#FAT25 · 7th track: Narayan · Another Single?

We began our massive track-by-track breakdown of The Fat of the Land back in 2022, sharing plenty of rare facts about the album at the time — and now, welcome to the story behind its seventh track. Today, we’re diving into the spiritual journey of Narayan, written and recorded together with Crispian Mills of Kula Shaker. We’ll also explore the release of its mythical single and reveal loads of rare details about the making of this magical masterpiece…

Speaking about Crispian Mills’ guest appearance on ‘Narayan’ — which was originally titled Western Sun until the Chemical Brothers released a collaboration with Noel Gallagher of Oasis called ‘Setting Sun’ — Liam said: ‘It was brilliant working with Crispian Mills. We did the main vocal in an hour and then spent about four hours doing the chant at the end of the track.’

It all began with Liam’s desire to collaborate with Perry Farrell — but by coincidence, that partnership never came to be. We covered this story in detail in our article on ‘Climbatize’. In fact, during the early stages, ‘Narayan’ and ‘Climbatize’ were part of the same demo, which Kula Shaker later covered.

So now, Howlett was looking for a worthy alternative to Farrell’s voice on a freshly composed demo. After hearing Kula Shaker’s ‘Tattva’, Liam got a similar kind of vibe. ‘It wasn’t quite the same,’ he recalled in a 1997 interview with Michael Goldberg, ‘but I got a similar feeling — that if I used Crispian in the way he delivered the vocal [on “Tattva”] over some beats and stuff, it could have a similar vibe [to Perry].’

Crispian Mills for Melody Maker: Liam heard ‘Tattva’ on a radio while he was driving around, and wanted to meet up and do something with us. So he sent me a tape of this track with lots of variations that they had and asked me if I had any ideas, and I said that I did, but I didn’t really. I was just making it up. And on the way there to the studio, me and Lonz got some ideas and basically we created a mantra symphony. I said, ‘I think we should take the music to the logical conclusion,’ and they said, ‘What’s that?’, and I said ‘The end of the world.’ And they went, ‘Yeah! Let’s do it’. Keith [Flint] was very helpful. He sat at the back and skinned up all day. We talked about auras and golden age, and the track sounds f***ing brilliant. It has two working titles at the moment. It could be called ‘Your Time Has Come’, or ‘Aum Namah Narayan’ which is a mantra for the lord of the universe. It’s a kind of spiritual air freshener for the planet.

Liam Howlett for Michael Goldberg: As always, things turned out different from the original idea. But I think that track did the right thing. It has a real cinematic, building feel to it and it’s really big. It’s in the right place on the album. It’s kind of a listening track. It’s kind of like a journey. Basically that’s the way the whole track came about. I didn’t know anything about Kula Shaker. We basically did the track and we were both happy with it!

‘Narayan’ represented Liam at his most commercial. An Eastern refrain unfolds into a hard groove, with Mills’ sugar-sweet vocal singing about the Western Sun over the top, building towards a climactic ending where Mills delivers one of his signature mantras. ‘It’s just like a mantra to me, just another sound I use,’ Liam told Michael Goldberg in the aforementioned interview. Though not a fan of Kula Shaker, Howlett nevertheless enjoyed working with their vocalist.

It’s important to note that the full-length mix of ‘Narayan’ actually runs for 7 minutes, not 9 as listed on the album. The additional beats between ‘Narayan’ and ‘Firestarter’ are in fact a separate demo track called Firedrill. This two-minute section is often mistakenly considered part of ‘Narayan’ — read our full investigation into these transitional beats.

One way or another, ‘Narayan’ gained significant popularity in the music press and on radio stations. Its pop-oriented sound sparked numerous rumours about a possible ‘Narayan’ single — speculation that persisted even after the release of ‘The Fat of the Land’. Now, let’s take a closer look at how it really went down.
 

Mythical single

The ‘Narayan’ single was first mentioned in the spring of ’97, even before the album came out. The track was considered a candidate for the third single after the album’s release. Rumour has it that at the time, there were two options for the next single: ‘Narayan’ and ‘Minefields’, the latter of which had originally been lined up as the second single after ‘Firestarter’ in 1996 but was later shelved. As for ‘Narayan’, the band weren’t keen on releasing a collaboration as a single. Either way, the discussion soon shifted, and the label had to decide which track would be released as the third single — ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ or ‘Narayan’.

We found a studio diskette containing three tracks: ‘Narayan’ (Edit), ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ (Edit), and ‘Minefields’ (Headrock Dub). We believe this is the D-CART prepared for the third single. The label was likely offered a choice between two main tracks — edited for radio play — along with a B-side left over from the scrapped ‘Minefields’ single. Notably, the diskette doesn’t include the second B-side, ‘One/No Man Army’, which was recorded in June 1997, allowing us to estimate that the diskette predates the album’s release and was likely compiled around spring 1997. This assumption is supported by an interview with VOX magazine conducted the day after the album came out, in which Liam announced ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ as the third single.

 
Moreover, the short version of ‘Narayan’ was also mentioned in the same interview.

Liam Howlett: Crispian did try and edit it down to five minutes, but i was like “No fucking way, it’s an eight-minute song!”.

This means there was no official single edit of ‘Narayan’. Still, a short version made by Crispian did exist. On another studio D-CART diskette, both versions of ‘Narayan’ are labelled as SHORT and LONG.

Anyway, it was XL Recordings who decided that the third single wouldn’t be ‘Narayan’, but ‘Smack My Bitch Up’. Liam himself addressed the decision.

Liam Howlett for Select: The obvious, safe record company choice for the next single would be the local controversy of that Crispian Mills collaboration ‘Narayan’, or the ‘Keith is mad’ cacophony of ‘Serial Thrilla’. But no, they’ll release ‘Smack My Bitch Up’. Why? Because they can.

‘The Fat of the Land’ track-by-track breakdown, packed with dozens of rare details from the people who were actually there: theprodi.gy/fat25.

Nevertheless, despite the official announcement of ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ as the third single and its subsequent release, rumours about a potential ‘Narayan’ single refused to die down. As we mentioned earlier, the track had a distinctly pop-leaning sound, which led to frequent radio play. It also began appearing on various hit compilations, in European music charts — and even on single charts. You could say the track became an unofficial radio single. In fact, some pirate compilations from around autumn 1997 even listed Narayan (Single Edit) in their tracklists!

Of course, we weren’t able to check all of those bootlegs and compilations, but the one we got our hands on featured ‘Instruments of Darkness (Prodigy Remix)’ instead of ‘Narayan (Single Edit)’.

Anyway, there are plenty of fake edits of ‘Narayan’ circulating online. One of them was promoted within an old fan community for quite some time. It’s also possible that some of these fakes were created by radio stations. The full version of the track they were so fond of runs for 7 minutes — or 9 minutes if you count the CD version with ‘Firedrill’ attached — and such length is clearly ill-suited for daytime radio play.

All the facts above only fuelled the rumours about an imminent single release. Since the internet wasn’t as developed as it is today and reliable information was scarce, occasional reports of an alleged single began to surface. The speculation kept resurfacing until 1999, when the source of the confusion was finally revealed: it turned out to be a fan’s piece of misinformation, posted in the BBC Ceefax’s Backchat section back in late ’98.

A quick recap:

• There were no solid plans to release ‘Narayan’ as a single — it was simply one of the options alongside ‘Smack My Bitch Up’.
• As far as we know, the band had no intention of releasing a fourth single from ‘The Fat of the Land’. All the remixes produced in 1998 — including those of ‘Funky Shit’ and ‘Diesel Power’ — were made for compilations. We’ll cover these mixes in upcoming articles.
• ‘Narayan (Edit)’ does exist, but it’s more accurate to refer to it as a short version made by Crispian Mills.
• The original edit was never released on any promo CDs, so all edited versions played on radio were created by the stations themselves.
• If the ‘Narayan’ single had been released, it would have come out instead of ‘Smack My Bitch Up’, and the tracklist would likely have looked something like this:
  1. Narayan (Edit)
  2. Minefields (Headrock Dub)
  3. No Man Army
  4. Narayan (Remix) or (Instrumental)

The next one on the list is ‘Minefields’, and we’ll be sharing the full story of how it came together really soon. Stay tuned and keep an eye on our socials — you won’t want to miss this one.

Headmasters: SIXSHOT, SPLIT
Additional thanks to: Canyon Hill, Juge L @theprodigy.info, Peter Thomas @prodge.demon.co.uk, Ant Camp (magazine scans)

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