Anarchic singer revelled in his notoriety
Esinger b September 17, 1969 d March 3 or 4, 2019
very generation needs its iconoclastic provocateurs whose music is guaranteed to generate parental shouts of ‘‘Turn that noise down!’’ For those coming of age in the 1990s, the role was played with enthusiastic diabolism by Keith Flint and the Prodigy.
When the band topped the charts in 1996 with Firestarter, the song was accompanied by a video in which Flint, covered in satanic tattoos, eyes bulging wildly and his hair teased into Beelzebub-like horns, snarled into the camera about being a ‘‘trouble starter’’.
Tapping into pop music’s carefully cultivated lineage of outrage from the Rolling Stones to the Sex Pistols, the lyrics were malevolent, the music raucous and the image fearsome, with Flint cast as the Johnny Rotten of his generation. When the video was shown on Top of the Pops, the BBC was inundated with more complaints than it had known since the heyday of punk.
The next year Smack My Bitch Up, which rose to No 8 in the British charts, was accompanied by a video that seemed to glorify drink-driving, cocaine snorting, vandalism and casual sex.
When questions were raised in Parliament about the song’s misogyny, the band responded that ‘‘most people have had nights out like that’’. Despite being banned by the BBC, the film won best dance video at the MTV Music Awards.
The song was later voted the most controversial of all time in a survey conducted by the Performing Rights Society. Among those who objected to the song were the Beastie Boys, who a decade earlier had themselves been dubbed ‘‘the world’s nastiest pop group’’ by the tabloid press.
When another hit single, Baby’s Got a Temper, extolled the virtues of the ‘‘date rape’’ drug Rohypnol, many began to suspect a certain cynicism in the band’s relentless desire to shock. ‘‘How very risque and rebellious,’’ Sarah Cohen of BBC 6 Music remarked. ‘‘Or, more likely, how very shrewd and calculating.’’
Emerging from the wastelands of Essex at the height of the chemically enhanced underground rave scene in the early 1990s, the Prodigy swiftly became crowdpleasing favourites at the all-night free rave parties and festivals that the Conservative government attempted to outlaw in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act.
The legislation even contained a clause that defined the kind of music played by the band and others at illegal raves as ‘‘wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’’. Whitehall’s description of rave music was the subject of much hilarity at the time, and the Prodigy responded with a song titled Their Law, on which they defiantly sang: ‘‘Crack down at sundown/ F... ’em and their law.’’
Known as the godfathers of rave and ‘‘the premiere dance act for the alternative masses’’, the Prodigy crossed into the mainstream to become one of the most commercially successful of all electronic dance acts, with worldwide record sales estimated to be in excess of 30 million.
Flint revelled in his notoriety and suggested his goals in life were to live out his ultimate sex fantasies with ‘‘lots of babes’’, have every part of his body pierced and dye his hair every colour of the rainbow. His favourite pastimes ranged from ‘‘going out all night on wild benders’’ to ‘‘photocopying my bum’’.
A tattoo on his stomach bore the legend ‘‘Inflicted’’, a reference to the line ‘‘I’m the self-inflicted mind detonator’’ in Firestarter. Having the tattoo done, he bragged, had felt ‘‘like he was on an altar being ritualistically scarred by a satanic beast’’.
On the group’s flights to the United States, where the Prodigy topped the American album charts with 1997’s The Fat of the Land, Flint was infamously a nightmare. One of his favourite tricks was to make erotic sculptures out of inflight food to embarrass the cabin crew and, on one occasion, he had to be restrained from kicking down the door to the cockpit.
He was unrepentant. ‘‘I’m sorry if I offend little kids, but this is just me,’’ he said. ‘‘I just love it when I see the faces of these stuffy executives who look me up and down wherever I go.’’
Yet like so many of pop music’s betes noires, there was another side to Flint. A great lover of animals and the natural world, he rescued a sick hedgehog at school and took it home to nurse. He was devastated when the creature died. He was also an enthusiastic twitcher and built a large pond to attract birds to the garden of his Tudor house in the village of Dunmow, Essex.
His other joy was a rare species of apple tree. He was described as kind and caring by his neighbours; one said that Flint had given him a bottle of whisky on his 80th birthday.
Over time, the outrage engendered by the Prodigy diminished, for it was hard to remain shocked once Firestarter had become a fixture in provincial karaoke bars. Instead, Flint found himself the inspiration for a Lucozade advert, in which one swig of the energy drink turned a geriatric lookalike from a docile grandad into a rampaging ‘‘twisted firestarter’’.
Long after the rave scene declined, the Prodigy remained hugely popular and the group’s 2018 album, No Tourists, became their sixth to enter the British charts at No 1.
Away from music, Flint was a keen motorcyclist. He raced in club competitions, riding his Honda FireBlade at speeds of up 180mph, and owned Team Traction Control. It competed in the British Superbike Championships and within a year of formation was winning Isle of Man TT races.
At the height of the Prodigy’s notoriety, Flint dated the TV presenter Gail Porter, who attained an infamy of her own when her naked image was projected on to the Houses of Parliament by FHM magazine. She described him as ‘‘lovely and gentle’’, although she admitted that, when her mother met him, she was rendered ‘‘speechless’’ by his green mohican haircut.
They broke up in 2001. In 2006 he married Mayumi Ka, a Japanese DJ who performed as DJ Gedo Super Mega Bitch. They were reported to be separated at the time of his death.
In 2014 Flint became the proprietor of the Leather Bottle pub in Pleshey, near Chelmsford, Essex, taking over when the inn was threatened with closure. He was a popular landlord and kept a jar in which customers were required to put £1 every time they made a ‘‘firestarter’’ joke when he lit the pub’s fire.
He left in 2017 without explanation, pinning a sign on the door that simply said: ‘‘Due to unforeseen circumstances, the pub is closed today. Sorry for any inconvenience.’’
Keith Charles Flint was born in September 1969 in Redbridge, east London, the son of Clive Flint, an engineering consultant whose father was a German Jewish immigrant, and his wife, Yvonne. By the mid-1970s the family had moved to middle-class, lacecurtained suburbia in Springfield, Essex, where Keith grew up in a quiet cul-de-sac.
He was dyslexic and attended the Boswells School in Chelmsford. Clearly intelligent, he was also disruptive and hyperactive. He fashioned his hair into a mohican and tore around the neighbourhood on a motorbike, but friends also recalled that he was polite and well brought up.
‘‘When he visited my house, he always called my mum Mrs Williams,’’ one school contemporary said. The teacher whom he hit with a rolling pin during a cookery class remembered him less fondly. Eventually, he was excluded and sent to a ‘‘special school’’.
Flint left at 15 with no qualifications and moved to nearby Braintree. He was working as a roofer in 1989 when he met Liam Howlett, a DJ, at a local rave club called the Barn.
Howlett suggested they form a group with the MC and vocalist Maxim. The Prodigy’s debut single, Charly, which sampled a public information advert from the 1970s and reached No 3 in the British singles chart in 1991.
Initially Flint merely danced on stage. ‘‘I never planned for Keith to become a singer,’’ Howlett said. ‘‘I didn’t even know he was capable of singing until he asked to have a go at Firestarter. The Prodigy was always about me doing the beats and the others doing their thing on stage.’’
Flint’s first vocal became their defining moment. He later formed his own band, which he called Flint.
In an interview in 2009 he conceded that, ‘‘I can be quite selfdestructive when left on my own, which is something I have to keep a check on.’’
Flint’s sudden death was confirmed by Howlett.
‘‘The news is true. I can’t believe I’m saying this,’’ he wrote on the band’s Instagram account. ‘‘I’m shell shocked, f...ing angry, confused and heartbroken.’’ – The Times Do you know someone who deserves a Life Story? Email obituaries@dompost.co.nz