The idea of a musical act featuring a dancer as an integral member of the team must be a strange one for modern music fans, as comparatively peculiar as teenaged, Auto-Tuned internet sensations would seem to an early ’90s raver. They might have looked like gawky, flailing slackers, one rung further down the ladder of musical respect than even the lowly drummer, but they were much more than just prancing mascots. Dancers in early rave acts were like hip-hop’s hype MCs: vital if you wanted to get the crowd whooping for more, and utterly essential to the live experience. And back in the day there was no live show better than The Prodigy’s.
The band formed in Essex in 1990, when six-foot-seven-inch dancer Leeroy Thornhill joined forces with fellow foot-flailer Keith Flint and producer Liam Howlett. With Howlett’s tunes, and Thornhill and Flint’s infectious dance moves, The Prodigy began clambering up the rocky face of public interest. Their first charting single, ‘Charly’, introduced a generation to the hardcore sounds of the rave scene, terrifying tabloid readers and right-wingers in the process. But it was 1997’s The Fat of the Land that launched them to megastardom – we’ll bet you’ve heard ‘Firestarter’ and ‘Smack My Bitch Up’, whether you’re a dancehead or not. By 2000, despite refusing most offers and requests to appear on TV – you know, credibility and all that – The Prodigy were on top of the world commercially, revered as gods among fans of all dance genres. And then, right as the band gazed down from that beautiful peak, Thornhill suddenly quit.
‘After we did The Fat of the Land I realised I’d had enough of it,’ he explains. ‘It was turning into a rock band – Keith was less a dancer and more of a vocalist and it wasn’t the same. The space I used to take up on stage was being filled by drums and guitarists, and the dancing itself wasn’t a challenge any more. Meanwhile, I was doing live vocals for DJ Hyper, a breaks DJ, and that gave me much more of a buzz.’
With his mind set, Thornhill headed off and forged his own career, opening record label Electric Tastebuds, continuing to dabble with music under the names Longman and Flightcrank, and teaming up with DJ Marten Horger to create nu-skool breaks outfit Smash Hifi.
None of this has come close to replicating the success he enjoyed with The Prodigy, but Thornhill doesn’t regret a moment. ‘[When I left], it was the right time for the band as well as me,’ he shrugs. ‘I knew I could DJ, too. And I wanted to explore music more and do normal things like play football without worrying about breaking my legs, or going to the shops without people bothering me. I used to look at my diary and think: the next seven months of my life are gone and there’s nothing I can do about it. Still, I’ve had an amazing life in and out of the band.’ And Thornhill parted ways with the others on good terms: ‘I got back on stage when The Prodigy’s greatest hits album came out a few years ago and my body just went into autopilot.’
Thankfully, Thornhill’s DJ sets are never autopilot affairs, and what exactly he’ll come up with at Yugong Yishan this month remains to be seen. ‘I keep thinking I’ll do a really purist set,’ he says, ‘but I always throw in a bootleg or two because they really go off. If people hear a Blur remix or a Red Hot Chili Peppers one, it just mixes it up a bit. I don’t do the whole set like that, but a good track’s a good track, you know? I’ll just try to keep it up and down and make it a bit of a journey.
‘With a lot of my friends, we’ll do bootlegs and there will only be about five or six of us who have them and you can play them forever, like a Beethoven remix. When you’re in a crowd, it’s nice to hear something that you know, even if it’s a different version of it. I can’t think of anything worse than a DJ who just plays music that no one knows. You might as well just be playing for yourself.’