Miranda Sawyer explains why the Prodigy track is so much more than a playlist favourite. Plus see Miranda in conversation with Chris Difford at the Idler Festival – details below

This is a story of two people: me and a guy who was born a couple of years after me, in east London, though he grew up in suburban Essex. OK, so let’s do him first. When this guy was young, he used to play his music really loud in his bedroom – Madness, Gary Numan or The Jam. This, of course, is pretty usual for a kid, but while he was playing his music, he used to chuck himself around. Bounce off the bed, slam into the floor, hurl himself into the wardrobe. His parents would come up and tell him to stop, but he couldn’t, really. Often the only way he could was to actually smash his head on the wall. It was what the music did to him, what he was playing it for. It released the inchoate rage inside. Or maybe not rage. Just… energy.

Anyway, he went to school, like kids do, but he had severe dyslexia and that, plus the wardrobe-confronting energy inside him, meant he wasn’t exactly celebrated. He was put into remedial class, where, he remembered later, he was taught how to use a ruler, for some reason. He was impatient with this. He was impatient with everything. At home, when he was called in for his tea, if he got into the kitchen and his mum said “three minutes!”, he would leave the room to do stuff, and then come back in three minutes. This wasn’t just because he was impatient. It was also because the atmosphere at home was bad: his dad was violent, and he hated him. Anyhow, the kid’s parents split up, which was good. He was expelled from school when he was 15, which was neither good nor bad.

He became a roofer, and a raver. A raving roofer. He roofed, he raved. By the late 1980s, Essex was rave central and he dived right in. His particular favourite club, the Barn, was in Braintree, and his particular favourite DJ would play there, and after the raves finished, this DJ would DJ at after-parties. Our hero would badger him at these parties, saying, “Ah mate, play the one that goes ‘whoop whoop’!”. (This reminds me of trying to find classical music tunes, of going into HMV and saying, “Have you got the one that goes, la-la-laaa-la-la-la-la-la-laaa?”)

Anyway, one day the DJ gave our guy a tape, with a mix of “whoop whoop” tunes on one side and the DJ’s own music on the other. Our guy loved it and told the DJ, “If you’re going to do PAs, me and my best mate, we’re your dancers.” They roped in an MC and their first gig was at Labyrinth, a pub in East London where the owner told them he had only put a band on once before, and they’d been dragged off stage by the crowd and beaten up. Our lot, a bit nervous, turned up at midday. They were on at 2am. They smashed it.
Can you guess who it is yet, readers? I’m talking about the Prodigy and, in particular, Keith Flint.

OK, so park that for a bit. Now I’m going to talk about the other person, which is me. I grew up in suburbia, in a place like Essex, but up north. My parents did argue, but they loved each other really and they loved me and my brother. I wasn’t dyslexic. I did well at school.
But throughout my childhood and teenage years, I too would lock myself in my room and throw myself around to music, though I used to pretend I was practising gymnastics. I too had an energy inside me that was only released by playing certain tracks very loud and then literally chucking myself upside down onto my head.

And that energy lasted after I left school and into my 20s and 30s. I can remember being at university, in a town where there was very little nightlife and the handful of clubs there required you to wear heels to get in. Me and my friends once tried without them and the bouncer said, “Come back when you’re real women.” So no joy there. But I was so full of this mad energy that I’d have to go out at 3am to a piece of grass outside my room and dance like a loony – to no music at all.

After university, I can remember moving to London, living in a shared house and staying up all night by myself without any stimulants because… who knew why? I’d stand on a chair in the kitchen on a Saturday morning looking at my older flatmates, who were waking up gently, sleepily rolling spliffs, and shout at them “What are we going to doooooo today?”

Luckily for me and my older flatmates, rave happened, and merged with indie music and I was saved. I went out. The first time I went to an all-night rave, in a film studio in Battersea, I arrived at midnight and there was a crowd outside the studio’s enormous doors. It was snowing. We were stuck out there in the snow until someone at the front barged through the doors and the crowd surged forward and I was carried in with my feet not touching the ground.

My friend left after a bit but I stayed all night. Everyone was really friendly and kept asking me: “Are you on one?” I didn’t know what they meant and just smiled at them. I stayed until 9am. I loved it.

When I went to other raves, or to gigs or parties, sometimes I took drugs but not always. I stayed up through the energy of the other people and the music and I would walk home at 9am with the sweat making my hair stick to my face, and my T-shirt to my skin and I would feel… relaxed. Like I’d bombed down the hill on a bicycle with no brakes and got to the bottom and not crashed.

But as you get older – I’m now in my 50s – the energy required for you to live changes. It has to become less rollercoaster, less up, less down, to become more even and consistent… Though even now I get bursts of that mad energy.

Which brings me to the track “Firestarter” and why we need it. Because honestly, I think most of us have that energy, no matter what age we are, and there are a few tracks that will get it out of us. Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is one. Dizzee Rascal’s “Bonkers” is another. I have a test for this. It’s called the toddler test. The test is: when you play this track to a toddler, do they lose their minds? Do they run around in a frenzy and then bomb up to an adult and punch them in the willy? Yes? If you have a spare toddler, why not try this at home? Play them “Firestarter”, loud. (Maybe cover your crotch with your hands.) And watch them go nuts. The power hurtles through their whole body, slams into their brain, their tiny, enormous soul and sets them free. They can’t stop themselves. It’s toddler crack.

Back to Keith. “Firestarter” was the first track Keith sang on, the first time he’d picked up a mic and performed. Liam Howlett had nabbed the “hey hey hey” from the Art of Noise’s “Close to the Edit”; the drums from Ten City’s “Devotion”; the guitar drone from The Breeders’ “S.O.S.” mangled into an unsettling wail, and made them into something queasy and lurching and weird. Keith said: “If I was ever going to do a vocal, this is the track I would do it on.”

The lyrics are Keith’s and they are Keith. He wrote loads on the spot; Liam picked out the ones that worked. They’re amazing lyrics. Here are some…

I’m the fear addicted, the danger illustrated
I’m the bitch you hated, filth infatuated
I’m the pain you tasted, felt intoxicated
I’m the self-inflicted mind detonator,
I’m the one infected, twisted animator

“Self-inflicted” and “I’m the bitch you hated” were the words that meant the most to Keith. He had the word INFLICTED tattooed on his stomach. Before “Firestarter”, Keith never had a microphone on stage. He used to communicate with the audience through the medium of dance. That and the internationally understood move for “Let’s have it”. You know that move. It’s where you step forward, arms out before you, hands upwards, and you flick your fingers, together, like little people, back towards you.

Anyway, once he’d written “Firestarter” Keith said, about singing it: “I’ve been screaming with my body for the past six years, so now it’s time to scream with my mouth.” He also said: “What you see in ‘Firestarter’ happens inside me even if I’m on the Tube. If I’m sitting there… I dance without moving my body.”

“Firestarter” went straight in at Number One. The Prodigy filmed the video for it in a disused Tube station. Top of the Pops only played it once.
Now, I love music, obviously – I’ve been writing about it for over 30 years – and I love fine art and films and books and all culture, pretty much. Still, I love music the most, because it’s the only art form that has room for our own stories within it, as well as the story of the people who made it. Music comes with us throughout our lives, because it helps us tell the story of our lives. Music is our lives.

But I often think we concentrate a bit too hard on beautiful music, on the songs that move us to tears, that help us through heartbreak or lift us to joy. When you listen to Desert Island Discs, everyone always picks “The Lark Ascending”, don’t they? It’s much rarer that anyone chooses “Voodoo Ray”, or “Anarchy in the UK”, or “Setting Sun”. But we need those tracks. Because there are emotions inside us that we suppress, in order to get through the day or, you know, not be arrested. Especially women. Women are often required to present themselves as more contained than men, expected to hobble ourselves in heels or wear frocks that make our tits look good. We’re not expected to show our inner wildness except in a sexy way. Come back when you’re real women.

And when we get to middle age? Well, let’s face it, we’re the bitch you hated. If you want to scream, do so soundlessly, possibly into the towel in the bathroom. And please don’t dance, mum, it’s just embarrassing.

But that “Firestarter” energy is in all of us and, yes, it’s in women too. That mad adrenaline, that frenzy, that ferociousness. It’s to do with every resentment, every disappointment, all your rage, your hurt, but it’s also to do with your triumphs and challenges and your actual living lifeforce… It’s sort of nauseous and sort of dangerous and men tend to act it out and women tend to take it out on themselves. We need tracks like “Firestarter” or we’ll all just be beating up our wardrobes, or only dancing on the Tube in our minds, or smashing our heads against the wall because we want that noise inside our brains to stop. We all need toddler crack, even when we aren’t toddlers.

Liam was once asked what the emotion was that he was trying to conjure with his music. He said: “Oh just a ten tonne weight dropping.”
In “Firestarter”, Keith says, “I’m a firestarter, twisted firestarter”. But he also says: “You’re a firestarter”.

One last thing. I have a t-shirt, which I’ll try to describe. It was made by my friend Adam and has a picture of me in the 1990s on it. I’m making a face – eyes wide and teeth bared. My hair is sweaty and stuck to my cheeks. I’m dancing. And yep, you can guess what track I’m dancing to.

Miranda Sawyer’s book Uncommon People: Britpop and Beyond in 20 Songs (John Murray, £25) is a behind-the-scenes look at 20 key tracks of the nineties and the bands that made them.

This article is from Idler #102.

MIRANDA SAWYER CHATS TO CHRIS DIFFORD
AT THE IDLER FESTIVAL

Miranda Sawyer is in conversation with Squeeze songwriter Chris Difford at the Idler Festival on Sunday 12 July. Expect stories behind some of Squeeze’s best-loved songs, as well as how their latest album Trixies, written when Chris and Glen Tilbrook were teenagers, finally made it onto vinyl.

The Idler Festival runs from Friday 10 to Sunday 12 July at Fenton House and Gardens in Hampstead, London NW3.

See who else is performing and buy tickets with our festival poster here. Click on the performer’s name for details.

Click here for the festival timetables.

See you there!

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