Forget the VIP section: Prodigy ‘VVIP’ tickets selling for €1,750

10-person VVIP tickets get waiter service and €1,000 worth of alcohol to watch British electronic dance maestros

The Prodigy: music for the minted generation?
The Prodigy: music for the minted generation?

For those of you in the cheap seats, scream and shout. The ones in the VVIP area just clink your champagne glasses.

Forget the VIPs who will be paying €55 to get up close to the stage to watch the Prodigy this Saturday at the Malta Fairs and Convention Centre. Ten tables will be hosting a maximum of 200 people, whose tickets are going for nothing less than €1,750 per table.

The ‘very, very important people’ will be hosted in an elevated section with private bar and toilets for only 200 ticket holders, with a total of 10 tables, with waiter service. The €1,750 tickets buy entrance to 10 people, and €1,000 worth of alcohol - not bad at €175 a head.

Swedish event organisers Martin Pettersson and Pierre Lindh, former gaming industry men now catering for the exclusive tastes of the well-heeled patrons of club TwentyTwo, bill themselves as the creators of “the best party ever” in Malta - Champagne Wars.

Controversial though The Prodigy have always been, albums Music for the Jilted Generation (1993) and the more commercially successful The Fat of the Land (1997) briefly made them one of the world's biggest bands. Now it’s their turn to play to the kind of crowd that likes to dance to, in Liam Howlett’s words, ‘Ibiza music, that shit that Pete Tong plays.’

But corporate tickets have become a mainstay in the financing of big acts: small markets like Malta's need to attract high rollers and corporate sponsors to finance acts like The Prodigy. Audiences in Malta are unlike those in European markets which attract tens of thousands to their arenas, and musical acts are paid their standard fees irrespective of audience size.