Liam Howlett can pinpoint the precise moment that he decided to incorporate rock guitar into The Prodigy's sonic arsenal. His band were in Los Angeles to film a video for Wind It Up, the fifth and final single from their 1992 debut album Experience, and had decided to check out new music from two of the city's emerging talents, specifically Dr. Dre's debut album The Chronic and the self-titled debut from Rage Against The Machine.
Howlett remembers the moment so vividly because after listening to Rage Against The Machine, he was suddenly struck by the thought that his own band were "finished".
"I remember very clearly being in the back of a limo," he recalled in a 2015 MOJO magazine interview. "We'd bought Rage Against The Machine's first album, put it on at 11, and at that moment I thought, This is where to take this. We can either stop this band and start another one, or just let me chew this over for a bit. I can change it."
"I came back from LA a different person and wanted to bring that energy to our music," Howlett told this writer in 2018. "That’s when I started writing Music For The Jilted Generation. Almost every track rebelled against the dance scene."
Somewhat ironically, RATM guitarist Tom Morello only became aware of The Prodigy after mistaking Keith Flint for an EDM act's roadie, while the two bands were on tour in Australia.
"I ran into him a few years later, like, Oh, hey, how’s it going, what are you doing?, still thinking he’s a roadie," Morello recalled in a 2020 interview with Pitchfork. "And he’s like, 'Oh, you know, I’m here with my band.' And I’m like, Oh awesome, when are you guys playing? He says, 'After you.' I’m like, What?”
"They were as aggressive and as heavy and as funky as anything that had ever happened," Morello continued. "And for me, as a guitarist, it was very inspiring. I started practicing their grooves and weaving those rhythms with my bare hands and a Marshall stack in a very analog setting... It really was informing my playing, and pushing me sonically to go even beyond the R2-D2 craziness that I was already exploring."
With both bands citing one another as inspirations in media interviews, it wasn't too long before contact was made between the two camps. Initially, Liam Howlett reached out to Tom Morello to ask if the guitarist might play on the track Serial Thrilla on his band's The Fat Of The Land album, but with Rage touring with U2 and lining up a subsequent tour with Wu-Tang Clan, Morello simply didn't have the free time.
Morello told NME that Howlett then asked for a DAT tape of "some fucked-up guitar", and so he recorded 15 minutes of a "squirrelly guitar playing... new hoots and howls and squonks and stuff" for the Prodigy's leader. Howlett would subsequently use fragments of the recording for the collaborative track One Man Army on the 1997 Spawn soundtrack, and rework it - removing Maxim Reality's vocals and adding more Morello - for future Prodigy B-side No Man Army.
Less well known is the collaboration between the two bands on a track called We Take Their Shelter, not to be confused with the RATM song No Shelter.
The track was premiered on July 25, 1997 as the final encore of a Rage Against The Machine show at the Akaska Blitz club in Tokyo on the Evil Empire tour, with Keith Flint joining Zack de la Rocha on vocals. It was played again the following day, when Flint and Maxim Reality guested with Rage at the Fuji Rock festival, and then performed just once more by the LA band, at a gig in Minneapolis that September, before disappearing into the ether...but fortunately not before a recording from Tokyo was posted on YouTube.
The mutual appreciation between the two bands continues to this day. In 2009, when RATM scored the most unlikely UK Christmas number one single of all time with Killing In The Name (re-released as a protest against Simon Cowell's X-Factor monopoly on the Xmas charts), Liam Howlett posted a message of appreciation oin The Prodigy's website reading, "“THE POINT HAS BEEN MADE, THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN. THE WAR IS WON... TAKE THE POWER BACK!"
That war may have been won, but the two bands are still out here fighting new battles, and presumably still taking pleasure and inspiration from one another's victories.
