ECHNO, punk or rock'n'roll - take your pick; The Prodigy have blown apart all barriers with their psychotic, pyromanic dance music, ignited the charts with their recent No 1 hits, Firestarter and Breathe, and evolved into one of the most exciting, explosive live acts around. Classically trained keyboard wizard Liam Howlett is the man behind The Prodigy's innovative sound, but the scarily familiar face of The Prodigy is Keith Flint, the clown haired dancer/frontman with the evil gurn and the large, reinforced steel girder through his nose. You know him - he's in your nightmares.
I phone Keith at his Essex home: he's just back from a tour of Germany. "We played in Hitler's bunker the other day, and it was almost like a pisstake! It was a really good buzz, like a final rubin. If Hitler was watching he would have cringed!"
Just like some modern pillars of society would, if they witnessed Keith, Maxim Reality and Leeroy Thornhill in full flight, leading the crowd like loved up drill sergeants to ever greater heights of dance driven ecstasy, while Liam pumps out the beats and bleeps with the relentless determination of a machine-gunner.
"We put a lot of effort into playing live," confirms Keith. "We feel entertainment is entertainment - you know, if you write dance music, you write music to make people move. We pride ourselves on the live act, getting it right."
Keith admits, however, that the band doesn't really rehearse for gigs, they just go on stage and get on with it. It used to be just Liam behind the keyboards and the other three goading the crowd, but now Keith has stepped into the role of lead vocalist, a satanic singer with the punk sneer, which should add a devilish dimension to the live show.
"I wrote the lyrics for Firestarter, and then the next week, that's it, you're out on stage doing it. There's no practising, you've never done lyrics before, you can't sing, and someone's just thrown you on the stage in front of 5,000 people - very, very scary. I jumped out of an aeroplane two weeks beforehand, and I have a height phobia, but I was more scared going onstage and doing Firestarter than I was of jumping out of the aeroplane."
Watching Keith in action, you'd think he wouldn't baulk at jumping into Hell itself, but the man is quick to bring things back to earth and remind us that, at the end of the day, it's only rock `n' roll. And techno, and punk and a lot else besides.
"We were just dancers, but I think we brought something from the dance scene - and I'm not talking about glow sticks and white gloves - I think we took a vibe from that and put it on the stage. And people were going, `hey, that guy's not dancing, and he's not a Morris dancer, and he's not Bez - what is he? He's up the front, he's standing there, he's nodding his head, he's doing a bit of a Freddie Mercury, he's sticking his arse out, he's going "look at me, I'm mentally deficient!" And then they speak to me in interviews and they think to themselves, hang on, he seems quite normal, what's going on here? I think there was just a little bit of confusion, that people thought, what does he do? But I mean, he does something, because people like it."
So, what drives The Prodigy and their manic frontman to do whatever it is they do? Is it dance, punk, or rock'n'roll, or something altogether darker?
"We're like a kind of fetish club, where people come along and act out their fetishes as far as letting off to music. I want people to come to the show and to rip off anything! Since I was the smallest little child alive, I've had a very weird streak, and when I was younger I was hypnotised and I used to go to psychiatrists. I had this frustration in me, and I don't know what it is to this day. But I get on that stage, and I can just let out everything. If I'm angry, if I'm happy, if I'm sad, whatever, it's my release. Something is coming out, a kind of madness that's in me."
SO perhaps we're right after all to be frightened of that demonic shock of orange hair and that Hannibal Lecter grin?
"I'm not trying to say, `ooh, I'm mad, I'm a crazy guy, you should be scared but there is something, maybe just an extension of my personality. I've had my ups and downs, and this is just an expression, and it's a way of it not coming out in my everyday life."
Phew, we can all breathe easier now.
