For Keith. Start the dance.

The routine: Out of Space into No Good

The routine runs The Prodigy's Out of Space into No Good (Start the Dance): two records, worked on the decks rather than left to play. Out of Space is the 1992 one — Max Romeo's 'I'm gonna send him to outer space' lifted from Chase the Devil, Kool Keith's Ultramagnetic MCs lines, and a breakbeat that still lifts a room thirty-four years on. No Good is the 1994 one: Kelly Charles's 'you're no good for me' over hardcore drums at around 145 BPM, marketed at the time as 'hard dance with attitude'. Both went top five in Britain, and neither has ever left a serious UK DJ's bag.

The two records were chosen for a reason. This is Keith before Firestarter — the years when he was the band's dancer, not its voice. In the Out of Space video he is the one in white overalls, a mask and fluorescent gloves; in No Good, shot in a disused cellar under Spitalfields Market, he is the one in the straitjacket, locked into a perspex box filling with smoke. These are the records he moved to, on stages and in fields, in the years when moving was the job. A routine is a dancer's tribute in a DJ's medium: hands doing what his whole body did.

The post carried the caption it carried — RIP Keith — and it is left here exactly as it went out. The rest of this piece is the history of the man it is for.

The dancer from The Barn

Keith Charles Flint was born on 17 September 1969 in Redbridge, east London. The family moved to Springfield, on the edge of Chelmsford, in the mid-1970s; he went to the Boswells School, was expelled at fifteen, and worked as a roofer. What found him at the end of the 1980s was acid house — the second summer of love arriving in Essex fields and farm buildings — and specifically The Barn, the rave club in Braintree where a local DJ called Liam Howlett played.

The band starts with a cassette. Flint asked Howlett for a tape of his DJ set; Howlett put his own home-made tracks on the B-side. Flint came back insisting the tracks be played live and offered, with his friend Leeroy Thornhill, to dance to them. That was The Prodigy in 1990: Howlett at the keyboards, Flint and Thornhill dancing, Maxim on the mic. A DJ, his records, and the people who moved to them — the oldest structure in this music, and the one this site's history pages keep coming back to.

The hits came fast. Charly went to number three in 1991; Everybody in the Place to number two; Out of Space to number five; and by the summer of 1994 Music for the Jilted Generation was a number-one album with No Good at number four. Through all of it Keith was the shape you watched — the one making a bedroom producer's breakbeats visible from the back of a field.

Firestarter: from the floor to the front

In 1996 Howlett handed him a vocal. Firestarter, released on 18 March 1996, was Keith's first performance as a singer and the band's first UK number one, three weeks at the top. Walter Stern's black-and-white video, shot in a disused Underground tunnel at Aldwych, drew complaints after Top of the Pops showed it and the BBC pulled it. The look in that video — the twin spikes of hair, the piercings, the grin — became the face of British rave to a world that had mostly never been to one.

Breathe followed in November and also went to number one. The Fat of the Land, in 1997, spent six weeks at number one in the UK and topped the Billboard 200 in America: a rave band from Essex, with a former roofer at the front, at number one in the United States. Very few British dance acts have ever done it; none looked like that.

The point worth holding, from a DJ's side: Keith was never a singer who joined a band. He was a raver who loved a DJ's records enough to stand in front of them, and the frontman was the dancer turned up. Every big-room performer since who has understood that a crowd needs a body to watch as much as a beat to follow owes him something.

Off stage: bikes, a pub and a parkrun

The afterlife of a rave icon can be quiet. His own band, Flint, made an album — Device #1 — that was shelved in 2003 after one single, Aim4. He turned to motorcycles: his Team Traction Control raced in British Superbikes and won four Isle of Man TT races across 2015 and 2016 with Ian Hutchinson riding. In 2014 he bought and renovated The Leather Bottle, a pub in the Essex village of Pleshey, and ran it until 2017; locals in nearby Dunmow remembered a genial, unassuming man rather than the Firestarter.

On Saturday 2 March 2019 he ran the Chelmsford Central parkrun and set a personal best of 21 minutes 22 seconds. Two days later, on 4 March, he was found dead at his home in North End, near Great Dunmow. He was 49. At the full inquest that May the coroner recorded an open verdict, finding there was not enough evidence to be certain of his intent.

The procession through Braintree

His funeral, on 29 March 2019, was at St Mary's Church in Bocking, and the town he came home to gave him a send-off rave bands rarely get: a horse-drawn hearse, a motorbike escort, and thousands of people lining a mile and a half of Braintree's streets, many of them playing his records out loud. A fan campaign put Firestarter back into the UK chart at number 58 that month; Donatella Versace dedicated a Versace menswear show to him; a mural by Akse P19 went up in Hackney in 2021. Howlett and Maxim took the band back on the road in 2022.

For a DJ the tribute is more direct than any of those. You play the records. Out of Space still lifts a room in 2026 exactly as it did in 1992, and No Good still starts the dance. A routine to those two records is a way of keeping a dancer moving.

Why a homage belongs in this practice

This site's history pages argue that British dance music is one continuous inheritance: sound systems into rave, rave into jungle and garage, and everything the London floor plays now on top of that. The Prodigy sit at the join. They came out of the same Essex fields and rooms as the hardcore that became jungle, and they carried breakbeat and a raver's energy into the biggest rooms in the world without cleaning it up. Playing them in an open-format set is not nostalgia; it is a footnote to a debt.

And the personal one. The caption on the post says what it says. Plenty of people who grew up on this music could say something like it — a record, a performer, a room that arrived at the right moment and held on. If that was ever you, and things are hard now: Samaritans are on 116 123, free, any hour, from any phone.