Massive Attack aren’t in it for the nostalgia. Their latest tour would rather be “unpredictable” than “formulaic”.
Massive Attack is taking their iconic album Mezzanine on tour over 21 years after its release in 2019. Their tour is taking the album
Del Naja confessed: “I don’t think I’ve got a problem with nostalgia, because a lot of the time things are self-referential…I stopped feeling nostalgia for the moment because I imagine myself looking back on it from the future, which really freaks me out. I get this vertigo where I’m not thinking about the past, I’m thinking about how I’m going to feel in 10 years’ time.”
“I’m happy for it to be unpredictable,” he added later in the interview. “That’s the point. There’s no sort of bants, no chatting because you kind of felt… Well, you wouldn’t go to a play and the actors turn around and say: ‘Are you all right?’ And there has to be some personal creative risk attached where you don’t know what’s going to happen. It should be disorienting for us and the audience otherwise…”
Adam Curtis interjects; “Gigs have become very formulaic these days. Not just gigs but all of culture – and that’s the challenge. The way you make people look again is by finding a different sort of image. And so the overall aim is to show how over the past 20 years, we’ve gone into a very static, repetitive world that surrounds us with the same images that keep us from really looking.”
Massive Attack will play at the 02 in London on Friday 22nd Feb before heading to Montreal, Canada March 11.
