Music review: Massive Attack, Hydro, Glasgow

Massive Attack’s third album Mezzanine, released in 1998, was a flintier affair than their previous trailblazing trip-hop albums yet it also contains some of the most beautiful music of their uncompromising career. Such contradictions were at the heart of this twisted, even contrary coming of age celebration, which scrambled and deconstructed the original tracklisting to include full cover versions of some of the album’s samples.

Robert del Naja, aka 3D of Massive Attack in concert at Glasgow Hydro PIC: Andrew MacColl/REX/Shutterstock

Massive Attack, Hydro, Glasgow ****

Strobing, modulation and distortion quickly gave way to the beatific psych pop of The Velvet Underground’s I Found a Reason, accompanied by unsettling footage featuring royalty, dictators and a discombobulated Britney Spears, all created specially for this show by the brilliant documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis.

Curtis’s political patchwork was a perfect match for Massive Attack’s claustrophobia and paranoia - which translated surprisingly well to an arena setting, but could have throbbed louder still – providing piquant juxtapositions of popular culture and the worst of humanity (or, combining the two, footage of a black and white minstrel show on ice) but also injecting shards of sly humour with archive images of clog dancing as a backdrop to their choppy new wave cover of The Cure’s 10.15 Saturday Night.

The brooding trip-hop of Risingson and industrial dub of Man Next Door, sung hauntingly by longtime collaborator Horace Andy, provided a shot of familiarity, and there were delighted cheers for the elusive Liz Fraser, who appeared comfortable in her breathy songbird role despite the extreme rarity of her live forays since her days fronting the Cocteau Twins.

The sublime reverie was rudely interrupted by Robert Del Naja’s nosebleed punk rendition of Ultravox’s Rockwrok, as delicious as it was disorientating, before a beautiful balance was restored when Frazer stepped forward again to deliver an all-too-rare but rather special live rendition of the balletic Teardrop. - Fiona Shepherd