30th anniversary of ‘Firestarter’ pt.1

On March 18, 1996, The Prodigy released their legendary single Firestarter — a pivotal release that forever split the career of the Essex electronic punks into ‘before’ and ‘afte’. Keith Flint’s electrifying vocal debut, Liam Howlett’s unrivalled beats, and that iconic guitar hook sampled from The Breeders instantly cemented the track as one of the definitive electronic anthems of the 20th century. In the first part of this article, marking the 30th anniversary of the single’s official release, we’ll focus on the story behind the track’s creation. Let’s go!

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In late 1993 and early 1994, Liam Howlett became increasingly fascinated by the guitar works of Rage Against the Machine, The Breeders and Nirvana, and this was directly reflected in his music. The album ‘Jilted Generation’ was far heavier than all his previous rave tracks, and, as it turned out later, this was only the beginning.
 
Liam began to use a “guitar” sound in his tunes more and more frequently. And we’re not just talking about live guitar at concerts or sampling guitar riffs; by the end of ’94, Howlett had mastered the art of transforming live guitar sound into something resembling an aggressive synth sound — the sort you’d usually expect more from electronic instruments than from a guitar. One of the first such experiments was the opening sound of the track ‘Scienide’, which sounds more like a siren than a guitar. However, according to Howlett, it was indeed the sound of a “distorted” guitar (we wrote more about ‘Scienide’ in our previous article about the single ‘Poison’). So it was only a matter of time before a tune like Firestarter was written, one that would sound unlike all their previous work and almost completely depart from the typical electronic scene.
 

Liam Howlett: There was no gap in writing those days, I just carried on writing, I was starting the new album and had a vision of what the intro of this album should be like. I asked myself, what do I want it to be? I was just messing around with sampling, loads of guitars at the time, and I didn’t ever want to write a tune where you could hear it was a guitar, so I spent a lot of time recording guitars and then really smashing them up and kind of trying to make a new sound out of it.

First, Liam sketched out something like the main riff on the synth, and then asked Jim Davies (the band’s live and session guitarist at the time) to play the same thing on guitar. As Liam recalled, “It took 10 minutes – all the best things are done quickly!”

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That is exactly how the legendary ‘Firestarter’ guitar sound/sample was recorded – the one that became the track’s defining feature, and which no one has yet managed to replicate or recreate. Thirty years on, you can find a few videos online featuring reasonably well-recreated remakes and bootleg remixes of the iconic track, but they all suffer from the same problem — the main guitar sample, poorly recreated using VST synthesizers.

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According to Liam himself, the overall sound of the track was inspired by the Foo Fighters’ song Weenie Beenie.

Even though ‘Weenie Beenie’ wasn’t sampled in the end, ‘Firestarter’ did feature quite a few samples from other well-known tracks. For example, the repeated “Hey, hey, hey” refrain lifted from Close (To The Edit) by Art of Noise, a track that Liam had to pay heavily for, even though it had been easily available as a studio sample since 1988. Another key element was a huge guitar sample lifted from The Breeders’ track SOS. Kim Deal from The Breeders reportedly hadn’t been asked about ‘Firestarter’ and wasn’t best pleased.

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In addition to the officially credited samples, the track also features: a kick drum from Chemical Beats by The Chemical Brothers (then known as The Dust Brothers), a couple of drum loops from Zero-G’s iconic Jungle Warfare library, and an arpeggio-fx from the legendary Korg Prophecy synthesiser, specifically its factory preset titled Space Adventure.

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Incidentally, there is a very widespread myth in the music world regarding the last preset — namely, that Liam supposedly borrowed the title ‘Firestarter’ from the Korg Prophecy synthesiser, or more precisely, from its factory preset called Fire Star, which was used in the track. This myth gained widespread traction thanks to a viral clip from an interview with the Canadian electronic producer Deadmau5, in which he confidently recounts this story as a unique studio insider’s tale.

DEADMAU5 INTERVIEW

 
In fact, this is completely untrue. Among the 128 original factory presets on the Korg Prophecy, there is simply no patch called ‘Firestar’ or ‘Fire Star’. It seems that the synth that ended up in Deadmau5’s hands had custom settings, and its previous owner had saved the ‘Space Adventure’ preset to a second slot under a new name.

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When the instrumental part of the track was almost finished, it became clear that the track was clearly missing something. At that moment, Keith was messing around in Liam’s home studio and proposed that he would like to try singing for a new demo. Liam was initially not thrilled about the idea, as he did not consider Keith to have a strong singing voice, especially after hearing him singing random stuff on the tour bus. Despite this, Liam respected Keith and was willing to give it a shot.

Singing for the first time was a real catharsis for Keith. Suddenly Liam had given him a new way of expressing himself; Liam had given him a voice.

“I hadn’t done any vocals at that time,” Flint admitted. Aside from “taking the piss” in the style of Rage Against The Machine at gigs or backstage, he had yet to appear on a track. But both he and Liam knew there was potential. “Liam said, ‘I tell you what, if you can focus that [energy] and do that seriously. Let’s do it on a track'” – Keef recalled.

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Turning up to Liam’s and hearing the wailing, muscular backing track for ‘Firestarter’, Flint knew he’d found his debut tune. Feeding off a loop of the track, Keith grabbed a pen and paper and set to writing.

Rolling Stones’ journalist asked Keef back in the days: “Why, suddenly, did you decide to write lyrics?” to which Keith replied, “That’s unexplainable. Why does a river turn into an oxbow lake? I’ve spent six years expressing myself with my body, shouting with my body. It’s like a conductor of the music. From the party scene, when a tune came on and it was your tune, I wanted everyone to know it was my tune. Yes! Fuckin’ hell! Rockin’! Just yelling at each other, dancing away. This is just an extension of that. If I could get a mike and just go, ‘Fuckin’ hell! Fuckin’ hell!’ I would do it. That is the punk-attitude, DIY aspect of The Prodigy”.

Keith Flint: “I said, ‘if you was going to put me on anything, that would be what I’d be on'”.

Satisfied with the monster they’d caged in their demo, Liam and Keith travelled from Essex to London for mixing and mastering in The Strongroom Studio, but surprisingly something didn’t go as planned there!

Liam Howlett: “I ended up taking my DAT into the Strongroom, where I work with a guy called Neil Mclellan — he’s the only person I can work with as far as mixing goes, because he really understands what I’m on about, and he’s got some wild ideas himself. We tried for eight hours on this super-expensive mixing desk trying to reproduce what I’d done in my studio but we just couldn’t get the compression and the attack. We just couldn’t’ get it better. So we put the vocal down, and maybe only needed to EQ the DAT very slightly. We recorded the vocal there, and added the mad backward sound effects, and then we just EQ’d the track a bit more in the cutting room.”

You can listen a rough mix of the track in the hidden section of our website!

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It was a similar story for Keith’s vocal. Instead of trying to polish the rough original, they “just plugged a cheap mic straight into the mixing desk and [Keith] performed it like he would do on stage. That take was the one”. Keith’s weed-infused punk roaring and Liam’s fast-paced breakbeat techno meshed together quite well!

Patrick McGovern on YouTube: “I had the honour and privilege to be the assistant engineer (read: ‘tape op’/‘tea boy’) for the vocal sessions for ‘The Fat of the Land’. When it came to ‘Firestarter’, it was decided that, for the vibe, Keith should do his vocals in the control room. He had a handheld SM58 with the lead trailing out through the control room door, into the live room, and plugged directly into a 4×12 Marshall stack. The stack was miked up and recorded. Can’t have the speakers bleeding over the vocals, so everyone had headphones. Except there weren’t enough headphones to go round, so I was the only one that didn’t have headphones.

So the track starts playing and Neil McLellan (producer), Liam, Maxim, and Keith et al. are nodding in sync, and all I can hear is the “tis-tis-tis” of the headphone overspill. And Keith’s heavy breathing. Keith is at the back of the room in long shorts, tattooed calves, and double Mohawk. Suddenly, Keith bends over double and screams “I’M THE FIRESTARTER” into the mic. Neck veins throbbing, snorting like a bull. Remember, I’m the only one that can’t hear the music.

I got to hear the whole acapella of ‘Firestarter’ sung at me by Keith himself.”

On their 90min drive home to Essex, “rolling down the M11” in a beaten-up car with a homemade tape system strapped to the boot, Liam and Keith listened back to ‘Firestarter’ “over and over again” to gauge the monster they’d created. “That moment in time it was just two mates who’d created something and it was no-one else’s,” Liam said. “It was just ours. It hadn’t been played to anybody, just the people in studio. We were trying to give it a couple of minutes, then put it on again and pretend we had new ears listening to it.”

Keith Flint: “It was like, are we enjoying the process and the thing that we’ve created? Or does this live outside of our own personal enjoyment? And obviously I hadn’t been doing vocals on stage and we were thinking: do we now exist with me as a vocalist? Is that a good transition for us?”

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Liam says he flogged the track “10 more times when I got home. Woke up in the morning with fresh ears, played it again, and went ‘yeah this is dangerous this tune’. It’s always what you’re looking for in the studio, create something that you just get that feeling.”

Liam Howlett: “This track was all about an attack. Sonic attack is what excites me, trying to capture this controlled energy that’s right out there on the edge, straining at the leash.”

FIRESTARTER LIVE

It is generally accepted that the live premiere of ‘Firestarter’ took place on 28 October 1995 at a gig on Ilford Island in London. However, it has recently come to light that premiere actually took place a day earlier – on 27 October 1995, also in England, but in Stoke-on-Trent. A couple of people who attended that gig confirmed that Keef performed the track solo with a microphone in his hands; what’s more, a photo has been found from that gig showing Keef on stage with a mic.

It was a fully spiritual experience for Keef: feeling himself totally naked standing in front of the crowd and premiering the song he sang by himself. Little did the band know that it would soon send their lives into orbit. Not that Keith really cared; he was too busy dealing with the pressure of stepping up to the mic for the very first time.

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Keith Flint, the self-proclaimed adrenaline junkie, reportedly admitted that singing on stage for the first time was even more terrifying than a parachute jump he had done a couple of weeks prior. Keef was extremely afraid to ruin Liam’s tune with his poor vocals. He even compared the experience to being in a school play and freezing when it was his turn to perform… Definitely, the entire performance was way worse than the parachute jump for him.

Liam Howlett: I’ll never forget the reaction when we first dropped this live, people were like… mouths open. When it finished there was a moment of absolute silence, then the whole crowd just went off it. Keith was really nervous about doing it. Up until then all he’d had to worry about was dancing onstage, but now he had to remember the lyrics as well. Suddenly he had to use a different part of his brain!

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The track made its TV debut even before the single was released; however, this was not a music video, nor even a studio recording, but a professional recording of the soundcheck and the subsequent live performance at the T Festival, held in Skopje, Macedonia, on 9 December 1995, which was filmed for a documentary about the festival.

A few months before the release of the ‘Firestarter’ single, Liam debuted a new transition between tracks, widely known as the ‘Secret Technique’ link. First heard on 22 December 1995 at Brixton Academy, where it was played before ‘Molotov Bitch’, it later evolved into a full-fledged, recognizable live intro for ‘Firestarter’ and became legendary among the fanbase. It used the sample from the 1979 Hong-Kong movie called Jade Claw (aka ‘Crystal Fist’) directed by Shan Hua: Liam pitched down the line ‘It’s my own secret technique’ and looped some punch hits from the fight scene. So simple and so catchy at the same time!

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We recreated this intro a couple of years ago and posted it on Patreon for our patrons!

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The album mix of ‘Firestarter’ from ‘The Fat Of The Land’ LP also contains its own original introduction! Officially titled Firedrill this intro is a separate demo track that is mistakenly considered as part of ‘Narayan’ by many people. For more details, read our special investigation…

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The original ‘Firestarter’ underwent significant changes for the first time since 1997 only in late 2004 — Liam made a new arrangement! Keith was just sick of performing the track in its original form and told Liam he won’t do it anymore.

Neko: So what about the old material? Are you going to update it in any way? You said somewhere that you were never going to play ‘Firestarter’ in its original form again …
LH: This is not ready yet, I know you will probably go to a few gigs so you will probably hear the transition to a new ‘Firestarter’. It will be something maybe bootleg style. Keith basically said he didn’t want to do it in its original form any more, so definitely by the UK tour I will be chopping the older tunes around, you know. For the first few gigs we really just want the new stuff from the new album sounding right, so we felt like, we can still change the older sound after,– if it works ‘Firestarter’ will be done by the UK tour.

Aside from the new beats for the verse, Liam also used Rage Against The Machine’s ‘In My Eyes’ guitar sample for the chorus. This new version premiered in Birmingham on December 2, 2004.

Liam Howlett in his blog (28/11/2004): “‘Firestarter’ remix will be played first time in Birmingham. It’s ‘Firestarter’ but it’s twisted up more and kicks harder!”

Liam Howlett in his blog (05/12/2004): “We played ‘Firestarter’ remix in Birmingham but it wasn’t right so I did some emergency reprogramming for Brixton and it rocked. It’s a hard track to make any better in my mind so I changed some of the chord structures in the chorus. It really felt like the best we’ve been as a band on stage since 5 years ago.”

This version was also perfomed at Radio 1 Maida Vale Session, which took place on 14 July 2005. For a long time, the recording was only available from FM broadcasting, but later the band posted the soundboard recording on their MySpace page.

Then, in 2006, Liam reworked the live version of ‘Firestarter’ once again, restoring the original chorus structure, as the crowd was getting confused by the new arrangement and didn’t always know exactly when to sing along.

OFFICIAL REMIXES

In addition to the live versions, it’s also worth mentioning the official remixes of this iconic track. Until 2012, there was only one official remix of ‘Firestarter’, produced by Empirion for the single — we’ll discuss this in detail in the second part of the article, which is dedicated specifically to the single!

In 2012, XL Recordings released a reissue of ‘The Fat Of The Land’ to mark its 15th anniversary, featuring a bonus EP entitled Added Fat, which included an official remix by Alvin Risk.

Later, the American experimental noise hip-hop band Death Grips got involved, posting their own remix of ‘Firestarter’ on their SoundCloud page in April 2013.

The track with the same instrumental was actually released on Death Grips’ album ‘No Love Deep Web’ as World Of Dogs back in October 2012, just a few months before the ‘Added Fat EP’ came out. It’s still to be officially confirmed what came first, but most apparently Death Grips did ‘Firestarter’ remix first in the spring/summer 2012 for ‘Added Fat’, and then after the rejection of The Prodigy or XL Recordings they re-arranged the tune as their own.

In the second part of article, we’ll focus on the story behind the single. Why was ‘Firestarter’ chosen as the first single from the upcoming album? What is known about the B-sides and the relatively new remix by Andy C? What story lies behind the single’s cover art? What actually happened during the video shoot, and where did the very first, unreleased version of the video disappear to? Answers to all these questions and many more coming soon in our next exclusive feature!

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Headmasters: SIXSHOT, SPLIT
Additional thanks to: Linda Marigliano, JHGFX (grenade artwork)

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