The Prodigy Brutalize Sziget
19 August 2011
The men sat in the front row of EasyJet flight 5443 from Gatwick to Budapest were wearing sunglasses and sheepish expressions. A fellow passenger caught their eye. "Are you guys in a band?" she smiled. "Yeah," sighed Maxim Reality as he glanced across at Liam Howlett and Keith Flint, a man who doesn't find it easy to look inconspicuous. "We're The Prodigy."
A look of recognition flickered across her face and the band shrugged, just a little self-consciously. Like the fine men and women of the British Music Press Corps scattered about the plane behind them, they were on their way to Sziget, a weeklong Hungarian festival which bursts into life every August on an island in the Danube nestled between the once distinct cities of Buda and Pest.
It was a Friday, and we knew that the festival had already started without us. The main stage which The Prodigy were due to play that evening had already been headlined that week by Prince, Pulp, The Chemical Brothers and a Hungarian 'pop rapper' trading under the name 'Gringo Sztár'.
We flashed our press credentials and made our way into the VIP area to watch The Prodigy. There is something stirring about watching several thousand Europeans simultaneously lose their shit, and The Prodigy are by now practiced experts at making this happen. In a strange way they share a birthday with this country: they've been making music for their jilted generation since 1990, the same year Hungary hosted its first free elections of the post-communist era. To my disappointment, the opportunity to sing 'Happy Birthday' never presented itself.
By the time the last reverberations of 'Out of Space' had finished echoing around the arena the crowd looked brutalized, and so did the rest of the Press Corps.
http://thequietus.com/articles/06803-sz ... he-prodigy