“After losing Keith,” the Prodigy’s Liam Howlett told NME earlier this week, “we couldn’t even think or talk about the band.” It was, he explained, around “two years” before he and vocalist Maxim could even face the prospect. And even then they wondered, “‘Could we play live again? Did we want to? Why? How?’”
The ‘why’, it seems, if that this gloriously unhinged, carnivalesque rave-up is a kind of living, breathing tribute to late vocalist and frenetic vibes man Keith Flint, who tragically took his own life in 2019. This is made explicit during Flint’s anthem ‘Firestarter’: screens on either side of the stage depict his unmistakeable, Devil-horned silhouette in neon green, with lazers beamed out into the audience as though he continues to cast his spell. Howlett and Maxim remix track to slow down Flint’s lyric, “I’m a firestarter!”, an immortal line if ever there was one.
And then there’s the ‘how’. Reading & Leeds’ new Chevron dance stage, replete with a canopy that glitches, flickers and pulses with flashing lights and even the band’s insidious insect logo, is the perfect platform for their return to a festival that, Howlett told NME, has always felt like home. The stage, meanwhile, is like a steam-punk serial killer’s basement from David Fincher’s nightmares: the aesthetic grey and rusted-looking, with analogue numbers counting down and ominous, oversized figures lurking in the background.
Overall, though, this is a glossily produced and sensationally life-affirming gig. In Flint’s absence, Maxim carries the show almost entirely himself: “All my Prodigy warriors here,” he commands, “let me see you! This shit is for life. Live this shit. Breathe it.” When he shouts out “all my shirtless, sweaty warriors in the middle,” live member Rob Holliday cocks his guitar like a rifle as if picking them off. Maxim lets out an ecstatic roar – “Whooooooo!” – to the sonic assault of ‘Roadblox’, the light show glitching out of control and the beats raining down blow after blow; the sense of release palpable.
For a good hour, this is the Greatest Show on Earth. The energy, though, dips in the final third, while the brain-frying ‘We Live Forever’ peters out into low-key bleeps and bloops that sap energy from a closing ‘Out of Space’. Still, the abiding image is that of the festival’s fairground rides scything away in the background as punters pulsate to audio-visual chaos from ahead and above, Flint’s spirit well and truly imbibed.
The Prodigy’s Reading Festival 2024 setlist was
‘Breathe’
‘Omen’
‘Spitfire’
‘Firestarter’
‘Voodoo People’
‘Roadblox’
‘Light Up the Sky’
‘No Good (Start the Dance)’
‘Poison’
‘Get Your Fight On’
‘Need Some1’
‘Smack My Bitch Up’
‘Take Me to the Hospital’
‘Invaders Must Die’
‘Diesel Power’
‘We Live Forever’
‘Out of Space’
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