On the contemplative first Sunday of Advent, The Prodigy’s concert will take place in the Velodrom Berlin. Anyone who thought that the evening would be pious and that Keith Flint’s absence would have a massive impact on the group’s live quality was without his right hand (the remaining second frontman Maxim Reality) and the brutally excessive Prodigy disciples.
Beer, taurine and fashion sins
Prodigy music in 2023 can be described almost better by the audience than by the concert itself. The party-hungry crowd is not the first to rush to the beer stalls, but instead forms traffic jams in front of the coffee and Red Bull stands. First drink “Energy” with taurine in half-liter cups. The average age of those present is somewhere between 35 and 50 – people are coming here tonight who sang along to Prodigy’s anthems in the 90s. Guys in colorful bobble hats wearing leopard-print and tie-dye leggings with short black cargo pants mingle with women with pink or blue hair in ripped tights and high-soled Buffalo shoes. “When you get to my age, then we’ll talk about mosh pits,” explains an older man to a younger man, who speculates whether the mosh pits in question would be like “back then” that evening.
The support act, which ultimately softens the crowd like the host does the Wiener Schnitzel, plays a melange of drum’n’base, techno, EDM, hip-hop, reggae and dub – and then Nancy Sinatra’s “Summer Wine” is played, and that Audience sings along. Should you know your way around here?
Ten minutes before the concert begins, a woman in her mid-50s, who has succumbed to alcohol almost to the point of unconsciousness, is led away behind the breakwater by rescuers. Further ahead, in the band pit, two dozen security guards face five times as many Prodigy Ultras as there are in a wedding line. At a quarter past nine the mood flares up. Orgiastic primal screams penetrate from the stage into the audience – Maxim Reality is here. Finally.
The Prodigy live: Like a futuristic psychosis
The 56-year-old Maxim Reality, now MC, singer and audience entertainer all in one, jumps across the stage like a boxer, his fists sailing through the air. His dreadlocks swing around him as he turns. He wears white war paint on his face and repeatedly shouts “Where are my warriors?” He looks as if he is not alone – as if Keith Flint is still next to him. Its spirit not only floats noticeably in the room, but can also be glimpsed in the oversized figurine that is set up parallel to the stage at the other end of the interior. In “Firestarter,” laser beams shoot out of this character’s eyes in all directions and ultimately draw Flint’s outline on the stage.
Maxim Reality and his electric guitarist give it their all; They sweat, they kneel in the solos, they scream and jump. Hits like “Voodoo People”, “Poison” and “Omen” sound animalistic, raw, brutal. The breakbeats, to which the crowd jumps around like on a large mass trampoline, sound as if they had been processed with an excessive chainsaw.
The concert resembles a futuristic psychosis. On Advent Sunday, all innocence was exorcised with The Prodigy – and a sweaty, dancing, happy alter ego was born. All of this without Keith Flint, but with a highly motivated Maxim Reality, who alone carries on the great legacy with great dignity