Massive Attack < LIVE > Archives

The imminent presentation of the 8th iteration of our live show has prompted us to reflect on the 7 versions that preceded it: what they looked like, their design methodology, the ways in which each responded to the moment that arrived them, and the forms of adaptation between each variant.

When it springs up in the context of live music performance, sociopolitical content is typically materialised in visual or verbal slogans as a call to attention or action. These moments of collective galvanisation in any cultural space matter, perhaps now more so than ever.

Our own stage shows are more complex, higher risk enterprises than general expressions of this nature. Conceptually, they have sought to synthesise contemporary and historic events to create a live flux of awareness and immersion that is structural to the body of the show. Live political, cultural and/or historical events are used as artistic material itself; serving as a provocative fifth column component to interplay with musical performance, film projection, sophisticated lighting design and audience reaction.

This post thread is intended as an invitation to any reader to delve into the evolution of this production series, and as an exploratory precursor to the new live show we’re about to tour. We’ve cut several short films to illustrate previous renditions and will invite some of our collaborators to share images, printed artefacts, or their own reflections on the works themselves and their specific contemporaneous atmosphere/context.

Sequential material will be updated incrementally to this post thread.

We hope readers might find the archive thread stimulating and a useful resource for their own practice - be that art, music, film, design or political activism.

MA [Helsinki. 27/05/26]

2003. Massive Attack x United Visual Artists

The 2003 show marked the first collaboration with United Visual Artists and was created for the 100th Window world tour. The production introduced the monolithic LED, live data feed screen barrage concept for the first time, fusing political and economic statistics with banal, general or localised news data. This innovation arrived within the catastrophic context of the US/UK invasion of Iraq, the globally transfixing mid-air explosion of the Space Shuttle Columbia, and the mainstream take up of camera phones, LCD televisions and broadband internet that increasingly permutated spectacle.

Lisa Rowell - BBC News, 29/08/03. LINK

“A couple of lads from Nottingham who’d braved the M42 and M5 southbound said they’d already seen MA on the 100th Window Tour and the light show was fantastic: “Once seen, never forgotten,” they enthused […] it was an addictive mine of information. Maps of the world whizzing from place to place - including Bristol and Queen Square, which got a huge cheer - statistics about the war in Iraq, backed up by verbal comments from 3D, and text about world energy consumption. The screen had been tailored for the local audience - loads of city suburbs flashed up, along with a full five-day weather forecast for Bristol and even a mention of the Downs League’.

3D / Ministry Magazine (Australia) 2003 LINK

“I wonder whether, if you were in a different part of the world looking in on our culture via TV, you’d be saddened and shocked by what you saw … It’s gonna breed more resentment of our culture if we don’t start to balance our view a bit and start thinking of more important things.”

2013. Massive Attack V Adam Curtis

This show model emerged through the vapours of the Occupy movement, the tumult and repression of the Arab Spring and the minatory spell of a (literally) post-Thatcher & pre-Trump penumbra. Answering the band’s desire to juxtapose clinical LED renderings of factual data with the emotional capacities of story and historic echo, Massive Attack began a new collaboration with visionary documentarian film-maker Adam Curtis.

Prototyped in a sunken, disused Edwardian rail depot warehouse in post-industrial Manchester and the vast Drill Hall of Park Avenue Armory, New York City, the eleven screen hypnotic, almost hallucinatory experience was then modified to provide a radical new design template for our touring stage production.

Adam Curtis / The Guardian, 30/06/13 LINK

“We are exploring a subject that has long interested us both and that we have been talking about, on and off, for two years. It concerns the rise of the modern ideology that we now live in, which is essentially managerial. We increasingly live in a world run by modern technocrats, whether government thinktanks or data analysts or terror experts or the big global internet companies that use algorithms to tell us what we want. They are all predicting the future through the data they collect on us, and which they then use as evidence to protect us from a future of risk. The whole idea, to quote a famous pop band, is to keep us safe from harm.”

Alex Poots CBE (Founding Artistic Director of Manchester International Festival), 2013.

“What I noticed early on is that they (Del Naja & Curtis) are both producers of a kind. They take different elements and meld them together, visually and sonically. There is that sense of collage in each of their styles, but also a shared sense of curiosity about the world we live in and the real power that is swirling around us and, in a way, controlling us […] Right now, they are grappling with a way of creating a performance that merges a concert and a film and, simultaneously, illustrates that mysterious world. If it works, and I think it will, people will be both surprised and stimulated. It will not be like any other gig that you have experienced, that’s for sure.”

2016. Massive Attack x Young Fathers x UVA / Giles Duley

A new recorded and live collaboration with Young Fathers (most notably on the Ritual Spirit EP release of the same year), screen innovations from UVA, and startling imagery provided by war photographer Giles Duley delivered a show variant of varied aspects and treatments.

3D (Robert Del Naja - 2002):

“By the time I was designing content for the 2016 tour the world had become an information battlefield. The US elections, Steve Bannon’s troll farms, Cambridge Analytica, Brexit bots. Our data vis experiments needed to adapt to reflect a febrile reality, and we began a new collaboration with Mario Klingemann, an artist and neurographer working with artificial intelligence; manipulating photos and video with GANs.

We built virtual machines that can be accessed on the tour via the cloud that distributes content from AI models. Inference engines, RNNs and GANs. Outsourcing the research and editing process that myself and Icarus Wilson Wright, Ben Kreukniet and UVA have been re-adapting for 15 years. It won’t replace us or the content design, but it does pose interesting questions about perception and truth.”

Jeremy Allen / The Quietus, 31/08/16 LINK

“Questions appear on the screen and translated into French, makes it all the more existential: “Ou êtes vous maintenant?” (where are you now?). “Quel est le but de mourir?” (What’s the purpose of dying?) “Je ne sais pas,” comes the answer. The ante is upped on the projection for ‘United Snakes’, and you suspect the intention is a didactic one. Political parties flash and mash together, mixed up with sections of logo (they might be from parties or banks, it’s hard to tell). UKIP, Sinn Fein, Plaid Cymru, The Liberal Democrats, The Conservative Party… as the song unfolds, party names are prefixed with “jerk” and “evil” …”

The Guardian, 02/02/16 LINK

“… stark data about the Syrian refugee crisis, including the relatively few asylum claims in the UK, is ruthlessly powerful, and a sequence displaying Google searches “can I give Benadryl to the dog” throbs with humanity.”

2019 – MEZZANINE XXI

This adaptation - produced (unknowingly) on the unseen precipice of a global pandemic & a total fracture of the human relationship with time - set out to unwire and dissolve the genetic code that formed the band’s seminal 1998 studio album, and reapply them into a theatrical discord charging through the chambers of the amygdala; from plastic pop culture to political grotesque.

Ian Bourland / FRIEZE, 03/11/19 LINK

“Rather than simply rehearse time-worn standards from a generation’s salad days, Massive Attack asks us to consider what we have done with the space between, and where might we go. While it was a rare gift to witness versions of these songs, many of which were given room to breathe or added chromatic depth, the mood at Radio City was urgent, less revivalism than activism. Until this week, I only had a hazy sense of Walter Benjamin’s concept of the ‘dialectical image’, wherein the past is an ever-accumulating wave of human dealings, and history can be accessed, now, in moments of rupture, through practices that line up temporal gateways which might help us see anew. Mezzanine XXI changed the way I will hear that record, but also the way I will understand a year in time, and the tragedy that it portended.”

3D (Robert Del Naja / The Fader, 25/09/19) LINK

“To be honest, the centrifugal force of the show is irony. Irony can be that moment where everybody just goes, “Oh. Of course. How could I be so foolish not to see the big picture?” The big picture gets revealed, and that can be a moment of great irony because you start questioning everything you thought. Irony is a powerful, sincere force. Being able to reveal yourself without irony can be very pretentious. We’ve never been a band that likes to take itself too seriously, and sometimes when it comes across too seriously, I try to keep it theatrical. You’re playing a gig — you’re not behaving the way you do on Tuesday.”

Manuela Pacella, 21/03/19 LINK

“In an age where we are spectators of bizarre theatrics of politicians and journalists, where everyone aims only to keep a strange and disturbing system afloat, and where those in charge “know that we know that they don’t know what’s going on”, it gives a sense of a lack of dynamism. “If you liked that, you will love this” is a slogan that not only stand out on the Massive Attack’s stage, but that we often read in our emails or on the online recommendations resulting from our searches. We are victims of a machine that knows everything about our latest choices, and which therefore predicts the future exclusively based on as many repetitions of our own past.”

2024 / MA x Adam Curtis aspect.

Contextualized by the Gaza genocide, this production was in a sense sharpened but also made emotionally porous in order to present implications of balance beside targeted, almost lurid imbalance. Presented to audiences routinely traumatised by Instagram killings and heartbroken by political inaction, that key symbiosis of film and digital visualization pushed further and deeper into experimental provinces, to generate a spectrum of encounter running consecutively from discomfort to near delirium.

The Curtis film sequences featured a narrative loop of doomed notions of self, surreal distancing from concepts of reality and the numb poignancy of societal atomisation. Other provocations included meditations on racing technological transgressions that threaten human autonomy, and an illusionary expedition into the psyche of the “merchants of war”.

Ian Winwood / The Daily Telegraph, 30/11/24. LINK

“… visual images – including of Gaza, Ukraine and Bosnia, and a munitions factory in Oklahoma – and berserk headlines running riot on chyrons. “90 per cent of voters have no idea that Joe Biden is a robot,” read one. With its information-age-currencies of paranoia and unease, it was like stepping into the pages of a Don DeLillo novel […] Stranger still, late on, was footage of a bird trapped behind a pane of glass. At most arena shows, toward the end of the night, music and showmanship conspire to persuade audiences that they can fly and be free. The point is to send ‘em home happy. For this band, though, life is more complicated than this. Amid a production that at times looked like the War Room from Dr Strangelove, Massive Attack provided a soundtrack for our gravely troubled times.”

2025 / MA x UVA aspect.

New, LED excoriation(s) of arms industry profiteering and the financial bankrolling of genocide give the screen monolith even greater gravitational pull. A satirical provocation on ubiquitous surveillance culture is potently rendered via a facial detection effect - fused with a randomised/fictional database that generates audience amusement and degrees of concern, and, later, media misreporting that required public correction & apology.

Martin Robinson / London Evening Standard, 07/06/25 LINK

“It is undisputed that Massive Attack are one of the greatest British acts of all time, but one of the reasons why that is the intent of it all. Politically, socially, environmentally conscious, they’re not just ‘all about the music’, with none of that ‘we write this for ourselves and if anyone else likes it, it’s a bonus’ […] And while other artists fret about whether it’s their place to talk about Gaza, Massive Attack use their major summer show in the capital as a multi-media platform for demanding an end to the genocide.”

Tiernan Cannon, 08/06/25. LINK

“At no stage during this entire set did things ever truly feel settled. You could be made to feel sad, joyous, angry or happy at any moment, and you just had to ride it out as it came at you […] It was actively challenging at times, such was the intensity of information being pumped to the audience from the stage. “

Fin Harrison / CLASH, 08/07/25 LINK

“Massive Attack’s Wednesday night headline set was particularly powerful. As expected, the Bristolian collective used their hypnotic combination of sound and on-stage multimodal visuals to amplify a broader socio-political message and re-enforce their anti-war stance. As Horace Andy, Deborah Miller and Elizabeth Fraser exchanged vocal duties between tracks, the screens behind them displayed real-time data about Palestinian deaths and casualties in Gaza, videos of children mining cobalt in the D.R. Congo, and footage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

For the past 20 years, the festival has been held at Babie Doły, an air base used by the Polish Navy, whose biggest concern, in recent years especially, has been that of Russian aggression. Throughout band’s set, clips of the war in Ukraine were intertwined with those of Vladimir Putin receiving standing ovations in the Kremlin. “