Massive Attack And Slow Decay

In case it looks like my only reaction to the Massive Attack show on Saturday was to bitch about the people standing in my immediate vicinity, I should tell you about the concert itself.
Originally Sinéad O’Connor was due to appear as a guest vocalist, but we heard at the last minute that she had been replaced by Dot Allison. I tried not to hold this against Ms A, but all attempts at impartiality failed at the first hurdle of her support act. Her moody stares and arm-waving were tiresome during the performance of her own songs and totally spurious during the Massive Attack set. Her voice? Competent, but doomed by comparison to the divine Misses O’Connor and Fraser.
Horace Andy was a less ostentatious performer, who shuffled and bounced a little and concentrated more on heartfelt renditions of the material than on any attempt to demonstrate stage presence. 3D was pretty immobile too, though with a steely-eyed demeanour and singularity of purpose befitting both the material and the outcome of his recent police investigation. Daddy G made a low-key appearance for a couple of songs, his voice seeming less confident than usual.
The musicians were uniformly excellent and the venue’s sound system is probably one of the best that I’ve experienced in a long time. From the start, we were immersed in an almost tangible MBVesque wall of sound with delicious stereo separation. This was demonstrated most spectacularly during the second encore (Group Four), in which layer upon layer of guitar created an ever more complex texture. You could almost see the notes hanging in the air like shards of glass.
With no disrespect intended to the musicians, though, I have to say that the star of the show was the dot-matrix board immediately behind the band. Clearly capable of a lot more (a couple of relatively high-resolution pictures were displayed at one point), it was mainly confined to airport indicator board style text of various kinds. Content appeared in various themes, depending on the song.
A common element was location-specific information such as area and suburb names of London districts, live feeds of train and plane information, weather reports, and so on. Another recurring theme was statistical information, from the trivial (I forget exactly what, but I think one was related to production of human excrement) to the globally significant (the military expenditure figures were simply mind-blowing).
Frequently, the information presented was subverted, firstly by preserving its structure but changing the words to random combinations of characters, then by eliminating the structure entirely. I guess the intention was, with the speed at which the words and figures were flashing by, to comment on information overload and the way in which any great volume of factual information eventually becomes meaningless due to the sheer inability of the human brain to absorb it.
At one point, my fellow geeks and I observed the whole display turning into a stream of HTML and PHP code – a clever trick that revealed both the mechanics of the presentation of information and yet also compounded the sheer incomprehensibility of what was being presented.
I think I’ve seen more live music in the past twelve months than I have in the previous five years. This concert will stick in my mind longer than most, for its mixture of multimedia art performance, superb musical dynamics, renditions of old favourites and the razor-sharp edge of the newer material. Above all, what impressed me most about this show was its sense of engagement with the world. For all its emotional dislocation, fragmented isolationism and monochrome ambiguity, the latest Massive Attack album might be the best collection of protest songs that the century has so far produced.