Massive Attack / David Holmes / Monkey Mafia
Birmingham NEC
Weird, these big arena gigs. The audience is largely comprised of middle-aged people and teenagers, beer is warm and overpriced and you’re meant to sit down. Not quite the Flapper and Firkin.
Monkey Mafia were on first at about 8 o’clock, and tried valiantly to stir the audience with their exuberant dubby collage of hip-hop and techno. Two thirds of the audience continued their conversations about market shares and Leonardo di Caprio, the rest tapped their feet a bit. David Holmes came on and did a cool DJ set almost immediately afterwards with the lights on, to precisely no response.
Soon the main act were on. And as the creepy opening beats of ‘Angel’ insinuated themselves into the vast arena it made sense. Massive Attack are in the big league, and any worries about whether the brooding menace of their music would translate to this kind of stage were quickly dispelled.
Their 90-minute set (including two encores) consisted of around two thirds of their total recorded output - remarkable that this could be true of a band who’ve been around for almost a decade, but also remarkable for the quality of the music they’ve made in that time. The supporting cast ambled on and off for their respective numbers - Horace Andy, doing his warbly thing, a woman introduced as Deborah who did a passable Shara Nelson impression and best of all, Liz Fraser for the beautiful ‘Teardrop’, as well as ‘Black Milk’ and ‘Group Four’. Centre-stage for longest, though, was 3-D, doing the rappy ones sometimes in tandem with Daddy G, more often on his own, trying in vain to be as creepy as Tricky.
The highlights were the tracks from Mezzanine. While it was fantastic to hear ‘Unfinished Sympathy’, it was the likes of ‘Inertia Creeps’ and ‘Risingson’ that stood out, sounding live twice as threatening as on record, not so much grabbing your attention as molesting it. What the arena crowd made of it I have no idea but I left feeling grateful to have seen a superb band showing why they’ve been at the top so long.
