Setting the World Afire

Prodigy’s recent concert at the Mayan Theatre was one of those events you live for in pop music--a night of glorious sights and sounds that sticks in your mind the next morning as if pressed there by a steam iron.

The manic set was highlighted by a captivating version of “Firestarter,” the 1996 single that combined what were long believed to be incompatible cultures--dance music and rock--much the way Run-DMC’s version of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” a decade ago achieved a breakthrough marriage of rock and rap.

Given the show’s nonstop energy, it was understandable that the band members seemed to be moving in slow motion the next afternoon as they sat in a Sunset Strip hotel room talking about the high expectations surrounding the British group.

Liam Howlett, the band’s leader, grimaces, in fact, when asked about the way “Firestarter” triggered an industry buzz in the U.S. about techno being the Next Big Thing in pop.

“Sure, I worry about the expectation level,” the soft-spoken Howlett, 25, says. “They are so high that no one can live up to them. That’s why we turned down the U2 tour. If we went around America playing stadiums, it’d only add to the feeling of hype that is out there.

“People want to discover music for themselves. They don’t want to feel like something is being pushed down their throats. We wanted to come here and do it properly, start out in small venues so people can see us up close and see what the band is all about for themselves. . . . It’s not about hype, it’s about music.”

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With its hard-core dance culture ties, Prodigy is such a confusing force that there’s debate over what to call it in a pop world obsessed with labels.

Dance?

Techno?

Electronica?

“Well, certainly not electronica,” snarls Keith Flint, the fright-wigged dancer-singer whose appearance is enough to make you think there’s going to be someone missing this night on a sanitarium bed-check somewhere. “I don’t even know where that word got started. Someone probably thought it was cute and that it was a way to describe everything that doesn’t have the usual rock [instrumentation].

“There are lots of dance bands in England that we like, but there are also a lot of crap bands that people are calling electronica and you find yourself part of something that doesn’t really represent you.

“Ultimately, what you’re talking about with these terms isn’t music, but fashion. It’s the flavor of the month and we’re not that kind of band. We’ve been doing this for 6 1/2 years now. It’s not like we are trying to jump on some bandwagon. If anything, we want to get off that electronica bandwagon.”

While flashy and aggressive on stage, the four members of Prodigy come across as disarmingly down to earth during an interview. They are polite and patient as they explain their somewhat convoluted rise from the underground dance scene to a level at which their next album, “The Fat of the Land,” will probably enter the charts in England at No. 1 next month.

Some observers expect the album, on Maverick Records, also to crack the Top 10 here, even though the group’s last album, 1994’s “Music for the Jilted Generation,” didn’t even make it into the Top 200.

Each member of the group plays a high-profile role in the show, but Howlett is the one who creates the music on a battery of synthesizers and who writes much of the lyrics.

Prodigy’s aim, Howlett explains, is to re-create the energy and escapist good times of the dance world, but with songs that carry some of the liberation of rock. The results, in such songs as “Firestarter” and the new “Mindfields,” are recordings as youthful and self-affirming as the Who’s “My Generation” or Pearl Jam’s “Not for You.”

The ideas in the songs are backed by musical strains that combine everything from hip-hop and rave to ska and punk. It’s a mix that, perhaps, had to come from England, where the barriers between musical styles are less rigid than in the U.S. At one of the massive British festivals, such as Glastonbury or Phoenix, it’s the norm to see bands from all those genres on the same bill.

Listening to Prodigy, you get the feeling that Howlett woke up after attending one of the festivals with all the sounds dancing in his head--and decided to put them all into his music. Which is pretty much what happened.

“I get depressed by the English dance scene--all its arbitrary rules about what’s proper and what’s not,” he says pointedly. “I hate purists and formulas.

“That’s why we don’t want to be tied to any [style]. I’d like to think we are in a similar position as Nirvana, though on a much, much smaller scale. They didn’t want to be categorized as a grunge band, which was a [marketing] concept. They just wanted to be seen as themselves and that’s what we want as well.”

Howlett was born in a small town on the outskirts of London, and music became an early fascination. The first records he remembers liking were the upbeat, party-minded releases by such ska groups as the Specials and the Selecter. He was drawn by the “rawness . . . the way the music seemed to come from the streets.”

Later, he responded to early rap and hip-hop recordings, especially the “scratching” of turntable whiz Grandmaster Flash, and the whole B-boy culture, including graffiti and break dance.

While he felt intimidated as a white British teenager dabbling in an African American culture, he was encouraged when the Beastie Boys’ “Licensed to Ill” album in 1986 showed that whites could achieve credibility in the field.

At 16, he formed his own hip-hop band, then gradually got caught up in the emerging rave/dance scene that swept England in the late ‘80s. Prodigy came together in 1990. The lineup included two dancers who had met as fans on the rave scene: the human dynamo Flint and the contrasting, gliding Leeroy Thornhill. Howlett also found Keith Palmer--known now as Maxim Reality--an emcee-vocalist who shared his love of hip-hop and ska-reggae.

“It all started for us in the dance and rave scene, which was an amazingly exciting period. It wasn’t born out of Kraftwerk,” Howlett says stiffly, referring to the German band that is frequently cited by critics as the starting point for techno.

“I can’t stand Kraftwerk. . . . Our music isn’t about technology, it’s about emotion. Our roots have more to do with funk, and Kraftwerk had nothing to do with funk. It was music for robots.”

Despite early success on the rave scene in England, Prodigy faced a lot of skepticism in the larger pop world when its debut album, “Experience,” was released in 1992. Recalls Maxim: “It was dismissed by some people as bedroom music because you can make it on a machine at home, it wasn’t people playing conventional instruments.”

As the rave scene slowly unraveled, Prodigy took on the challenge of competing against traditional pop-rock acts, booking shows in student unions and other traditional rock venues. Its second album, “Music for the Jilted Generation,” was a rock-influenced breakthrough in the U.K., where the album went gold and was widely hailed by critics. New Musical Express called it flat-out “magnificent.”

Far more than the first album, “Jilted” contained some of the rebellion and generational identity found in rock over the years--attitudes that also became a dominant part of the group’s stage performance. In the U.S., however, the album caused so little stir that the band was eventually dropped by Elektra Records.

It was only after “Firestarter” that the band’s career was jump-started here. The single has sold 400,000 copies, and all dates on the band’s eight-city showcase tour were sold out in a matter of hours.

On disc and on video, “Firestarter” had such a convincing, futuristic feel that MTV, feeling its audience was burned out on grunge and rap, opened its programming to British dance acts. U.S. record labels dangled multimillion-dollar contracts at the band. U2’s Bono called Prodigy the best band in rock.

But the group knows the real test will be the upcoming album and its appearances this summer on the Lollapalooza tour.

Guy Oseary, the young Maverick Records partner who signed both Prodigy and Alanis Morissette, is confident the group will not disappoint live.

“The way you prove yourself is that you play your music and you blow people away, and that’s just what they are going to do,” he says. “You’ll be seeing a lot of them this year.”

Indeed, the band is already committed to another round of headlining dates after Lollapalooza.

After more than 200 shows around the world, Howlett, too, appears ready for the challenge.

“‘We’re ready to work,” he says. “We’re not a ‘bedroom tape’ band. We’re a stage band.”