“It’s a joke, innit,” Keith laughed at the time. Much to The Prodigy’s amusement, there were even questions asked in the Houses Of Parliament. The iconic video, featuring a pierced and snarling Keith Flint apparently advocating arson, was everywhere, the Daily Mail’s headline shouting ‘Ban This Sick Fire Record’. They did, however, kick major ass, and over the next few months the tide slowly turned, not least with the release of the brilliant Firestarter single in March 1996, which featured Flint on vocals for the first time and spent three weeks at Number One. The Prodigy was not metal! And, to be fair, people were right The Prodigy was anything but metal. When that first feature came out in Kerrang!, the magazine received death threats. Among the tributes pouring in following his death, there came one from World Superbike Champion Carl Fogarty, such was the respect for him in racing circles.īut I digress. Ever the adrenaline junkie, he was also clocked by Motorcycle News doing 167mph on a drag-strip. He loved his bikes and would eventually come to own a racing team, Team Traction Control, who competed in the British Superbike Championship and won three Isle Of Man TT races. “Roar there, get stoned, you couldn’t ride home so you’d get pissed and stay the night, sleeping beside your trusty steed.” “I used to go and watch the Hamsters and Dumpy’s Rusty Nuts at these biker things,” he told me. But he was also a veteran of the Hells Angels Kent Custom Bike Show and a kindred spirit. A previously unemployable hippy/biker, he’d bummed around Europe for eight months before returning to his home in Braintree in the late-’80s and stumbling across the burgeoning rave scene, drawn to its energy like a moth to a flame. It was difficult not to like Keith Flint. Music For The Jilted Generation, from 1994, was a Number One album, they were already massive, and yet they acted as if we were somehow doing them a favour and not the other way around. He was quiet, polite, friendly, funny, and, what’s more, strangely grateful that Kerrang! were giving them the time of day. It was the first time I met Keith Flint and he, like the rest of the band, were not at all what I expected. They also cancelled an interview with the BBC in order to talk to Kerrang!. Two months later – having not shut up – I was finally dispatched to T In The Park in Scotland to do a two-page feature, and, once again, The Prodigy knocked it out of the park, untouchable in every respect. He continued, despite my pleas, to say no for the rest of the week. Hell, they weren’t even a band, just a bunch of button-pushing buffoons who were the antithesis of everything the magazine stood for. This was not a band that were on Kerrang!’s radar. On Monday morning I went into Kerrang! and told our long-suffering then-editor, Phil Alexander, that I wanted to write a feature about them. We danced like maniacs punks, bikers, hippies, ravers… disparate clans not giving a fuck. Instead, they hit the stage with Break & Enter and the entire field went fucking nuts. The booze was wearing off and had I realised that these were the same white-gloved ravers that I’d seen on telly dancing around to cat noises (the Charly single of 1991), I’d have gone elsewhere. A couple of friends wanted to check them out, so we stumbled across the big field and waited for what seemed like an eternity.
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I first saw The Prodigy when they headlined the second stage at Glastonbury in June 1995. And Keith Flint, in many ways, was the host of the party, danger illustrated, mad as a bag of weasels, the twin-mohawked loony with a lust for life… A life ended far too soon.
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Whether it was on a club dancefloor or in a muddy field, you couldn’t not dance, couldn’t not feel alive to your very core. They were the soundtrack to ’aving it large and jumping around like your boots were on fire, the punkin’ instigators who always put a smile on your face. You see, The Prodigy didn’t write sad songs, never fell on black days. The party is over.Īnd maybe that’s why this sucks so much and is so very difficult to comprehend. At just 49 years old, Prodigy frontman Keith Flint died by suicide.
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We’ve lost too many in recent years, and it will never get any easier to deal with. On March 4, 2019, as the news of Keith Flint's tragic passing broke, he penned this heartfelt tribute to a man he came to know away from the stage – words that echo loudly, two years on… Some 26 years ago, writer and photographer Mörat was responsible for bringing The Prodigy into the Kerrang! world.