There’s a good reason you won’t see Massive Attack headlining the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury. For many reasons they are the ideal main draw for the festival’s summer showpiece, an iconic band transcending the decades with a collision of musical styles and a whole host of gargantuan pop classics in their sonic armoury. A band rooted in British subcultures who have taken their sound overground to the masses. They now sell out the country’s arenas with ease.
Yet Massive Attack are too bold, too brutal for these times, when political statements are not allowed during televised Glastonbury performances. The modern festival would rather leave Massive Attack’s message at the door.
Tonight’s show at Liverpool Arena underlines Massive Attack’s power and modus operandi, an explosive art-rock assault of the senses, exploring the genocidal wars unfolding before our eyes, the corruption inherent in politics that govern our daily lives and the empty sloganeering of the mass media.
The 8,000 people in attendance in Liverpool tonight were primed in advance about the nature and the seriousness of tonight’s performance. The gig forms part of a three day event called Act 1.5 – a climate action accelerator aimed at transforming how music events can be staged, with the other two nights featuring Idles and Chic.
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As part of this package there has been a conference featuring the likes of conservationist Chris Packham, aiming to create a carbon zero staging music events while tackling the environmental issues of staging huge shows of this nature. The shows finish at 10.00pm, so most of the audience are able to use public transport rather than drive, all food served in the arena during the three days is plant based and the events are powered by clean energy.
Alongside tonight’s environmental themes, the band decimate the senses with an unrelenting visual display, depicting the brutality in Palestine, Trump’s populism, Puttin’s rise to power and the crassness of contemporary media.
And yet, juxtaposing all this, Massive Attack are a heavy, heavy groove machine. They know how to make the masses move.
Before the band hit the stage, messages begin being typed out on the huge screen that forms the backdrop. The messages are Hello magazine type headlines about celebrities and the kind of banal, blatantly untrue titillation that sadly passes for journalism for this swathe of magazines. As these messages are typed out, a clicking sound accompanies each letter.
The messages start off appearing one at a time, but this increases exponentially, until we are swamped by noise and words, unable to read or take in the messages and battered by the relentlessness of the words and sound, which one presumes is exactly the intended effect. A better demonstration of media overload it is hard to imagine.
As this sensory overload reaches a fever pitch, Massive Attack take to the stage and launch into Risingson. The Mezzanine material has always sounded tremendous live, the claustrophobia and dense instrumentation being powerfully reproduced on stage.
For this first song things are in black and white. Only a few spartan white lights on stage and the screens either side showing black and white images. Colour is added as the show progresses, notable starting with blood red. Throughout the show, the only spotlights are for the guest vocalists, the band preferring to let their music and messages take the attention. By the time Horace Andy and Elizabeth Fraser come on for songs two and three respectively, I am almost surprised that the spotlight shows them to be in full colour, so effective has the black and white theme been so far.
As the set progresses, the backdrop shows images of Ukraine and Palestine before and after war has been waged on them, contrasting modern cities populated by smiling people with the devasted ruins that followed. It is a stark and effective illustration of what is happening beyond our own privileged lives.
Numbers appear on the screen showing how many people have been killed, injured, displaced by these wars and how many bombs have been sold to the war’s participants by other countries.
If you are thinking that all this sounds a bit heavy going, I would not particularly disagree with you. After a while it does have the effect of feeling a bit harangued. But the choices we have are to take this information on board, to become at least informed by details that are not broadcast by the mass media, and possibly to take that information in and respond to it in some way or other, or to ignore the message and dance.
Plenty of people take the second option, turning their back on the stage and dancing with their arms in the air. Massive Attack cater for both sets of people and all those in between.
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Young Fathers take to the stage for three songs, introduced as “our brothers in arms”. Their songs are harder than anything we have heard so far, but this is contrasted with Elizabeth Fraser returning to the stage for a cover of Song To The Siren. Fans of Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil know that this is a special moment, Fraser’s phrasing is very different from the recorded version she made back in the 80s, a fact that makes hearing a new version even more special.
Cover versions are very much part of the Massive Attack live experience, ranging from the impressive (the best version of Ultravox’s ROckwrok I have heard) to the ill advised (Levels by Avicii – Cheesey chart dance pap).
Special mention must be made of Deborah Miller, who handles the vocals for Unfinished Sympathy and Safe From Harm excellently, with a superbly controlled voice.
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For two hours, Massive Attack entertained and educated. Both their music and their message are intertwined and an essential part of Massive Attack’s DNA, it is impossible to separate one from the other. Yes it can be a bit relentless, but so is the barrage of misinformation, sensationalism and gossip that we are subjected to outside of this arena.
Maybe Massive Attack are just trying to balance the scales a little. If that was their aim, we can say that they succeeded.
Tonight was a timely reminder of what music, art and a powerful message can do.
Music for our mess age. Just don’t expect it to be televised.
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