After several years of soul searching and a couple of false starts, Liam Howlett is back with a new album. The repentant prodigy tells Jim Carroll how good it feels getting back to the rock 'n' roll basics

The last time Liam Howlett put on a pair of stripy socks and went to town to talk about his new album, the world was a very different place. It was 1997. Tony Blair was a fresh-faced man, kicking off the Cool Britannia era to the sound of D:Ream's Things Can Only Get Better. People took Oasis seriously. The words "crisis" and "club culture" were never twinned in a sentence. And The Prodigy were the biggest electronic rock 'n' roll band in the world.

The last time Liam Howlett was here to talk about a new album, it was The Fat of the Land. By their cartoon caricatures, you knew his band. There was Keith, the he's-mad-so-he-is bloke from the Firestarter video. There was Maxim, the big dancer with the crazy eyes. There was the Other One who danced a bit. And there was Liam, the quiet boffin at the back of the stage who pressed the buttons.

If anyone recognises Liam Howlett this morning as he slips quietly into London's Groucho Club, they don't let on. He is here to talk about Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, the new Prodigy album which arrives without blather, hype or expectations later this month.

Behind a pair of glued-on sunglasses, Howlett exudes a quiet confidence. You would too, if you had an album like this to sell to the world. It is an album which will, if you let it, blow your head off. Instead of doing whatever everyone expected him to do, Howlett took a few detours and went back to basics. He says at one stage that "this album is the most honest album I could have written", and you're inclined to believe him.

What Howlett has done is rediscovered that the real stars of The Prodigy were always the beats. Over the course of an angry, raw and fierce album, Howlett lays down a few new laws. There's the rough and tumble hip-hop of Get Up Get Off. There's punk rock swagger with a sneering Juliette Lewis on Hotride. There's the Bomb Squad panache and Arabian frills of Spitfire.There's no sign of any twisted firestarters, and you murmer a silent thanks-be-to-God for that.

It was Baby's Got a Temper, says Howlett, which made him realise that the old game was up. That single from two years ago was a parody of the Prodigy, a Spitting Images puppet of their sound and style. "It was a mess. It was a bit like the band at that point - it was cluttered, quite dark and didn't have the usual Prodigy energy," he says. "But it was a very important record to release because it showed me what path I shouldn't go down. It made me think I had to do something else."

What he did next, he admits, was also wrong. Having binned the tracks he had been working on, Howlett went home. "I have a nice house in Essex, a big house in the middle of the country. But I don't think it's the right place to write a Prodigy album. It's very mellow, too fucking mellow. I spent months just sitting there looking at my computer screen and hoping to write a tune. I'd go to bed and think 'Yeah, tomorrow is the day when I write a decent tune'." The next morning, he'd wake up to find the tune fairy had not visited during the night.

After four months, Howlett decided the time had come to try another tack and he set up a studio in Hackney in London. "It's not the best area, but it has an edge. I also had a mobile recording set-up, which meant I could write and record anywhere. As soon as that happened, I was off, I felt comfortable."

Very comfortable, in fact. "The best writing was done in bed at night on the laptop," he says with a smirk. "I had a little cocoon there. I'd have a James Bond film like The Spy Who Loved Me on TV. Because I was happy, I could write. I wrote Wake Up, Girls and Spitfire like that. I'd go into studio the next day and say, 'Do you want to hear what I did in bed last night?'"

He'd also walk around Hackney, "sometimes out of my head", and sounds would hit him and inspire him. "When I was doing Fat of the Land, it was watching other bands play live which inspired me. This time around, I didn't buy any new music or watch any bands play. It was walking around, walking into shops and hearing stuff on sound systems, which really inspired me."

He couldn't even sit down to eat his dinner without hearing things. "One night, I was having a romantic dinner in a Lebanese restaurant with Nat [Appleton, his wife]. Nice candles, tablecloth, the works. When we sat down, I heard this track coming out of the kitchen, so I got up, went into the kitchen and asked them what the music was. It was this amazing Iranian singer Gholam Hossein, and I went off down the Edgeware Road the next day to track down the CD and that became part of Medusa's Party. You've got to jump on these ideas when you can."

There's no sign of Maxim or Keith on this album. "I wanted to go back to where I was back around Music for the Jilted Generation, where I had free rein to grab a female vocal for this track or a guitar for that track, to create a textured sound and not rely on one vocalist. I think I backed myself into a corner with tracks like Baby's Got a Temper by having to use one voice."

The others will be back onboard for the live shows. That's the way Howlett likes it - he doesn't want to be the firestarter. "The set-up was always Keith and Maxim and Leeroy, before he left, fronting it. And I was happy to be the guy at the back who presses the button to make everything to go bang. I've never been a performer, I've never wanted to be a frontman."

But Howlett has always wanted to tour because that was The Prodigy's strength - even back around the Experience album, when they were headlining every rave arena that would have them. Howlett says he has been watching Glastonbury and T in the Park on TV, and he has the urge to be up there again.

"It's been a few years since we toured and it will be a challenge because some of the gigs we did towards the end of the last tour were dreadful. I thought that big Reading Festival show was appalling. I think we had become complacent. Now, we've got our hunger back and we have a point to prove."

What he also has is an album he will happily stand over and talk about. Everything else may have changed immensely but Howlett knows this album is the one to kick sand in a lot of faces.

"I like to have that element of surprise. Expectations are really low and it's great to be in that position because it catches people offguard. This one has taken a right turn and people won't have seen that coming."

• Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned is released on August 27th on XL Records