MASSIVE ATTACK REVIEW
I was reminded never to wear sticky lipgloss and a flailing faux fur scarf in strong winds again when walking to The Docks’ M&S arena from Queen Street bus station. Fluffy lips or what. I opted for stagecoach services as opposed to Uber’s for the occasion.
Before the main act even began, it was an aquatic dystopia. I penetrated the stadium from the Riverside entrance set against the backdrop of a pitch black menacing Mersey that went on forever in imitation of the sky up into which it was vacuumed.
Inside, Act 1.5 text loomed in silvery white against blackness as if floating. You couldn’t tell from where it came, be it projection, banner, laser lights or screens. Millions of numbers flickered everywhere. We were the inside of a water-damaged calculator, reminded we were small, wholly intertwined with technology, and now cast at sea where we were helpless in the face of nature’s enormity.
Human heads bobbed smoothly like swans on an electrical current. It was far from feeling that joined the crowd. More of a mode into which we acquiesced. I couldn’t stop thinking about Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island, which details robotic versions of people of the past, the remnants of which they’re among yet possess no memory. I hadn’t thought about it in many years which told me how real my notion of submersion in something much more powerful than humanity was there and then.
Markedly different from anything electronic or industrial I’ve experienced, such as a rave, it was inhuman, like we had all arrived to be engulfed by the elements. It was a step beyond a foreboding or inevitably as we were already there.
Like the malfunctioning calculator, the music was fractured and futuristic, ever since the main act had begun and the crowd had decanted into this indoor reservoir. With such a start, you couldn’t avoid feeling instead of hearing the notes as though by a sensory medium beyond sound, a sixth one. Partly too because I wasn’t used to experiencing live music so subserviently, accentuated by my seated position and the eerie attentiveness of the pack of people.
Massive Attack setting about the “room” was futile as that aforementioned “thing bigger than humanity” was unrelenting in its prominence, if not the only presence pouring into the void in my perception I seemed to have grown specially for the occasion.
Diamonds on Horace Andy’s black leather, any glitter, and all that was metal, were reflections on water. The crowd rippled, tickled by the wind of the tracks. Humanity was introduced on-screen, syncopated by tales of scientific experiments and artificial intelligence. Everyone moved like animals. Artists on-stage threw themselves around decidedly.
Vape smoke rose. Videos of bombs filled our eyes. A complete shift occurred. For better or worse, a “man as boss feeling” was abetted by what we saw. Oddly this meant my mental return to something familiar to large gatherings, a transition from obscurity as humans, to alchemists.
News footage and man-made messes splayed across screens. Never had so much that is separate from music sprung to my mind while at a concert. But now the bass thump overtook my body, before a drastic catapult to filmic dystopia. For the first time: a stylishness and real dressing of the mood. Colours flashed instead of black and white. Euphoria. We transcended the preceding theatre-clean feel. I remembered that, oh my goodness, I love music(!).
A nasty and chaotic beast of a beat dragged then bounced with bravado. Voices had tone and feeling. I could focus on the music. Wow. What a diversity of sentiments in one night. My organs still thudded. Massive Attack members moved so unusually I couldn’t appreciate it more, a tangible reminiscence of Liverpool’s own individuality.
The red shirt adorned by a mere one member on-stage amongst the black leather was a sign of another ascension but moments away. Visuals displayed were more proud of humanity. Even its vulgarity. But mainly our expressive boldness and artistic and physical feats of the last century. The previous message emanated via their voices like an exorcism, and so the otherworldly thread holding the night together both persisted and was released closeby.
Finally the tsunami on the horizon, stoked by the sea-feel, burst into the space. Visuals of people penetrating water interspersed strife through gun lenses, drones and night cameras. Then excitement. Classic Massive Attack singles boomed and stunned, that initial sterile exactness and animalism, then concrete jungle, and latterly eccentric rock ‘n’ roll long gone. We bowed in spirit, to appreciate mystical music and ethereal voices, particularly at the gentle point when Elizabeth Frazer’s rose. She, David Munn and Horace Andy were so, so cool. They moved with command, different from the almost-futility of their presence within a turbulent nature at the very start.
References to “this [all being] a dream” and “paradises in our own minds” were an incredibly befitting near-end to the surprise spaceship ride through climates, extremes and states of mind.
Words by Sophie Sandor
