Voodoo People · ’05 Remixes · Pendulum
Another significant event of the outgoing year is 20th Anniversary of Pendulum’s remix of ‘Voodoo People’, which was released in October 2005. Today, this banger consistently ranks among the five most-streamed Prodigy tracks on YouTube, Spotify and Deezer — a rare case where a guest remix stands shoulder to shoulder in popularity with an act’s own biggest hits.
To mark the twentieth anniversary, we spoke with Rob Swire of Pendulum to explore how the track came to life and uncovered several lesser-known details. We dived into all existing versions and revisited some curious moments from the video shoot. In addition, our team touched on ‘Immunize’, the second collaboration between Pendulum and Liam Howlett. Our crew also looked at other versions of the single released on 3 October 2005, as well as tracks that became (or could have become) part of it. Let’s start!
VOODOO PEOPLE (PENDULUM REMIX)
In mid-October 2005, marking The Prodigy’s fifteenth anniversary, the band prepared to release their career-spanning collection Their Law: The Singles 1990–2005. As part of the promo campaign, several versions of the split single ‘Voodoo People / Out of Space’ were issued, each featuring fresh remixes by guest artists. This resulted in a new take on ‘Out of Space’ by the British electronic duo Audio Bullys, a distinctive rework of ‘Voodoo People’ by London grime producer Wonder, a drum and bass reinterpretation of ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ by Sub Focus, and, of course, the blistering drum and bass remix of ‘Voodoo People’ by Pendulum.
Official Press Release: “October 2005 sees The Prodigy release greatest hits album, ‘Their Law: The Singles 1990–2005’ All the classics are accounted for and as an added bonus, a couple of ultra hot new remixes included. Pendulum reworks rave fave, ‘Voodoo People’ updating it in to a snarling drum and bass monster. Whilst the swaggering, shouty, Audio Bullys square up ‘Out Of Space’, resulting in a track that is nothing short of molten fury. The two remixes will be released as a double A side single on October 3rd, ahead of ‘Their Law: The Singles 1990–2005’ a fortnight later on October 17th 2005.”
The story of Pendulum’s remix of ‘Voodoo People’ begins with XL Recordings approaching the band and inviting them to rework any track from The Prodigy’s catalogue. While it has occasionally been suggested that the project may have started life as a bootleg, Rob Swire told All Souvenirs that it’s not true.
Rob Swire for All Souvenirs: “There was no bootleg of ‘Voodoo’ before XL asked us to remix it. As I remember, they just asked a bunch of us to choose our favourite tracks and remix them. ‘Voodoo’ had been one of my favourite Prods tracks as a kid (the music video scared the shit out of me), so I chose that one.”
XL Recordings genuinely weren’t able to provide any stems for the remix. However, the specific elements the group wanted to use were already well isolated in the original 1994 version: the Nirvana-sourced guitar riff, the flute part, the synth line and the vocal sample “Magic people, voodoo people”. The boys sampled all of these directly from the original CD.
‘VOODOO PEOPLE’ SAMPLES
- Sample: guitar riff
- Sample source: Nirvana – Very Ape [In Utero, 1993]
- Note: In the booklet of ‘Music For The Jilted Generation’, Lance Riddler is mentioned as the guitarist who played the main riff for ‘Voodoo People’. Nevertheless, it’s not true, since Jim Davies admitted that Riddler was a made up name that was put in the booklet to avoid any copyright issues. In reality, ‘Very Ape’ was sampled directly. Upon closer examination, the waveforms of the riff in ‘Voodoo People’ and ‘Very Ape’ are exactly the same. Moreover, in live recordings from early 1994 the Nirvana guitar can be heard as is.
- Sample: vocals (‘magic people, voodoo people’ & ‘the voodoo who do what you don’t dare do people’ & ‘moving!’)
- Sample source: The Last Poets – The Shalimar [Right On! (Original Soundtrack), 1971]
- Note: The sample source is listed in the booklet of the US release of the ‘Voodoo People’ single: Sample on tracks 1, 2, 6 and 7 taken from ‘The Shalimar’ by Gylan Kain.
- Sample: synth
- Sample source: Roland JD-990 – Patches – 65 Wailing Guitar
- Sample: flute
- Sample source: Johnny Pate – You’re Starting Too Fast [Outrageous, 1970]
Wikipedia occasionally repeats an unverified claim that the guitar parts on the remix were recorded by Tom Morello, the legendary guitarist of Rage Against The Machine. When we asked Rob about this, he explained that he had recorded the guitars himself. “But Tom Morello probably would have done a better job!”, Swire laughed.
The remix, put together in a matter of days, appeared on the final release without any alterations. The only additional version was the radio edit included on the maxi-single with the catalogue number XLS219CDA — Voodoo People (Pendulum Radio Edit), running at 3:16. This edit, featuring extra sound design, was used as the audio track for the music video. In this version, Howlett sliced the drums and the main synth lead slightly differently, giving the track a more dynamic feel and bringing it closer to the band’s signature sound.
Rob Swire for All Souvenirs: “I think Liam added an extra kick drum to the music video version. Not sure why.”
‘Their Law’ compilation rumours had already been circulating in the press and among fans by the summer of 2005, and the promotional campaign needed to begin. This was the reason the video for ‘Voodoo People (Pendulum Remix)’ was produced — it premiered on 2 July 2005, exactly three months before the single’s release.
The video was filmed at Romford Market, a large open-air market area in London. Its storyline follows several people taking part in a blindfolded race: the participants run with their eyes and hands bound, with the sole objective of crossing the finish line first. The starting point of the race is 82-84 Market Pl. Members of The Prodigy — Liam, Keith and Maxim — appear in the video as observers.
This concept for the video was inspired by 2001 Spanish thriller Intacto. It was directed by Ron Scalpello, who still refers to it as an important milestone in his career. “The Prodigy have a history of making great pop promos and I was so pleased when they approached me to come up with a concept for their re-release of ‘Voodoo People'”, he writes on his website.
The Motorola logo, a popular mobile phone brand at the time, appears several times in close-up throughout the video. Both Liam and Keith are shown holding models from the Razr line, and in one scene Flint films on his mobile as one of the runners collapses in pain and drops out of the race. When Neko jokingly asked Liam in October 2005 whether there had been any sponsorship from Motorola, he laughed and admitted he had never thought about it as advertising: on set, someone had simply handed him a phone and told him to use it in the shot. According to Liam, he received no perks for it — as he put it himself, he was ‘pure Nokia’. The Prodigy mastermind added that asking him about sponsorship would be insulting, as no one sponsors him anyway.
At the end of the video, a woman is the only participant to reach the finish line and claim the coveted prize in the large bag. She is played by Sharkey Campbell — a former member of The Prodigy who left the band shortly after its formation.
Photo courtesy of Jay McKendry Jenkins.
In an October 2005 interview, Liam Howlett recalled being surprised by how many viewers recognised her on screen. According to him, the team had even considered running a competition asking whether anyone had spotted something unusual in the video, as he hadn’t expected fans to identify her. Howlett added that at the time, Sharkey was working with John Fairs, one of the band’s managers, and remained a close friend of the group.
Neko: “Last question about the video. What’s in the bag?”
LH: [laughs, then silence] “It’s a 12-inch dildo, that’s why Sharkey looks very happy!”
On Ron Scalpello’s website, an unusual short version of the video can be found — running 2:16 and featuring different editing. It was possibly an early rough cut.
Paul Harding (aka El Hornet) from Pendulum wrote that the band only found out about the video when they saw it live on TV — no one had told them about the filming, nor were they invited to take part. Instead of Pendulum, the video features hired actors alongside members of The Prodigy.
In an interview with Yekaterinburg MTV on 21 September 2006, Liam Howlett recalled that Pendulum had always struck him as a group doing something unconventional, standing out through their distinctive sound. Since ‘Their Law: The Singles 1990–2005’ was a retrospective compilation largely built around older hits, the label needed a strong promotional mechanism to support it, something akin to a pre-album single. The idea of commissioning a Pendulum remix and producing a video for it seemed the most fitting solution. The only weird aspect, Liam noted, was taking part in a video shoot for music they hadn’t wrote themselves (extra kick aside :D).
A year after the release, Pendulum began performing their remix at shows, and shortly afterwards created a special VIP version specifically for their live sets.
We checked with Rob Swire to see whether this VIP mix had originally been an alternate version made for XL back in 2005, or whether it was something else entirely — to which Swire replied briefly and succinctly: “We just like making VIPs”.
Ten years after the original release, Liam, in turn, created his own VIP remix of Pendulum’s remix. In 2016, he updated the mix for live shows and attached it as a drum and bass ending to the live version of ‘Voodoo People’, which by that point had already been reworked several times for the stage.
A couple of years ago, this outro in studio quality briefly surfaced in a teaser for the ‘Army of the Ants’ 2023 tour.
Following ‘Voodoo People’, Pendulum received further requests to work with The Prodigy’s catalogue: at one point, they were invited to remix Everybody In The Place. In an interview with All Souvenirs, Rob Swire recalled that he declined — in his view, remixing the same artist twice felt like an odd move. Besides, at the time he simply couldn’t imagine how to surpass the original.
IMMUNIZE / THE CALLING
In 2010, however, Pendulum and Liam Howlett did work together again — this time on the track Immunize, which appeared on Pendulum’s album ‘Immersion’. Its instrumental version circulated on promo editions under the title The Calling. The difference in naming is simple: one was an early working title, the other the final name used for the release.
According to Rob Swire, the collaboration was initiated by Pendulum themselves: they reached out to The Prodigy’s team, and Liam came down to their studio. The track came together quickly: Swire told All Souvenirs that they had only two studio sessions, during which the tune was almost entirely completed.
Beyond ‘Voodoo People’ and ‘Immunize’, no concrete plans for further work with Liam Howlett ever materialised, but Swire maintains that he would gladly return to such collaboration. Moreover, he noted that he would love to create a full side project with Liam, in the spirit of Them Crooked Vultures — only in a decidedly darker, more ‘evil’ electronic form.
At the same time, in 2016, Howlett sent a kind of tongue-in-cheek greeting to Rob Swire during a video interview for theprodigy.ru. When asked about white labels and tracks he had produced for other artists, he jokingly replied: “Yeah… I released it last year under the name Knife Party. That’s me.”
It is unusual that, despite so many points of connection, there are no known photographs of Howlett and Swire together. Rob laughed about this and remarked that the very idea of taking photos during their time working together would have been received in a rather… specific way.
Rob Swire for All Souvenirs: “If either of us had tried taking photos during that session, one of us would have smacked the other. Which is as it should be”
OTHER D&B REMIXES
Returning to the compilation ‘Their Law: The Singles 1990–2005’, it is worth noting that ‘Voodoo People (Pendulum Remix)’ was not the only drum and bass remix prepared for its release. In the mid-2000s, drum and bass was rapidly breaking into the mainstream and onto larger stages, which meant that, alongside Pendulum, several other mixes in a similar style were also commissioned.
English producer Sub Focus delivered his own take on ‘Smack My Bitch Up’. His version was also officially included on one of the single editions released on 3 October.
Alongside it, another drum and bass remix of the same track existed — this one produced by TC — but releasing two remixes in the same style for the same track was deemed unnecessary. TC’s version eventually surfaced some time later on his MySpace.
There was also a fourth drum and bass remix — this time not of ‘Smack My Bitch Up’, but of ‘Charly’, created by the legendary DJ Zinc. His version occasionally appeared in his DJ sets and, according to the plans at the time, was intended not only for the single promoting the compilation, but also for inclusion on the compilation itself. In the early stages of the promotional campaign, it even appeared in Japanese tracklists of the compilation.
Later, we were able to confirm directly with DJ Zinc that the drum and bass version was essentially a VIP mix, while the original remix had been produced in his trademark breakstep style. It was this original version that was intended for release, but it ultimately did not come out either. Some time later, that remix also surfaced on MySpace.
OUT OF SPACE (AUDIO BULLYS REMIX)
Alongside the burst of drum and bass, the single also featured the then-fashionable electro house sound: this came courtesy of the duo Audio Bullys, who remixed ‘Out of Space’, the second title track from the split single ‘Voodoo People / Out of Space’. It remains unclear who originally proposed revisiting this track from the ‘Experience’ era, but the end result was pretty good. Across all available formats — CD, promo and vinyl — the Audio Bullys remix was issued in four slightly different versions:
- Audio Bullys Remix
- Audio Bullys Remix Edit
- Audio Bullys Dub
- Audio Bullys Remix Club Edit
And here it’s worth taking a closer look at the different versions. The thing is that on the Remix and Edit versions, Liam Howlett is credited as a co-remixer alongside Audio Bullys, whereas the other two list only Audio Bullys. Some promo editions even refer to the track as The Prodigy vs Audio Bullys Remix. The reason is simple: after Audio Bullys submitted their final mix, Liam made a few tweaks of his own — mainly by rebuilding the beats. He later mentioned this in an interview with Neko.
Neko: Audio Bullys did a remix for Out of Space…
Liam Howlett: I love it. I know its not very popular. But I love it.
Neko: In the credits it says you did some additional production on it. Did you rework it a lot?
Liam Howlett: Not really, I edited it and reprogrammed it a bit. To be honest, what happened was, they gave me a mix, and to me it was a bit too club based. So I kind of chopped it down, did some edit on some of the beats, did some minimal work on it, just edited it down and chopped the beats around. […] Not many people like that, but I do really like it! I like it, because theyve taken an old track and just stamped their authority on it, stamped what they’re about on the track. You cant beat the original, the original is a classic now. But I really like their track!
Neither the Dub version nor the Club Edit credits Liam as a co-remixer, which clearly indicates that he didn’t rework these versions. We also compared the mixes in detail and found that the ‘Club Edit’ and ‘Dub’ versions don’t feature any breakbeat sections — something that’s typically Liam’s signature. Moreover, it turned out that the ‘Club Edit’ is actually the original version submitted by Audio Bullys, which Liam later reworked for the other mixes. As you might expect, the ‘Dub’ is simply a dub version of that original mix. In essence, Audio Bullys delivered a classic house 12-inch format — with the main mix on one side and the dub on the other.
But since Liam isn’t particularly into house music, he reworked the original mix and also created a shortened version for radio play. In the end, these two Liam-edited versions were released as the main mixes. Meanwhile, Audio Bullys’ original house versions were included as additional tracks on selected editions.
To make things a little clearer, the versions break down as follows:
- Audio Bullys Remix = The Prodigy vs Audio Bullys Remix
- Audio Bullys Remix Edit = The Prodigy vs Audio Bullys Remix (Radio Edit)
- Audio Bullys Remix Club Edit = Audio Bullys Remix (Original)
- Audio Bullys Dub = Audio Bullys Remix (Dub)
| dub mix of the ‘original mix’
It is also worth mentioning that Audio Bullys also made a VIP mix for their live performances:
VOODOO BY WONDER & NO GOOD (REMIX)
Among all the tracks officially released on 3 October, the most distinctive was the highly unorthodox remix by Wonder. Wayne Gardner, one of the founding figures of grime, had been writing and producing dubstep long before the genre entered the mainstream.
A founding member of what is now the most recognisable grime crew, Roll Deep, he had worked with Dizzee Rascal, Plan B and many other icons of the scene. His dub-styled upgrade of ‘Voodoo People’ was genuinely ahead of its time — at least five years in advance of where the sound would soon head. Today, ‘Voodoo People (Wonder Remix)’ is available on streaming services as a standalone single with its own dedicated artwork.
It is also worth mentioning the unreleased remix of No Good by an unknown producer. Liam Howlett referred to it in the same interview with Neko, given two days after the release of ‘Their Law’. However, it still remains a mystery who created this remix and why it was never issued.
Liam Howlett for Neko: “There was a ‘No Good’ mix and another ‘Voodoo People’ mix, the Wonder kind — did you hear the Wonder kind mix? All in all, there’s about seven remixes floating around, some of which we didn’t use. The thing with this record is, we didn’t kind of want to do the usual thing and release a token new track and put it out as a single — everyone does that. For me it was about the past, it wasn’t about selling it off the back of that. There won’t be any more singles off that record.”
Recently, a promo CD surfaced on Discogs with No Good (Pendulum Remix) listed in the tracklist. Hoping it might be another unreleased version, we contacted the owner — but he told us the tracklist was incorrect, and the disc actually contains the same ‘Voodoo People (Pendulum Remix)’.
Thus unfolded the fate of the remixes that were originally meant simply to support the anniversary release ‘Their Law: The Singles 1990–2005’, but ultimately became a chapter of their own in The Prodigy’s history. Even twenty years on, they continue to sound powerful and unmistakably authentic.
Headmasters: SPLIT, SIXSHOT,
Additional thanks to: Rob Swire, Epicshot
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