The catalogue streaming on this station did not start with a record label's plan. It started in a home studio in Braintree, Essex, built with money from seasonal jobs by a teenager who named the whole project after the synthesiser he wrote his first tracks on.
A Rave Kid With a Home Studio
The Prodigy was officially formed on 5 October 1990 in Braintree, Essex, when producer Liam Howlett paired his beatmaking with dancers Keith Flint and Leeroy Thornhill, with MC Maxim joining after the group's first show in February 1991. Howlett was, by his own account, totally absorbed in London's warehouse rave scene at the time, and he built his early tracks in a bedroom studio funded by odd jobs, working out the sound that became the group's 1991 breakthrough singles "Charly" and "Everybody in the Place," both of which reached the UK top five almost immediately.
An Album Written as a Response to a Law
The group's second record, Music for the Jilted Generation, released in July 1994 and entering the UK chart at number one, was shaped directly by the UK government's criminalisation of parts of rave culture that year. Howlett has described wanting the record to be a "hard dance band" statement made without commercial compromise, and The Guardian later called it a complex, powerful record that helped push dance music out of warehouses and into stadiums.
The Single a BBC Presenter Refused to Play
Keith Flint's vocal debut on "Firestarter" in 1996 drew a formal complaint from the Daily Mail and a public refusal from BBC presenter Chris Evans to put it on air, yet it still became the group's first UK number one single. A year later "Smack My Bitch Up" brought heavier backlash, with the National Organization for Women objecting to its lyric and retailers including Walmart and Kmart pulling the album from shelves entirely, a reaction that did little to slow the record it came from.
Breaking a Ceiling No British Dance Act Had Broken
That record was The Fat of the Land, released in 1997, which entered both the UK Albums Chart and the US Billboard 200 at number one, an outcome almost unheard of for a British electronic act at the time. It went on to sell more than 10 million copies worldwide and entered the Guinness World Records as the fastest-selling dance album in UK chart history, moving 317,000 copies in its first week alone.
A discography stream built around that run covers a lot of ground: a bedroom producer's rave singles, a protest record against anti-rave legislation, two of the most complained-about singles of the decade, and an album that did something no British dance act had done before it. Working through the catalogue in order on a station like this is close to hearing that whole arc play out in real time.