#AONO20: Action Radar • DirtCandy

Inspired by The Prodigy’s 2005 concert, posted a couple of days ago from the Pinkpop Archive, we decided to finally finish the series of articles dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the album Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, which we started last year! Today we’ll talk about Action Radar — the result of a collaboration between Liam Howlett and British artist Paul Jackson, former member of the Essex punk band Dirt Candy. What began as an exclamation of “Turn that fucking music down!” upon first listen grew into many years of collaboration. Much of it remained unreleased, but it had a profound impact on Howlett himself and his fans.

ACTION RADAR (‘AONO’)

Action Radar is the seventh track on the album ‘Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned’. Critics described it as “Kraftwerk meets Gary Numan, with a man screaming over the top”. The multi-layered, sharp and bright acid sound echoes both the ‘new wave’ era of the 1980s, thanks to the legendary sound of the Oberheim synthesiser, and the electroclash of the early 2000s with its hysterical punk vocals. What at first glance appears to be careless production is in fact a conscious and deliberate move.

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Liam and Paul Jackson’s collaboration began in a rather unusual way. One day, Howlett’s stepdaughter Rachel invited a friend over and the girls turned on some music. Liam reacted like a typical boring father: “Turn that fucking music down, it’s too loud!”. The next day, hearing the same music again from Rachel, Liam suddenly noticed something special about it. ‘I thought, “I’d like to do something with this guy”’. he recalled in an interview for DJ Times.

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It turned out that Paul, who had previously played in the Essex punk band ‘Dirt Candy’, was the father of Rachel’s friend. His band had broken up, and the nickname DirtCandy (sometimes written separately as Dirt Candy) had stuck with Jackson himself. After meeting Paul right outside the school where their daughters studied, Liam invited him to the studio.

Liam Howlett for DJ Times (2004): ‘I said, “Do you know a band called Prodigy?” He said, “Sure”. So at first I tried to get him to do some stuff on this one track, but it didn’t work out. But I kept him in the back of my mind and when I was mixing the record in London, I had a separate vocal room set up, and I finished “Action Radar” as an instrumental and I gave it to Paul and it’s a track I really like.’

Keen fans may recall an unreleased demo track with a similar title, ‘Action’, but it most likely had no connection to ‘Action Radar’. It is known that ‘Action’ was named after a line from an early unreleased track, ‘Nuclear’: “Every action, a reaction!”, which later found its way into ‘More Girls’.

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Continuing to talk about titles, it is also worth remembering that in 2002, one of the sections on the band’s website was called Radar. It’s funny that Howlett, like an experienced collagist, carefully preserves all his stuff and not only easily combines different musical sketches in one project, but also mixes the rough titles of his ideas created at different times!

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‘Action Radar’ was the last track recorded for the album, with work on it continuing until around spring 2004. An Oberheim Two Voice synthesizer, one of Howlett’s analogue favourites when working on the album, was used to record the track. Like the rest of the album, the track was sketched out in Propellerheads Reason and then refined at Whitfield Studios in London. As noted in Sound on Sound, Jackson’s vocals were heavily compressed two or three times to get it sounding “really crunchy”. The female vocals in the intro were recorded by Louise Boone, and the guitar parts were played by Mike Horner (a British sound engineer who was working at Whitfield at the time) and Liam himself.

‘ACTION RADAR’ GUITAR (LOOP)

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Despite the track’s enormous potential for live performances, ‘Action Radar’ was never performed in its entirety at the gigs: Howlett saw no point in including the song in the set list if Paul himself could not join the band on stage. However, Liam did not rule out the possibility!

LH: “I’d like to see Paul on stage at some point though, to do ‘Action Radar'”

Neko: “Are you going to play this track live at all?”

LH: “I won’t play it unless Paul does it. It’s the Paul vocals. Keith and Maxim doing that track – Nah, wouldn’t feel right. I don’t think it’s really a Maxim track. We’re not taking Paul around Europe , but we may do some gigs in the UK with him if we can work it out – you like that track, don’t you?”

Neko: “Yeah!”

LH: “Yeah, it’s going to be remixed. I’m excited how the tracks can evolve now for live.”

via LH interview for Neko (Sep 2004)

In the end, the track did make it into the band’s live programme, but in a heavily abridged form: the version listed in the set lists as Action Radar Link was performed entirely live and resembled a kind of reprise version.

This short instrumental fragment was first added to the set in 2004 as an introduction to the new ‘Firestarter’ — similar to ‘Firedrill’ on the album ‘The Fat of the Land’.

Six months later, it began to be performed after ‘Firestarter’ and became a kind of signature piece for live shows. A reference to it can be heard, for example, at the very end of ‘Firestarter’ during the Radio 1 Maida Vale session in September 2005, where Keith Flint utters the canonical phrase “A little action”. Over the several years that this link was used on stage, it underwent some changes: in 2005, as mentioned above, it increasingly resembled a separate reprise version.

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Our team has recreated this version especially for this article!

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In 2006, ‘Action Radar Link’ finally took shape as a full-length reprise and was performed in this form until 2009.

And then Liam shortened it to a very short riff, which was listed in the set lists as Action Riff.

Although this short riff was present in the setlists until 2012, since 2010 it has been played without vocals or any references to the track, i.e. it no longer had anything to do with ‘Action Radar’. It turns out that five years after its release, ‘Action Radar’ completely disappeared from the live programme, but fortunately, the collaboration between Liam Howlett and Paul Jackson did not end there.

PAUL ‘DIRTCANDY’ JACKSON

In 2008, several demos from the ‘Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned’-era surfaced on Paul’s MySpace — 9Mill, Nail ‘Em, and the legendary ‘Dead Ken Beats’. Unlike the instrumental version played live in the mid-2000s, the demo recording with Paul (as in the case of Bobby Nio, whom we mentioned in our previous article) contained vocals, and the track itself was called Advice.

‘9Mill’ turned out to be a demo loop from ‘More Girls’. It is evident that all these demos were recorded during the work on ‘Always Outnumbered’, which Howlett mentioned in an interview for DJ Times: “At first I tried to get him to do some stuff on this one track, but it didn’t work out”.

When the demos became public knowledge, a message appeared on DirtCandy’s page stating that these were ‘very rough studio demos’ recorded many years ago and did not reflect the sound Paul is currently working on.

DirtCandy on MySpace: ‘This site was not intended as a fully working site as is not the «dirt candy site». All the tracks that were posted onto these sites are at least 4 years old, are very very rough studio demos and bear no relevence to what Paul Jackson is currently involved in. The sites were created for “business reference” purposes only.’

A year later, in 2009, news broke of a new Paul Jackson track called AWOL, and at the same time, his MySpace profile was renamed awoldirtcandy2. That same year, Liam mentioned the unreleased track of the same name in interview with Neko. Fans connected the two facts and began searching for the demo online — especially since it was mentioned on Last.fm — but to no avail. A few years later, The Prodigy did indeed release a track called ‘AWOL’ featuring a vocal sample from Jackson, but it was a different work altogether.

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The complete story of the ‘AWOL’ – from the very first demo in 2008 with Paul Jackson to the release of the ‘Strike One’ version in 2015 you can find in our special article!

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It is also worth remembering that after the tour in support of ‘Their Law’ in 2006, Liam Howlett was looking for new ideas for the next album. He tried different approaches with several vocalists, including Paul Jackson, for whom Howlett was simultaneously producing tracks for his solo album. Information about this was available in 2006 on the website of the label Reverb Records Ltd (reverbxl.com), which planned to release Paul’s music.

Press-release on the Reverb Records Ltd website: ‘Paul Jackson, aka DirtCandy, is currently busy with his long-awaited solo project… as well as working in the studio with The Prodigy on their new album… scheduled for release in 2007. Liam, in turn, will be involved in the solo album “The Dirt Candy”. Paul is also working with Bloodshy & Avant to create a unique sounding album, which is due to be released later this year.’

At the end of March 2006, in an interview for the Suicide Girls, Howlett mentioned an upcoming production project, but it is not known for certain whether he was referring to Paul Jackson or the artist Bobby Nio.

Daniel Robert Epstein: “What are you doing today, press?”
Liam Howlett: I’m in the studio”
DRE: “What are you working on?”
LH: “New album, side projects, different shit”
DRE: “A solo album?”
LH: “Not a solo album. Production on another vocalist”
DRE: “Can you say who?”
LH: “It’s top secret”

via interview for Suicide Girls (22 March 2006)

How many tracks were recorded during this collaboration is unknown. But in addition to the aforementioned ‘AWOL’, it is known that a track called Sirens was created for The Prodigy — Paul Jackson himself once mentioned it in a conversation with our mate Rapraiz. He called it “killer” and regretted that the recording was never released.

Rapraiz: ‘What do you think of the new album, “The Day Is My Enemy”? And what’s your favourite collaboration with Liam?’
PJ: ‘It’s a cool album. I did a track with Liam a while back, it wasn’t released, it’s called “Sirens”, and it was killer…’
Rapraiz: ‘Are you going to release it/post it on SC page?’
PJ: ‘Maybe…’
Rapraiz: ‘Do it, bro!!! And this instrumental by Liam, is it not “Get Ur Fight On” 2013 version, with those bloody sirens?’
PJ: ‘No, man, that’s not it, no one has heard that track.’

As for the tracks produced by Liam for Paul’s solo release, some of them first appeared on his SoundCloud page in 2012. In addition to the previously released demos ‘Advice’ and ‘Nail ‘Em’, there were new tracks from the upcoming EP — for example, Get Back Atchya, credited as “Strong Howlett Style”, Rapstars Do It Bad But Rockstars Do It Badder, and other works with obvious references to Master H’s style.

The release of the EP was postponed several times: initially planned for 2015, it was then delayed for another two years. Ultimately, the EP, titled Churning Dope Voodoo, was only released in 2017 and was available exclusively on Jackson’s website; it was not published on other platforms. Liam’s participation was not officially mentioned in the EP’s description, but the title itself clearly hints at his contribution, especially since Liam did indeed have plans to produce a side project called ‘Voodoo’ in the post-AONO period. The EP included seven tracks, at least five of which were definitely produced by Liam. A few months later, the release was removed, and later the website itself stopped working.

1. Die for You (Version#1) — the first version of ‘(Ain’t Gonna) Die for You’, possibly produced by LH;
2. Jamaica Nuclear — produced by LH;
3. Cos Rock Stars Do It Badder (Version#1) — the first version of ‘Rock Stars Do It Badder’, produced by LH. The demo was also tried out with Bobby Nio;
4. Tracer Fire — the track is based on a very simple drum loop, so it’s difficult to say anything about the musical producing here;
5. Give It Up (Version#1) — the first version of ‘Give It Up’, produced by LH. The demo was also tried out with Bobby Nio, only it was called ‘Hot’;

6. Get Back Atchya — featuring Nefertiti (Strong?), produced by LH. On the SC page it was credited as “(Strong?) Howlett Style”;
7. Beautiful People — possibly produced by LH.

Among other things, the site also featured other releases — such as the ‘Speedos’ EP and the album ‘Youth’ — as well as numerous demos. It is clear that Paul’s work is based on live rock music, which has little in common with electronic sound. The few electronic tracks, in turn, were produced either by Liam or by a second electronic producer who worked with Paul on ‘Speedos’ EP. Among the electronic demos produced by Howlett and not included in ‘Churning Dope Voodoo’, there were a couple of others that had not been published anywhere else before.

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In 2018, Paul Jackson renamed the project The Bureau of Dead Rock Stars and released three mini-albums under this name: Cos Rock Stars Do It Badder X, Motorcycle Leather Baby X, and See The Lights A Flashin. Without any promotion, they quietly made their way onto streaming services, went unnoticed, and later disappeared. We were only able to find the first EP ‘Cos Rock Stars Do It Badder X’, which features several tracks with Liam Howlett:

1. Cos Rock Stars Do It Badder X — the second version of ‘Rock Stars Do It Badder’. It was probably produced by Liam, just like the first version.
2. Japanese Speedos XX — the same version as on the previous EP of the same name. It most likely has nothing to do with Howlett.
3. Be Your Lover Be Your Whore — a very old, almost the very first demo Paul posted online. Only initially it was called ‘Hardnoise’. On this release, it differs only in title and sound quality — weaker mixing and mastering. Based on the sound, it is difficult to say anything about the musical producing.
4. Give It Up H2 – is a slightly updated version of ‘Give It Up’, produced by Liam.
5. Ain’t Gonna Die for You – is a slightly updated version of ‘Die for You’. It was probably also produced by Liam, as the first version was featured on the ‘Churning Dope Voodoo’ EP.

We were unable to find the other two EPs anywhere, so it is currently impossible to confirm or deny the presence of tracks produced by Liam on them.

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Incidentally, at the same time as the releases from The Bureau of Dead Rock Stars, The Prodigy’s new (at the time) album ‘No Tourists’ was also released. It is unknown whether Paul auditioned for any demos for the album, but on his Instagram page, he posted a couple of videos where he performs one of his unreleased songs over the instrumental of ‘Fight Fire With Fire’.

Just a couple of years later, Paul deleted all his releases, cleared his Instagram and SoundCloud pages, and his official website stopped working — and he disappeared from “the radar” completely. We don’t know exactly why he made this decision, but we’ll be happy to hear new tracks from DirtCandy, both on new releases from The Prodigy and on his solo releases!

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Headmasters: SIXSHOT
Additional thanks to: Split, Sergey ‘SerGun’ Raspushitel, Canyon Hill, Rapraiz, Faust

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