How To Steal A Jet Fighter • 2012-2014
Now it’s time to delve into another significant milestone of this year: about 10 years ago, the much-anticipated album How To Steal A Jet Fighter was poised for release. To mark the date, we’ve decided to revisit the album’s preparation and all the preceding events, as well as the news of its cancellation. As always, we will share some exclusive stuff from All Souvenirs! Get ready for the most comprehensive journey through The Prodigy’s history of that era.
How To Steal A Jet Fighter was intended to become the second album for the group after their departure from XL Recordings. By then, the success of ‘Invaders Must Die’ had been resonating for a couple of years, during which The Prodigy had managed to create quite a stir. Liam Howlett had produced several remixes for other artists, and the band was on an intense tour throughout 2009 and 2010. Among their achievements, they organized a massive show for 65,000 people at the Milton Keynes National Bowl on July 24, 2010. A year later, on May 11, 2011, this event was officially released as a live album titled ‘World’s On Fire’. The concert footage was available on blu-ray and was also screened in movie theaters across more than 10 European countries, as well as in Australia, South Africa, Russia, and others. Finally, Liam felt that the time had come to embark on the next full-fledged LP.
The second untitled demo, based on a couple of The White Stripes samples, was informally referred to as Bring The Noise among the fans due to Maxim’s random shouts. However, neither on the day of the premiere nor at the next gig did this track have an official title, as it was missing from the official setlists.
It was only in the beginning of 2012 that the track received its official name – Dogbite! We wrote a detailed history of this track in our article a couple of years ago: theprodi.gy/dogbite
More detailed story of the track AWOL you can find in our special article on our Patreon! We’re also happy to share AWOL (2011 version) with Keith Flint’s vocals in full, which we recreated together with Rapraiz!
We also recreated Dogbite 2011!
Preparing the album
Anyway, at the beginning of 2012, the band had only 2 finished tracks. That’s when Howlett had an idea for the album title, which Liam spoiled in an interview with Zane Lowe on January 6, 2012. Moreover, he modestly shared plans to release a separate single before the album!
JETFIGHTER vs SYSTEM OF A DOWN
On June 8, 2012, the band unveiled the long-awaited title track of the album – Jetfighter, at Download Festival.
We’re also in the process of recreating the track JETFIGHTER and we can’t wait to share the interim result with you already!
2012 Outcomes
After the gig at Download festival, where ‘Jetfighter’ premiered, the band released a video from the festival with an exclusive professional recording of the live track Spitfast, which in principle can also be called a kind of “demo” of that period.
Liam’s personal photos from his studio were also sprinkled in there, hinting at the beginning of the busy process of working on the new album!
But we restored this demo in last year as well! 🙂
This 2012 demo, by the way, we completely recreated a couple of years ago too!
The second track was a short filler called Eagle Break, where several symphonic loops were played in reverse. It’s quite possible that this was indeed the long-discussed Reverse Brass, also left from the ‘Invaders Must Die’ working tracklist: theprodi.gy/live2008
Incidentally, the new 2012 Intro was used in studio quality in promo video announcing these shows in Brixton.
2013
The year 2013 wasn’t particularly productive for The Prodigy either. Apart from the three ready-to-go bangers, various other new beats and pieces began to surface throughout the year, collectively confirming the shift towards a heavier rock-influenced sound. In the early summer of 2013, the first unnamed heavy beats emerged (they were titled as simply NEW BEATS in the gig setlist), and following suit, a full-fledged new track named RockWeiler was presented at the German Rock am Ring on June 8th.
By the way, we also recreated these NEW BEATS 2013!
Throughout 2013, the band didn’t do much in the way of interviews or talk about the album, but Liam continued to actively push the “jetfighter” theme on his instagram.
And like all the previous tracks, in a completely different arrangement from the 2015 album version.
Once again, the release of the new album has been pushed back a year, to the 2014…
2014
In 2014, already being in a new studio, work on recording the album continued. You can read more about this period in our interview with Neil McLellan, mixing engineer and co-producer of several The Prodigy albums – theprodi.gy/neilmclellan_interview
Liam, as promised, sat down to finalize the track ‘Jetfighter’:
And a little later on, Liam posted another cut better known as the Sunlight Out Riff, or simply Sunlight Riff – fans were absolutely thrilled by it, although unfortunately, it never became part of any new track:
VISUALS AND DESIGN CONCEPT
A DEPARTURE FROM THE ORIGINAL IDEA
Time went on, and towards the middle of 2014 Liam started to say that the concept of the album would be completely different and nothing that had been played in the past couple of years would appear on the new release. On July 17, 2014 in an interview with Zane Lowe, Howlett said that he has about 8 tracks ready, but he doesn’t want to play too much new material – so that the record will still be fresh when it comes out. Liam also recalled the moment he worked on the ‘Jetfighter’ album, where he wanted to change everything.
- Zane Lowe talks to Liam Howlett (17.07.2014)
Liam Howlett for Zane Lowe: On the final stages, when I’ve written everything, I’ve just put it all together, you know, went to track six and [was like] ‘Man, we need something else!’
Furthermore, he mentioned that he wasn’t sure if ‘AWOL’ would be on the new album, for there are tracks that sound much better. (Later, after the release of the album, AWOL will be released as ‘Strike One’ version of The Night Is My Friend EP).
The subject matter of Instagram posts closer to the fall also began to gradually change and posts with jetfighters abruptly disappeared from the agenda.
When it came to the mixing of the album, it was clear that the words about all the previous material going to the trash were not a joke. And along with snippets of new tracks, all sorts of cringe memes and photos of stuffed foxes began to appear.
In September 2014, the band played their last gig of the year in Ibiza. The artwork with the jetfighter was still on stage, but the new album was destined to be somewhat different, despite the presence of ‘Jetfighter’ and ‘AWOL’ in their concert setlists.
However, if to summarize, the revision of all ideas for the 6th album is not surprising, because the concept looked very doubtful: not only half of the tracks were sampled from ‘Rage Against The Machine’ and ‘System Of A Down’, but also the title of the album was obviously borrowed from S.O.A.D.’s album title – ‘Steal This Album’. Anyway, release of a small EP with tracks such as: AWOL, Dogbite, Jetfighter and some other 4th track from the same period would obviously not be the worst idea! Considering that it was a 6-year wait for the next album after ‘Invaders Must Die’…
Headmaster: ALL SOUVENIRS
Additional thanks to: Jordan Atkinson
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