THE PRODIGY
Hordern Pavilion, February 13
LIKE A REPUBLICAN SENATE caucus facing Robert Kennedy’s confirmation, there are no innocent parties at the beginning of a Prodigy show: we know what you do; we enabled this. But the night’s opening, Voodoo People, almost sneaks past as a benign presence, sounds ambling in like the four members had, emerging from the wings with a wave, a polite thrust of guitar, a finger pointed at us from the perch of the drum kit.
Then someone trips a wire, and all hell breaks loose.
That familiar Prodigy slam to the solar plexus and head, enhanced by the freewheeling kick to the cods, knocks the wind and any lingering resistance out and the Hordern floor is alive like an ants nest emptied on to a massive hot plate: frantic, incoherent, antennae (or cameras) up, burdens shucked, the mass of bodies blocking exits so it’s vertical escape routes only. For now, no vax seems sufficient, no moose is safe.
By 30 seconds into Omen, as the rapid fire beat squashes the siren synths, the seated areas behind and to the sides begin to shed people, the ones who somehow thought they could watch this sitting down and whose self-propelled feet are showing them otherwise. Light Up The Sky compounds the moment, Fight! enflames it.
It’s been, what, seven years?, but muscle memory is activated. Roadblox channels their metal edge, force feeding it through an industrial press; Their Law is propulsive, percussive, a dance track and a fight track, a concrete pour at triple speed that hardens and cracks and resets continually.
For the first 20-25 minutes the lights are hardly sophisticated, the screen projections brutally simple and exhortations of now-lone vocalist/hype man, Maxim, are much the same: variations of “are all my voodoo/Prodigy/shirtless people here” and “make some noise”. But the force is with them: power, impact, torrents of live instruments incorporated into Liam Howlett’s assault-and-battery of sounds. Simplicity is not a problem when the combinations make for layers of searing.
But it does have its limits. Something else that hasn’t changed in seven years, in 25 years, is that there are still sections of a Prodigy set where power is dissipated, bodies stop moving, minds are engaged more than viscera, and you realise that everything feels like it is marking time until the next wave. As Trumpian types know, space for thinking is not always advised because that’s when reality gets in, and who needs that shit?
And thinking has you noticing that there’s no escaping the elephant not in the room, the shock haired Keith Flint, whose death in 2019 temporarily derailed the band. Evident in the mouthy yelps (which are more irritant than inspiration) and his relatively static presence more often posed at points on the stage rather than dancing anywhere, Maxim is no Flint. Not in his physicality, not in his charisma or his threat.
Wisely there is no real attempt to have him fill the gap left by the punk-haired dancer-cum-quasi-frontman, but that somebody/something is needed in that gap is made even more clear when we do get chips of the old Flint.
His presence is in shots of his eyes flashed up on the screen and his slowed down voice intoning “I’m the firestarter” (the song itself still a 360 degree barrage, thrillingly enveloping and worthy of the man himself), in the dedication “to our brother” in the set-closer, Breathe (which finds Maxim at his most potent for the night, amid the chugging beat, rolling thunder and calls to “exhale, exhale”) and in the residual and continuing force of “our fucking anthem”, Smack My Bitch Up, opening the long encore and still the fully charged child of Public Enemy, Sham 69 and Metallica.
Not having Flint doesn’t stop The Prodigy owning this concrete box, owning a whole lot of – surprisingly young, like under 30 young. I know right. When did that happen? – arses. Their power is undiminished, and flawed or not it does remind us of something from the older, saner, of the Robert Kennedys, that "the future will be shaped … by those willing to commit their minds and their bodies to the task". Or their minds and our bodies.
The Prodigy play:
Hordern Pavilion, February 14
Riverstage, Brisbane, February 16
Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne, February 18
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