The band Tom Morello said kicked Rage Against the Machine’s ass: “It was very inspiring”
At just 18, it was one of those shows that I knew would be seismic in my own musical education, and so I fought through the unrelenting downpour of a Friday night to see The Prodigy at the Isle of Wight festival.
In a bid to resist any of my spirits being dampened, I put on a £1 poncho, which may well have been a bin bag, and waited. In an admission I am now ashamed to make, I was minutes before calling it a day, but then, the opening riff of ‘Breathe’ burst out of the speakers.
To this day, it remains one of the most formative live shows in my life for a number of reasons. It paled into meaning what a festival set meant, it bolstered my resilience as a festival goer, but perhaps, most importantly, it taught me something that I was resistant to admit until that point: electronic music has a crucial place in big festival environments.
Of course, that was an idea that was fed to me regularly through British culture, and while I had to make my own way and cultivate my own opinions, The Prodigy’s position in the pantheon of British musical history was never in doubt. In the mid-1990s, Britpop and electronic music co-existed in complete harmony because the bastions of each genre, Oasis and The Prodigy, were doing it with unmatched authenticity, becoming some of the biggest players in this diverse landscape of expression.
But that hadn’t quite translated in America just yet; they didn’t quite have an electronic artist operating on the same level as The Prodigy and so found themselves somewhat confused by the success of the British band, to a point where Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello mistook Keith Flint for a roadie.
“First of all, The Prodigy is one of the small handful of bands that kicked Rage Against the Machine’s ass in a live setting,” he explained, “They were on tour with us in Australia, and I didn’t know they were a band, I thought Keith Flint was a roadie or something. I would see them around, but they were playing in like the EDM tent, and we were on the main stage.
“So 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. 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. And for me, as a guitarist, it was very inspiring.”
The success of The Prodigy and the root cause of Morello’s admiration was down to their ability to shapeshift. Sure, lazy critics might have labelled them an electronic band, and that word might have softly reached America, in a bid to market them across the pond, but they were more than that. They were a band who united subcultures and genres to capture that vibrant sense of 1990s expression, and it is for that I endured the muddy wait.
