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There’s only a couple of bands I generally buy all the output of without question, one is – perhaps unsurprisingly to anyone who knows me – the Levellers, and the other is the Prodigy.  As such I opted to take the unusual step of plugging their very-soon-to-be-released album as upon first few listens, it’s a dramatic return to form.

The Prodigy perhaps don’t really deserve such loyalty for recent output.  I grew up very much with Jilted as a soundtrack, and despite latterly finding it the beginning of a decline – The Fat of the Land provided a soundtrack and seminal genre-defining tracks (Firestarter, Breathe) to a fairly significant period in my life, so I have retained a lot of fondness for it, although a glance at my iPhone tells the story – I’ve chopped out the chaff and retained the eight tracks I like.  Jilted I’ve dropped only the incongruous ‘One Love’.

Of course, it all started with the release of Experience – but that’s an album I picked up on latterly having been seduced by Jilted.  However, it does include such gems as Charly and Out of Space so it can’t be ignored completely – nonetheless I digress completely, we’d got as far as The Fat of the Land.

After this there was the interlude release of Liam Howlett’s ‘Dirtchamber sessions’ which had a Prodigy logo on it – I’ll be honest, I bloody love this, it’s basically Liam mashing up tracks before mashing up really was part of the general consciousness.  They then released the rather lazy and ill-fated ‘Baby’s got a temper‘ single – a time when I wondered whether they’d produce any decent output again (although it featured an interesting video).

Another gap, where presumably some more snowboarding took place, and ‘Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned’ arrived.  I like this album, but it’s a Liam Howlett project really – it has some cracking tracks on it, and some fillers – it doesn’t feature Keith or Maxim.  One of the tracks also featured on a BMW advert I think!  It’s good, and it has unmistakable Prodigy-like elements, but it wasn’t great – things were declining.

Yesterday I listened to their latest album, due for release next week, and was pretty much blown away.  It starts with some proper head-juddering tracks that frankly have to be listened to loudly.  I don’t think it’s any exaggeration to say that this is perhaps the album that The Fat of the Land could have been.  Whilst it doesn’t (and what could?) eclipse Jilted, it competes and is a great natural progression.  A build upon that style with a few flashbacks to the more overtly dance roots from which they came from.

I love it.  I most definitely recommend availing yourself of it when it is available – whilst clearly I already have the means to listen to it I shall be purchasing too next week.

I just scrape in to the realms of being semi-literate, crossing off 13% of this list of books, most of which look terribly boring, and a number of which I read as a child or was enforced to through study (although some of which, I’m looking at you, Thomas Hardy!) I never finished despite completing exams about them!

The key is thus:

Bold means I’ve read them
Underlined means I might intend to read them (or it, in my case!)
Italic means I love them (I bolded them too, since presumably to love a book one must have read it?)

You might want to join in too via the means of copying and pasting.  Or you may not!   

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling 
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible – I liked bits of Revelations.
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – does listening to the Kate Bush song count?
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare 
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – J D Salinger – came highly rated, it was bobbins.  American bobbins at that.
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres 
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – it’s a great Levellers song, though!
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy – I was meant to for English Lit, but it was dull.
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel – I was disappointed this wasn’t about the number.
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’ Diary – Helen Fielding 
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie 
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute – Is that where the Clash song comes from?
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo