At an art conference in 2004, Paul Laffoley shocked his audience by appearing at the lectern with a lion’s paw in place of the lower part of his right leg. Three years before, the American artist had fallen badly in his Boston studio. Recuperating on the hospital ward after an operation to remove his leg below the knee, Laffoley was visited by a group of psychiatrists who wanted to measure what they called his Happiness Index. “What,” they asked, clustering around his bed, “would make you feel better about the loss of your leg?”

Laffoley’s reply, “a lion’s foot”, was not the answer the doctors were expecting. Laffoley, though, had never been more serious in his life. He made contact through a mutual friend with Stan Winston, the late Hollywood special effects designer who made his fortune with the Terminator films. Intrigued, Winston fashioned a lion’s limb that would attach to Laffoley’s stump exactly like a conventional prosthetic. But… hang on a minute. Why a lion? “I’m a Leo!” says Laffoley, as if merely stating the obvious.

With his shaved head and mad professor’s stare, above the knees the 69-year-old resembles a cross between Buddha and Back To The Future‘s Doc Brown. (His voice, appropriately enough, is an exact replica of Hubert J Farnsworth, the aged scientist in Futurama.) Yet his physical appearance is positively mundane compared to the workings of his mind as expressed through his art: dense, geometric paintings which resemble Eastern mandalas or the covers of fantastical 70s prog rock albums; six-foot square arrangements of diagrams and texts; images of flying saucers, occult symbols, human skulls and impossible mathematical shapes. Intricately detailed, they can look almost computer generated, but are in fact painstakingly pieced together by Laffoley using only paint, ink and stick-on letters.

These fascinating works, which Laffoley has been producing since the late-60s, are based on encyclopaedic and tireless research. His references and reading weave together ancient Eygptian lore, Medieval mysticism and the theories of 20th century scientist-dreamers such as Wilhelm Reich. Obsessed with the relationship between science and the spiritual, with time travel and out-of-body experiences, he returns again and again to themes of transcendence and higher consciousness, many of which are outlined in long texts on his gallery’s website. (Be warned: the essay accompanying his 1992 work Dimensionality: The Manifestation Of Fate alone runs to 12,000 words.)

This mix of learning and conjecture has seen Laffoley labelled a visionary artist; it’s a description he doesn’t seem to mind. “It has to do with the connection between the physical and metaphysical,” he concurs. “The structure of the mystical experience.” Laffoley has linked that structure to a four-dimensional mathematical figure known as the Klein Bottle, which when drawn as a diagram looks like a trumpet bent round on itself. He on to explains that such a shape allows our consciousness to pass seamlessly through time and space – or, as Laffoley puts it, “from one dimensional realm to another”.

It’s probably clear by now that Laffoley’s explanations of his own working methods rarely simplify matters. When I call him at his studio at 9am on a Monday morning, it turns out he’s just finished fitting his (conventional) artificial leg and morning reading. Naturally, he was immersed in nothing so lowly as a newspaper, opting instead for a chapter of Joscelyn Godwin’s 1987 book The Harmonies of Heaven, subtitled ‘The Spiritual Dimension of Music from Antiquity to the Avant-Garde’. And then, before I can stop him, he’s off into a description of a new painting which takes in Plato’s Republic, the burning of the ancient library at Alexandria, the Faust legend and 19th century religious doctrine Theosophy. It comes as no surprise to learn he usually works a ten-hour day. “I consider what I do to be like inventions,” he says. “An invention can be very quick when you think of it. But the craft of art can go on for a long time.”

Born in the university town of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Laffoley’s early life was outwardly conventional – his mother was a staunch Roman Catholic with an addiction to soap operas. By contrast, his father, who worked as a lawyer and some-time lecturer at Harvard Business School, maintained a life-long fascination with eastern religions and the occult, even performing as a medium at a Boston theatre. When Laffoley was diagnosed with mild Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism, as a child he found himself first examined by psychiatrists (who pronounced him to have an intellect around “room temperature”) then assigned a tutor – an Indian Brahmin who taught in the Mathematics department at Harvard and told Laffoley’s father, “ I can fix him up.”

Laffoley claims his IQ “rose immediately” after meeting the Brahmin. Certainly by the time he graduated from Brown University with a degree in Classics and Art History, it was up to 183 – which puts him amongst an elite group of geniuses. “I just said to myself, ‘This means an IQ is stupid’,” Laffoley demurs. On leaving Brown in 1962, Laffoley found himself taken up – and quickly dropped – by a series of prestigious academic institutions, companies and fellow artists, many of whom were unable or unwilling to engage with his prodigious intellect and unorthodox ideas.

He enrolled to study architecture at the Harvard Graduate School Of Design (only to be asked to leave after suggesting a solution to low-cost housing based on genetically modified plants). He worked briefly for New York architect Frederick Kiesler (who chased him out of his studio when Laffoley damaged a sculpture he was supposed to be cleaning) and for Emery Roth & Sons, where he helped draw up the floorplans for the World Trade Center (and was fired for daring to suggest the twin towers should be linked by walkways). And, after cold-calling as many famous artists as he could find numbers for, he was hired as part of a team watching a bank of televisions left on day and night in Andy Warhol’s Harlem studio. Laffoley got the graveyard shift, between 2am and dawn, when all that was being broadcast were testcards. The repetitions of the cards across multiple screens reminded him of Warhol’s own work. When he reported his observations back to the pop-artist, however, Laffoley claims Warhol seemed affronted and refused to discuss the matter further.

By 1968, Laffoley had had enough of the Big Apple. He returned to Boston to work on realising his own artistic ambitions. Unable to afford a proper live-work space, he rented instead a utility room in an office block – a room he ended up living and working in alone for the next 38 years. Only in 2006, after his landlord finally threatened to evict him, did he move into a purpose-built studio.

Laffoley has always been a peripheral figure in contemporary art. The artist group he is cited as being a founder of, the Boston Visionary Cell, has just one member: him. Although his new works sell for upwards of $95,000, he is best known by a wide spectrum of obsessives and cranks. Over the past decade, though, there’s been increasing interest from cutting-edge curators and museums, and this May his work forms the centrepiece of a new show at one of Paris’s premier modern art spaces, Palais De Tokyo. Laffoley admits he’s delighted with the prospect. Although even Palais De Tokyo’s dramatic spaces fall some distance short of his ideal: “a giant sphere where you can have different works talking to each other across the space, with the viewer in the middle.”

In many respects, Laffoley is both a true visionary and a product of far-out 60s idealism. His work is often utopian in outlook and hallucinatory in execution, evoking an art history which spans eons rather than mere millennia. Had he been less intellectually minded, he might have become one of the first art stars of the psychedelic era. Yet he was as misunderstood by 60s hippy radicals as he was by his fellow artists and architects. When Timothy Leary turned up at one of his early shows in Boston he simply turned to Laffoley and told him, “I like your sense of humour.” And when a rogue gallerist transported one of his shows to Woodstock and exhibited it in a tent, Laffoley drove to the festival in a truck and took it back. He also claims never to have sampled LSD, though when he exhibited in a rock venue in Boston in the 1970s, bemused visitors would ask the manager, “What does he take to do this?”

Laffoley dismisses such interest in his work as superficial. “It’s like in the 19th century,” he says. “Because artists in Paris liked absinthe, there was an association made between being creative and the substance. I don’t think creativity has anything to do with that. It’s behind everything, so you can’t easily account for it.” For Laffoley, art isn’t just about sensations; it’s a way of accessing thoughts and feelings which might otherwise remain hidden or closed off. In 1975 he claims to have “received” the idea for a time machine based around a kind of gyroscope made of nested fibreglass spheres. Named the Levogyre, the machine wouldn’t actually transport anyone. Rather, the user’s mental abilites would be enhanced to the point where they could see far into the past and future. It all sounds hopelessly far-fetched, yet Laffoley insists he has the theories to back up his conjectures.

He also says that to come to an understanding of his work requires effort on the part of the viewer (one of his best-known paintings, Thanaton III, actually requires people to place their hands above the picture’s surface on special pads and stare into an all-seeing eye). Not to mention patience. A lot of patience. “I don’t do the kind of art that you see if you go to the meat market in New York,” he says. “In terms of executing it and observing it, it takes a long time. People who have bought my work say the usual time it takes to comprehend it is 15 years.”

It should come as no surprise to learn that Laffoley is obsessive about everything. He says he likes watching films in his spare time, but admits that he tends to watch the same ones over and over, especially Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and 50s sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. Because of Asperger’s, he says his brain “operates in a different way” – and, certainly, it might help explain the almost overwhelming detail and sense of a private world evoked by some of his paintings. But he’s equally happy to entertain the possibility that he might just be, well… a bit crazy. “The question is, ‘What is madness?’” he asks cheerfully. “Think of what happened from the 16th- to the 19th-century, from the Renaissance to Freud. People’s ideas as to what constitutes being nuts keep changing. Maybe we’re just starting to wise up to that’s how the mind operates.”

Words: Rupert Howe

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #18, Apr/May 2009

The post Paul Laffoley appeared first on Wonderland.

Keith Flint is shivering. It’s a cold afternoon in West London and his Prodigy bandmates Liam Howlett and Keith “Maxim” Palmer are wearing substantial overcoats – Palmer’s even has a fur lining. Flint, foolishly, has opted for a neon pink blouson that barely reaches the waistband of his jeans. “It’s the price of fashion,” he grimaces, as we retreat to the relative warmth of a gastropub. With his facial piercings, abstractly cropped hair and tattoos – the index finger of his right hand forms the barrel of a futuristic weapon – Flint still cuts a striking figure. Even if the vivid red horns of his //Firestarter// days are long gone. It turns out Flint bought the jacket on a whim in Bristol a few years back and has been looking for opportunities to wear it ever since. “It’s by that well-known Irish designer,” he says with a mischievous cackle, “George O’Marney.”

In some ways it’s a surprise that Flint, Howlett and Palmer are here at all – let alone in such good spirits. For much of the 90s The Prodigy were the biggest, loudest, most exhilarating live act on the planet. To the post-acid house generation, they were a raved-up, revved-up Sex Pistols, a sonic middle-finger to rock and pop convention. They charged up the UK charts, notching successive Number One singles with Firestarter and Breathe; and galvanised crowds from Glastonbury to Moscow, where they played a now-legendary set in Red Square in 1997. The same year, rock-rave landmark album //Fat Of The Land// sold over eight million copies and turned them into a global phenomenon.

But the punishing tour schedule that followed; the pressure to produce an equally all-conquering follow-up; and, of course, a penchant for very hard partying eventually took their toll. “Well,” confesses Howlett, the 37 year-old producer and Prodigy mastermind, “it was more of some things than others…” Either which way, by 2000 the band had begun to disintegrate in earnest. Dancer and original fourth member Leeroy Thornhill quit after suffering a knee injury. Howlett scrapped an entire album’s worth of new material. The derisive critical response to 2002 single, Baby’s Got A Temper – its controversy-seeking lyrics included a reference to date-rape drug Rohypnol – helped convince him that the band were headed in the wrong direction, fast. “That was a particular low point,” Howlett admits between mouthfuls of French onion soup. “I probably didn’t speak to the guys for nearly a year. Though we never actually split up.” Flint concurs: “I don’t think any of us thought we had or even were going to,” he insists, dunking hunks of bread in Howlett’s soup. “But we knew it was pretty down.”

What seemed the band’s death-knell came in 2004 when Howlett went off and recorded a new album on his own. //Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned// used a rotating cast of guest vocalists including Juliette Lewis (who unleashed blood-curdling screeches over explosive opener Spitfire) and, virtually unrecognisable on the abrasive Shoot Down, Howlett’s future brother-in-law Liam Gallagher (Howlett is married to All Saints’s Natalie Appleton; Gallagher is married to her sister, Nicole.) But despite a collection of inspired moments, the album seemed half-formed, receiving a tepid response from critics and hard-core fans alike. Where, after all, were Palmer’s prowling rhymes and Flint’s Sid Vicious-on-E snarl? It seemed an ignominious end for the brash lads from the Essex hinterland who had gatecrashed the pop charts in 1992 with cheeky rave anthem Charly. In fact, another incarnation of The Prodigy was just around the corner.

The 2005 tour which followed the band’s greatest hits collection Their Law, a swansong to original label XL, unexpectedly connected them with a new, younger audience. Howlett, Flint and Palmer began to patch up their differences, talking through their issues into the early hours in hotel rooms and tour buses. “There were a few late nights,” says Howlett. “Just setting it straight. And from then onwards it’s all been fine.” That’s about as close as they come to self-analysis. Individually and as a group they’re not much interested in going over the past (“People only need nostalgia when they’re not going anywhere else,” says Palmer). Besides, they freely admit that their memories of their 90s heyday are hazy at best. “When you’re in it,” says Howlett, “you don’t remember any of it.”

They do, though, still cherish the outsider ethos of the early-90s rave scene. After all, it was during that helter-skelter period that The Prodigy came into being. Howlett, a hip hop fanatic turned sometime DJ, would spend hours splicing together breaks in his bedroom studio in Braintree, Essex. At weekends, he’d play at local nightclub The Barn, then a magnet for young ravers thanks to the Ecstasy pills flooding in from nearby Harwich. And he’d always be bumping into Keith Flint, an affable if somewhat over-excited local rave fanatic who pestered him for tapes.

Like Howlett, Flint grew up in Braintree (for a time they even attended the same secondary school) and lived for the buzz of the weekend. A notable failure at school, he found his feet at The Barn, where he and his mate Leeroy would practise their dance moves and dream of new careers performing on the emergent rave circuit – Leeroy actually had a job as an electrician, but Keith was merely scraping by on what he made dealing pills and grass at parties. Technically, Leeroy was the better dancer, more sinuous and funky. But Flint had a manic energy no one else could match. When Howlett finally gave him a tape containing a selection of his tracks, written with a view to doing some live PAs, Flint suggested he take him and his mate on as dancers. Howlett agreed, boosting the line-up with an aspiring MC from Peterborough who called himself Maxim Reality.

Where Flint was manic, Palmer exuded quiet authority. He had stage presence, too, and knew how to work a crowd. And while none had ambitions far beyond the scene which had united them, once Charly hit in 92 there was no looking back. A string of equally brilliant rave cut-ups (including the Max Romeo-sampling Out Of Space) followed, their music and attitude a triumphant celebration of the here-and-now. Even so, two decades on, don’t they wince just a little at the idea of being the “elder statesmen” of rave? “Not at all,” says Howlett. “We’re surrounded by people that are older than us and in bands so it never bothers me. It would if we were bald and looked old and felt old.”

Today, Flint has lost none of his eccentric charm. He remains the band’s ambassador, joking, chatting and shaking hands with anyone who steps within arms’ reach. (Palmer, by contrast, lurks on the fringes; even when the tape-recorder gets switched on, he talks almost entirely in one-liners – though nearly all get a nod of assent from Howlett.) And while Flint has quite clearly put a lot of effort into making sure he looks every inch the popstar, he’s perversely keen to display his man-of-the-people credentials. “I want to show you something,” he says when the conversation touches on the subject of fame. Opening his wallet and removing an Oyster card he brandishes it at the Underground line which passes outside the window. “I know where that tube line goes because I sit on it. That’s all part of being in touch. We live it large because we live it.”

Musically, The Prodigy has always been Howlett’s baby. “We represent Liam’s music,” admits Flint, chewing a mouthful of artfully prepared chicken (Palmer has opted, sensibly, for a hearty-looking pie). “Whatever it is, however it comes, we’re there.” But Howlett himself has always insisted that however it might look to outsiders, they are a band. Indeed, Howlett now refers to his two bandmates as being “like brothers”. He also recognises that post-Firestarter, it was Flint and Palmer who took the limelight. Flint remains a talismanic figure, the one who takes the crowd’s energy and enacts their fantasises of anarchic release – not just the public face of the band but a kind of cyberpunk Pied Piper to the post-Ecstasy generation.

Yet following the success of Fat Of The Land it seemed both Flint and Palmer were about to abandon The Prodigy and launch their own solo careers: Palmer as a rapper, Flint as frontman to thrash punk outfit Flint. Both now state such ambitions have been forgotten – not a huge surprise given that Flint’s debut album was scrapped and Palmer’s is now a footnote in UK hip hop history. So there was surely a sense of relief when, following the success of the Their Law compilation and subsequent tour, Howlett felt they should seize the moment and start work on a new album. The only trouble was, Howlett was having difficulty getting down to work. Having built a studio at his house in the Essex countryside, at a cost of some £70,000, he found he couldn’t bring himself to use it. “It felt too much like, ‘You have to write great music in this room,’” he says. In the end he removed all the equipment and sold it. “I’d never have a studio in my house again. It’s a bad vibe. I like to drive to work.”

To break his writer’s block, he ended up hiring a large studio near his London base in Ladbroke Grove. Having parted company with former label XL, at the outset Howlett funded the sessions himself, keeping the studio open 24 hours so that he or Flint or Palmer could stop by any time the mood took them. Perhaps inevitably, it ended up becoming a “party space”. They even installed their own sound system. “It was ridiculous,” grins Howlett. “When we moved in the people who run the place were like, ‘What have we done renting the studio to these nutters?’”

Palmer chuckles, shaking his braids in disbelief: “The only thing missing was a couple of mirrorballs.” After four or five months of “messing around” they’d only sketched out a few tracks, but crucially the “buzz” was back. At this point, Howlett decided to call a halt and move into a smaller studio upstairs, leaving the partying behind. “I used to put my empty champagne bottles behind the settee in the studio,” he says. “When we finally moved out there were 60 empty bottles of Veuve Cliquot back there. Everyone in the building laughed about it.”

Yet when the serious work started in the upstairs studio, the old adrenalin quickly started to flow. New album Invaders Must Die – their first as a trio since Fat Of The Land – is a head-on collision of rave energy and rock’n’roll bravado. Delivered with fearsome intensity, any suspicion that they might have mellowed in the past decade evaporates instantly on hearing the vamping synth riffs of Warrior’s Dance or Omen’s eruption of distorted bass. It’s also instantly clear that The Prodigy still sound like The Prodigy. “Well, it fucks me off when people talk about Oasis saying why don’t they do something different,” says Howlett, actually in reference to his own, fundamentally unchanged, production style. “But why should they? They’re great at what they do, people love it. As long as the songs are good, they don’t need to change.”

You’re not just saying that because Liam Gallagher’s family? “No, I never talk to Liam about music at all.” Because you’d disagree? “No, not at all. It’s just boring, isn’t it? It’s like work. So we just talk about other shit, like babies.” With his bleached crop and shy grin, even at 37 Liam Howlett still has a boyish air about him. Articulate and opinionated, he can also turn defensive in an instant, and is always looking to assert his independence. Whichever way everyone else is headed, Howlett wants to be going in the opposite direction. His bizarre grey-checked ankle boots were originally a bright tartan, but he ended up spraying them black because they looked “too Burberry”.

Like Howlett, The Prodigy have remained impervious to changing trends. Even at the height of 90s rave mania they were never considered cool – to the point of being accused by dance magazine MixMag of being the band who “killed” rave. And their infamous 1997 hit Smack My Bitch Up deliberately offended the sensibilities of the liberal establishment. (Flint claims that the front rows at their shows are packed with “badass girls” who scream out the song’s refrain.) Yet their abrasive, kill-your-idols attitude has recently proved infectious. There are traces of The Prodigy’s aural aggro in both Justice and Crystal Castles, as well as new-rave acts like The Klaxons and Does It Offend You, Yeah? (the latter’s James Rushent has become a friend of Howlett’s, even lending production assistance on Invaders Must Die).

Howlett, true to form, steadfastly refuses to be impressed by the competition. “I’m not into any bands,” he says. “At the point when our record comes out, I’m not a friendly guy. They’re the enemies out there. We want to roll over everybody. But I think everyone should be like that. You’ve got to be like, ‘Here we come, get out of the way.’”

In the late-90s, The Prodigy earned a reputation for playing hard and partying harder. Howlett admits that those days are not entirely behind him, but reveals he has recently taken up running in an effort to offset the excesses. Flint, on the other hand, has decided enough is enough. Towards the end of our conversation he describes his decision to clean-up his act (bar “a bit of caffeine”), and while his eyes still show glimmers of the old fire, his voice sounds almost apologetic. When Howlett orders a glass of red wine, he eyes it carefully, before commenting with mock-surprise, “What’s that, Ribena?”

“I’m actually really ashamed to say I’ve given up drugs,” says Flint. “But I was greedy and I pushed it as far as I possibly could – to the edge of insanity and lost reality. But I couldn’t fuck up this album. There’s always another line, another pub open, another 24-hour off licence. But I wasn’t going to fuck it up this time, and I was heading that way.”

Warming to his theme, he expresses a horror of ending up a “a fat has-been” and reveals that he’s now more likely to spend his evenings in the gym than propping up a bar, attempting to ready himself for the fevered release required by a Prodigy performance. “People don’t come to see me for my beautiful tones. We can’t just dress me up with a few dancers and a nice outfit and say there’s Keith Flint the lovely singer from Essex. They’re there to see a fucking lunatic shouting his lungs out.”

Howlett grins at him. “You’d still do it even if you weren’t in shape,” he says. “But you’d be a fat lunatic.”

Photographer: Jon Bergman
Words: Rupert Howe

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #17, Feb/Mar 2009

The post The Prodigy appeared first on Wonderland.