The Prodigy took their name from a synthesizer scrawled on a mixtape
A dancer at an Essex nightclub asked the DJ for a mixtape. Liam Howlett handed back a cassette with his own tracks on the flip side and one word scratched on it, the name of the Moog synth he used. That tape became The Prodigy, later hailed as the godfathers of rave.
Howlett was 18 when he came home to Braintree in 1989 after quitting as DJ for a hip-hop crew, drawn to the calmer mood of raves. At a gig at The Barn he met dancers Keith Flint and Leeroy Thornhill, who choreographed routines to his tape and proposed forming a group. The band officially began on 5 October 1990. At their first show in February 1991, at a Dalston club Howlett called the roughest in London, MC Maxim, who had skipped an arranged meeting, turned up unannounced and improvised lyrics onstage.
XL Recordings signed them after another label passed. Their August 1991 single Charly sampled a government public-information cartoon and reached number three. Cartoon-sampling copycats followed, mocked as kiddie rave, and Howlett knew another such record would sink them, so he spent the royalties on new gear including a TR-909 drum machine. Everybody in the Place stalled at number two in December, held off by a Queen reissue after Freddie Mercury's death.
The band then toughened its sound. Music for the Jilted Generation, released in July 1994, answered the Criminal Justice Act's crackdown on raves, went straight to number one and earned a Mercury nomination, while the group refused Top of the Pops. In March 1996 Flint, previously a dancer, insisted on writing words for an instrumental. The result, Firestarter, drew tabloid calls for a ban yet spent three weeks at number one in Britain and cracked the American top 30, launching his pierced, spiky-haired punk image. Breathe topped charts in nine countries that November.
The Fat of the Land in 1997 reached number one in 16 countries. Thornhill left in 2000 and Flint died in 2019. The group has sold an estimated 25 million records and notched seven straight British number-one albums.
Source: The Prodigy
