Rock and Hard Places (10 page)

For me, this turned out to be the first of several trips to Beirut, which is now immovably lodged very near the top of my list of favourite places to visit. There is no wearier cliché in the travel writer’s lexicon than “land of contrasts,” but Beirut is exactly that, to degrees both tragic and hilarious, a city of materialist decadence and observant abstemiousness, of cheerful hedonism and holy fury, of affable, pluralist civilisation and vicious, sectarian barbarism: an accurate municipal coat of arms would feature the cocktail and the Kalashnikov.

YOU WOULD IMAGINE that anybody who has served in Lebanon’s armed forces for as long as the sentry in the airport baggage hall clearly has would have seen just about everything, but right now he couldn’t look more amazed if his rifle turned into a snake that spoke Gaelic. He stares at Keith Flint, and at Keith Flint’s twin-blade mohawk haircut and earrings and nose-ring and tongue-stud and tattoos, stares unabashed and unblinking for minutes on end, as Keith talks to a film crew from Reuters and tries to ignore him.

“I don’t really know anything about Beirut,” Keith is telling the reporter. “It’s somewhere to play, isn’t it?”

Keith shrugs, finally, and turns to the gawping soldier with a slight, pained grimace. “Alright?” he asks. The sentry walks away, shaking his head.

 

TURNING UP IN this part of the world in funny outfits and confusing the natives is a British tradition dating back to Richard the Lionheart, but an interesting perspective on The Prodigy’s visit to Lebanon is provided by a local fan quoted on the front page of the following morning’s
Beirut Daily Star
: “This is the greatest thing ever to happen in the Middle East.” The report does not say whether or not twenty-year-old Rania Attieh was subsequently incinerated by a lightning strike.

Beirut, on first acquaintance, is at once as dismal as a ruin and as optimistic as a building site, which is because just about all of Beirut
is either a ruin or a building site. Beirut, all the storybooks say, was a beautiful town. Few of the houses, churches and mosques that earned it this reputation survive. Those that do are scarred with shrapnel pocks and bulletholes as tragic and pathetic as acne on a handsome face.

Beirut has been the definitive and archetypal victim of the sort of war that has become bafflingly fashionable in the latter half of this century: the sort of war where one bunch of a country’s inhabitants decide they don’t like one or more other bunches of the same country’s inhabitants. Everyone then spends years demolishing everything that might have made the place worth fighting over in the first place. Then, when there’s hardly anything left standing up, the squabbling parties realise that not only have the neighbours they didn’t like not gone anywhere, nobody’s got a roof or running water either, and the country is now run by people who didn’t even live here when it all started (in Lebanon’s case, Syria and Israel).

My parents’ and grandparents’ generations were wrong about a lot of things, but they had this one pretty much sorted out: if you’re going to have a war, have it somewhere else. If you lose, at least you’ve still got what you started with. What every one of Beirut’s barely countable squabbling factions did, in effect, was held a gun to their own temples, announced “Everyone do as I say, or this guy gets it,” and pulled the trigger.

“So . . . what went on here, exactly?”

We spend the day before the gig wandering Beirut’s noisy, dusty, crowded streets with those of the touring party who can be bothered. These include the invited press contingent, which is myself, and Mat Smith and Steve Gullick from the New Musical Express. Last time we’d all been away together, it had been to Sarajevo to see U2. Next year, we hope to go to Mogadishu with The Spice Girls. We are accompanied this warm afternoon by blue-haired and somewhat unfortunately named Prodigy guitarist Giz Butt. Giz wants to know why, according to the morning’s paper, there was a gunfight a few blocks from our hotel last night. We all slept through it. Four men were wounded.

“Hezbollah and Amal,” explains someone from the gig promoter’s office. “They fight like this all the time. Who knows why?”

Giz and a couple of other members of the band have brought
portable tape recorders with them, on which to collect the sounds of Beirut. We can look forward, therefore, to the next Prodigy album making extensive use of samples of car horns and people yelling about their carpets.

 

THE PRODIGY ARE not the first western pop act to visit Beirut since Lebanon’s seventeen-year civil war ground more or less to a halt in 1992, but they are, by some distance, the most interesting and most contemporary. The people of Beirut, as if they hadn’t suffered enough, have spent the years since independence enduring such meagre musical pickings as epically tedious German heavy metal time-wasters Scorpions and pensionable crooner Paul Anka. Later this year, they can look forward to performances by Julio Iglesias and Joe Cocker, unless they reach the not unreasonable conclusion that a return to internecine slaughter might be preferable.

It would be an exaggeration to suggest that The Prodigy’s visit to Lebanon has been motivated by any deep-seated sense of history or empathy with the suffering. The Prodigy have come here for the same reasons they’ve previously gone to Poland, Macedonia, Russia, Iceland, Hong Kong and other places off the path usually beaten by touring bands.

“It keeps it fresh,” says Liam Howlett, The Prodigy’s songwriter and keyboardist. “You don’t hear of many mad gigs anymore. You hear about Oasis going to America, you know, and that’s boring. I know U2 do their share, but nobody else does.”

A few hours before showtime, Liam and Keith are lounging about, picking at a small room-service banquet in Liam’s suite at the Lancaster Hotel. The Lancaster, a new building a short walk from the seafront, is a good sign: you don’t build a hotel like this if you think there’s a meaningful chance someone’s going to knock it over again. The Lancaster gleams and sparkles and has obviously been constructed in anticipation of a return of the glory days; my suite downstairs is bigger than my flat back in London.

Liam and Keith didn’t go out today. Despite Liam’s professed hunger for new frontiers, they seem completely indifferent to their surroundings.

“We get involved this much,” says Liam. “Do we want to go there? Yes. Is it safe? Yes. Right then, let’s do it.”

It’s nine months since I went to U2’s concert in Sarajevo. They’d gone to Bosnia on a self-appointed mission of solidarity with the people of a city that had been walled off from western pop culture for three and a half years. They’d slashed ticket prices, talked up the healing properties of rock’n’roll, displayed a commanding knowledge and understanding of local politics and history, and gone round for tea with the president. The Prodigy aren’t even holding a press conference.

“I find it very hard to understand politics,” admits Keith. “I like to go to places and just take them in at a surface level.”

Last night, I’d been telling Keith about U2’s Sarajevo show, and trying to get him interested in the idea of taking The Prodigy to Bosnia and Herzegovina, where they are massively popular. “We’ve been,” Keith said. No, I said, they hadn’t. Otherwise I wouldn’t have had so many Sarajevan friends bending my ear about whether The Prodigy would ever go and play there. “I’m sure we have,” Keith had insisted, distractedly. Eventually, I’d suggested that maybe it had been Zagreb or Llubljana. Easy enough mistake to make if you spend your life on tour, I guess, though it would be a bad idea to make it while actually in any of those cities. “That’s it,” Keith had said. “The one starting with L.” Someone else later explained that The Prodigy’s Balkan show had been in neither Croatia nor Slovenia, but in the Macedonian capital of Skopje.

“It’s funny being here, though,” muses Keith, looking out the window. “Because it’s like a joke, this place, isn’t it? If you go on holiday and stay somewhere shitty, you come back and say it was like Beirut, don’t you?”

I’m sure Brian Keenan did.

“Who?”

Hostage. Him and John McCarthy. You know.

“Fucking hell. Was that here?”

The really frightening thing is that I know that Mat from the
NME
has had exactly this same conversation with Keith already today. Despite Keith’s fearsome appearance, there’s something of the mildly batty but loveable maiden aunt about him.

“Hey!” he announces, gesturing at the television. “That’s, um . . . whatsit Square, we played there!”

It’s a story from Moscow. Boris Yeltsin’s fallen over again, or something.

“Red Square,” says Liam.

“That’s what I mean,” says Keith. “I mean, you spend your life while you’re growing up watching these geezers with fur hats marching up and down it with guns and bombs, and then one day you find yourself playing in it, and it doesn’t really register at the time, but three months later, like . . . well, like this, you’ll see it on telly and think fuck me, did I really do that?”

“We don’t get involved with the politics,” says Liam, “and we don’t get involved in the set-up of the gig, although I know this one has been a nightmare, and still is.”

He isn’t joking. As he speaks, we don’t know if the show is going ahead. It had been called off for the first time three days before, after an argument about the suitability of the venue. Other arrangements had been swiftly made, and it was all on again. This morning, The Prodigy have seen these other arrangements for the first time, and are less than impressed. An open-air stage has been erected in a car park near the Green Line that divided Christian East Beirut from Muslim West Beirut during the war.

“The power,” explains an incredulous Keith, “comes from the mains lead, which has been dug out of the ground, sawn through, and the bare wires from that are taped to the gear, no insulation whatsoever—I tell you, it’s fucking lethal.”

The weather isn’t helping. We’ve heard reports that the fierce wind, which is currently turning Beirut’s formidable reserves of dust into a million tiny tornadoes of corrosive, eye-stinging grit, has also taken the canopy off the stage, exposing the dubious electrics to the rain which looks sure to follow.

“I’d be betting against it, at this point,” admits Liam, glumly.

 

AT ABOUT SIX o’clock, four hours before The Prodigy are due on stage, we get word that all systems are go. Paul Fairs, The Prodigy’s tour manager, explains that there has been a fair bit of telephone traffic this afternoon between The Prodigy’s lawyers, the promoter’s lawyers and the Lebanese Ministry of the Interior, and there is a general feeling that “if we don’t do this show, we may have trouble getting home.”

Down at the venue, as the first punters begin to arrive, I speak to Philip Kfoury, the worried-looking twenty-three-year-old whose company, Power Productions, has brought The Prodigy to this unlikely
destination. He reckons to have sunk US $250,000 in putting tonight on, and reckons he’ll lose most of it, though he’s hoping the kudos he accrues for getting The Prodigy this far will pay back his losses with interest in the future.

His difficulties, he explains, have been manifold. Not the least has been trying to get publicity for the gig without bringing The Prodigy’s often contentious subject matter to the attention of the Lebanese authorities, who are not a rocking bunch. They have previously deepsixed proposed Beirut concerts by Pink Floyd and Aerosmith, and once turned Iron Maiden away at the airport. It is sadly unlikely that any of these have been purely aesthetic judgments.

The Floyd, the Smith and the Maiden are three bands who, in their own countries, are rightly regarded by all bar the most demented wowsers as about as grave a threat to public morality as a seaside pantomime. The Prodigy, however, are nowhere near their artistic sell-by date, and are still capable of inciting genuine controversy. They quoted Josef Goebbels, albeit ironically, on the sleeve of their
The Fat Of The Land
album—though this may have been a ruse to distract attention from an even less forgivable inscription elsewhere on the same cover (“Guest vocals, Crispian Mills”). They recently had a hit with a single called “Smack My Bitch Up” (and, I thought, handled the subsequent controversy about misogyny and violence badly; Liam Howlett, instead of defending his view of women to every scandalised hack in pursuit of an easy why-oh-why story, should have issued a statement saying it was about feeding heroin to his dog).

The really important thing about “Smack My Bitch Up” is that it’s a great way to start a rock concert. The Prodigy appear on time on their jerry-rigged carpark stage. Keith and The Prodigy’s other two rapper/dancers—the unfeasibly tall Leeroy Thornhill and the kilt-clad Maxim Reality—make up in presence and activity what the set lacks in The Prodigy’s usual volume, and the overwhelmingly teenage crowd, mostly children of Beirut’s wealthy, make up in decibles what they lack in numbers (the tickets were a distinctly uncharitable US $30 a go, which is why only 5,000 of 6,500 have been sold; also, about another 5,000 people have spotted that an excellent, and free, view of the show is afforded from a nearby highway flyover).