The Prodigy had taken dance music to a whole new level in the early 90s, marching it into the mainstream with their frenetic meld of rave, techno and breakbeat. But the Essex crew were never ones to sit still. Despite the fact their 1994 game-changing second record Music For The Jilted Generation had been a huge success, by late 1995 the band’s ringleader Liam Howlett was plotting a new way forward. “I was on a bit of a mission to move away from the rave scene, that had kind of gone,” he told Triple J podcast Inspired in 2019. “We were breaking out and trying to do something a bit different.”
Howlett, who was constantly writing at the time, had already fused rock riffs into his band’s work, basing a guitar part on …Jilted Generation standout Voodoo People on a riff from Nirvana’s Very Ape. As he came to work on the song that would define The Prodigy’s next phase, it was the early Foo Fighters cut Weenie Beenie that he had in mind, keen to inject some of that amped-up band-in-a-room energy into his own work.
