Keith Flint  is dead. The news will pass quickly and many will rightly say that there are many other musicians to be pitied. But not me.

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I was eleven when I bought the "Danceteria 2" cassette. It was a compilation of very tamarra electronics mixed by  Fargetta  and Molella, full of acid sounds, samples taken from everywhere and imbued with a feeling of anxiety halfway between rave and apocalypse.

There was one piece that made me fly more than any other: it was called  Everybody in the Place  and the artist was credited as_cc781905-5cde-3194-bb3b- 136bad5cf58d_ The Prodigy .

Back then, before the internet, it was hard to get information and you could only hope for record stores, but they not only had none of this Prodigy, but they didn't even know if there was an entire album.

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A couple of years passed and I found the cd of  Music For The Jilted Generation  in a shop. It turned out that what I thought was a producer was actually a band.

The Prodigy became my favorite band and definitively convinced me of how stupid it was to limit music to one genre: energy and personality could tie things that were very ghettoized at the time (at least in Italy) such as punk, hip-hop, metal and electronics. The idea was also born of making electronics not as an individual but as a group.

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I still had doubts about the respective roles of the Prodigy. There was Liam, mind and proponent of all music. There was  Maxim , singing in  Poison . And live there were two dancers: one very tall, named  Leeroy Thornhill  and another really strange.

The strange one was called  Keith Flint . I considered him by far the most useless member of the Prodigy.

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But one rainy day in 1996, the television sent something that hit like a punch in the stomach. It was the best song I'd ever heard, with the most powerful black and white video in history - there was still nothing that sounded like

Firestarter . And the most incredible thing was that it wasn't Maxim singing, but Keith. That strange and useless dancer had turned into a  Johnny Rotten  of the future: jerky, wild, amphetamine. I fell madly in love with that sound and that aesthetic.

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Up until then, naively, I thought I was the only one who loved the Prodigy. But a few days later, leaving school, I saw something on the newsstand that almost gave me a heart attack:   Keith Flint  was on the cover of a magazine, with just a alongside Renton of  Trainspotting . The title was a "toxic and prodigy young" shit.

From that day on I started buying  Rumore  and I did it for at least five years, while the Prodigy became more and more famous. It was hard to go to a party and not find yourself dancing  Out of Space  - even if it was a track from the first record, which I love. Some fans of the new hour thought that Prodigy was just a pseudonym of Keith, at least as long as  Breathe  not depopulated and everyone understood that he was only one of the two singers of this singular innovative English training.

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I gradually stopped listening to them, partly out of underground snobbery (which fortunately I lost), partly because it didn't seem to me that the new productions were so interesting. Sure,   Smack My Bitch Up  was a bomb, but what they had to say, in my opinion, they had already said.

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In 2009 I went to see them at the  Sherwood Festival  and, when the concert ended, more than sweaty we seemed to have just come out of the shower. The energy that Keith was able to unleash from the stage was incredible, despite the past years.

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A little while ago the phone rang e  Martino  asked me if I knew about Keith. He asked me like that, as if he were a friend. I know it's stupid, but I've been hurt, much more than for certainly more important and significant musicians.

I no longer followed the Prodigy but still today, inside of me, there is a little Keith ready to go wild and have a tongue in the front bass line.

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Goodbye, firefighter.