Only CDs Is Sounding Like These # 25: Prodigy, The Fat of the Land (1997)

A new occasional series - CDs are coming back baby! And I’m here for it. BIGTIME! Also, some albums just REALLY suit the format, right

I was so excited to hear this album again — I recently picked up a copy, and had not heard it for absolutely years. Of course Firestarter and Breathe and Smack My Bitch Up swirl in the ether, but the whole album? I had a feeling it had aged remarkably well.

Wasn’t wrong either. It was almost a case of me declaring, to the empty room, that I’d found my new favourite album of 2024…um, a record that dropped in 1997…

But I’ve always held onto the idea that the first three Prodigy albums were just unimpeachable, just fantastic. I heard 1994’s Music For The Jilted Generation in 1995, alongside things like Sabres of Paradise, Tricky, and Portishead, it was a bit part of me discovering music for myself. Where previously I relied on mum and dad’s records, the music my brother was bringing home from university, and the taste of my school friends (and of course I was a leader in that, not much of a follower), now I had free reign to seek and find. And Jilted Generation blew my mind. A couple of years later I’d be working in a record store, and Jilted followed me home on vinyl one night. I also went back to 1992’s debut from the band, Experience. Which I similarly adored.

My memory tells me that Breathe and Firestarter were long-lead singles, so when I saw the Prodigy at The Big Day Out in early ‘97 they played those songs but The Fat of The Land was not yet released.

By the time it was out, I had my first record store job — and we planned a launch party for the album. People could pre-order it across all three formats, vinyl, CD, and tape. They got a free poster if they paid the $35 or so in advance (probably $20 for a tape and $45 or so for a record back then). We hired a bar (La Luna) and put DJs on. We had something like 500 pre-orders for the album.

Not everyone showed to the launch of course, many slinking in to the store over the next week to collect. But the party was pumping. We were there cutting shapes, we were there rolling up posters, we were there basking in just how big the Prodigy was. (People wanted the photocopied fliers we’d made as souvenirs). And how just everyone loved them. The actual ravers. The cool crowd. The rugbyheads too. It was electro punk, it was safely anarchic. It was cool. But it wasn’t too obscure. Big Beat music was the ‘techno’ for the mainstream, but the best of what the likes of Chemical Brothers and Prodigy had to offer was good still. And that’s why it worked. (And why is still does).

At some point I just lost complete interest in the Prodigy. I mean I owned a Greatest Hits CD because I was still working in music retail and you’d get given samples of such things, and I was building a personal music library back then, so such a thing seemed useful. But I never really played it. And anyway, each Prodigy album (the first three anyway) had a vibe, a sustained mood.

Smack My Bitch Up and Breathe still feels like an incredible 1-2 to start an album. Firestarter is a little morsel buried deeper. But there’s other great tracks on this album. Diesel Power and Funky Shit for starters. It was so thrilling to just sit with this album, how it almost seemed even better than at the time.

But, yeah, of course it plays now with a permanent reminder of 1997. And that’s part of the charm, of the album, and of CDs in general — they transport you to the era in a way that the digital files on a stream can never quite do.

I loved 1997. Personally I was a mess, but musically, it was, erm, sound. I was buying a couple of new records a week, working a job in a music store, and just being turned on to so much stuff. I was playing in a covers band for drinks and a bit of spending money on the side. And I was starting to really amass a vinyl collection, including a lot of ‘dance’ music. My CD collection was exploding.

It was my immersion into the world of club culture. I listened to DJ Shadow and The Orb and Future Sound of London and The Herbaliser and Kruder & Dorfmeister, and all sorts of things that moved between ‘chill’ and toward ‘trance’. I couldn’t quite ever get on board with the biggest of the ‘oonst oonst’ and ‘doof doof’ musics but I did like some of the stuff that licked at the lap of those things.

I even went to a club by myself and danced late into the night a few times. Until one of my friends saw me there and told me I danced really badly. So I stayed home, drinking wine and smoking cigarettes and listening to my music in my room.

It was an odd year. And painful in some ways. I was checked out completely. And borderline lost. I was the life of the party. But the party was toxic for my life.

I turned 21. I went home for my party and had to tell my folks I had completely crashed out of university. They were horrified. There’s a video of me just devouring a yard glass in a minute or so with my grandmother shouting “don’t get him drunk” in a divorced-from-reality bird-like screech. It was too late for that. Too late for nearly everything…

I drove back with my new Discman connected to the car stereo via a tape adapter. The “Anti-Skip” didn’t stand a chance the way I took those corners. Breathe the pressure, come play my game I’ll test ya…

Thank god I survived. And this music did too.