In This Together Tee

PRINTED ON GD1801 BLACK TEES.

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Massive Attack’s Mezzanine remains an extraordinary album: a work of suspense and brooding soul that envelopes you entirely. For the London show marking its twenty-first anniversary—the second time that the Bristol outfit have collaborated with doc filmmaker Adam Curtis (Bitter Lake; HyperNormalisation)—the group somehow make the vast O2 venue feel incredibly intimate.

There’s an unexpected jolt when the show starts not with the deep, dub-laced rumble of album opener Angel, but a full band take on the Velvet Underground’s I Found A Reason—which Massive Attack spliced into their own, shiver-inducing Risingson with mainmen Robert “3D”  Del Naja and Grant “Daddy G” Marshall resuming their persuasively raspy, conspiratorial lead vocals. But the band have never been given to basic nostalgia: in Mezzanine XXI, it feels like we’re looking inwards, rather than backwards. The setlist intersperses the album’s original intoxicating tracks with cover versions of the far-ranging numbers that provide samples and connective material for Mezzanine; spanning Bauhaus to the Cure and late EDM artist Avicii.  

“I told the promoters that there was going to be no Hollywood ending” All of Mezzanine’s material is here, along with phenomenal guest vocalists Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins (an ultra-rare performance) and Jamaican roots reggae songwriter and singer Horace Andy, making the experience somehow both unmistakeable and unpredictable. Giant screens and digital columns on either side of the stage transmit Curtis’s immaculately spliced visuals: side-eye views of pop culture and political spectres (the London crowds jeer at images of Donald Trump, then cheer excitedly for Judy Garland as Dorothy in The Wizard Of Oz), off-kilter slogans, and an overriding sense of wonder and dread. It also frequently evokes the consumer meltdowns of Jenny Holzer’s Protect Me from What I Want…

The concept of revisiting Mezzanine in the twenty-first century, and extending that creative rapport with Curtis, felt like a natural progression. “Adam (Curtis) and I both work in collages; Massive Attack used music, rather than images,” adds Del Naja. “The idea I wanted to convey in this show was a mirror to where we are now. Examining where we are culturally, through the medium of a gig, trying to create moments where things felt harmonious, and where it would jar. I took the approach where we’d “extract” the tracks that were sampled for Mezzanine, and Adam was interested in making films that explore the nature of meaning and history.

“We had this shared desire to do something really disorientating, but it also had to have feeling and soul. Adam has access to a massive archive which he uses to build these amazing, informative, beautiful pieces of art, which tell you about the world you think you know. I love the way he tells stories about people, as well as the brilliant social and political analysis. His films remind me of the ghosts of the songs we write. A lot of this has been about the reliability of information—how it’s distributed, in what direction. Can we move forward if our behaviour is dictated by algorithms—predictive technology designed to influence the future?”

“Repurposing Mezzanine felt like an opportunity to sabotage expectations,” Del Naja explains. “In the original Greek definition, ‘nostalgia’ means ‘homecoming’ or ‘homesickness’. Doing something that everyone knew so well was the perfect opportunity to create that slightly difficult emotional environment. With Adam, we always talk about the idea that you resurrect ghosts every time you bring something back from the past, whether it’s music, film or the kind of stories that Adam tells.”

This, of course, is now contested territory. Reinterpreting the past can be dangerous, both in the context of conspiracy theories and in the nostalgia inherent in nativist populism. Del Naja embraces the challenge of this bigger picture. “It’s not putting an idea out there for the creation of hysterical conspiracy theories,” he says. “It’s about asking what really happened. Is the past what we think it is? Populist movements have been about resurrecting versions of their respective nations’ former glories. It’s a false memory for times that weren’t actually that glorious. Those memories become collages of reality and fiction.