Journal #8323

Sweet

Fucking

Jesus.

New years and crimbo have been pretty crazy, but totally shoving that in the shadow was my recent 320 mile trip down to Manchester and back to see The Prodigy performing at the Manchester Warehouse Project. I bought the tickets July time - and unfortunately only a couple months ago I found out I had a programming exam the day after. I'm still waiting to see if i've passed it or not.

But holy fucking jesus christ titballs, don't pass up an opportunity to see these guys. Absolutely fucking insane. The venue - the manchester warehouse project - was insane.it was the basement of some converted victorian warehouse - the upstairs is a fairly modern hotel. The basement? Basically empty. It had toilets that had obviously been recently made - brick and mortar, temporary lighting and sinks... the bare concrete walls, lack of anything "homely" made it seem like I was in some sort of illegal rave. Which is an amazing atmosphere to have.

The actual night dragged on a bit. I was expecting the prodigy to be on around half ten / 11, but it turns out they were on at midnight. Midnight. Arriving at 9 o'clock with my best mate, we had to put up with some seriously shite support bands for 3 hours. The first was "Gedo Mega Bitch" - who I later found out was actually married to one of the prodigy's MCs Keith Flint, was terrible. She kept on playing generic drumstep pish with Marilyn Manson videos playing on the LED screens. Boring. And this dragged on for an hour.

Next up was "Black Futures" who were apparently known as Subsource before. These guys were actually really good - it was a live drum and bass / drumstep band (imagine pendulum live but good). It had a drummer, some guy on guitar, the lead vocalist on an ELECTRIC DOUBLE BASS ( all sorts of badass), and some guy on synths.I loved their music, they were a bit too drumsteppy for my tastes ( if they focused more on DnB they'd be FANTASTIC) but were definitely one of the highlights of the evening. After that was Caspa - a generic DJ. He had an MC on stage with him , and for an hour and a half he was playing skrillshite and other dubstep - hilariously boring. We left the main area to get check out what else was in the venue. After coming back and finding out that he was unfortunately still on stage, "Jaguar Skills" was on afterwards. He had a much better taste in music, more drum and bass and classic dance / rave songs. One gripe about him though was that he'd stop a song mid way to do some shite self-promoting crap or just do a "I SAY JAGWAR YOU SAY SKILLS" shit. For the half-songs that he played, he was alright.

After what seemed like a bloody eternity, being partially blinded by all the lights that seemed to be scattered about all over the venue like a bad rash, and partially deafened due to simply how loud the speakers were, the prodigy EVENTUALLY came on. We got moved from being near the front to pushed to under some funky light setup in the middle of the venue because people KEPT ON PUSHING IN and considering these were all mancunians in their late 30s, I wasn't in a position to stop them.
Insane.These guys were everything they were hyped up to be. Maxim was keeping the crowd under control, whilst Liam Howlett was churning out some of the prodigy's new unreleased tracks - which I swear to god are going high in the charts once they're released. They were that fantastic.
Apart from almost dying from dehydration, the only gripe I had with them was their sound. Keith and Maxim were clear as day, and so was the music, but whoever was in control of the subwoofers deserves a punch - I like me some bass, definitely - but it was at the point where the bass was so intensely loud that it drowned out the rest of the sound - and helped make me deaf in my left ear for 3 days. Eventually managed to get back home at 4 in the morning, and up in edinburgh for my exam at 12.

Video of "Smack My Bitch Up" from the day I was there on youtube.
Verdict : Go see them. I'm making sure I've got some tickets for sonisphere.