s pop stars fly on private jets and haul stage sets around the world, with their fans collectively generating significant emissions via their own travel to gigs, Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja has said “it’s time to act” and address the environmental damage wreaked by live music.– will be 100% powered by renewable energy, in what the band say is a “world first” for an event of its scale.
The environmentally minded show was conceived in 2018, and announced in 2021 – a scheduled performance in Liverpool was pulled owing to the venue’s“It’s been a long journey; I was a young man once,” jokes the show’s lead producer, Mark Donne. He detected in Massive Attack an “intense frustration with their sector”, which had, he claims, “a sort of intransigent attitude to anything other than the decorative or superficial. Our plans became practical very quickly.
The band’s own travel setup has been massively slimmed down. “At blueprint level it was: how do we design an exciting show that doesn’t take 25 trucks to move from place to place?” Del Naja says. “Now our haulage is down to two trucks, and I feel the show is more confrontational, provocative and visually dynamic. It hasn’t lost anything – it’s gained more.
“This isn’t us trying to point the finger at the consumer,” he says. “It’s more about the promoters, who hold the power in this sector, who need to do more. They have the ability to make the change; the finances. What’s frustrating is knowing that people are sitting there on their hands, waiting for legislation to happen.”