Massive Attack Live

Massive Attack, Brixton Academy, London

By Nick Hasted

12 July 2004

Massive Attack have been shaken almost to pieces in recent times. First, one of their central trio - Andrew "Mushroom" Vowles - left for good, then Grant "Daddy G" Marshall absented himself from the studio, leaving Robert "3D" Del Naja to assemble the first average Massive album, last year's 100th Window.

The disgraceful slurring of Del Naja with unfounded allegations of accessing child porn, just as 100th Window was released - and, some noted, as he made himself a vocal opponent of the Iraq war - only added to the band's embattled status. If, as Del Naja often states, Massive Attack is a brand, the name for a largely unrecognised collective of shifting personnel and musical styles, then that brand is weaker than ever before.

Once untouchable masters of a claustrophobically beautiful musical kingdom all their own, ever since their deified debut Blue Lines (1991), 2004 finds Massive Attack very much earth-bound, with a reputation to reclaim. At least they have safety in numbers again, as the tall, rangy G takes to the stage with the slight 3D and Horace Andy, the light-voiced singer who connects them most closely to the Bristol reggae blues nights of the Eighties where the band first came together.

They are greeted with a friendly cheer, not the roar reserved for conquering heroes, and the subsequent applause rises with the age of the songs, in a set that, wisely, draws heavily on 100th Window's great predecessor, Mezzanine (1998). The backdrop is minimal but effective - glowing bars of light which turn into subliminal neon messages. But mostly the stage stays in shadow, suiting the understated, crepuscular sounds that Massive Attack conjure tonight.

Andy takes centre-stage for "Angel", followed by a heavy dub excursion that ends in a shriek. 3D meanwhile murmurs raps and adds harshly scraped guitars and snapping wood-block beats, the jagged irritants which stop Massive Attack sinking into trippy inertia. There are acoustic folk elements too, mostly added by guest vocalist Dot Allison, standing in for Liz Fraser on the Cocteau Twin-like "Teardrop". It's still an accumulation of sounds like no one else's, thick and heavy but with leavening flashes which stop it ever being oppressive. It's music which makes few melodramatic gestures, instead dragging you in almost subliminally, till the beats are thundering in your brain.

No one dances to this so-called dance music, instead bending their heads to its weight. It's also music which is undoubtedly designed to be chemically enhanced, and the parade of thirtysomething drug casualties, as well as the blatant E dealers creeping through the crowd, show the generation Massive Attack still speak to.

Accordingly, Blue Lines' "Hymn to the Big Wheel", with its sunrise sense of coming up on Ecstasy, gets the biggest cheer, at least until the inevitable encore of "Unfinished Sympathy". With its acid house keyboards and soulful vocals, it's a reminder of days when Massive Attack seemed untouchable. Those days are gone, but they are still something special.

Massive Attack. Brixton Academy, London

David Peschek. Monday July 12, 2004. The Guardian

Through the dazzle of the lightshow and the swirl of dry ice, it's hard to tell how many people are coming and going across the stage. Massive Attack grew out of a sound system, possibly the most spontaneous and democratic grouping of musicians possible, and have become a de facto pop group, albeit one now led by resolute non-star 3D. So while surviving founding member Daddy G hangs about, offering the odd vocal interjection and generally looking spare, it's around 3D that the largely anonymous gaggle of back-up players coalesce.

It's an unenviable position: left in the wake of a string of charismatic performers (Tricky, Shara Nelson, Tracey Thorn, etc) who came and went with each album, he has a lot to carry.

Massive Attack were at their best when mapping out a future for British soul on their debut album, Blue Lines. They've grown progressively whiter (losing Nelson, Tricky and founding member Mushroom) and less interesting. It's telling that the three most powerful songs tonight are Safe From Harm, Hymn of the Big Wheel and the still overwhelming Unfinished Sympathy, all from Blue Lines and almost 15 years old. They're presented in passable but pallid versions, with Hazel Fernandez replacing Nelson. At least Horace Andy, a man with a voice like curls of silver leaf falling from a bright blue sky, is here to send Big Wheel soaring.

Unforgivable, however, is Dot Allison's turn as Fraser. Teardrop is among the most exquisite songs to survive the 1990s, and she massacres it, failing to hit most of the notes, offering a sub-Dannii Minogue drizzle in place of Fraser's sensual otherness.

When 3D himself takes the mic, his raps are barely audible, his between-song politicising mumbled. The music sulks and pouts, straining for gravity, hitting onerous and ponderous on the way to sonorous. The largely tuneless current album's songs are virtually indistinguishable from much of its predecessor. How dated this pre-millennial gothic seems already.