As Massive Attack perform an amped-up version of Man Next Door – Horace Andy’s voice quavering, its ominous dub backing freshly augmented with distorted guitars – the screens behind them flash up a warning against the seductive power of nostalgia. “All around you are two-dimensional images of people who died long ago,” it reads, over black-and-white footage of a person who died long ago, British pop artist Pauline Boty. “They say, ‘don’t bother with the future. Stay with us here. For ever.’”
This is an intriguing message to send out in the middle of one of those gigs at which a band play a beloved album from their back catalogue in full, but then Massive Attack’s live revisiting of their 1998 album Mezzanine is clearly a more complex and troubled affair than such gigs usually are. Most gigs like this are predicated on a comforting familiarity – the audience buy tickets knowing exactly what they’re going to get – which is not an accusation you could lob the way of tonight’s show. Instead of Mezzanine’s opening track, Angel, the gig commences with a grinding one-note drone, followed by a surprisingly faithful cover of The Velvet Underground’s I Found a Reason, replete with vocalist Robert Del Naja doing Lou Reed’s deadpan spoken-word interlude about walking down life’s lonely highways hand in hand with himself. Then they play Risingson, a track from Mezzanine that sampled a tiny snatch of the doo-wop-inspired vocals from I Found a Reason. It’s a trick they repeat over and over during the show, switching from covers of tracks they sampled – The Cure’s 10:15 Saturday Night, Ultravox’s Rockwrok – to the tracks that sampled them: Man Next Door, Inertia Creeps.
It works remarkably well, both as a deconstruction of the album and as a sly nod to how ahead of the game Massive Attack were in 1998. Five years before indie bands started doing impersonations of Gang of Four or Josef K, Massive Attack were mining the post-punk period for inspiration more creatively: they didn’t just borrow and warp sounds, but moods, as evidenced by how well a bass-heavy cover of Bauhaus’s goth anthem Bela Lugosi’s Dead slots into the set. It’s not the only way that Mezzanine seems remarkably foresighted. In 1998, a lot of music sounded like Massive Attack’s debut album Blue Lines: umpteen trip-hop and chill-out compilations were packed with artists imitating it; you couldn’t turn on the TV without hearing something inspired by it pattering away in the background of an advert. At the time, Mezzanine seemed completely at odds with the mood of beatific stoned tranquillity the band had inadvertently unleashed. It was twitchy, gloomy and suspicious, filled with songs that fretted about surveillance and control, less fashionable topics then than in today’s era of data harvesting and digital footprints.
Mezzanine’s curious prescience is picked up by documentary film-maker Adam Curtis’s accompanying visuals, a characteristic jumble of images – from Ken Dodd to footage of shootings and bombing raids, to the wedding of Prince Andrew – pinned together by Curtis’s usual preoccupations: our computers are watching us, politicians and pharmaceutical companies are controlling us, conspiracy theories might in themselves be a conspiracy theory, designed to keep people afraid. Sometimes it can feel a bit heavy-handed – there are only so many times you can be told you’re a lobotomised minion of the military-industrial complex before it starts to get on your nerves. But more often it works to overwhelming effect. The scattershot images are potentiated by the music, which has lost nothing of its power in the intervening years: Elizabeth Fraser’s rendition of Teardrop and the lounge-y instrumental Exchange come as brief moments of calm, flickering light in the otherwise all-pervading darkness. What it never feels is nostalgic, a cosy wallow in former glories: the concert sets its own conditions for revisiting the past and meets them perfectly.
• At 3Arena, Dublin, 24 February. At Steel Yard, Bristol, 1-2 March.
