When Keith Flint died in 2019—it seemed over. What was left of The Prodigy?
“I didn’t actually remember speaking to Maxim that much for probably a year, or probably months on end,” Liam Howlett says, of his fellow Prodigy band member, formally known as Maxim Reality. “No one really knew what we were going to do, just getting over that.”
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A year and a half or so had passed, and the members of the group naturally found themselves talking again. Still very much mourning, but starting to kick around the idea of playing some shows together again.
“All these questions that we didn’t really [have] the answers for,” Howlett says. “The end result was…the only way to find out was to actually do some fucking gigs and book some gigs.”
That led to a little tour in 2020, which Howlett calls “one of the hardest fucking things” he’s ever done, but it felt important. There was obviously the glaring hole without Keith, but it gave the remaining members a sense of drive to keep it going perhaps for him, with his spirit inextricably linked to the whole thing.
The tours got a little more expansive as things felt “right,” and The Prodigy found itself playing festivals again—big ones. Now, the band is on the Coachella poster. It’ll be the first time The Prodigy has come back to the States after getting the band back together, and it’s a big one, along with a few San Francisco dates.
Howlett is excited for the opportunity it presents, though. At this point, having been gone so long, the Coachella shows will be a way for him to rediscover the American audience as they rediscover The Prodigy.
“Going back to America is going to be interesting for us because everywhere else we’ve played in the world … it’s kind of like we never left,” he says. “We always go to Europe, we know what we’re expecting. We know what to expect in Japan and different places. America, it feels like a brand new country, so that’s exciting.”
The American Coachella attendee is different than it might’ve been back when it was just a single weekend when The Prodigy used to play. But, as Howlett points out, a lot’s happened in America in regards to electronic music in the interim. EDM has cemented itself as the primary tastemaker and, if you listen to certain music outlets, the killer of rock music and the guitar band.
Howlett agrees that it’s a big opportunity for the band to recapture a younger audience, or maybe allow themselves to be “rediscovered” by EDM fans looking to trace back to the roots of the artists they love, but he says age demographics won’t influence what he and the band do. Put simply, “It’ll go off.”
This time, Coachella will be streamed via livestream to everyone who can’t afford to be on the ground. And while Howlett relents that it’s cool to have such a wide reach, there’s still that London rave purist in there saying that if you weren’t there, you just weren’t there.
“You need to see The Prodigy, you need to be there in front of us,” he says. “There’s no substitute for that. And especially in the world we live in now, with all this fucking streaming and whatever—I’m old school as far as standing in front of a band, seeing people sweat and wiping their eyes and things like that. That’s what it’s about.”
In the Spotify and livestream era, the live element is the one thing that can’t be taken from musicians, in Howlett’s view.
“It should be held very high,” he says. “It is to us a very important thing, like, top of the list. Anything else in music, you can download, you can grab, you can steal people’s music. Everyone can do that. But to go stand in front of a band, someone you like, and watch them deliver music to you, there’s nothing to replace that, really.”
It’s special that after all of this time, and after the unthinkable tragedy the band has navigated, there’s still the spark that excites Howlett to get into the studio and “make noise,” and allows the whole thing to go off. It hasn’t gone away, even if it was hard to find for a little while. But it’s never felt like work or a chore.
“We live for this shit,” he says. “We absolutely live for this. We’re planning gigs for the end of next year. We’re that far ahead. We get excited about what we could do. It’s constant for us. How can we make it better? How can we deliver this? It’s like a gang, our band. We lost Keith sadly, but we still feel like he’s with us. He’s in the studio, he’s always on my mind.”
There’s the idea that the only true death comes when people stop talking about you. For Keith Flint, as long as The Prodigy is out playing for the people who love them, he’ll always be there. He’ll be there in the tent for people to discover or rediscover. And he’s certainly there with Howlett and the rest of the band wherever they go.
“It was devastating that we lost him, but now I’ve gotten to a stage where my brain only thinks of the funny shit and the great times,” he says. “I don’t get bogged down in sadness, I just laugh. I don’t know if that’s a natural protection or something, but that’s where I am now with it.”
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