It comes as no surprise to hear Liam Howlett say "DJs are over-rated; all they do is play other people's music," as he gets ready to release his own DJ mix album. This from the same man who turned down a U2 tour, told Madonna he wasn't interested in collaborating with her and released a single (Smack My Bitch Up) knowing in advance it would be banned. To make matters worse/better, he then made a video for the song which he also knew would never get shown because of its, quite literally, sex and drugs and rock'n'roll subject matter.
He is also someone who originally made his name way back in the days of "rave", but now professes to despise the scene; someone who stubbornly refuses to play one his band's biggest hits, Charly, much to his fans' chagrin; and someone who is, quite uniquely, as big a rock star as he is a dance star. It starts to make sense when you change your way of seeing and consider Howlett's band, The Prodigy, as the 1990s version of The Sex Pistols. It's all there: the controversy, the iconoclasm, the electrifying nature of the music, and the occasional use of style over content to paper over the odd crack. By simply using the technology at his disposal, Howlett has fashioned The Prodigy into the nearest thing there is to a "punk" band around today - the only real difference is that The Prodigy are more of a multi-platinum unit-shifting commercial beast. And when they tour the US they don't fall to pieces.
Currently weighing in as the biggest dance band in the world, The Prodigy are still reeling from the global success of their last album, The Fat Of The Land, which leaves Howlett free to release a labour of love, solo, DJ-mix album. If the latter term has you, like many sane people, reaching for your gun, cut the guy some slack - this is no standard-issue bleep and squelch affair. Containing 50 tracks organised into eight "songs", The Dirtchamber Sesssions, Vol 1 is primarily Howlett's attempt to showcase all the music that has influenced The Prodigy's, but as a knock-on effect, it also manages to be a beguiling introduction to hip-hop sounds for people who still haven't evolved beyond listening to Dire Straits.
It started back in October of last year when Mary-Anne Hobbs of BBC Radio One's Breezeblock show invited Howlett into the studio to play some of his favourite tracks. He mixed all the songs together over an hour-long programme, and sooner than you could say "copyright infringement", bootleg tapes of the mix were changing hands for ridiculous sums of money. The Prodigy's record company then decided to beat the bootleggers by officially releasing the work.
Very much a flick through Howlett's record collection, the album is a giddy tour around punk, ska, old skool hip-hop and very early rave (not unlike The Prodigy's sound itself). The Sex Pistols sit side by side with Fatboy Slim, Public Enemy nudge up to Barry White and The Charlatans mix it with Bomb The Bass - while Herbie Hancock, KLF, The Chemical Brothers, Primal Scream and The Beastie Boys all put in guest appearances. It's a remarkable voyage around the last two decades of musical adventure. "I was just sick of all these other shit compilations that were around," says Howlett on the reasons behind the record. "One of the things that was really annoying me was all this `old skool reunion' stuff - people don't really understand what it was like back then, they think it was just Run DMC and things like that. This was my way of saying `this is what the old skool is about' and I gave it that flavour, not simply in the tracks but in the way I put it together. "It's not like dance DJs who just beat-mix; my mix is all about using DJ tricks to create something different. This isn't really for the clubbers, it's more for the B-boy and B-girls, it's more from the roots of hip-hop. It goes back to me in my bedroom when I was 14, putting tapes together with the pause button on the cassette, trying to be Grandmaster Flash!"
Good and all as the album is, isn't there a touch of hypocrisy about someone who's vociferous in his criticism of the current dance scene releasing a mix album? "Well, I didn't want to do something like `Ministry Of Sound Volume 98', I wanted to do a hip-hop DJ album like Skratch Piklz - of people I respect. I'm not saying there's no skill in building up crowds in clubs, but I just don't agree with this whole thing of DJs being stars . . ."
And dance culture now? "I never totally disliked dance culture, I just disliked parts of it. I disliked the mentality that said there wasn't room for people to come out and be successful and be a fuckin' big band."
One of the songs that was on the original Radio One tape but never made it on to the official album was The Beatles's Sgt Pep- per. Howlett wrote to Paul McCartney asking him if he could use two verses and a chorus from the song, and McCartney had no problem, but Apple Records stepped in to forbid clearance - Apple never let Beatles tracks appear on anything other than Beatles albums - they did tell Howlett, though, that it was "nothing personal", simply policy. On the album, it was replaced by a Jane's Addiction song.
Picking out five records off the album that he says have helped to shape The Prodigy's musical direction, Howlett lists Coldcut's Beats And Pieces - "it's raw and has a good feel, a real buzz"; KLF's 3am Eternal - "I felt like I was in Close En- counters, I expected to see spaceships coming down, it was such an amazing sound; Primal Scream's Kowalski - "Mani on bass is pure class"; Ultra-magnetic MC's Give The Drummer Some - "the sheer sound of the Bronx", and the Beastie Boys' Time To Get Ill - "whatever has happened between us, there's no respect lost as far as the music goes, no one touches them as far as three guys on mics go."
The Dirtchamber Sessions Volume 1 is out now on the XL label.
