“Can I ask you a few questions now?” Howlett says. “What makes you say we’re a techno band?” End of interview.įour days later, a final exchange on the telephone is coming to a close. When he does, he is as economic with words as Keith is free-spending. Liam Howlett, The Prodigy’s bleach-blond musical engine, the one the others still defer to, seldom speaks. “Do you feel a kind of justification, headlining a rock festival as a techno band?” Then the radio man comes back with what appears to be an innocent, throwaway parting shot. The Band Who Want To Kill Me, who fancy themselves as being at the forefront of the revolutionary vanguard (Rage Against The Machine, if you’re interested), are clearly going to hate these Essex-born enemies of sensibleness. He wants to know whether Firestarter didn’t amount to an arsonists’ charter? Whether Keith frightens people? (“Well, they get a little… cross sometimes.”) What don’t they like about touring? (Trench crotch, an ailment something like the trench foot they used to get in World War I, only, er, higher up.) And, like everyone else in the room, the poor reporter is probably feeling a little bit stoned by now. Back in the changing room, in response to I don’t know what, Keith is proclaiming magisterially: “You know us, we never, ever get stoned.” No one really annoys me.” He’s what you call a “character”. Keith, bless him, merely said: “Erm, nothing, really. When another magazine asked each member of The Prodigy, separately, what the single most irritating habit of anyone else in the band was, Maxim cited Keith’s notorious propensity for dithering Leeroy his annoying behaviour while shopping (though this, he noted, was just one of many unfortunate traits) and Liam his sonorous arse, which “goes off like an alarm clock at six o’clock every morning”. Short, stout, dressed in orange, he is like a cross between Max Wall, Uncle Fester, Toad of Toad Hall, Private Godfrey from Dad’s Army, Bart Simpson’s mate Krusty the Clown and, we have to say it, Sid Vicious. Unusually long lashes give his eyes a soft, feminine quality. For one thing, he is seldom to be seen without a puckish grin playing on his lips. In the flesh, Keith could never be threatening, though.
#KEITH THE PRODIGY DRIVERS#
Like it or not, he is the demonic public face of The Prodigy now, the one passing cab drivers shout “Oi, Firestarter!” at – all because of that one inspired, beautifully chaotic song. There are stories of children being terrified by the sight of him shivering and shaking in the Firestarter video on Top Of The Pops, though the reality is that kids are fascinated, perhaps recognising him as one of their own. Keith has turned out to be The Prodigy’s secret weapon. The poor reporter tries to think of another question. He is also trying to perch a folded-up towel on his head like a turban. In answer to the journalist’s question about the strangest show the Prod have ever done, Keith is spinning some yarn about a benefit gig in a prison to raise funds for a new library trolley. With the mic in his outstretched hand barely visible through the bilious clouds of smoke, he looks a little like a doomed Luftwaffe pilot squinting anxiously into the mist. He’s sitting on a wooden chair, looking a touch nervous, wearing goggle-like specs and chunky headphones. So this is causing me some discomfort, but it pales next to the far greater unease Liam, Leeroy, Maxim and, especially, the horny-haired Keith, are visiting upon a Belgian radio journalist who’s been sent to interview them before they close the Pink Pop festival in Holland. What’s worse (and this was always inevitable), the band you’re with, the one dance act Noel Gallagher rates, whose last album Bono took on holiday, whose last single Smashing Pumpkins covered on tour, whose Glastonbury show an envious stage director recently described as “the best theatrical event” he saw last year – the band of the moment, The Prodigy – think their neighbours are cool.īuzzin’. It is a strange and unforgiving sort of God who places the changing room of the band you’re with bang next door to one of only two acts in the world who have publicly expressed a desire to kill you.
0 kommentar(er)
