Added to the recognition came the controversy with the track’s lyrics, The Mail On Sunday suggesting that they advocated arson and leading the campaign to ‘Ban This Sick Fire Record’.

The video ensured that Keith was transformed almost overnight into one of the most recognisable frontmen of his generation. In fact, Keith had cast himself in the same mould as the likes of Alice Cooper and the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten – a comparison that he most enjoyed.

The image that Keith Flint projected in that video underlined that this was music made by freaks and rank outsiders. The song’s success suggested that music could still rise from the underground to achieve mass success. In a year where the likes of The Spice Girls and Peter André topped the singles charts in the UK, the fact that Firestarter enjoyed a three-week stint at Number One proved a defining event in British popular culture in the ’90s. The accompanying video was bleak and mesmerising, and featured Keith in the starring role, singing the song in a derelict London Tube tunnel. Three months after their first appearance in the pages of Kerrang! everything changed for The Prodigy with the release of Firestarter, the first single from the band’s forthcoming album, The Fat Of The Land. Part-clown, part-punk, part-court jester, he provided the band with a live focal point alongside their charismatic MC, Maxim, and 6ft 7in dancer Leeroy Thornhill.

If Liam is the band’s studio mastermind, then Keith Flint was vital in projecting those musical ideas on to an audience. A sound that is a glorious hybrid of post-hip-hop beats married to techno’s drive and punk’s original invective – all of which are mixed in Liam Howlett’s head with added sonic detail thrown in for good measure. That feeling of unbridled energy is what lies at the heart of The Prodigy’s sound. You take Speedway (from the band’s second album, Music For The Jilted Generation), put it on your Walkman, and get on your bike. “Roar there, get stoned, you couldn’t ride home, so you’d get pissed and stay the night sleeping beside your trusty steed, all that kind of thing. I used to go and watch The Hamsters and Dumpy’s Rusty Nuts at these biker things,” explained Keith Flint during the course of the interview, name-dropping two of the least fashionable boogie-biker bands imaginable. “We do have genuine roots in the rock scene. It was Mörat’s evangelical support of the band during one particular editorial meeting that led to that first proper feature and, just as Kerrang! embraced The Prodigy, so too they embraced Kerrang! – blowing out an interview with the BBC to speak to the magazine for that initial interview. His editorial instinct was also reflected by the fact that certain more adventurous DJs had begun to slip the band’s most recent single, Their Law, into sets alongside tracks by Rage Against The Machine, Slayer and Fear Factory, at rock clubs across the country. Our aforementioned resident ‘punk thug’, Mörat, had begun to travel throughout the UK to see The Prodigy just prior to the release of their second album, Music For The Jilted Generation, and had filed a number of increasingly enthusiastic live reviews along the way. The Prodigy seemed the logical extension of that hard-edged electronic sound, with the added appeal that they created irresistible beats to match. In our world, labels like Chicago’s Wax Trax (home to KMFDM, Front 242 et al) and artists like Nine Inch Nails had already begun to redefine rock music. The Prodigy themselves didn’t much care about the sniping from rock’s sidelines. The very idea of Kerrang! covering a band that had emerged from the rave scene and that had recently won MTV’s Best Dance Act award was decried as nothing short of heresy by certain members of the rock community – some of whom were still busy lamenting the fact that hair metal had been killed by grunge. Back in the mid-’90s however, things were somewhat different… And I can describe that sub-head as over-cooked because, as the Editor of the magazine at the time, I actually wrote it.Īdmittedly, in 2019 it seems like a try-hard introduction to a band whose influence on rock music is now blatantly obvious. Punk thug Mörat reckons they’re one of the heaviest bands ever,” continued the rather over-cooked sub-head. Techno terrorists The Prodigy are for real. ‘Do Not Adjust Your Set’ ran the headline of the very first Prodigy feature that appeared in Kerrang! back in December 1995.

No music prodigy video