The Prodigy had stopped doing press at this time – they simply didn’t need it – but it says a great deal about them that they continued to talk to Kerrang!. We’d stuck our necks out and they didn’t forget it. (Indeed, later at the Kerrang! Awards 2006, Keith and his bandmates would pay tribute to our long-running support: “We’re not here to just cruise around picking up awards because we think we’re cool. We’re here for a reason: because we were supported, and because it was real. Fuck everything else.”)
And so I got to know Keith a lot better over the years, both on and off the record. I followed them around the world – Australia, France, Holland, Ireland, Los Angeles, all around the UK. Once in a while we’d sit in his hotel room smoking weed until the sun came up. They were never less than awesome, and Keith Flint was never less than… Keith Flint. He wasn’t just a bonkers firestarter; he was a multilayered, complex human being, not always comfortable with fame, sometimes even a little shy, but never less than personable and down to earth.
“I’m really pleased that I’m quite mellow in myself,” he told me one time. “It’s just as shocking for people. They’re almost waiting for me to explode. But that’s me, and what I’m like onstage, that’s me too.”
Likewise, his ‘image’ – the flame-haired mentalist – was far more than just an image.
“It’s just me,” he explained, when The Fat Of The Land was Number One in 22 countries and he’d become very much the face of a generation. “I didn’t design it for the band, but the band allows me to do it. Anything I do now is for the band because that’s my life, but I don’t do it for the band in the first place.”
More than anything, it was the band that made Keith happy. We talked about it often, the buzz he’d get from being in one of the greatest live bands on Earth, charging around the stage like he’d been let off a leash, often diving into the crowd to be one with the audience. That massive rush.
“Before we went onstage at Brixton Academy, you couldn’t have injected me with any drug that made me feel better than that,” he said. “Any more than that and I would’ve felt ill, my head wouldn’t have been able to handle it. It was like tripping to the max!”
And then…
“I’m seriously frightened of becoming [old], ’cause I reckon I’ll be firestarting until I’m 60, with this beer gut, thinking I’ve still got it. I won’t have to shave the middle of my hair because I’ll be totally bald.”
That was Keith’s sense of humour. At the height of his fame, he got a bit pissed-off with people forever shouting, ‘Firestarter’ at him everywhere he went, but in later years after he bought his pub, he saw the funny side and by all accounts had a log fire and a swear jar into which people would have to put money whenever they said the inevitable.