I will write him over myspace

Do it, he really will answer you if he has the time for it

How did you get the guitarist slot with the Prodigy and what were the highlights of your tI'me in the band?

I was at university at the time, I was working loading in the PA for the gigs which meantI got in free to all the gigs! I wanted to see Prodigy as I'm from Essex as well so they were always local heroes. It was at that time that I started getting into dance music and I'd just got the 'Jilted generation' album.

I saw them sound check and was surprised they didn't have a guitarist so I asked the roadie afterwards and he said they didn't have one and to do him a demo, so I ran home and played over a lot of the Jilted album playing guitars on tracks like voodoo people and break and enter and then gave it to Liam Howlett after the gig.

He rang me up 2 weeks later to see ifI wanted to play in Paris with them the next week! which was amazing obviously so I did, and then carried on playing live with them for a year until I left to join Pitchshifter.I rejoined the Prodigy in 2002 for another year's stint.I also played the guitars on the fat of the land album which was a massive buzz!

MD: You left The Prodigy after your second stint in 2004 - has there ever been an offer to rejoin, and is that something you’d ever revisit?
JD: No, no. When I first did it when I was twenty one, it was amazing. I’d come out of university and it was just like, wow, I can’t believe this has happened, like I‘ve joined this band and we’re touring all over the world, and I’m doing Glastonbury when I should’ve been at university. You know, that was amazing but, when I left that, it had obviously done me the world of good because I got to play on those big records and that’s how I joined the next band. When I came back to doing it again in 2002, obviously it was a case of the gigs were the biggest I’ve ever done in my life. I headlined Reading for God's sake in front of sixty thousand people! But, at the same time, my head was in a completely different place. I was thinking, well, hang on a minute, I’ve gone away and done all this stuff, but I’ve ended up being a live guitarist again - I don’t want to be a live guitarist again. And with The Prod, it’s always a glass ceiling - it’s always gonna be the three of them, and you’re gonna be the live guitarist. There’s not an amazing amount of room to record with them. I did my recording which I was cuffed with because I know what Liam’s like, and he’s very closed when it comes to who he lets into his music. So I was chuffed when he let me in as I don’t think many other guitarists have really played there. But when I came back to doing it I just thought, hang on a minute, I’m back to where I was when I was twenty one and live it’s all about the performance side of things, and not about what you’re actually playing. It’s more about jumping around and giving a good performance, which I understand is part of the whole thing but, for me, I just had so many ideas and I sort of felt like I’d done it the first time around. So, I don’t know, I think I’d done everything I could do with those guys and I don’t think I would do it again. I think they’re very happy with who they’ve got now; he’s a great lad and he’s a really good performance based guitarist which is what they need. I was always far more into the studio side of things more than the live side of things. I always felt a bit awkward on stage with them because I always felt I had all these ideas and I was up there playing a bar chord. But, you know, that’s what they needed; they need a performance based guitarist, not someone up there who can go “look, I’ve got this, and I can do this”. But I understand that now. When I was younger though, it was like “look, I can do this, and I can do that”…

MD: I read you did an album with Keith Flint a few years ago…2002...2003...?
JD: Yeah, that’s right.
MD: …and that was never released. What was the nature of that music, and are those recordings ever gonna be released, do you think?
JD: It’s a very long story, but basically we recorded an album with Youth from Killing Joke. I’d just literally finished playing with Pitchshifter, we’d done our last gig…well, what I though was gonna be the last gig…and then went straight into the studio with Keith and we did a whole album’s worth of stuff. But it was all just a bit of a mess really. I think we went in there with Youth and all very closed off, you know, we didn’t have any contact with the record label - they were Polydor, so they weren't quite a very sort of cutting edge label; they just wanted commercial kind of stuff. So they just left us to our own devices, and we just spent three months making a really raw punk album. And it was a really raw punk album! It just got to the point where the A&R man came in after three months and went “uh…what the hell am I gonna do with this…”. He was expecting something that he could put on CD:UK next to Rachel Stevens. It just all went a little bit, “just hang one a minute, what are we trying to do here?” There were too many people involved and it all just sort of combusted. It won’t ever be released, but it’s out there to get. It could’ve been so good. It could’ve been an absolutely amazing album but it just wasn’t done right and it’s a shame.