of the Land came along, which swiftly became the group’s 2nd UK no.1 album, as well as their first no.1 stateside.

The album opens with ‘Smack My Bitch Up’, a song that in the words of Pitchfork, ‘depending on your point of view […] was either revolting or revolutionary.’¹ The US’s National Organization for Women were of the former view, objecting to the song’s seeming misogyny.

In the following quotes, gathered from various interviews and articles, The Prodigy’s Liam Howlett, Keith Flint, and Maxim discuss the controversy surrounding ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ as well as the album’s recording process and legacy…

Liam Howlett (Producer, Keyboards, Songwriter):

‘[W]e made all the tracks for The Fat of the Land on the Mackie 8-Bus, and then we tried to go into the studio to mix. But we ended up back at my place, and I did the whole thing on the 8-Bus […] People are always coming up to me and asking how I got so much attack into ‘Firestarter’, and it was largely down to the way you can push those Mackie channels. The mixer was the key to that sound.’²

‘He’s (Keith Flint) got not a cent of common sense, but he’s actually really intelligent. [The ‘Firestarter’ lyric] ‘I’m the self-inflicted mind detonator’ — that’s him. He’ll build things up in his head until he’s on the edge of going mad. That lyric was spot-on.’³

‘"With ‘Firestarter’, that was an instrumental record, the first instrumental for the album, and I played it to Keith to see what he reckoned […] He said, ‘Yeah, I’d like to put some lyrics on it’. And I laughed. I said, ‘Are you serious?’ And he was, ‘Yeah! Absolutely!’ So I just thought, yeah, let’s try it. At that time I wasn’t thinking, ‘I’ve got an album to write, I need to get onto the next track’ or anything. And when we did it, it was convincing, and it works. It’s so simple but it fuckin’ works. That’s something that Keith’s got that not many other people’s got – Keith’s so simple with his delivery and with his lyrics it’s almost too simple. But it’s got a punk rush, a crude feel about it. His performance gets that across spot on. I’m not saying people want to be like Keith, but they want to be simple and straightforward: but lyrics confuse things and complicate things too much. But Keith’s no singer, and he’s not trying to be, that’s Keith. That’s why he’s good at what he does.’⁴

‘When that whole hysteria [around ‘Firestarter’ and the album] was happening, we definitely rose to the occasion and took the piss. We thought ‘Okay, now we’re up here, don’t think we’re going to be responsible.’ ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ was just us acting like angry little teenagers.’⁵

Discussing ‘Smack My Bitch Up’…

‘I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to write a record to really get you thinking now […] We’ll see how far this can be taken.’⁶

‘[‘Smack My Bitch Up’] was for the fans. Only brainless people get some stupid message out of it… I'm often misquoted. Some magazine said, 'Liam Howlett says his band are dangerous.' What I said was, 'For this band to survive, it has to be dangerous for us'… I wasn't saying we were dangerous because we're firestarters and we have spiky hair.’⁷

Talking about The Fat of the Land’s CD booklet including a quote slightly adapted from a Hermann Goering speech…

We have no butter, but I ask you, ‘Would you rather have butter or guns? Shall we import lard or steel?’ Let me tell you, preparedness makes us powerful. Butter merely makes us fat.

‘It just fitted in well with the whole vibe of the album. Not obviously from the Nazi point of view, but B-boy culture. It scared me when I read it. It’s such a powerful quote, but it’s really scary: butter or guns. It stuck in my head. I thought it was perfect for what we wanted.’⁸

Keith Flint (Vocals, Dancer)

Talking about the night that he and Howlett wrote ‘Firestarter’ and played it about 30 times in the car…

‘I don’t think either of us could quite believe it was me […] I’m not a singer. I love the fact that there’s people out there that have been trying since the age of 9 to sing and get the voice right — do, re, mi and all that — and I can roar in, not ever written anything or performed lyrically anything, and write a tune that’s so successful. I think that’s a brilliant piss take on a lot of people, and that gives me a buzz.’⁹

Discussing the controversy surrounding ‘Smack My Bitch Up’…

‘At the end of the day, the girls who come to our shows are hardcore girls, and they don’t look at it as that. If some girl in an A-line flowery dress decides there’s some band somewhere singing about smashing bitches up, let’s get a bit militant. They don’t know us. They never know us. They never will.’¹⁰

Maxim (MC, Vocals)

‘[If I had to recommend an album for someone looking to get into dance music], I’d give them The Prodigy, Fat of the Land. It’s a good spectrum of style and music.’¹¹

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As the home of some of The Prodigy’s most loved songs, ‘Firestarter’, ‘Breathe’, and ‘Smack My Bitch Up’, The Fat of the Land is an album with iconic status, breaking the British electronic punk group into the USA, and securing their position as, in the words of EDM, ‘the world’s biggest punk rave group.’¹²

What are your experiences or stories to do with The Prodigy’s The Fat of the Land? Have you seen them perform live? Let us know in the comments!

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The Making of Muse’s Black Holes & Revelations (started a 2-week run at the top of the UK Albums Chart on 9th July 2006)

Black Holes and Revelations is the album that spawned ‘Supermassive Black Hole’, ‘Starlight’, ‘Knights of Cydonia’, ‘Invincible’, and ‘Map of the Problematique’. It was described by the Guardian’s Andrew Perry as ‘entertaining and rabble-rousing, daft and deadly serious, […] a fantastic record […] with almost limitless appeal.’¹³ It would appear that the world agreed, with Black Holes and Revelations achieving ten top 10 chart positions, building on the chart success of previous studio album, Absolution.

In the words of producer, Rich Costey, and Muse’s band members, here’s the story behind the making of Black Holes and Revelations…

Matt Bellamy (Lead Vocals, Guitar, Keyboards):

‘Yeah, we’ve got Morricone and flamenco going on [in the album.] We recorded some sections in Northern Italy, which is why I think we took on that south European sound. I’ve always loved that stuff but never found a way of getting it into the songs. I tried a bit on the second album with Screenager but it came out a bit crap.’¹⁴

‘We’d been stuck in this berserk studio in the south of France for months, a beautiful but very desolate 600-acre deal with nowhere to go, no car, no TV and nothing to do except hang around and talk shit to one another […] Going up the walls, basically. The heart of the album came from that time – we basically had to produce something out of nothing. It was all very dark and gothic. We had this barn full of bats, and whenever we started playing late at night, they’d fly in which was disconcerting. This place was a maze, full of secret tunnels, you had the feeling it was haunted…

It’s all a bit weird being cut off, so to contrast that, we went to New York, which is the sort of place where you walk out the door and you’ve made 20 friends before you’ve got as far as the shops. We’d head out dancing and generally getting involved in New York life, which is how the album’s more uplifting stuff, like ‘Supermassive Black Hole’ came about.’¹⁵

‘Lots of songs on the album are about the things that keep you awake at night. So I think a lot of the darker side of the record probably can be traced to that time [in France]. [New York] felt like a relief after the seclusion. It helped the recording process, and there was a definite sense of, ‘Life’s great really, enjoy it while you can, get on with it.’’¹⁶

On ‘Knights of Cydonia’…

‘We really pushed that song to its limits. We pushed the fantastical elements so far, maybe too far, so it sounds like a sci-fi film. Cydonia is the area of Mars where they think there’s that big-faced temple thing. Mars used to be the same distance from the Sun as we are now and so some people think that maybe there was a civilisation there. I find that idea quite appealing.’¹⁷

Chris Wolstenholme (Bass Guitar, Backing Vocals):

‘It’s quite a drastic change [from our previous albums]. We have touched on the pop thing a little bit in the past but we would always do the obvious thing and rock it up a little bit. This time, the pop influences aren’t always hidden by guitars. They’re not always the main thing. While all our previous albums have always been influenced primarily by rock, this one has been influenced by older guitar music from the late 50s and early 60s. We’ve never really gone down that road before.’¹⁸

‘On Black Holes and Revelations, [the song that stands out] was probably ‘Supermassive Black Hole.’ And I think there are always certain songs like that where we really kind of push the boat out and try, I guess, try to shock people, really […] Try and write something that people listen to and go, ‘Wow, that’s totally out there for this band.’¹⁹

Dominic Howard (Drums, Percussion):

Discussing the album leaking early…

‘It's inevitable that these things happen, but it's just a shame that whoever did it knobbed it up - it leaked in mono rather than stereo, which compromised the sound quality. The record label likes to sit on records for ages, so it was going to happen once they started sending CDs to magazines.’²⁰

'[‘Supermassive Black Hole’] is the album's extreme left turn. We put it out first to show we've moved on, we also thought it'd work well as a single - we'd like to hope it makes you want to dance! It shows we've evolved, and we're not afraid to try new things.’²¹

‘We started off in the South of France, got in and wrote, experimented a lot, and it got too much, too deep. It was really secluded, the songs were really long, and we found it hard to make decisions. New York helped us speed it all up - the fast pace of the city made decisions much easier to make, it was a nice environment to work in. The energy helped too, and going out to clubs playing music we didn't know - it was R n' B, and everyone was dancing to it - we liked that, I think that put the groove in there, especially 'Supermassive Black Hole'. Then we went on to Italy, where the songs changed more still.’²²

Rich Costey (Producer):

‘We were definitely going for something great, but we were also going for something a bit more personal than Absolution. On Absolution, for example, the guitars really sound big, but you don’t hear as much of Matt as a true player. When Muse plays live, you can really hear his personality as a player. I wanted to make sure we preserved that—I wanted to make a record where you could hear his fingers on the strings, and you could hear his pick hitting the strings. I wanted a little more clarity on the album than Absolution had on it, perhaps.’

‘[O]ne of their songs, “A Soldier’s Poem,” was leftover from Absolution. On that album, that song just didn’t seem quite ready and we ended up leaving it behind. For the new version of the song, Matt had completely changed the lyrics, the meaning and the arrangement. It is actually inspired by an Elvis recording, “(I Can’t Help) Falling In Love.” You can hear this in his tenor.’

‘[For the mic setup on ‘A Soldier’s Poem’], we were recording in the main room Studio A in Avatar, which emits this classic gigantic drum sound, and that was of course the opposite of what we wanted for that song. I couldn’t find a room that was dead enough, so I stuck them in the lounge. The lounge in that room is really narrow and long. The lounge is split in half, so we put Dominic in one of the lounges, and basically just a U47 on the bass drum and a Coles on top of the drum kit, and that was it.’

‘[O]n “Map of the Problematique,” I basically put that whole guitar sound together. Matt just wanted to use a keyboard—he was a little unsure of whether a guitar was going to work. I really wanted a guitar sound and we did manage to back-engineer it to make it work. It took a couple of days, but we did manage to do it.’²³

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From a ‘barn full of bats’ in the south of France to the ‘fast pace’ of New York, Black Holes and Revelations is, in part, a product of the settings in which it was made. It also represents an evolution in style for a band with supermassive ambition and sound.

What do you think of Muse’s Black Holes and Revelations? Do you have a favourite song from the album?

The Round-Up (7th-13th July)

7th July 1969: The Beatles began the recording of ‘Here Comes The Sun’

‘Here Comes The Sun’ was written by George Harrison. He discussed its inspiration in his 1979 book, ‘I Me Mine’…

‘Here Comes The Sun’ was written at the time when Apple [Records] was getting like school, where we had to go and be businessmen: ‘Sign this’ and ‘sign that.’ Anyway, it seems as if winter in England goes on forever; by the time spring comes you really deserve it. So one day I decided I was going to sag off Apple and I went over to Eric Clapton’s house. The relief of not having to go and see all those dopey accountants was wonderful, and I walked around the garden with one of Eric’s acoustic guitars and wrote ‘Here Comes The Sun’.²⁴

When the day came to record the song, the Fab Four were a Beatle short. John Lennon was recovering from a car crash while holidaying in Scotland, and so it was down to Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and Harrison to bring ‘Here Comes The Sun’ to fruition.

The track was completed on 19th August with Harrison adding a final touch, the Moog synthesiser, an instrument he had experimented with on his solo 1969 album, Electronic Sound.

You can hear the isolated Moog synth arrangements from ‘Here Comes The Sun’ here…

8th July 1995: TLC started a 7-week run at the top of the US Singles Chart with ‘Waterfalls’

Described by Stephen Thomas Erlewine as ‘one of the classic R&B songs of the ‘90s’²⁵, TLC’s ‘Waterfalls’ was a worldwide hit with an important directive.

As Fuse notes, ‘[t]he track told a cautionary tale of HIV and AIDS, ands its video depicted a man who didn’t wear a condom with his girlfriend and later watched his body degenerate in the mirror.’²⁶

Rozonda ‘Chilli’ Thomas told the Guardian ‘Anything that’s self-destructive, that’s chasing a waterfall. We wanted to make a song with a strong message – about unprotected sex, being promiscuous, and hanging out in the wrong crowd.’²⁷

9th July 2006: Lily Allen scored her first UK no.1 single with ‘Smile’

‘Smile’ was Lily Allen’s debut single. It was the first song Allen had ever written with the help of Iyiola Babalola and Darren Lewis. Talking about the decision to use a sample, ‘Free Soul’, by the Soul Brothers, in the track, Allen said…

‘When I set out to do this I knew I wanted to make songs that sounded a) up to date and now and b) really organic […] Because you can't get really good players without spending loads of money these days, the only other option is to sample. The first song I ever wrote was Smile [with] a guy in Manchester […] We just went through about seven or eight sample lyrics, found a beat, put it all in... Then when it comes to writing lyrics I write... like a rapper would, I suppose, with absolutely no melody involved whatsoever, I'm just getting my flow sorted. Then I write the whole text of the song and then ad lib the melody into the microphone. It's not terribly clever!’²⁸

10th July 2000: Coldplay released their debut album, Parachutes

NME said of Parachutes, ‘it’s incredible this is a debut album. Accomplished, yet subtle, it works perfectly as a whole in a way all the production skills in the world couldn’t replicate. Forget trashing rooms and rent-a-quotes, just listen. This really is all that matters.’²⁹

The album features some of Coldplay’s best known songs including ‘Yellow’, ‘Trouble’ and ‘Shiver’.

10th July 1968: Eric Clapton announced the break-up of Cream

Cream are widely considered to be the world’s first supergroup. Formed by Jack Bruce, Eric Clapton, and Ginger Baker in 1966, Cream released four top 10 albums in a three-year span. However, according to Ultimate Classic Rock, while recording 1968 album, Wheels of Fire, ‘things had taken a more abusive turn, with each member trying to overpower the others by sheer instrumental volume.’³⁰

Relationships between the three band members continued to deteriorate with Bruce and Baker frequently arguing on-and-off-stage. So, on 10th July 1968, Clapton finally had enough, and announced the band’s break-up.

Discussing the band’s demise in his autobiography, Clapton said…

‘Musically, we were flying high, but once we stopped touring in America, it was the beginning of the end for Cream. Because once we started working in such an intense way, it became impossible to keep the music afloat, and we began to drown.’³¹

Some of Cream’s best known hits include: ‘I Feel Free’, ‘Strange Brew’, ‘Sunshine of Your Love’, and ‘Badge’.

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Some music-related quotes from musicians born this week:

Ringo Starr (born 7th July 1940)

’I’ve never been able to sit round on my own and play drums, practise in the back room, never been able to. I’ve always played with other musicians. It’s how I play. There’s no joy for me in playing on my own, bashing away. I need a bass, a piano, guitar, whatever, and then I can play.’

Beck (born 8th July 1970)

‘I think you have to keep a childlike quality to play music or make a record.’

Courtney Love (born 9th July 1964)

‘Rock is all about writing your own script; it’s all about pioneering.’

Jack White (born 9th July 1975)

‘I keep guitars that are, you know, the neck’s a little bent and it’s a little bit out of tune. I want to work and battle it and conquer it and make it express whatever attitude I have at that moment. I want it to be a struggle.’

Lil’ Kim (born 11th July 1975)

‘When you are a real artist who is serious about your craft, you love good music. Period.’

Christine McVie (born 12th July 1943)

’I write about unrequited love in a very optimistic way.’

1. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-prodigy-the-fat-of-the-land/

2. https://theprodigy.info/articles/interview-with-liam-howlett.html

3. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/prodigy-firestarter-keith-flint-1997-rolling-stone-cover-802615/

4. https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/anniversary/the-prodigy-fat-of-the-land-anniversary-review/

5. https://leftlion.co.uk/features/2005/12/interview-with-liam-howlett-on-the-return-of-the-prodigy/

6. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/prodigy-firestarter-keith-flint-1997-rolling-stone-cover-802615/

7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fat_of_the_Land

8. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/prodigy-firestarter-keith-flint-1997-rolling-stone-cover-802615/

9. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/prodigy-firestarter-keith-flint-1997-rolling-stone-cover-802615/

10. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/prodigy-firestarter-keith-flint-1997-rolling-stone-cover-802615/

11. https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/maxim-the-prodigy-interview-nfts-keith-flint-1235116710/

12. https://edm.com/news/prodigy-road-sign-tribute

13. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2006/jun/18/17

14. https://ianwinterton.co.uk/interview-muse/

15. https://www.musewiki.org/Hot_Press_2006-07-26_%E2%80%93_Have_we_got_Muse_for_you

16. https://www.musewiki.org/Hot_Press_2006-07-26_%E2%80%93_Have_we_got_Muse_for_you

17. https://ianwinterton.co.uk/interview-muse/

18. https://www.musewiki.org/Interview_with_Wolstenholme_(200608_Reading_Festival_programme_article)

19. https://forum.muse.mu/topic/9852-newsok-chris-wolstenholme-interview-%E2%80%93-%E2%80%9Cwe-are-basically-a-school-band%E2%80%9D/

20. https://www.musewiki.org/This_Is_Fake_DIY_2006-06-19_%E2%80%93_Interview:_Muse

21. https://www.musewiki.org/This_Is_Fake_DIY_2006-06-19_%E2%80%93_Interview:_Muse

22. https://www.musewiki.org/This_Is_Fake_DIY_2006-06-19_%E2%80%93_Interview:_Muse

23. https://dailymusebread.livejournal.com/12588.html

24. http://www.beatlesebooks.com/here-comes-the-sun

25. https://www.allmusic.com/album/crazysexycool-mw0000120130

26. https://www.fuse.tv/videos/2013/10/tlc-waterfalls-interview-ceelo

27. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/may/15/how-we-made-tlc-waterfalls

28. https://web.archive.org/web/20090912202211/http://www.musicomh.com/music/features/lily-allen_0806.htm

29. https://www.nme.com/reviews/reviews-nme-2510-332217

30. https://ultimateclassicrock.com/cream-break-up/

31. https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/eric-clapton-on-the-moment-cream-began-to-split/