The Mirror

Rave from the grave; The Prodigy are back to their best and storming Europe

• 3rd April 2009
• Gavin Martin

In the backstage tunnel at Paris's Zenith auditorium, The Prodigy - Essex-bred, 20 million album-selling rock'n' rave kings - are preparing to take the stage.

As the sound of the 7,000-strong crowd mounts, Liam Howlett, the band's musical mastermind, has the steely concentration of a team captain at the start of a cup final. Live-wire Firestarting frontman Keith Flint is as elated as a school kid who has just won a free trip to the moon.

He is grinning from ear to ear, jumping up and down on the spot and launching himself high into the air.

By contrast, towering rapper Maxim is cucumber cool, holding it all in reserve as he prepares to launch his verbal missiles at the crowd.

The Prodigy have had their differences, but tonight they seem to be bonded together tighter than ever, playing a show that is as exciting as any I have ever seen.

They have the theatrical energy of The Specials, the earth-shaking ferocity of Led Zeppelin, the in-your-face zeal of punk and rap, and the spirit of the rave culture that bred them.

Their excellent new album Invaders Must Die is a merely a taster for the transformation that takes place when they play live.

"The music is written to be played up there," agrees Howlett, 38, talking earlier in the band's hotel. "That's where it fulfils its purpose. It's reallyintense. When I come offstage I can't sleep for five hours - although that might be to do with a lot of other things!" Prior to the group forming in 1990, Liam had actually been a piano prodigy, but he gave it up for the glory of rock 'n' rave.

"When I was 15, I sent a mixtape into a competition on a London radio show," he says. "I was worried it wasn't good enough so I sent another one in under a different name. I ended up coming first and third. But to me, rave culture always felt renegade and lawless. I arrived at my first party to find 500 people in a forest and the police knew nothing about it. It was like an underground movement.

It could have been any music, but it was about community and it really blew my mind." At one point in the show Flint, 39, comes to the edge of the stage goading the crowd. It's terrifically entertaining and, he insists, not a pose.

"We've got a punk ethic of standing up to things that annoy you," he says, "and not just taking it. That's not in our nature." When The Prodigy released Firestarter back in 1996, Keith became Britain's most recognisable pop star.

"I lived it every day, that's for sure," he says. "I've always been an 'out there' sort of character. The funniest time was walking through a shopping centre in Manchester and someone sneered, 'That guy really thinks he's Keith Flint'." By the end of the 90s, Liam Keith decided to shake the band format up and neither Flint nor Maxim were asked to contribute to the 2004 album Always Outnumbered Never Outgunned.

"It was tough, of course it was," admits Flint. "You can't put all that passion, love and respect into a relationship and have it go into the washing machine and not get hurt. We all know that what we've been through makes us stronger, but kissing and making up is one thing.

The only way of finding if the bond was rock solid was finding if it worked onstage. We had to get up there and rock it like The Prodigy or get out of town." The Paris show is the end of the band's mainland European tour and they have brought a set of friends along to celebrate. At the side of the stage, Liam's wife and former All Saint Natalie Appleton dances with her old bandmate Melanie Blatt.

Back at the band's hotel, the champagne flows before we all head off to the aftershow party at a nearby club. Keith, however, is notable by his absence. These days all his partying takes place where it matters, onstage.

"I'm totally clean now," he told me earlier. "And I didn't have to do rehab either. I got married. That means more than anything to me and the band mean absolutely everything.

" When you have two things equally important and you're intelligent, you ask, ' What am I doing? I can go down with the sinking ship or I can get up there onstage and live'. I chose to live." And how! UK tour starts Sunday in Cardiff.

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• Keith Flint