1999 Live Beats • Fuck What U Want!
Traditionally, each year we celebrate not only the anniversaries of released tracks, but also the premieres of unreleased live tunes by The Prodigy. And today we commemorate a couple of live bangers from 1999, and in particular the mysterious yet legendary Fuck What You Want!, which recently turned 25.
Right before the ‘98 Reading Festival, where both bands were set to perform, Beastie Boys called The Prodigy to talk about ‘Smack My Bitch Up’. In a later email to NME, Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch explained, that ‘rather than make a media event out of it’ New York trio prefered to call the band directly and ‘tell them privately how we felt, in the hope that they would strike it from their set’. As a smashing answer, The Prodigy just wanted to prank at the Beasties: while The Prodigy’s set, Maxim stated that the band will play ‘what the fuck they want’, and Keith Flint for the first and the last time in his career went onstage heavily made-up in a woman’s dress, white-faced, dark-eyed and bald-haired.
‘We received a call from one of the Beastie Boys.
They didn’t want us to play dis fookin tune!
And the way things go, I do what the fuck I want.
You understand?’, Maxim snarls at the crowd on 47:10
Incidentally, in the same year, 2002, fans from the Brainkiller community chatted with the band and asked about the fate of ‘Fuck What You Want’.
FreakoftheForest: oh and do you plan on doing anything further with ‘we do what the fuck we want’? i really like that tune
The Prodigy: it was mainly a live tune Prodigy, but anything is still possible in this experimental stage
In those days after the first ‘Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned’ release was shelved, Liam often talked about how disappointed he was with ‘Baby’s Got A Temper’ and often complained that half of his new tracks were as slow as ‘Poison’, including numerous live jam tracks from that period.
Liam Howlett for Neko: So with this album, I started writing a couple of tunes and then I thought ‘Hang on, this album sounds quite slow’ so I kind of had to start and write some faster tracks because it really started to sound very slow. A lot of the tracks were sort of ‘Poison’ kind of speed and ‘Baby’s Got a Temper’, so we’re doing a couple of faster ones now’.
That’s why ‘Fuck What You Want’ can rightly be described as the beginning of this ‘slow’ tracks trend.
Check out the in-depth feature on
The Dirtchamber Sessions (Volume One):
theprodi.gy/dirtchamber
Headmaster: Sixshot
Additional thanks to: Split, Neko
Header ‘Maxim’ font: ‘Wishbone’ by Karl Randay
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