143. Massive Attack
Hyde Park
1 July 2016
We are merely a few days out from the Brexit referendum that has gone so spectacularly wrong. The sky’s grey, the mood’s grimmer, and Massive Attack have just turned Hyde Park’s “British Summertime” event into the last rave before the apocalypse. Somewhere between a protest march, a sonic séance and an art installation made by very angry electronic dance pioneers, this was less a gig and more a full-body anxiety attack you could dance to.
My two best friends and I are in the VIP section. It was not lost on us that, hanging in the angry air, there was an outside chance that we would be the first to be pushed up against a wall by those in the main field, if the revolution started here.
Anger is on the stage too, as 3D, eyes blazing like a sixth-former who just read 1984, shouts out: “We didn’t realise we’d be playing Eurochild as a requiem.” Oof. Subtlety’s not on the setlist tonight. Nor, apparently, is hope.
Still, Massive Attack don’t do happy. They do bleak. They do bass. They do what it would sound like if a serial killer had a panic attack in a Berlin underpass. Tonight’s visuals are a buffet of doom: surveillance-state font vomit, images of flights cancelled en masse, and enough digital static to reboot the Matrix. It’s not so much a concert as Newsnight directed by Stanley Kubrick.
But here’s the twist: they’re angry now. Furious, even. What used to drift by in a dubby stupor now pulses with political venom. They dedicate the rumbling “Shame” to “Boris Johnson and Michael Gove “lying fucking bastards” they shout and Hyde Park cheers like it’s 1991 and Thatcher’s just tripped over a speaker cable.
This is a night of guests taking the stage. Tricky appears like a gothic rap poltergeist to growl through “Take It There”, whilst Horace Andy, the Jamaican roots singer, despite appearing to have been wheeled on from A&E, still sings “Angel” like a man possessed by the ghost of Lee Perry and a bottle of rum. He is, for all intents and purposes, the reggae Dave Grohl: injured, indestructible, and somehow louder than god.
But it’s the younger voices that jolt the gig into another gear with Young Fathers, standing out amongst them, dancing like Scottish whirling Mevlevi Sufi who bring with them a jagged modernity. Their foghorn raps and spidery rimshots slot into the gloom like precision-machined parts. It’s beautiful. And terrifying.
Then, the finale. “Unfinished Sympathy”, now with added orchestra, projected refugee faces, and a massive “We Are In This Together” slogan. It’s the sort of moment that makes you cry and want to overturn a government simultaneously. Hyde Park is damp-eyed and furious. Job bloody done.
Massive Attack may have started the fire, but tonight they handed the torch to a whole bloody choir of arsonists and lit it up. No banter. No smiles. Just weaponised melancholy and bass that rearranges your internal organs. But somehow, it’s brilliant. Beautiful, brutal, and about as “British Summertime” as a power cut in Chernobyl, but perhaps a fitting epitaph to the national act of self harm that we just inflicted on ourselves.