Victoria Park, London
Friday 6th June
The newly anticipated LIDO festival is making its debut at the legendary East London’s Victoria park. Set across two weekends, the likes of Jamie XX, London Grammar and Charli XCX will be taking to the stage in the park’s 5000-capacity Lido Field. For the inaugural day, LIDO is being headlined by none other than the legendary trip-hop pioneers Massive Attack, with support from legendary French space cadets Air.
Since their formation in 1988, Bristol’s Massive Attack are famed for their signature downbeat stylised ‘trip-hop’ on ‘Blue Lines’, and ‘Mezzanine’, and blurring the lines between musical electronic rock act and social activism – in all the right ways.
And their performance at LIDO festival reinforced just this.
The soaring June sun retreats behind the clouds over Victoria Park, under a vast sky of Palestine flags, as video clips of what appears to be fake news headlines jitter across the screen in an eerie silence. A bleak reminder of the distraction techniques of the media that keep us at bay from the real issues.
Robert Del Naja and Grant Marshall walk onto the stage to introduce the dirge-dub opener ‘Ringson’. “Where have all those flowers gone?” bellows out into the ominous North London fields where rippling Palestine flags hang sinisterly in twilight. 3D and Daddy G replace the sun with the deep dark vast ocean of a sunless life – swapping the facade of hope for dread.
As ‘Ringson’ coils back into the earth, Adam Curtis’s carefully crafted visuals depict what look to be fluctuating profile pictures and facets of coding scattering along the LIDO screens, as long-term collaborator, Horace Andy, joins the stage to sing ‘Girl I Love You’, taken from the 2010 album Heligoland. A slow wonk-driven crowd move to the textural pulsating rhythms as Horace gently lays his vocals upon the explosive wails that build until final the crescendo.
A deep red beam masks the stage, creating the illusion that the band are engulfed in flames. It is now, the end is here. A downbeat apocalypse – the everyday apocalypse. An intense trepidation surges. Doomsday is upon us, and here is soundtrack.
Out of the darkness, cataclysmic images of an apocalyptic Palestine, as well as Ukraine and Bosnia, are projected together with hypnotic primitive beats of the live drums, waves of samples and noise drones captivate the audience and awaken a truthful report of what is happening around the world.
Massive Attack perfectly blend traditional rock and electronic music through an authentic warped blend of tribal beats, juxtaposed with noticeable British sub-cultures to unite and capture the pure essence of Britain during the 1990’s and still this present day. Darkened landscapes of post-Thaterism still linger, Massive Attack document and encapsulate a truthful realism of Britain, much in the same vein, as T.S Eliot’s 1922 poem ‘The Waste Land’.
“It feels like they know something we don’t” Halycon Cowgirl
Just as when you think the caliginosity of the evening can’t become any deeper, the earth-shattering tribal density of ‘Intertia Creeps’, from Mezzazine, pound into the pentatonic plates, reaching the pinnacle of the live annihilation, as Trump & Musk’s baleful AI video of an American occupied Gaza Strip is soaked maliciously into the audience.
As the meditative immersion draws to a close, a cloak of darkness wraps Victoria Park into a stillness; obscurity. Horace Andy returns to the stage to conduct a spellbinding cover of ‘Angel’, from Mezzanine. The set draws to an end with ‘Safe From Harm’, a poignant moment where rising statistics of the Palestinian death toll is depicted since October 7th.
Fan favourites ‘Unfinished Symphony’ from Blue Lines, and a guest appearance from Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins for the 1998 hit ‘Teardrop’ closes and offers a slight glimpse of optimism to conclude the evening.
Using Adam Curtis’s clever re-appropriations of cultural clippings and tabloid headlines outlining social, environmental and political issues, Massive Attack remove the context of the subjects from their formally read environments; news sites, tabloids, and juxtapose them alongside their music, which allows viewers to see a dreaded realism in the subjects without a journalistic influence or biased tamperings.
In their live performances, the downbeat, darkened vocals from 3D and Daddy G, combined with the introspective visuals of Adam Curtis, provide the perfect soundtrack to spotlight the artificial misery we are all subject to on the daily.
“A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.” Marshall McLuhan
In times like these, we need the unity and defiance of Massive Attack now more than ever.
