The Prodigy had taken dance music to a whole new level in the early 90s, marching it into the mainstream with their frenetic meld of rave, techno and breakbeat. But the Essex crew were never ones to sit still. Despite the fact their 1994 game-changing second record Music For The Jilted Generation had been a huge success, by late 1995 the band’s ringleader Liam Howlett was plotting a new way forward. “I was on a bit of a mission to move away from the rave scene, that had kind of gone,” he told Triple J podcast Inspired in 2019. “We were breaking out and trying to do something a bit different.”
Howlett, who was constantly writing at the time, had already fused rock riffs into his band’s work, basing a guitar part on …Jilted Generation standout Voodoo People on a riff from Nirvana’s Very Ape. As he came to work on the song that would define The Prodigy’s next phase, it was the early Foo Fighters cut Weenie Beenie that he had in mind, keen to inject some of that amped-up band-in-a-room energy into his own work.
It was another song that he turned to to start the process, though. A big fan of The Breeders’ 1993 album Last Splash, Howlett had met Breeders singer and guitarist Kim Deal when her group and The Prodigy had appeared at festivals together and he was enamoured by the guitar sound on the record. A sort of churning, drone effect they used on the song S.O.S particularly caught his ear. He looped it and crafted a guitar riff on a keyboard of his own out of it. One of the 90s’ greatest singles had its starting point. This was the beginning of Firestarter.
“Our guitarist at the time, Jim Davies, came round and played was I’d written,” Howlett recalled. “That took ten minutes – all the best things are done quick. I was writing the track are you hear it. I was thinking, ‘Right, this track needs drums from hell to come in’, cos it had such an evil build that it needed something to pay off with the drums.”
At that point, though, Howlett had no idea about the key addition that was about to turn the song into a world-beater. The Prodigy’s music had yet to incorporate vocals into its sound, with charismatically menacing pair Keith Flint and Maxim operating more as dancers-turned-MCs. But that would all change on Firestarter.
Howlett had been the one to encourage it. It had become a little comedy routine for the late, great Flint to burst into a Rage Against The Machine-style improvised vocal over the top of a random track to make his bandmates laugh, but Howlett saw something in it. “If you could focus that and do that seriously, let’s try and do it on a track,” he told Flint.
When Flint arrived at Howlett’s house whilst he was working on this new song, something clicked. “The backing track for Firestarter was almost done,” Flint recounted, “and I said, ‘If you were gonna put me on anything, that would be what I’d be on’.”
Grabbing a pen and a piece of paper, Flint began working on the lyrics for what would be his debut vocal performance, writing a set of words for what essentially was a description of himself.
With a demo done, they realised they had a blueprint for what their next record could be. “The way the production came out on this tune, it sounded fresh,” Howlett said. “It traced the lineage of what we were doing before but it was pushing forward a bit more.”
A few weeks later, they entered the Strongroom Studios in London to get the song down properly only to discover that they couldn’t better the raw ferocity of the version they’d laid down in Howlett’s home studio. They ended up binning that high-end take and using the demo. Similarly, they discovered that Flint delivering in his vocal in a booth, as per every other singer, wasn’t cutting it. Instead, they plugged him directly into the mixing desk and let him sing it as if he were doing it live.
Driving back from east London to Essex later that night, the duo hammered Firestarter all the way home. This was the audacious fresh start that Howlett had envisaged. “At that moment in time, it was just two mates who’d created something and it was no-one else’s, it was ours,” Howlett marvelled.
Not long after, they played it live for the first time, Flint getting over his nerves at singing and delivering a powerhouse performance that would become his trademark. “I’ll never forget, we put it in the middle of the set, and you’ve got to remember no-one had ever seen Keith with a mic in his hand or speaking,” Howlett remembered. “It was a great moment. The tune finished and the whole place just went silent then, ‘arhghhhh!'".
It was a line in the sand for The Prodigy, an era-defining smash that went to Number One and helped make them one of the world’s biggest bands. It will forever the song to define Flint, their twisted, mercurial and much-missed frontman. For Howlett, it summed up how they work at their best. “Like anything good with The Prodigy, it was all spontaneous,” he said. “It happens without any thought, off-the-cuff.” This was the moment The Prodigy showed they were a cut above everyone else.
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