Kool Keith and Ced Gee have shared their memories of the late Keith Flint. The Prodigy frontman was found dead in his home earlier this month.
- The NME Obituary: Keith Flint, 1969-2019: the twisted face of rave, the beating heart of The Prodigy
Ced Gee, TR Love, Mo Love, and Kool Keith Thornton are all listed alongside Prodigy co-founder Howlett as songwriters on their 1997 hit ‘Smack My Bitch Up’. As Kool Keith and Ced Gee now reveal, the opportunity came at a pivotal time in their careers.
“They had called me up. Liam [Howlett] was a great friend anyway,” Keith told AFH. “Let me tell you how he got his number,” Ced Gee added.
“What happened was they were working with the president of Next Plateau, Eddie O’ Loughlin, at the time. He cleared the sample. So Eddie said, ‘Why don’t you just do it fresh with Keith?’ Because I was working at Next Plateau at the time as the head of A&R and we gave them Keith’s number, and that’s how the reach out became. That’s how they started working together.”
“I did shows with [The Prodigy] when the record [The Fat Of The Land] came out. I did one or two shows with them. One of them in New York and another, I think, in Melbourne, Australia. I was backstage with them and [Keith Flint] was a cool person,” Kool Keith continued. “They had a lot of champagne, a lot of girls and cool Electronic music. That was a nice tour out there with them. And for the first time, it was good that I had real fun with those guys.”
The pair say the collaboration led to more work and more specifically, helped Ced Gee out of a particularly rough financial situation. “I was under a levy from the IRS at that time. The ‘Smack My B*tch Up’ sample paid off the levy which was about $100,000. After it was over and all corrected, I still had $18,000. That’s how sweet that was. [Laughs] I got that, so imagine what [others] made.”
Kool Keith added, “I never had to run around to chase that money, and I was provided for well. And I hope that band didn’t break up, but Keith was such an important person as the lead singer in the band. That’s like Michael Jackson in Jackson 5, Kurt Cobain [in Nirvana], so it’s kind of hard.”
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