The abandoned London Underground station where The Prodigy launched ‘Firestarter’
No matter how much you might want to criticise it for constantly running late or being overcrowded, the entire concept of the London Underground is one of the city’s most iconic features and one of its finest inventions.
Affectionately known as ‘The Tube’, the London Underground was the first of its kind and set a precedent for rapid inner-city transport systems around the world. While other cities around the world have gone on to adopt the same concept and have arguably done a better job of implementing it, it’s still quite a remarkable feat for the UK capital to have achieved in the first place, and something it holds with a sense of pride.
However, the way in which it has inspired countless songs and been brought up in the lyrics of various outfits tends to be focused more on the negative side of it. For example, The Jam sang about how grim and hostile it can be down there on ‘Down in the Tube Station at Midnight’, with Paul Weller singing about how many of his fellow passengers seemed to be looking for a scrap during the wee hours of the night.
But despite this unwelcoming environment that Weller spoke about, that dank darkness has also ended up being the perfect setting for one of the most stark and confrontational music videos ever created, and one that ended up propelling one of the most unique acts of the 1990s into the mainstream.
While The Prodigy had been seen as troublemakers over the course of their first two albums, with a handful of aggressive songs making waves in the UK charts but failing to reach the upper echelons, nothing was quite as impactful as the first single from their third album, which ended up being the true launching pad for the rest of their career.
‘Firestarter’ was the first taste of The Fat of the Land, and was the first song to feature the band’s dancer, Keith Flint, on lead vocals. It ended up going straight to number one in the UK and alerted the public to their revolutionary take on the underground rave culture that had been brewing since the start of the decade. However, while the song itself has become notorious, it’s often thought of in tandem with the video, directed by Walter Stern and featuring Flint as its focal point.
The black and white video for ‘Firestarter’ was recorded in an abandoned tube station in Aldwych on a budget of £20,000, with Flint maniacally bouncing around the dimly-lit tunnels and viciously hitting himself around the head as he barked the literally incendiary lyrics, and while it was nowhere near as creative as some of its competition at the time, it has the ability to make an instant impression for how confrontational it is.
Stern’s video ended up being one of the most famous and celebrated of the decade, despite the fact that the BBC banned it from being shown shortly after it made its way to number one and was aired on Top of the Pops. This is a somewhat ironic state of affairs considering how they followed it up with an even more controversial video for ‘Smack My Bitch Up’, which depicted hard drug use, violence and sexual assault.
Aldwych is hardly the most well-known tube station, but if you showed someone a still of the video, they’d immediately be able to identify what they were looking at, and that says a lot about just how impactful it was both as a song and an accompanying visual element.
