“You bought it, you put it into the charts, not us": How a novelty sample almost derailed the career of one of the greatest electronic acts of all time

With a sound that appeals to old school ravers, metalheads and techno connoisseurs alike, The Prodigy are widely regarded as one of the greatest electronic acts of all time.

Back in the early-'90s, however, the band came dangerously close to having their fledgling career overshadowed by a novelty sampled hook, all thanks to the double-edged success of the band’s breakthrough single.

First released in 1991, long before classic LPs Music for the Jilted Generation and Fat of the Land, Charly is a breakbeat-driven rave tune built around a bendy synth bassline and a sample of James Brown scatting. The song’s most recognisable element, however, is the voice of its titular cartoon cat.

The sample is sourced from a BBC public information film named Charley Says, which features a young child and his pet cat Charley, who warns children of various day-to-day dangers.

Both characters are featured on the record, with Charley’s distinctive – and arguably quite annoying – caterwauling capped off with the iconic line ‘Charley says always tell your mummy before you go off somewhere’.

Written, recorded and produced entirely by Prodigy lynchpin Liam Howlett, Charly was only a minor hit, peaking at number 3 in the UK charts, where it stayed for two weeks. Nevertheless, it marked something of a turning point for UK rave music as one of the first tracks to break through onto the radio and beyond the underground realm of the raves themselves.

That kind of early breakout success can often prove difficult for a band or artist to live up to, particularly when it comes attached to a recognisable gimmick like Charly’s subversion of childish innocence. Speaking to Future Music in 1992, Howlett was well aware of the potential pitfalls of trying to follow-up Charly with something too similar.

"If we'd have tried to write another Charly," he says, "it would have been the downfall for us: we'd have been labelled the cartoon samplers, the toy-town techno group."

Despite its popularity, Charly has proved critically divisive over the years. It doesn’t help that it spawned a whole genre of copycat kiddie rave tracks that range in quality from bad to downright unbearable.

Charly and the run of Prodigy singles that followed it did a lot to raise the profile of the UK rave sound, something that led to a certain amount of pushback from the hardcore hardcore. But Howlett was adamant about pushing back on the idea that The Prodigy were selling out the scene.

"We know the music and the scene really well and we try to stay true to that," he tells FM. "We're not trying to commercialise the rave scene; the records get in the charts because people buy them. People say 'Why did you put that into the charts?' We say, 'You bought it, you put it into the charts, not us’."

Looking back, the manner in which The Prodigy responded to the success of Charly is a textbook example of how to break free from the shackles of a debut hit. For one thing, Howlett sensibly reinvested his royalties back into his music making.

"Most of the money I got from Charly was spent on the mixer, the studio, all the bits I needed,” he told FM. “I started with the W-30, then I got a Roland U-220 and a 909.”

That gear allowed Howlett to complete work on The Prodigy’s debut album, Experience. Charly was included as part of the record, but as a new Trip into Drum and Bass Version, which dials down the prominence of the sampled hook, making room for some fairly awe-inspiring drum programming.

By the time he was making Experience, Howlett had begun to look beyond the rave scene for inspiration, as he told FM at the time.

"I never get inspiration from the rave scene," he explains. "The rave atmosphere is inspiring, it gives me a buzz, but lately there seems to have been something in the songs that I don't like - halfway through they bring in a riff that's been used loads of times before on other tracks. Occasionally there's something: Tim Taylor's horn track and The Aphex Twin's Didgeridoo are both very good."

A significant part of this shift meant moving away from the use of such obviously sampled hooks. That said, Experience’s other big enduring hit, the Max Romeo-sampling Out of Space, is a notable exception to that rule.

"With Out of Space I kinda let myself down a bit 'cause there's such a big hook," Liam admits. "I came across the Max Romeo track and I really liked it. I'd already written a version of Out of Space, but that sample fitted really well with it. I was getting to the end of the album and I felt I wanted a reggae type track, so that was it."

As for Charly’s other recognisable sound – its hoover-like bassline – that came via a bit of resampling of a classic analogue synth.

"I heard it first on Joey Beltram's Mentasm and I was saying 'What's that sound? What's that sound?',” Howlett explains. “We went over to New York and I asked Joey. He said, 'Don't tell anyone but it's from a Juno-2 - I put it through a sampler and messed it up'."

It helps too that the original single version of Charly came backed with another bonafide classic on the b-side, Your Love. Of the two, it's this that holds up best more than 30 years later. It might have been the novelty a-side that first got The Prodigy on the radio, but the makings of greatness were there for those who knew where to look.