The Prodigy have produced one of the finest frontmen ever to destroy a stage, and now thankfully for us, Keith Flint’s started the most kick ass band you’ve heard in years - punk hasn’t been this snotty since The Sex Pistols.

Fronting a band which bares his surname as their moniker, Keith’s not worried about the cynical among you thinking what you’re thinking, "I wouldn’t say I was bothered about it. I try not to give any of the politics surrounding the music business too much thought, otherwise it can sway where you’re going and what you’re doing. We’re a band and that comes across. It’s not like Keith Flint and his backing band."

Flint the man knows that Flint the band - Jim Davies on guitar and both Tony Howlett (no relation to Prodigy mainman Liam Howlett) and Kieron Pepper on drums - is as real a band as it gets, "it’s not about me respecting the other guys and getting them in. Saying, ‘oh don’t worry guys, you’ll be in the pictures.’ We are a fucking band and we’re all incredibly relevant. There’s not one of this band that we could function without."

Keith’s not trying to erase his past, he’s still in and a significant part of the Prodigy: "that’s where I’m from and I’m proud of that, so that’s good, and Jim has his roots as we all do in our own way. We look like a band and we sound like a band. It doesn’t sound like Keith Flint singing on some rock music. It sounds like a well gelled piece of music. It’s not like they played tracks and I laid some vocals over it."

"The sound’s not based on what we should be doing, it’s just what we were doing. It’s something that was good fun. It was so touchable, to just go in there with an idea. It was just really good fun," Keith says recalling the hazy days of last summer, when four people found they had more in common than just being friends. It was a meeting of minds, on such a subtle level that no one noticed it happening. Kieron, the then live drummer for Prodigy, popped round Keith’s house one day and it all began, "Flint was originally a joke, it was really tongue in cheek, but initially it started through Kieron teaching me guitar, Tony being a
drummer and a close friend and us just sort of jamming. Getting excitement for that and the creation of that. Just chucking some ideas down on Kieron’s eight track hard disc recorder," Keith explains.

Jim joined the fold, shortly before the demise of the band Pitchshifter with whom he was playing guitar, and slowly the pieces began to fit into place. From there on in, all of them spent their time around Keith’s house, just kicking ideas about, "we had a summer of writing, bringing up ideas and working on older stuff. It seemed to be more exciting when it was all together cos it felt like a band.

All the elements were there and we knew what was going on," Keith remembers. "With what Jim brought to the party, just what he does, once we got together with him we sorted out about 15 songs. It was a great feeling and we used to jam silly. It was so hit and miss but the more you let yourself go and the more you want to be in it, fuck being self-concious, just let yourself go and you realise then that you create great things.’

As seems the way with Flint, selecting who would produce the album was a very natural occurance, and Killing Joke bassist Youth fell in behind the mixing desk, "he got it and was really into it. He came down after the four of us had literally spent the whole summer together round Keith’s house writing songs. When Youth came down it was the first time anyone came to see us. It was really weird when someone came in from the outside," says Kieron. When they finally got over being found out by someone, they went in to Olympic studios in London to record the album, with Youth producing, "there’s quite a few songs with really long outros, cos we’d just go off on one playing live in the studio. Youth was behind the screen almost conducting us," says Jim. To which Keith adds, "Youth would say, ‘that’s the one,’ so we’d keep the live jam on the album. It was just a little nugget of gold for us."

Recording the album very raw, and a lot of the time as a live band, was something all of them really enjoyed discovering. As Keith describes it, you’d think it was almost spiritual, "we put a bit more soul back into it without even trying. Just breathing with it a bit. There’s so much opportunity when playing it all live. You just go with the push and the pull of it and how the energy changes. Whilst you’re in there doing it, you’re with a big loud live room, and it’s just really there."

"We were so focussed in our way of thinking that this was it. We went into the live room and played the songs, to see where we were going to take the album, and we knew we had it, that we didn’t need to change a thing. It was that honest. There’s no hidden agenda. It’s just the four of us," says Kieron, who also played bass on the album.

After a year and a half honing their sound and getting their songs right, Keith explains that all they want is to be on the road, "our biggest thing is just to get out live. We’re greedy and hungry to play in front of people. We’ve listened to the album, reflected on it and rehearsed for the last three months, we couldn’t be more ready!"