The Prodigy
All Together Now, Sunday
★★★☆☆
Two very different versions of the 1990s clash on the final night of All Together Now, as the shoegaze survivors Slowdive pack the big Something Kind of Wonderful tent and techno titans The Prodigy bring down the shutters on the main stage.
Slowdive are sublime (and loud), and it is telling that their new songs are received as warmly as the oldies. The Prodigy, by contrast, feel locked in the holding pattern they’ve maintained since The Fat of the Land rolled all over mid-1990s popular culture like a monster truck with a misfiring exhaust.
They are relentless: the light show looks like an alien landing, and their MC, Maxim, spruces up the action with a patter such as “All my people in Waterford … can I hear all the people from Waterford”.
You wouldn’t think it from the performance, but The Prodigy are also wounded goliaths. Five years ago the group’s best-known member, Keith Flint, died unexpectedly. His loss is acknowledged during Firestarter when an outline of his spiky silhouette appears on the screen. From there it is business as usual as the band, led by the producer and musician Liam Howlett, clock in with a powerful yet generic set.
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If you’ve caught The Prodigy at any point in the past three decades you’ll have seen and heard it all before: huge rumbling breakbeats, blitzing strobes, jagged runs from a live bassist. The closest thing to a surprise is when Maxim apparently dedicates a song to the former Cork City and Waterford FC goalkeeper Mick Devine (unless I’ve misheard because of my brain being blitzed by the giant Pikachu Pokémon I’ve just encountered rolling around on the ground outside the portaloos).
All Together Now has built a reputation as the most esoteric festival on the Irish calendar. In that context, booking The Prodigy – mainstream ravers who headlined Electric Picnic in 2018 – felt like a departure. They put in a decent shift at Curraghmore, but it is, in the end, just another Prodigy concert that musicians and audience alike are likely to have forgotten five minutes after Out of Space, their truncated closer, ends and the lights go dim.
