Keith Flint, vocalist with the Prodigy, has died at the age of 49. He was found at his home in Essex on Monday.

The Prodigy released a statement confirming the news, saying: “It is with deepest shock and sadness that we can confirm the death of our brother and best friend Keith Flint. A true pioneer, innovator and legend. He will be forever missed. We thank you for respecting the privacy of all concerned at this time.”

Liam Howlett, who formed the group in 1990, wrote on Instagram: “I can’t believe I’m saying this but our brother Keith took his own life over the weekend. I’m shell shocked, fuckin angry, confused and heart broken ..... r.i.p brother Liam”.

An Essex police spokesman confirmed that a 49-year-old man had died. “We were called to concerns for the welfare of a man at an address in Brook Hill, North End, just after 8.10am on Monday,” he said.

“We attended and, sadly, a 49-year-old man was pronounced dead at the scene. His next of kin have been informed. The death is not being treated as suspicious and a file will be prepared for the coroner.”

With his punk aesthetic of piercings, spiked hair and intense stare, Flint became one of the UK’s most iconic musical figures in the 1990s. He joined the Prodigy as a dancer, later becoming a frontman alongside rapper Maxim. Aside from their 1992 debut, all of the group’s seven albums have reached No 1 in the UK, the most recent being No Tourists, released in November 2018.

Flint performed the vocals on the Prodigy’s best known singles, Firestarter and Breathe, which both went to No 1 in 1996. Firestarter became their biggest US hit and the group are often credited with helping to break dance music into the mainstream in the country.

Firestarter’s black and white video, featuring a headbanging, gurning Flint, was banned by the BBC after it was screened on Top of the Pops, with parents complaining that it frightened children. The self-lacerating lyrics - “I’m the bitch you hated/filth infatuated” - were the first Flint had written for the band. “The lyrics were about being onstage: this is what I am. Some of it is a bit deeper than it seems,” Flint told Q magazine in 2008. The track sold more than 600,000 copies in the UK.

Speaking to the Guardian in 2015, Flint lamented the state of modern pop music. “We were dangerous and exciting! But now no one’s there who wants to be dangerous. And that’s why people are getting force-fed commercial, generic records that are just safe, safe, safe.”

His success was hard won. Having grown up with dyslexia, he dropped out of school aged 15 and worked as a roofer in Essex before joining the Prodigy. He later weathered an addiction to prescription painkillers but became sober and married Japanese DJ Mayumi Kai in 2006. The couple later separated.

As well as his success with the Prodigy, Flint founded the successful motorcycle racing outfit Team Traction Control, which made its debut in 2014 and went on to win multiple Supersport TT titles.

The Prodigy played some of the biggest stages in the UK, including the 1996 Knebworth concerts headlined by Oasis and, in 1997 became the first dance group to headline Glastonbury. Festival organiser Emily Eavis paid tribute, calling their set “a huge, unforgettable moment”.

Eavis added: “He’s played here so many times with the Prodigy and was booked for 2019. What an incredible frontman.”

Gail Porter, who dated Flint between 1999 and 2000, simply wrote the word “heartbroken” on Twitter.

Further tributes have been made from his musical peers. Ed Simons of the dance duo the Chemical Brothers shared a memory of Flint on Instagram.

A post from the Chemical Brothers’ official Twitter account said Flint “was an amazing front man, a true original and he will be missed”.

Richard Russell, the head of the XL Recordings label that first signed the group, said on Twitter: “Devastated keith flint is gone. not just a great performer. he had total integrity & an incredible sense of humour. one of the sweetest people I’ve ever worked with. what a beautiful energy. what a gentleman. privileged to have known him. miss u keith.”

Sleaford Mods, whose frontman Jason Williamson collaborated with the Prodigy on the 2015 track Ibiza, tweeted: “Very sorry to hear of the passing of Keith Flint. Good night mate. Take it easy.” Another collaborator, the band Kasabian, described him as a “beautiful man” and “incredible pioneer”.

The rapper Professor Green said the Prodigy at the Brixton Academy in 2009 was “the best gig I’d ever seen, and still is till this day” and had inspired him to be a music star. He added: “Your music, your presence, your attitude. It all had such an influence on me. Saddened doesn’t even cut it.”

Canadian Rick Genest - known as Zombie Boy -, a model and artist known for his extensive tattoos, including of a skull and brain on his head - has died of an apparent suicide, Canadian media reported.
Zombie Boy, whose real name was Rick Genest, died around 5pm (2100 GMT) on Wednesday (Aug 1), the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation said, citing police sources. He was 32.
"They are classifying his death as a suicide," CBC said.

He held world records for having the most bones tattooed on his body at 139, and the most insect tattoos, with 176, according to Guinness World Records.
Montreal tattoo artist Frank Lewis was "responsible for inking the majority (of) the designs", it said.

American singer Lady Gaga - who appeared with Zombie Boy in her Born This Way music video - said she was "devastated" by his death.
"The suicide of friend Rick Genest, Zombie Boy is beyond devastating. We have to work harder to change the culture, bring Mental Health to the forefront and erase the stigma that we can't talk about it," Lady Gaga wrote on Twitter.

Dulcedo Management, the talent agency that reportedly represented the Canadian, described him as an "icon of the artistic scene and the world of fashion".
"The whole Dulcedo family is shocked and pained by this tragedy," the agency said in a post on its Facebook page.

Original source: Strait Times (SG), 03 August 2018

by Michael Gerhard Martin*

It's been over a week since Robin Williams killed himself. I loved Mork when I was a kid, and Williams (as Mr. Keating) was one of my idols as a young teacher. I am sorry to hear of his passing, but I wouldn't say I am grieving. After all, I didn't know him. But as someone who struggles with depression, I've found that the media blitz around his suicide has messed me up more than I could have imagined

I had my first thoughts about suicide around the eighth grade. I was bullied at summer camp, which certainly didn't help. Once you contemplate suicide, it's in there forever, a rattling in the attic, a whisper in the ear. The window in an airless room. I survived decades without help, and I'm not entirely sure how.

The songwriter John Prine sang, "Two men were standing upon a bridge/ one jumped and screamed 'You lose!'" Johnny Cash wrote about driving out to some caves, crawling inside one, and waiting there to die. At my worst - and that was hanging out on the Panther Hollow Bridge in Pittsburgh, looking down to the shallow, filthy pond hundreds of feet below -- I berated myself for my cowardice. Come on, pussy - up and over and you don't even have to walk home.

It took a few days to figure out where the creeping dread was coming from, like a rotten potato behind the fridge. Any kind of habitual self-destruction cuts a deep rut in the brain, and I felt the wheels jerk between its walls before I knew what was going on.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with my life - I'm not Robin Williams, but I have a book deal and a good job. I'm happily married and live at the beach. That doesn't matter. While some people might be able to process a news cycle full of suicide, racial violence, and apocalyptic climate change with analytical distance, I've felt personally overwhelmed with hopelessness and shame. And most of all, the constant, graphic reports about Robin Williams' death have haunted me.

For about three days, I'd been exposed to hundreds of news stories, social media posts, eulogies, obituaries, memes, appeals for mental health care, hotlines, media insensitivity and testimonials. Suicide, suicide, suicide, suicide, suicide, like a crossword puzzle with dozens of clues and only one answer, repeated over and over. Until the wheel spins and digs.

Shrinks always ask if I have ever made an "attempt," meaning something that led to hospitalization. I never have. That would have put me in a position where I couldn't do it if I wanted to. There was a time when killing myself seemed the only way I could imagine having control of my life, my mind, myself.

In college I bought a rifle, thinking I would take up hunting with some of the guys. I tried out the steel barrel, to see how it felt under my chin. I got rid of it.

Now, I'm not in any danger. I've responded well to medication and therapy, and eventually Robin Williams and his suffering and his tragic final choice will cycle out of the news, and I'll stop feeling crushing doom every time I read the goddamned word. My suicidal ideations will hang in the doorway, but they won't get in. I've trained like an athlete to fill in that rut. I laugh and say, "I hate my brain!" to avoid thinking "I hate myself." But our media's relentless fixation on Williams' suicide -- not just on the fact that it happened, but on hashing out the gruesome specifics -- has felt deeply inappropriate and misguided to me.

Personally, the only way I've ever been able to process death is through humor. My mother scolded me for cracking jokes at my grandmother's funeral when I was 11. When my friend Aimee was in the hospital to have her gall bladder removed, I drew her a diagram of her intestines populated by spermatozoa, chicken wings and worms.

And in this situation, as hard as it may be, perhaps we should all be cracking jokes ─ memorializing Williams in the way he lived instead of ruthlessly publicizing the terrible way he died. After all, Robin Williams ran from the sounds of mourning; he wanted, profoundly, to hear laughter.

* Michael Gerhard Martin originally published this post on Salon.com on Aug. 23, 2014