19th April 2003 - Brixton Academy, Brixton, UK
It’s about fucking time I went and saw a rock show in London; I’d missed quite a few shows I really should’ve gone to simply because of my usual inertia. The Massive Attack tickets were booked months ago back in Florida, as part of the initial coordination of Prol’s birthday celebration, so the lethargy that took hold of me in London didn’t have an effect on my decision to see them. So this was my first time in the remarkable Brixton Academy; quite the excellent venue. Not only is it quite pretty (one of those simulated-outdoors spaces, with Italian balconies flanking the stage to make it look like an outdoor ampitheatre), but the acoustics were fantastic (as Cameron pointed out, the volume was high but we left the venue with absolutely no ringing-ear syndrome, which has never happened to me before at any concert. Wow) and although the stage was surprisingly large, the band weren’t dwarfed on it, largely since the giant screen filled the space they couldn’t.
The “band” consisted of a drummer, a guitarist, a bassist, and a DJ/programmer/keyboardist; the various vocalists — 3D, Dot Allison, Horace Andy, Daddy G, and a woman whose name I don’t know (but who was fantastic) — took turns coming onstage for their various songs (they were only all together for their bows at the end of the show). The live sound was pleasantly strong, although it often drowned out some vocals (3D’s especially) and submerged the most interesting programmed sounds, though it made up for it with sheer muscle. Not every number worked; putting some of the 100th Window tracks next to songs from Blue Lines just pointed out the difference between them; i.e., the new ones are just tracks — sound experiments — and the older bits are songs and pretty fuckin’ great ones at that (”Safe From Harm” and “Unfinished Sympathy” especially just blew me away). The video show was interesting; flipping back and forth from politically-charged war stuff to techno-centered streams of digits and information. All I could think about was how absurdly “modern” it all was. Some of the techno-fetishization (binary code?) was elementary, but some of it was excellent, like when posts from the Massive Attack message board (NEED TIX 2 BRIXTON SHOW 4/19) were scrolled by, or the HTML code for their website (you know the bloggers in the house appreciated that). The most effective visual presentation of the night was definitely “Safe From Harm,” in which the defense budgets of all the world’s nations scrolled by from smallest to largest. Second-largest: Russia, $60 billion. Largest: U.S.A., $399 billion. Holy shit. The correspondence between the song (”But if you hurt what’s mine / I’ll sure as hell retaliate / You can free the world, you can free my mind, just as long as my baby’s safe from harm tonight”) and the information might have seemed facile at first, and yeah, flashing a skull and crossbones was a bit much, but the force of the performance was enough to marry the two presentations successfully, if that’s not too clinical a description for you.
Disappointments? Absolutely no material from Protection (it’s not that strong an album, sure, but it does have some of their best songs) and the merely-functional Dot Allison, who gave a piss-boring acoustic opening set and basically just filled in space on her other numbers — “Black Milk,” “Special Cases,” “Teardrop,” and “Group Four” (which ended with a rock ‘n’ roll guitar freak-out of surprising proportions). Had Sinead O’Connor been singing, however, the night would have been completely transformed and I think my head literally would have exploded. But life goes on and there’s no point in fixating on a missed opportunity… if she actually is sick, I hope she gets better, but if that was just a dodge, then grrr, woman. Grrrr.
Review by Chris Conroy from www.doyoufeelloved.com/ dated 21st April 2003
This show was part of a five night residency by Massive Attack in London at Brixton Academy. This fact is quite historic as they were the very first act to sell out Brixton Academy for five nights in a row.
With Sinead O’Connor departing the tour after her very brief stint at the shows in Glasgow and Manchester, the setlist reverted back with the Brixton Academy shows, to one used in Australia and Japan in the previous month, without What Your Soul Sings and A Prayer For England. This setlist is what would become the standard at the majority of the remainder of the 2003 tour.
Dot Allison would provide support for this show in the form of an accoutic guitar performance.
The official site for the Brixton Academy is located here.
These photos were taken by Annabelle Dalby. Some of these images are taken from the other four Brixton dates, as part Massive Attack’s record-breaking five night residency in London. Click on the thumbnails below to view a larger image.
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