Hungry For More - The Prodigy

We’ve barely been in each other’s company for ten seconds but The Prodigy’s Keith Flint has already said something that’s left me gobsmacked. “I want some ice cream,” he says, tottering off to consult a menu. He begins reading the options aloud before settling on one that, when it arrives mid-way through our interview, makes his eyes sparkle and his band mates – Liam Howlett and Keith ‘Maxim’ Palmer – stop dead in their tracks. “Fucking hell,” Howlett says, mid-sentence. “I know, there’s some cal-ooor-ies there, I’ll tell ya,” Flint responds, before going to collect what can only be described as a vanilla and chocolate ice cream mountain draped in rivers of sticky chocolate sauce. 

The Prodigy are in high spirits. We’re in a basement room of a London hotel to talk about the reaction to ‘Invaders Must Die’, the dance trio’s fifth studio album and fourth chart-topping release in a row. It’s been widely regarded by critics as a return to the primal core of bass and drums that first characterised the band’s music almost twenty years ago. The songs, still all written by Howlett, are all hard-hitting, while Flint and Maxim’s visceral vocals are joined once again by old-school samples. At times, most notably on the new single ‘Warrior’s Dance’, it could be 1990 again, yet ‘Invaders Must Die’ sounds unremittingly avant-garde.

“I think it was important for us to take what’s best about the band and make that really solid - and make a band record again,” Howlett says. “Do you know what I mean?”

Today all three men punctuate the majority of their sentences with that same oratorical question, as is if they’re all constantly seeking some sort of reassurance, not from me, but each other. It’s testament to how far The Prodigy have come from 2002 – a period when the band, Howlett admits, experienced “some issues” following the conclusion of an almost non-stop five year tour in support of 1997’s ‘The Fat Of The Land’. While the tour solidified their position as one of the world’s biggest live bands, it tested their friendship.

“I think we just didn’t communicate,” he recalls. “It’s like, obviously frustrating, but I think we’d been on the road for a long time so it was probably…”Flint interrupts and begins, as he often does, by speaking as if he’s giving therapy to the others. “You never fell out. It’s not like someone wrongs someone, like, Maxim caught me in his house stealing his wife’s jewellery and he’s like: ‘Why’d you come round my fucking house?’” Maxim and Howlett suddenly burst out laughing; Flint just continues obliviously. “It’s not like that. No one had a bad word to be said – or would have said – about each other.”

Flint says he hit a “particular low” following touring “because of the contradiction of needing that time off more than anything, but not being able to handle it”. Maxim adds that it was different for each of them. “For me, I loved the time off, where as Keith didn’t want the time off.”

Howlett and Flint pick up the conversation.

“Yeah, I think it was just that people were doing things at different times,” Howlett says. “We did everything in sync and suddenly we were all out of sync,” Flint adds, before Howlett continues: “The guys were kind of ready for me to write the next album, I wasn’t ready to do it.”