Okay, let’s get the music journo griping out of the first – yes, The Prodigy have been usurped in the dance-rock stakes by the DFA/LCD Soundsystem New York scene and probably a thousand other nascent experimental acts, yes, we’ve all heard the line “I’m the arsing FIRE bastard well STARTAH!!” a few (thousand) too many times, and yes, Keith Flint is such a self-consciously “mad” bastard that one of these days you expect him to stick a garden hose in his mouth and pump himself so full of water that he expands to the size of hot-air balloon and explodes over the first five rows, but, my friends, here’s the news – The Prodigy are still a rather fantastic live act.
I once put it to Liam Howlett that if Harrison Ford had strayed into a nightclub for a boogie in Blade Runner, the resident live band would most probably have looked and sounded like The Prodigy. Howlett wholeheartedly agreed, and this dystopian quality is immediately apparent in the nightmarish visage of Maxim. In person a laidback, softly-spoken and even introverted kind of character, onstage he looks like the voodoo-priest leader of a Clockwork Orange-style street gang. Commanding, focused and very, very threatening, if he rather than Jodie Foster had walked around the corner in Silence Of The Lambs, Lector would instantly have fallen to the floor and begged for his mommy.
‘Their Law’, one of their best tunes, is nothing short of staggering – wave after wave of distorted guitar backed by powerhouse techno beats (and live drums) that carry near atomic force. ‘Breathe’ is another moment of stunning ferocity – it’s cor Rósive, it’s devastating, it’s the reason an entire generation of males know what the word “psychosomatic” means.
The first half of ‘Poison’ I spend convulsed with laughter, not at the band but rather at the novel “dance” attempted by the incredibly pissed gentlemen a few seats to my left (it ends with him thrusting his crotch forward in time to the beats in the chorus, after which he’s promptly escorted away by security). Nonetheless, once I’ve regained my composure, it’s hard not to be extremely impressed by the tune’s incendiary mix of industrial dissonance and hip-hop rhythms.
The encore consists of ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ (relax, it’s “ironic”), ‘Jericho’, ‘Out Of Space’ (which ends in a mass, a capella singalong) and a final, euphoric ‘Charly’. So, yes, I really enjoyed it. For penance, I shall say five Hail Marys and read nothing but The Wire for the next fortnight.