Interview: Prodigy star rates rides over raves

By Michael Neeves -

General news

21 July 2009 16:10

Fresh from the wildest tour of 2009, it's gigs one day, track days the next for GSX-R1000 K9-riding Keith Flint.

MCN Senior Road Tester Michael Neeves got a few laps in with Flint around Castle Combe. According to Neevesy, “He’s a bit handy!”. MCN caught up with him (just) to talk bikes.

How did you get into bikes?
To be quite honest bikes were my ultimate freedom when I was sixteen. I had a few novice field bikes before that, but I got a Fizzie, followed by an RD50 and an RD80, and it was the first thing that got you freedom, it felt like you could go anywhere. F**k me, who’d go more than 30-miles on a 50? But you felt you’d got that freedom and it certainly had a sort of lawlessness about it. It was exhilarating because I had older brothers who’d take me out for rides from where I lived in Chelmsford up to Epping Forest and High Beach. It was a tear up and I sound like an old git now but those were the days when you could just nail it, you know what I mean?

What do they mean to you now?
They mean exactly the same thing to me now. When you’re scratching, it’s that buzz of doing something you f**king love, that freedom. In your mind you know when you’re on it and you’re just flowing. You’ve got to give it enough thought to do it well, but not enough thought that you are over thinking it. It’s like anything in life really, you have to have a nice free-flowing mind.

What gives you the biggest buzz?
Riding on the track like I have been today. It charges you with adrenalin and it’s exactly the same feeling as when I walk off stage. If you asked me what it’s like when I’m on stage that is what that’s like. I charge myself up with that. As for cars, it’s all well and good having a nice motor, but they don’t even come close.

What was your most memorable bike?
The air-cooled RD400 I had. I can’t remember who it belonged to, but I got it off a bloke who’d crashed it. It was a proddie racer, all lock-wired with a blueprinted engine. It came with standard pipes, as that was what they had to run, so I bought some Allspeeds and put those on. I bought it when I was 15 and rented a garage off an old girl on the estate to keep it in. I used to take my 50 round there, then ride the RD400 on a Sunday down to Southend and places like that.
I talked different mates into going on the back and we used to go up the bike park and hang out, or go to Le Mans, Bol D’Or or Spa and some of the other races. Someone came up to me recently and said ‘I’ve got a photo of you when you used to come round on that 400’. I looked like this f**king kid on this bike, I was more scared seeing it then than when I was on it at the time, like, what could of happened?
I had two or three RD400s. I’d do them up and get the tanks and frames sprayed up and fit Allspeeds to make them look special.

Do you modify your bikes yourself?
I’ve had my greasy phases. The first one I did was a GS550 I converted into a café racer with an ally tank. I did it up in my Nan’s garage. Then I got a GS850 I had big plans for, and we went off and did all the usual things, like going to the Kent Custom Show, bike rallies and the BMF looking for bits and ideas. But then I went travelling and kind of fell out of bed with the bikes. I gave the GS850 to a friend and he’s still got it now, funny enough.

What bike did you you buy when you first hit success?
When I joined the band and started to earn a bit of dollar, I got the Blade when it first came out, in 1992. Then I got it Repsol’d because I became a massive Mick Doohan fan. Nick Morgan [now team manager of the MSS Kawasaki BSB squad] tuned it for me. He was just down the road from me in Chelmsford. He’s a wicked guy, I love him to bits, an awesome bloke. I sold that to buy another Blade, which TTS tuned and track prepared for me. I used it as a trackday bike now.

Tell us about the bike you raced
I raced this ex-Red Bull Ducati 996 in 1998 at club level. I’ve really got to thank team owner Ben Atkins for all that and to John Reynolds, who rode for them at the time, for all his help. He’s a lovely guy.

What’s your current road bike?
An Aprilia Tuono Factory. I’ve done a load of touring on it including going to see MotoGP races in Europe. After riding the GSX-R1000 K9 today, though, I’m thinking of a way to trade the Aprilia in for the Suzuki, I’d desperately like one of those!

Invaders Must Die but So-Cal audiences are welcome to check out Prodigy.

The no-politics of dancing

By John Esther

A revered band in certain foot-stomping/patting/cutting arenas, Prodigy hits Southern California for two concerts this week. Tonight, Prodigy will be playing at The Grove of Anaheim. Tomorrow night they will be in Los Angeles at the Palladium.

Coming strong off Prodigy's most successful record to date, Invaders Must Die, the band will feature songs from from the fifth release plus songs from the past. A dance band feeding off live responses, Prodigy is quintessentially a band to experienced from the stage than from a studio.

We recently spoke to Prodigy co-founder/composer/DJ Liam Howlett on what to expect this time around.

JEsther Entertainment: What can audiences in Los Angeles expect from Prodigy this time around?
Liam Howlett: We got a new album. The band is in really good shape. We’ve been playing these tunes for seven or eight months. We just came off of a UK-arena tour. We’re just ready for it.

JE: How does that differ from your previous performances in Los Angeles?
LH: How does any band differ when they play? We’re not going to suddenly burst into flames. We’re there to play the songs.

JE: How does an audience dictate or influence a narrative of a concert? Does it alter which songs you will play at a given time?
LH: The set can change if things feel like they need to move on quicker, if we need to pick up the energy. The songs are programmed, locked down. We tweak shows as the go down, but we’re pretty much locked down.

JE: Will you be playing older songs as well? Are you focusing on the new release?
LH: We play six or seven of the new tunes and some old ones. Some of the old tunes are a bit mixed up, chopped up. It’s more for our benefit really because we’re trying to keep it interesting to ourselves.

JE: Moving onto the new release, what does the title Invaders Must Die imply?
LH: It’s probably the most meaningful title to us as a band. The album is about what happened to us as a band over the last six or seven years. We’ve been through a few internal problems. In 2003 me and Keith weren’t really talking. We didn’t really communicate for a year and a half. People were really happy like, instead of getting us back together, they were all happy to say, “Oh, I hear Keith’s working with him.” It was a lot of kind of anger ‘round me at that time. Later on Keith and I felt we had been invaded. That became one kind of meaning. As time went on we just felt it was a good album title; it seemed to have a good, solid meaning for the band and what we’d been through. It’s almost biographical, you know.

JE: So it is rather personal rather than a reference to the grander scheme of things going on in the world right now?
LH: Yeah, absolutely, Man. We don’t get involved in that shit. This band has always been about escapism, hedonism. That’s what we want, to keep it primal, you know. We’re not interested in politics or world issues.

JE: Is that because the political bands are filling a place and you guys are filling in a void somewhere else?
LH: It’s boring. I see a lot of bands and I don’t think any band has pulled it off. I get really bogged down with issues and shit. I don’t want to see a band that bogs me down in shit like that. It’s a very hard thing to pull off. Rage Against the Machine were very good at it. There hasn’t really been any other bands that have pulled that off.

JE: What are the primary concepts behind the band’s direction with Invaders Must Die?
LH: Basically when we got back together and we were really excited about doing a record; the main thing with this album is that it had to be a “band album.” We weren’t really interested in any other vocal collaborations. We wanted to make a record that incorporated everything good about the band. We wanted to push the vocals more, keep it more melodic. Slightly more melodic without losing what we got. That was the main aim. Halfway through, once we recorded six tracks, we all felt we had something solid here.

JE: The new release sounds more refined than your previous efforts.
LH: For me it feels like a long road to come out of all that personal shit. It feels like it’s up. We really didn’t set out to make an “up record.” It came out quite uplifting. The dark stuff didn’t really materialize.

JE: I especially like “Warriors Dance.” What went behind that song?
LH: That particular track wasn’t meant to be in the record. We were playing at a big party, rave, in England. I’d been in the studio for about five months, haven’t really written anything I was really happy with, and Keith suggested, “Let’s forget about the album. Let’s write a track for that party.” We had 20 years of acid house, it was that kind of celebration going on, so we used that as a kind of focus. Basically we wrote that track. It’s a sample chop-up track. It harks back to early 1990s style. It came really quickly, but it was just meant to be played at that party. We played it a couple of times and then it became like a bit of an anthem. It felt like a really good direction for the record. That was the track that kind of shined a light on maybe some of the other tunes on the album. After that track we rolled on with the other tunes.

JE: Do you enjoy playing some songs more than others?
LH: Yeah, we played most of the album out. We definitely got our favorites. “Take Me to the Hospital” is a big live tune. We played “Thunder” live, but it needs a bit more work. Nine times out of ten, when I’m usually writing the tracks in the studio, we think about what we can play live -- to go straight from the studio to the stage. Some of them work better than others.

JE: Do you keep your audience in mind when you are composing or is it the kind of music you want to hear?
LH: I definitely keep it mind, a bit. A good Prodigy tune is a tune that connects.

JE: Has there ever been surprising reactions to particular Prodigy songs when you play live?
LH: We’re more aware of it than other people. There are tunes we’ve only played once on stage. You pretty know if it’s working or not. It has a certain feel. There’s been songs we worked on for a month, played it live and never heard it again. It’s just a feeling you get.

JE: Which leads me to my last inquiry. What do you think about interviews where you talk about Prodigy and the music? Does it serve the music? Should the music speak for itself?
LH: People should check us out live. That’s where it makes sense, a bit. I guess it’s frustrating to try and explain what it is because I don’t know what it is, you know. It’s kind of dance music. To me if people aren’t sure what we’re about they should see us live.

http://jestherent.blogspot.com/2009/05/ ... wlett.html

The Prodigy's Keith Flint on battling his addictions and finding peace
The Prodigy singer, who is about to turn 40, tells about battling his addictions and finding peace in rural Essex


Back in the Prodigy’s 1990s heyday, Keith Flint was known as the “scariest man in music”, with his tattoos and nose studs and his manic onstage persona, but in person it turns out that he is exceptionally gentle and has impeccable manners. True, he swears like a trooper, but after he accuses someone, often himself, of behaving like a c***, he promptly apologises, before using the word again.

When we meet over a large bottle of fizzy water and a bowl of fruit off the Portobello Road in Notting Hill, West London,he realises immediately that I am no rock journalist. I had tried — oh, how I had tried — to listen to the Prodigy’s new album Invaders Must Die. But Flint is sporting enough not to ask me my views.

We talk, instead, about his Tudor home in Essex — a source of pride. Flint worries that because he is an Essex boy, readers will think his house, set in ten acres, is a mock-Tudor Barratt home, when in fact it is a listed historical treasure outside Felsted, with a priest box in the roof. The village features in the Domesday Book, and Cromwell mustered his troops on Flint’s property, which he has meticulously restored from the ruinous state in which he acquired it.

bought the surface of an entire street in Bristol so that he could secure the right cobbles for his driveway. Then he hunted down 19th-century porcelain toilets and matching hand basins to get the feel right in the bathrooms. “It’s very boring and very un-rock’n’roll to talk about it, but I do love my house,” he explains apologetically. “I sold on the cobbles that I didn’t need. I’m from Essex you see, so I’m quite a dealer.”

When not touring with the band, he’s at home, with his six dogs roaming the extensive grounds, which is an important detail because Flint says that the dogs were the main reason he did not kill himself when things were not going so well in his life.

Prodigy were huge in the 1990s, and Fat of the Land went double platinum. They have sold more than 17 million albums worldwide and, unlike some of the Brit bands of the 1990s such as Oasis, they cracked the American market. After a period of inertia after the turn of the millennium, Invaders has sold all over the world, boosted by a recent bravura appearance at Glastonbury. In the Nineties, parents worried as their teenage children disappeared to dance clubs to take Ecstasy and grind around to their most infamous numbers, notably Smack my Bitch Up and Firestarter. It is hard to square this image with the man now sitting calmly in front of me.

still has the tattoos and nose stud, but he is teetotal and much more likely to be found these days in the gym, boxing or practising Brazilian ju-jitsu, than disappearing to the loo for a line of coke.

For a while during the band’s downturn in fortunes, many of Flint’s friends would not have bet on his reaching his 40th birthday next month. He is at first reluctant to talk about this phase of his life because, he says, “drink and drugs hell” is a self-indulgent cliché, and he has never wanted anyone to feel sorry for him.

Flint had a tough upbringing in Essex. He no longer speaks to his father. He was a bright boy with severe dyslexia, so he was disruptive at school and was sent to psychologists to be sorted out, though they found that there was not a great deal that they could do for him. “I’ve always had mental problems, so to speak. I’m incredibly self-destructive,” he says.

He spent much of his youth locked in his room, listening to the Jam, banging his head against the wall. His first job was as a roofer in Braintree before he was asked to join the Prodigy, first as an onstage dancer, then as vocalist.

He had spent much of his early life hating his father, but as the Prodigy came to prominence, he took a view that he was not going to waste emotional energy feuding with him, so he simply cut him out of his life.

He took his share of drugs and of the girls who threw themselves at the band, but in those days, the main high came from getting on stage. When the Prodigy went into abeyance it was, he says, like “a death” to him. “You see, the band is everything to me, it’s the only thing I’m really proud of about myself.”

cheer himself up, he bought a Ferrari, and thenfelt profoundly ashamed when he realised that it had depreciated in value by £60,000, which was more than his grandfather had earned in his life. “I got bang into coke, weed, drinking a lot. This made me reclusive, boringand shallow.”

But an even bigger problem was his dependence on prescription drugs. “I’d line up rows of pills and just take them and take them and I’d lose track of how many until I passed out.” I ask him if he was then specifically suicidal. “I guess so. But you need a lot of balls to kill yourself. I was a coward.” And then, when our conversation threatens to become too solemn, he says that he could not have really done it because his dogs would never have forgiven him.

life now is scarcely recognisable from that dark trough, partly because he says of his immense good luck in meeting a “beautiful, f***ing cool” Japanese DJ who spun discs in Tokyo under the moniker of Super Megabitch, but who these days prefers to be known by her given name, Mayumi. “We were touring and she just walked into this room we were in, and you know how it is, I just couldn’t talk, I was overwhelmed. I’d done my share of drugs and shagging around. Look, we all like to get busy, but in truth I was a bit worn through with it.” So they were soon an item, and married three years ago in Felsted, and Flint has found someone to love other than his band. “We’re not exactly planning to have children, but we’re not planning not to either,” he says enigmatically. Around the time of his marriage he gave up drugs, cigarettes and alcohol. Mayumi indulges Flint’s remaining addiction, to motorbikes. Often at weekends, they head off somewhere in Europe on a road trip to attend a motorbike grand prix. “We take one of the Range Rovers, and plan our route, and stay in hotels along the way, nothing lah-di-dah.”

Otherwise, they stay at home and explore rural Essex. “We like to take picnics and sandwiches, driving through the green lanes. My wife loves the house, the dogs, and the animals we have around us, the deer and the fox that comes and pokes his head through the hedge.”

Or they entertain friends, who tend to be neighbours and have nothing to do with the music world. Flint will jog, or take the dogs out on a mountain bike. He concedes that he “burns a lot of petrol” with his cars and motorbikes, but points out in mitigation that he has planted 80 native trees on his property, and put in half a mile of indigenous hedgerow. His weekend existence now is more that of a country gent, albeit with facial jewellery, than a rock star’s.

Flint, as he emphasises, absolutely loves the band and the music that they produce, but he does not take himself, or his “art”, too seriously.40 next month holds no horrors for him. These days he is wiry and fit, and has never felt better.

“I’ve taken this vessel of a body to every corner of the Earth, and already done more than most people could even dream of.” He won’t be slowing down, and wouldn’t mind cracking on well into his sixties like the Rolling Stones and other ageing rockers. “But it mustn’t become a pantomime,” he adds sharply.

Prodigy’s new single Take Me To the Hospital is out on August 31

My perfect weekend

Town or country?

Country

Cornwall or the Caribbean?

Cornwall

Full English or fruit salad?

Full English

Owl or lark?

Owl. I rescued one as a child and it brought me good luck

Sky sports or gym?

Gym

Beer or wine?

Neither now

Vinyl or digital?

Vinyl

Mobile phone on or off at weekends?

Off

Jeans or a suit?

Jeans

Film or theatre?

I saw Gran Torino on a flight

Sat-nav or sense of direction?

Sat-nav

Builder’s tea or soya latte?

Builder’s tea

Stadium or secret gig?

Secret gig

Computer game or board game?

Board game

Book or DVD?

I’m dyslexic so I download talking books on to my iPod — I’ve got Russell Brand’s My Booky Wook and Lance Armstrong’s memoirs at the moment

he says of his immense good luck in meeting a “beautiful, f***ing cool” Japanese DJ who spun discs in Tokyo under the moniker of Super Megabitch, but who these days prefers to be known by her given name, Mayumi.