Experience – The Prodigy – Released September 28th, 1992, XL Recordings
Experience, also known as The Prodigy Experience, is the 1992 debut album by British electronica group, The Prodigy.
Prior to Experience, XL Recordings already had a string of rave hits under its belt including EPs from Ellis D, John & Julie, Cubic 22 and SL2. The label also distributed the warehouse anthem Anastasia by T99, arguably the biggest rave track of 1991.
All the while Liam Howlett was building up his studio, releasing tracks and setting the groundwork for the album which would well and truly put The Prodigy, XL Recordings and, indeed, British electronic music as a whole, well and truly on the map.
A lot had changed in the brief period between the first Prodigy release, 1991’s What Evil Lurks and 1992’s Experience. The acid house era was over but the scene it spawned was growing bigger. So big, in fact, that it could no longer be contained in small clubs. The rave revolution had begun.
Large in scale, epic in execution and fuelled by ecstasy, the BPMs increased dramatically between 1991 and 1992, rising from the traditional 120bpm range of house music to the 150-160 bpm range, tempos we now associate with drum n bass and jungle.
And all the while, the enormous momentum generated by the movement meant that, for the first time, underground electronic music acts were beginning to break the mainstream charts. And right there are the pill-popping pops, was The Prodigy.
Borrowing his name from a Moog synthesiser, The Prodigy was founded by Liam Howlett, a former hiphop DJ who, like so many others of his peers, dove headfirst into the rave scene and never looked back.
For live shows Howlett teamed up with dancers Leeroy Thornhill and Keith Flint, plus a former-reggae MC called Maxim and suddenly the Prodigy was no longer a solo act but the most exciting musical group in Britain.
In addition to those legendary early live performances, Thornhill and Flint’s appearances in the early music videos, with their vastly different yet equally energetic dancing helped to popularise The Prodigy further.
Leeroy’s smooth shuffle style was the perfect contrast to Flint’s berserker stomping. Seeing them together on screen was mesmerising to watch, and, being young and impressionable, we were, of course, compelled to copy them.
Whenever a new Prodigy video came on TV we’d dive towards the video player, jam in a cassette, agonise over the slow loading mechanism – “come on, come on, come on!” and hit record so we could watch them over and over.
Pretty much all my dance moves are ones I ripped off the Prodigy. And, advancing years and girth aside, I can still pull them off expertly. (Tell me I can’t and I’ll shuffledance on your skull)
Aside from Howlett’s compositions, Maxim is the only member to appear on Experience, providing vocals on Death Of The Prodigy Dancer. The album also features guest vocalist Simone Berryman on two tracks, Music Reach and Ruff In The Jungle Bizniss.
Fun fact, writer turned director, Alex Garland, who wrote books like The Beach and would later go on to direct movies including the scifi masterpiece Ex Machina, created the inlay card art.
You know those hand drawn top trumps-style member profiles on the inlay card? That was him. When I first heard about this I thought it was an internet rumour but I’ve since confirmed it from multiple sources. I love finding out little tidbits like that.
But I digress. Because we’re not here to talk about the album’s artwork, are we?
“Let’s Talk Components”
The most remarkable thing about this album is the limited equipment used. There’s the Moog Prodigy, obviously, from which the group takes its name, plus the obligatory Roland TB303 and TR909, alongside other bits of gear. But the main lynchpin of the album, and indeed of early Prodigy in general, is the Roland W30.
The Roland W30 was a workstation product with both sequencing and sampling capabilities, and Howlett certainly knew how to work it to the limit.
It should be no surprise, given Liam’s hiphop background, that he chose this keyboard as it was extensively used in hiphop. Other famous users included hiphop producers like EPMD’s Erick Sermon and DJ Lethal from House Of Pain, but none used it with such flair as Howlett.
According to Leeroy Thornhill, each track was also painstakingly programmed by hand. Liam apparently didn’t loop bars, which goes a long way towards explaining why his breaks have such a freeform organic feel. It was all punched in from start to finish.
While What Evil Lurks was the first Prodigy release, Charly was the group’s first official single, which entered the charts in 1991.
The track borrows beats from Meat Beat Manifesto’s Radio Babylon mashed up with a Joey Beltram Mentasm sound, known as the hoover which, by then, had become a staple rave sound thanks to tracks like Human Resource’s Dominator.
Topping it all off was a tongue-in-cheek sample from an old British public safety announcement featuring a cartoon cat, who just happened to share a name with a slang word for cocaine.
It ended up going to number three on the mainstream pop charts, kickstarting a series of rave tracks with not-so-subtle drug references following suit.
Rather predictably, the mainstream British press took umbrage with this and meanwhile the dance music press, namely Mixmag, accused the track’s success and, by extension, Liam Howlett of “killing rave.”
This breakout success was swiftly followed up by subsequent singles, Everybody in the Place and Fire which, once again, performed well in the charts despite being unapologetically hardcore.
An album was the next logical step.
But rather than stuffing the singles together with a bunch of filler tracks, Liam worked hard in the studio to deliver the world’s first proper rave experience in album form.
Experience wasn’t just the title of the album – it was a statement of intent.
The result was an album that sounded 100% fresh on release and hasn’t lost its intensity after three decades and rising.
Though borne of the rave scene, the fusion of influences are much further reaching.
Even before the guitars joined in, The Prodigy was already a thick, bubbling cauldron of sounds, a hyper speed mashup of post-acid house breakbeat rave with hiphop, electro and Caribbean sound system culture.
For this reason, Experience not only served as one of my primary entry-points to dance music, Liam’s broad sampling pallet also set me on a voyage of retroactive discovery taking in everyone from Max Romeo to Kelly Charles, Captain Rock to Bernard Purdie and, of course, Ultramagnetic MCs.
Admittedly, I wasn’t a huge Prodigy fan to begin with. My gateway to dance music came via groups like 808 State, KLF and Adamski, and later, Altern 8 whom I worshipped at the time.
The Prodigy took a little bit longer to fully appreciate and required repeated listens of my Experience tape to essentially recalibrate my brain.
Now I’ve owned this album in multiple formats over the years, the first being tape. As such, I always view this as an album of two sides, with the majority of the single remixes appearing on the B side. Nestled in among those B side tunes is one of my favourite pieces of all time, but more on that in a moment…
It’s fair to say that the first three Prodigy albums are inextricably linked with my youth, after which point I slowly lost interest as the output quality waned.
Although I love Jilted and though Fat Of The Land has its share of bangers, Experience is the only Prodigy album I play with regularity from start to finish.
30 years from now, if I’m still here, I’m sure I’ll still be playing it. And that’s why I can think of no better album to serve as the inaugural post on this blog.
So let’s blow some trumpets and make some noise with…
The Whores Of Jericho
Few albums have an opening track as epic as Experience. And a biblical epic at that.
The thundering bass, the frantic beats and those loud blaring horns…
The opening track of Experience is named for the city whose redoubtable defences famously crumbled under an onslaught of noise.
Having failed through conventional means, the assembled hordes of Jericho instead blew their horns so loudly the vibration shook the walls to rubble.
Course I had a mate who insisted it was the whores of Jericho.
And I mean, I know there was a whore of Babylon in the bible and I’m sure there were whores in Jericho, as there would be in any large population centre with a high concentration of soldiers but…
“It’s hordes you idiot.”
“It’s whores, are you deaf like?”
“It’s hordes, the hordes of Jericho.”
“Do you even know what a horde is?”
“Yeah, it’s like a big group of people, a vast horde outside the city walls.”
“What you on about?”
Of course years later I can now admit it’s neither whores nor hordes, it’s horns, because of course it fucking is!
My bible knowledge is a bit patchy but we all know that. They blew their horns, the walls fell down, end of story.
You can hear the phrase more clearly in the original source track, “The Badman Is Robin” by Hijack, also the source of all those, “bad boy come again” samples you heard throughout the 90s.
Aside from the vocal hook the other standout component is the melodic hook, adapted from the reggae classic Kunta Kinte Dub, but with a rave riff underneath it.
And finally, we have two secondary vocal hooks from the jungle brothers, “hear the bass come down on me” / “keep on dancing”.
It’s UK and US hiphop, reggae and rave all ground up together in a high-octane breakbeat blender and saturated with subsonic bass. And I loved this track from the first moment I heard it.
Music Reach (1/2/3/4) jumps straight in at the tail end of Jericho with the squeaky chipmunk vocals, “1,2,3,4”, before we’re once more bombarded by pounding bass-heavy breaks served up with a sizzling one/two riff combo.
Oh how we giggled at the “make me wanna shit!” vocal sample, since that was the kind of thing we still found hilarious at the time. It’s also the first of two tunes to feature Simone Berryman on vocals, singing the main chorus.
Again, 30 years on and this track hasn’t lost a single nano-joule of its original energy.
Wind It Up jumps straight in with some proper white gloves and glowsticks 90s pianos, but rather than sounding cheesy and jaded, like so many rave-by-numbers tracks that followed, when Liam does pianos the effect is jubilant.
There’s also plenty more ragamuffin bizniss ahn ting courtesy of the Anthony Johnson track Equal Rites, one of the several trips Liam made to the Kingston well in search of vocal samples.
We get even more pianos in Your Love, alongside some classic 90s rave organs. Yet again, despite the track clearly being a product of its time, this one just feels timeless.
The hands-in-the-air-pianos formula is one of the most done to death tropes in dance music, but rarely is it executed as well as it is here.
Another timeless feel-good track, it’s bouncy and uplifting in a way few dance tracks today compare with. And as we approach the four minute mark the track has one of the most simple yet effective melodic breakdowns ever recorded, where every bar just elevates the feeling further – it’s like the entire early 90s rave experience perfectly distilled into a single track.
Next up Hyperspeed, oh how we loved the intro to this one back in the day, wondering what scifi movie it came from only to learn several years later it was nicked wholesale from Kate Bush. (Wait, what?)
The main hook, meanwhile, comes from Captain Rock and there’s also plenty of other hiphop and electro samples buried in here too, including Liam’s perennial favourites Ultramagnetic MCs.
Last but not least, the sci fi chords and melody, laying the groundwork for some further interstellar hijinks to come…
No doubt a lot of people were expecting the original version of Charly on this album – it was the group’s breakout track after all – but instead Liam decided to do something different.
And although the original is one of the biggest all-time rave anthems, strip away all the hype and nostalgia and you have to admit that Charly (Trip into Drum and Bass Version) is a far superior track with sub bass that has the power to utterly demolish contemporary speakers.
If you’re lucky enough to hear this on a proper sound system, you’ll feel the bass deep in your chest – and all your other bits too. Feels nice doesn’t it? Be careful tho, seen too many mates get hooked on Charly.
Once Charly ends it’s time to flip the tape over. And indeed it’s much the same with my vinyl version, marking the end of the first record. (I also had this album on CD but fuck CDs.)
The second half of the album starts with Out of Space, a track which, I need to be honest here, is a victim of its own genius. The catchy main melody, that cosmic chord progression, the Max Romeo sample fusing reggae with double-time breaks, everything about this track, right down to that silly little spring that goes “boing!”
It’s all brilliant.
Only thing is I’ve heard this track so many times now, played over and over, I’ve somehow become immune to its charms.
There’s only so many events you can go to where the DJ plays this as his last song last then pulls down the fader so the crowd can singalong before it all starts to feel a bit cringe.
And I think that’s the problem, since it’s become increasingly difficult for me to remember a time when this song was fresh and new, like nothing we’d ever heard before. Because if rave was a country this could well be its national anthem.
Charly mostly slipped past me when it first came out, I think I was only vaguely aware of it at the time. For me the name The Prodigy didn’t really stick in my head until their second single, Everybody In The Place.
I wasn’t all that impressed though. No seriously, I’ve never been a huge fan of the Fairground remix and I still think it’s one of the Prodigy’s weakest tracks.
Everybody in the Place (155 and Rising) mix is a completely different animal, however, a furious breakbeat assault clocking in at 155 bpm and, as its name promises, rising in intensity.
This one’s still a kinetic dancefloor weapon.
Finally! We’ve arrived at my favourite track.
Weather Experience is not only my favourite track on the album, it’s also my favourite Prodigy track overall. I also rank this right near the top of my favourite acid tracks of all time.
Now, it was several years before I discovered this, but turns out the main string melody is a variation of a piece from the soundtrack to the 80s movie Flash Gordon. Liam’s improved it however, by rejiggering the notes ever so slightly.
This melody sets the tone of the track. Then we get those Uptown Dope On Plastic beats, first at regular speed, making it the slowest percussion on the entire album… but not for long, however, since there’s a storm rolling in…
Ooooh that acid!
The track has veered into completely new territory now, dark and ominous, the thunder grows louder until… Red sky!
The Uptown break reappears, this time at double speed. The accompanying melodies are childishly simplistic yet devastatingly effective, augmented by the strings, the chords and, of course, that speaker-ripping crack of thunder.
I love this tune
SO.FUCKING.MUCH!
But then suddenly, as is customary with weather in this part of the world, we get a swift meteorological 180, as the storm’s rage subsides, the clouds part and the sun reappears to warm us once more.
The original melody is reprised slowly, giving me goosebumps every single time.
Seriously, I consider this to be the best thing Liam Howlett has ever done and it’s the reason why I’ve been holding out for years in the hope that he’d make a solo album, just a one-and-done thing that dispenses with the Prodigy stadium rave aesthetic for a while.
We know he’s a punk fan, but we know he’s a Pink Floyd fan too. So I’m still hoping for a longform Liam Howlett album minus the stadium fillers with more tunes like Weather Experience, Climbatize and Skylined.
Once upon a time, Fire (Sunrise Version) was my least favourite track on the album. I have to say, over the years its grown on me to the point where I think it might well be the most genius piece of beat programming Liam’s ever done.
The original Fire mix is a much simpler piece with a straightforward hardcore vibe, which is precisely why I liked it the most of the Prodigy’s first three singles.
Whereas the lopsided skank and back-footed percussion of Sunrise, coupled with the peculiar melodic choices Liam built around it, threw me off initially.
And the “woo-hoo!” sample on repeat over and over I found grating.
It was only after repeated listening that I eventually grew to appreciate the sheer genius of this track, something made all the more remarkable considering the whole thing was painstakingly done in one take, every single beat laid down two-finger-typing style on Liam’s Roland W30.
Just another example of god-level sequencing on this album, the whores of Jericho meets the patience of Jobe, with some added Pablo Gad and Arthur Brown hellfire for good measure. (Actually the “woo-hoo” still gets on my tits slightly but I’m mature enough to let it pass.)
Ruff in the Jungle Bizness is perhaps the closest thing this album gets to a “filler” track – and even then it’s still an apex predator banger of a filler track.
It also features that unforgettable hook that automatically plays in my head whenever anyone mentions the words “jungle” or “rough”.
True to its title, this track is teeming with twittering creatures and exotic percussion, it also features live vocals from singer Simone Berryman, the second of her brief appearances on the album.
Feel the jungle vibe baby!
The album ends with Death of the Prodigy Dancers (Live) – the live is the important point here, as it’s the first taste many of us got of what a live Prodigy gig felt like.
There’s an unreleased version of this track doing the rounds out there on the intermajigger but it’s naff by comparison.
Liam often made tracks which never got official releases and existed solely to be played out live. Death of the Prodigy Dancers features MC Maxim Reality in top form and manages to convey a sense of the relentless rave energy of those legendary early Prodigy gigs.
Lots of albums leave you hungry to hear more. So you flip it over and listen to it again from the start.
But Experience does something different, something no other electronic album has done before or since, it makes you want to go see the act live. Doing this was Howlett’s final masterstroke.
Because, as anyone who’s ever been to a Prodigy gig (especially the earlier ones when Leeroy was still with them) will tell you, it’s the purest form of Prodigy Experience.
And it’s precisely that energy which propelled the Prodigy forward from the early 90s and right through to the present day.
“Dust Particles”
The Prodigy Experience exists today within a time capsule, a vibrant snapshot of the UK rave era that somehow remains timeless.
Despite some fairly simplistic and catchy melodies, many of the musical choices here are anything but straightforward, often contrarian by deliberate design. They don’t always fit the beat, but rather dance frantically over it.
The end result is a hyperactive distillation of sounds, styles and influences which comprised the British underground, utterly uncompromising, yet somehow also achieving massive commercial success.
And for us spotty teenagers, it was THE album to listen to prove that you were cool (even if you were anything but).
For me, Prodigy Experience remains one of the purest examples of 90s rave music around and one of the finest dance albums ever recorded.
Music For The Jilted Generation may have topped it in many respects, but as the years go by, I’ve found myself playing it less, while Experience still enjoys regular rotation.
Jilted may well be The Prodigy’s finest hour. It’s where the group peaked. The follow-up, Fat Of The Land, was the beginning of the end far as I’m concerned. (It’s also when Howlett stopped making tracks with a Roland W30 so we lost a lot of that simplicity.)
Ironically, by walking away from the rave era and turning their back on everything that made them great, I feel they lost their rock and roll edge while trying to break America.
Not that the rave movement would have lasted much longer anyway. By 1997, when Fat Of The Land was released, the rave movement had completely fractured into dozens of different scenes and genres.
Whereas looking at the shout-outs on the back of the Experience album cover it’s impossible not to be struck by how diverse a list it is, with respect going out to Orbital, Carl Cox, Ray Keith, Danny Breaks, Mickey Finn, Moby, SL2, N-Joi, Joey Beltram, DJ Rap and Aphex Twin.
It’s impossible to imagine those names existing on the same three-day festival billing, never mind on a single event flyer.
Yet they’re all namechecked by Howlett on the Experience liner notes because, once upon a time, they were all part of the exact same rave scene.
Can you imagine a big rave event with all those names in the one place, how crazy would that be?
It’ll probably never happen, of course, so instead I’ll finish by quoting Leeroy Thornhill, “you’re welcome round to smoke some banana skins anytime.”
Respect.