8th September 1999 - Festival Del Unita, Modena, Italy
Somewhere, a bat squeaks.
Clouds are heavy with portent, the air is curdled with doom. Massive Attack,
masters of gloom, are playing their penultimate show before retreating into
their studio crypt for two years, their legion diminished by Mushroom's departure
but their multifarious demons still present and correct. It's a special night.
A significant night. Cut open the chickens and read the auguries within...
Quite literally, in fact, for somehow tonight Massive Attack find themselves
playing a festival of food in Modena. Not the festival of belfries or paranoia
or grim urban relationships you might expect, but instead a wide range of salami,
dolci and poultry. Four people wait in front of the stage while the city's middle-aged
leave their sensible cars and go foraging for crepes. Daddy G looks despondently
out of the bus window. "It's not even a festival of food," he says,
looking at the serried saloons, "it's a festival of parking." You
don't need the full hazel twig kit to divine the vibes are distinctly low.
However, by the time
an atmospheric dusk has fallen - something you strongly suspect Massive request
on every rider - the young of Modena have crept Morlock-like from their burrows
to watch this band ink the sky a darker shade of black. It's become easy to
be blasi about Massive's - yes, yes - rumbling menace, their clotted blood thinned
by the curse of Sunday supplement ubiquity, the sense that the Sword of Damocles
has been replaced by some nice Le Creuset knives. Yet here, you could only describe
them as 'coffee-table' if you own the matching skull-and-electric-chair set
from the Habitat Goth collection. As the spectral dub of 'Angel' skulks out
and Horace Andy twists and prowls like an autonomous shadow, the intimate chill
of sweat-soaked sheets instantly sets in. It doesn't lift for a long, long time.
In the cracks in the
cloud between songs, however, they seem oddly buoyant for a band who have just
lost a key member, Daddy G and 3D a ritualised bundle of hugs, salutes, and
mutual cigarette lighting. They have a right to be pleased - this valediction
shows a perfect honing of their dynamic, a stately creep through the hope and
the horrors, from the resinous smoulder of 'Karmacoma' to the sweet silvered
strangeness of 'Spying Glass'; from an impossibly intense 'Safe From Harm',
3D's consonants ticking like a timebomb, to the delirious 'Unfinished Sympathy',
until finally, in the stroboscopic flicker of 'Group Four', they stand head
down and silent until the darkness lifts. And then they smile.
Two years, then, until
they return. Set the alarm on the doomsday clock now. Wait for the chimes.