PRODIGY ] ]]ENTER]Prodigy ]] GOD-DAAMMMNNNN!!!! DID you see the size of that girl's breasts?!!??" Keith Flint's arms are flailing desperately. He's trying to stop himself crashing off his stool on to the floor of the Toronto television studio. Either side of him, bandmates Leeroy Thornhill, Maxim Reality and Liam Howlett sport expressions that range from mock-resigned head-shaking to bouts of adolescent giggles. Somewhere out of camera range a tall, bearded man called Bob, whose job is to sell as many Prodigy records as possible in Candada, is bent double, as if someone's just thumped him in the stomach. It's difficult to tell whether he's laughing or crying. The flustered presenter rustles her sheaf of notes and ploughs gamely on. "Is this the sort of thing that happens backstage?" she asks the Prodigy boys. "You get to meet large-breasted girls?" Liam is the first to recover: "I'm not really into large breasts," he offers, attempting to steer the interview off the rocks. But Keith, who will later claim that he didn't realise the show was going out live, is still gazing manically through the studio's plate glass window and off into the street. "My God!" he blurts, a little calmer. "It was like an eclipse of the sun!" Regaining his posture and stifling an expletive under his breath, Keith Flint rolls his eyes and gets back to the job in hand. He doesn't wear the look of a man whose puerile yet strangely endearing behaviour has just been broadcast live to a quarter of a million Canadians. But then again, confounding expectations and getting up people's noses if exactly what the Prodigy, and Keith in particular, are all about. The Prodigy have been in Canada less than 15 hours. They only have another 22 to go. Strap yourselves in: it's going to be a hell of a ride. THE STORY's pretty familiar by now. Dancefloor buddies Flint and Thornhill approach the young DJ at Braintree's The Barn night club in 1991, hoping to get a mix tape off him. The DJ, Liam, obliges, but sticksa selection of his own compositions on Side Two. Blown away by his tunes, Keith and Leeroy offer to dance onstage to Liam's music- happily, he's just signed a record deal with Beggars Banquet subsidiary XL. A mutual friend introduces the trio to Maxim, an MC weaned on reggae sound systems. They don't meet until the night of their first gig, in east London. It all goes swimmingly, and the Prodigyis born. P] After a string of largely instrumental rave anthems make the band a regular feature in the upper reaches of the singles chart, and with their manic appearances at the huge parties of the early '90s becoming an increasingly trumpeted attraction, Liam finds himself staring out from a stage in Scotland at 15.000 E'd up clubbers and decides it's all far too easy. Ditching the format that's brought him and the band fame and fortune, but not a great deal of respect, Howlett goes back to the drawing board and creates a brooding masterpiece of dark dance majesty. Trailed by the massive single 'No Good (Start The Dance)', 'Music For The Jilted Generation' is salivated over by fans and critics alike, goes straight into the album charts an Number One and is nominated for the 1994 Mercury Music Prize. Liam proves it's possible to be both credible and successful at the same time, but he unwittingly gives himself a bit of a headache: now does he top that?" Then, at the start of last year, a new Prodigy record punches its way out of radio speakers and into the national consciousness like no other before. 'Firestarter' sounds pretty strange anyway, but the vocal, from Keith, is coruscating. Steadfastly refusing to appear on Top Of The Pops, the band end up forcing the Beeb to screen the stark black and white video for the track when it debuts at Number One. With Keith cavorting around a poorly lit underground tunnel, screeching about being "the twisted Firestarter", the clip arouses more complaints than TOTP have ever had before. And in the midst of the attendant tabloid fury, the Prodigy suddenly become Britain's most controversial pop stars. One single later, the genuinely unsettling 'Breathe' (their best-selling release to date), and it's time for album number three. Only by now the buzz around the group, particularly in America, is huge. Hailed as the figureheads of a new British invasion of 'electronica' or 'digi-rock' by the US media, the Prodigy blow out a planned triple-bill Stateside tour with the Chemical Brothers and the Orb. The album is delayed. The group are reported to have turned down the chance to hitch a ride across the globe in the company of U2, and the rumours that Liam is having difficuty finishing the record gather momentum. P] Then suddenly, the band's UK label announce a firm release date: journalists and industry people are flown in a fleet of helicopters to a farm in the Hertfordshire countryside to hear some of the new record, 'The Fat Of The Land'. It's slower, more hip-hop-oriented than before, with more vocal tracks and guitars, and is more than enough to push them ever further up fame's greasy pole. And, confirming that they're ready, the group finally schedule some North American gigs. Which brings us to Toronto. TORONTO IS a sprawling and surprisingly green city, home to four million people. Sat on the banks of Lake Ontario, an inland water mass bigger than many countries, the city can lay impressive claim to the world's tallest free-standing structure, the CN Tower. Beneath the revolving restaurant near its top, a section of floor has been removed and replaced with glass. Visitors are encouraged to walk across the three-inch thick panes while looking 1.500ft straight down- an unearthly experience lent extra weirdness by the gentle, but far from imperceptible swaying you can feel. If the CN Tower was rigid it would snap, so the designers had to make sure it had enough give in it to move a bit in the constant winds. Keith hasn't got time on this visit to Toronto, but he'd love to walk across the glass floor in the CN Tower. It's the sort of 'buzz' that rules his life. The same sort of feeling he gets when he's on stage with the Prodigy, dancing to Liam's breakbeat-fuelled headfuck tunes or, better still, bellowing his own twisted lyrics across the top of them. But when the band goes months without playing live, as has been the case for much of the past year, and Keith needs to hit those highs somehow, he'll turn to his beloved Fireblade motorbike. And do everything he can to get to the point where he almost crashes. "Every now and then you have something that's a near-death situation," Keith explains quite matter of factly. "I used to enjoy crashing as much as riding. The slow motion trip that you get as things are coming towards you, and the way your head works under those situations, when you are doing speeds of, like, 180 mph... I imagine sometimes how fast my back wheel is spinning at that speed, and kind of look at bridges as they're coming up, and imagine hitting'em. You can almost imagine how far you would fly if you hit something stationary at that speed. At those speeds your eyes kind of flicker, and what you see is gone as you see it. And that's quite a good little buzz." "I used to do motocross," he continues. "I used to like my forearms weren't gonna hold on to the bike. So that when you went into the jumps you were kind of unsure if you were gonna be able to hold on any longer. And I used to like that sort of tempting fate situation." P] Liam worries about Keith when he's out on his bike. He's had first-hand experience of his friend's predilection for pushing himself and his machine to the limits. "I was on his bike doin' 160 down the A12, and I was thinking: 'Fuck, I'm not gonna go much faster than this,'" Howlett recalls. "I was in the fast lane, and I turned around and there was Keith, going past me at 180. This was in the middle of the day, there was loads of cars around, and he passed me about ten inches away from me. He's nutter on a bike, but he's got good control. But yeah, I do worry about him a lot." Liam prefers cars to bikes, but he doesn't think four-wheeled transport is going to prolong Keith's lifespan. "He drives a fucking car like he drives a bike," says the production and keyboard genius. "It got to the stage where I didn't actually want to get in a car with him. He'd try and get through really small spaces. I've had a couple of crashes with him in cars. But he's not stupid. He used to be stupid, but he's not any more. He did have a crash, but he chilled out after that. It was good really, he needed that. And after that he calmed down, but he's got worse on the bike. But that's all part of his personality, it brings that out." AND IT's Keith's personality- specifically, the parts of it that enabled him to write, perform and record the vocal to 'Firestarter'- that has been the decisive factor in the Prodigy's rise to the top of the pile. Without overlooking the contributions of Maxim and Leeroy (of which more later), it's Keith's instantly recognisable image and eviscerating vocal display that set the band on their current path. Leeroy says that "all the lyrics (in 'Firestarter') are just totally Keith." He also reckons that Keith's a "watery" person, and that he gets affected by the full moon. Liam, for his part, reckons that "without his drive, and the fact he's a brilliant performer- he's the best live performer in England- it wouldn't have worked." But for Keith it wasn't simply a question of capturing something of his moods and emotions: in a manner that has absolutely nothing to do with the song's commercial success, 'Firestarter' changed Keith's life. "When I was so very, very small- eight, nine, ten, when tunes stirred me up more than anything else- I wanted to smack my head on the wall. I really wanted to hit my head on the wall and run at the wall and stuff," he remembers. "I just couldn't... get it... out. And that's what's happening now. I know that kid is coming out now. That's why doing the vocals is so cool, because it's another way out. And that's why I think it's so honest in a way, because I can relate that to something no one used to see. People used to hear it, and someone used to have to clear up afterwards, but no one used to see that. I don't think people realise how honest it is." "Keith's dad's quite successful, and because Keith was a little mod and then he was a biker, there was such a clash there", Leeroy postulates the following day. "I imagine that his dad expected a bit more from him than he got. But now the band's come along, he's finally realised he can do so much." "When I first did 'Firestarter', I felt: 'Fucking hell, Liam has made me like myself for the first time,'" Keith confesses, animatedly. "For the first time I'd liked something I'd done. Not just musically, but personally. It's hard to explain just in that one sentence, but from that moment on I loved Liam to bits even more. 'Fuckin' 'ell, you can't do that, you've cheated my own mind! I got home and I put it on and I thought: 'I fuckin' like this', and I felt this massive wave of emotion..." Did you cry? "No!" This child-scarer, this twisted firestarter, this motorbike-mayhem trouble-causer clearly isn't keen to break the unwritten golden rule of male behaviour and admit to a blubbing session, even when hit by an event so profound it caused him to reevaluate the evidently low opinion he sometimes has of himself. But there's a side to Keith that the cameras and the tabloid hacks won't see and can't comprehend: for all his speed-freak adrenalin rushes and his on-stage menace, Keith Flint has a softer side. For example, he's really into gardening. ("You won't be able to find Keith for a week because he's out in the garden, confides Leeroy. "Or he's out digging a pond in his garden that's four feet deep and 20-odd foot long. He loves his gardening.") Hi listens to Pink Floyd on his Walkman when he's in the bath. During the few hours VOX spends with him in Toronto, he wanders off into the garden of a derelict house to get a closer look at some squirrels and, later, attempts to make polite, if excitable, conversation with a skunk. And, even when the humour turns a deep shade of blue in the back of the tour bus, Keith remains easygoing and personable company. He is, in short, a lovely man. We'll try again. You did, didn't you? "There was a tear..." he pauses, half-smilinng, starting into space. "...the throat went taut... it made me highly emotional. That was quite mental. An absolutely mental feeling. And that," he vows, turning to fix me squarely in the eye, "is as honest as it gets." ARROW HALL is a massive, barrel-vaulted shed on the outskirts of Toronto. Close to the airport and located on what appears to be an industrial estate overflowing with bingo halls, it's a far from ideal setting for the Prodigy's auspicious first gig on this 'break America' tour. With neither the intimacy of the originally planned club show- the 1.700 tickets sold out in a staggering seven minutes- nor the wide-open spaces a festival affords, the venue offers an uneasy compromise. Clearly, it would've been easier and, in term of reaching a new audience, much more productive, for the band to have bitten the corporate bullet and accepted the offer extended to them to take part in the year's biggest world tour. But Liam Howlett delights in making things difficult for himself. "I like U2, I think they're a fuckin' really good band, but it wasn't hard decision, we didn't sit there umm-ing and ahh-ing about it," he explains, mulling over the Prodigy's rejection of an offer to support the Irish rock behemoths, "I personally thought we weren't readyto do that, and we wanted to crack America on our own level. If we don't crack America, I won't be sitting here thinking: 'Fuckin' 'ell, we should've done that U2 tour,' because that's compromising, and if we don't crack it, we don't crack it. I don't care." Howlett surveys the filling space of Arrow Hall with calm detachment. The in-house DJ is playing a selection of rave and techno tracks in the minutes before the band's set, something Liam's not entirely comfortable with. "We tried to have hip-hop before going on, but it just didn't work," he muses. It's not just the involvement of seminal American rapper Kool Keith (whose 'Dr Octagon' relase on Mo' Wax last year is probably his bestknown work in Britain) on 'The Fat Of The Land' that pitches the new record closer to hip-hop than the Prodigy have been before. Liam, Maxim and Leeroy were all deeply involved in the first real wave of hip-hop that broke on British shores in the mid-to-late '80s. Liam's formative experiences as a DJ were all based in the idiom: indeed, when the sent off his taped entry to a hip-hop DJ mixing competition on London radio station GLR in 1987, his skills were developing so quickly it was only a matter of days before he'd surpassed himself again. A second entry under another name was prompty dispatched before the deadline. He won both third and first prizes. "When people were talking about the Prodigy being techno, that was a loose term, but we labelled 'techno', because I wasn't as stupid as to think we were," Howlett postulated. "We weren't ever techno. I've never written a techno record in my life." "I love the humour in the music," continues the man who rates Skint as his favourite label. "There's definitely a bit of humour in what we do. I mean, 'Smack My Bitch Up'- you can't think I'm serious about writing a record about smacking women up. There's humour involved in the tunes, it's got to be like that." ]ENTER]Writed by Maîy from VOX Magazine