For you, what has the rock world lost with the passing of Keith Flint?
“We’ve basically lost another amazing frontman. I mean, you almost forget that with The Prodigy it has always been about their sound, but Keith orchestrated everything, and he was the focal point of the band. When most people think of The Prodigy they think of Keith. If you go back to when that Firestarter video first came out, and when we all first saw it, the character that Keith plays in that, I think elevated The Prodigy from what they were to this iconic and original band.”
Even though they were classified as a dance act, with Keith’s image in that video he became iconic as this edgy-looking punk dude. Would you say this is why they were able to cross a multitude of genres and communities?
“They were like a rock’n’roll band. It was punk, it was edgy, it was angsty. I remember when I first booked them to play Download in 2006, the majority of rock music fans thought I was insane for booking them, but I knew what they would bring to the festival. As a band they transcended that pigeonhole of being a dance act. They played the second stage, which was in a tent at the time. People were climbing poles inside the tent, it was rammed, you could not move in there and it was insane.
“A lot of people forget that Keith played at the very first Download: he had a solo project [Flint] when The Prodigy were on down time. He was an absolute gentleman, and he was the same all the times that I worked with The Prodigy when they came to Download. He was always friendly, always chatty, always appreciative of everything that anyone did for him."
And of course in 2012 they headlined the Download for the first time…
“In 2012 – and we mustn’t lose sight of this – when The Prodigy headlined, it was the biggest selling Download we’ve ever had. People go, ‘Yeah, but you had Sabbath on the bill and Metallica on the bill,’ but the bulk of our tickets were weekend sales, so people wanted to be there for the whole thing. Even though the weather was fucking horrendous, The Prodigy absolutely fucking smashed it.”