Act 1.5: Inside Massive Attack’s Bristol blueprint for the future of sustainable live music

Last weekend, the pioneering group held the UK’s biggest low-carbon gig ever with a one-day festival on Clifton Downs, putting their calls for the music industry to respond to climate change into action

Arriving by bike across the flat grass commons of Clifton Downs as the final notes of Massive Attack’s soundcheck – the ’90s trip-hop anthem ‘Teardrop’ – fade out, it feels like something significant is taking place. A homecoming show for upwards of 30,000 fans by an act synonymous with Bristol’s music and political activism is a big deal under any circumstances, and the band have hinted it could be their last show in the city. But this isn’t just a victory lap.

This moment marks the culmination of a lot of hard work, passion and activism to create a truly sustainable live music event. Today (August 25), the group’s Act 1.5 gig finally arrives, its name a reference to the level of global warming that scientists define as unacceptably dangerous for humanity and its aim to create a blueprint for eco-friendly touring.

For the first time ever for a show of this size, the entire production is powered by a family of batteries charged by renewable energy. The biggest of them is proudly on display at the left of the stage, covered by a solar array. And behind the scenes, a convoy of electric trucks silently shift more giant power units around the site. It’s a bit like being backstage in the future, and that’s only the start.

Through a comprehensive programme of measures – some familiar, but many that are pushing boundaries – Massive Attack claim this is the lowest carbon show of its size ever. This is a show (not just according to the band, but also the scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, who the band have partnered with) that aims to be compatible with those global climate change targets agreed by the UN.

It’s big talk, and in the publicity around the show, the band have been strident in their criticism of how (un)seriously most events and promoters treat climate change, and the emissions from live music. Mark Donne, who led the production of the show, explains, “I had a conversation with Robert [del Naja] on tour in San Diego, and he said, we can’t keep doing it like this any more. But if you just don’t tour or do live shows, promoters will just book other headliners. So how do you meaningfully, systemically change this sector?

“You will find a multiplicity of plans and reports for decarbonising this sector. There is only one that is compatible with Paris 1.5 targets that our partners at the Tyndall Centre produced for us.”

There’s a debate to be had about whether the lack of progress on live music’s carbon footprint is due to a lack of commitment or the same inertia that almost every other sector struggles with. There are performers and promoters who are trying their best and who have pioneered more sustainable practices at a smaller scale. There are also plenty of events and artists that have done next to nothing to meet the moment.

What Massive Attack – and the cluster of committed partners around them – manage to achieve with their Act 1.5 show is to bring everything together in a single show of this size.

For most events, it isn’t the performers themselves that account for the biggest part of the event’s carbon footprint; it’s the audience. It’s one thing to charge people for reusable cups (although at the Massive Attack show, the band go one further and allow people to bring their own from home). Food waste and recycling systems are things that events can more easily monitor and improve. The way in which thousands of people get to and from a show, though, is a major source of carbon emissions, and it has traditionally been the biggest headache for events that want to get it right.

But how people travel to events is often seen as beyond the direct control of promoters. Laying on event shuttles is a common approach, and this time, there are electric vehicles ferrying punters to the city’s railway stations. But one of the single biggest steps the event takes is in partnering with Great Western Railway to put on specially commissioned trains, taking people back to a range of places across the southwest, which run beyond the usual schedule.

This kind of partnership isn’t something that every event can necessarily achieve – the clout and credibility of Massive Attack is absolutely doing some of the work here – but it shows what’s possible. And, independently of the extra trains they lay on, the fact that some cancelled trains across the network mean not everyone can make it home as planned is a reminder of how, even with the right clout, things don’t always go right. It is, after all, the tail end of a bank holiday weekend.

In an interview with the BBC ahead of the event, Massive Attack’s Robert del Naja said that he hoped the event would just feel like a normal show for the audience. Conversations between local punters – tickets had gone on sale earlier for people with Bristol-based postcodes, as a way to encourage local fans to attend and save on ‘gig miles’ – suggest this is the case: people notice the climate messaging but aren’t impacted one way or another by the absence of a car park. In a city setting, driving to a show like this doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Plant-based menus and a ban on single-use plastics are increasingly familiar sights at festivals these days. But Ecotricity’s giant renewably-charged batteries, which power the entire main stage’s sound and lighting rig, are perhaps less common. At most events, diesel generators are chugging away behind the scenes, keeping the lights on. But the kind of diesel often used in generators like this is one of the most polluting fuels around. It’s something that has to change.

Ecocity boss Dale Vince, green events pioneers like A Greener Future’s Claire O’Neill, and the Tyndall Centre scientists who have helped Massive Attack work out what truly sustainable live music looks like, are all in attendance to see the show unfold. “Without Claire and the AGF team this event just wouldn’t have happened,” Mark Donne tells NME. “They do so much, including coordinating which vehicles are going where and when, then crunching that travel data, which gets handed to our partners at Tyndall.”

Professor Carly McLachlan, the Director of Tyndall Manchester, puts it like this: “If you can demonstrate that this amazing, brilliant thing that people love can be done in a much lower carbon way, then you can show authentic leadership and then be in a better position to ask something of the audience, to travel in a different way for example.”

As Claire O’Neill agrees, not all of the approaches on display at the show are necessarily brand new, but the scale it is all happening on – and the media attention being drawn to it – is important.

The pace of the musical programming at times seems a little lacklustre for an event with so much incredible effort put into the sustainability of the production. But Irish drone-folk band Lankum hold the mid-afternoon crowd’s hushed attention, and Run The Jewels rapper Killer Mike tees up Massive Attack’s headline performance.

The architect of this event’s show is a pointed, at times unsettling, blend of dark, hypnotic soundcraft, discombobulating and dystopian visual media, and stark political messaging – much of it focused on the horrors of war in Palestine. As their focused commitment to climate change would suggest, this is not a band that downplays their beliefs and convictions: they don’t want you to look away.

In the sheets of rain – the heavens opened shortly after Massive Attack took to the stage – the snarling bass and metronomic rhythms of ‘Mezzanine’-era tracks like ‘Angel’ and ‘Inertia Creeps’ seem to take on an even greater sense of gravitas than usual. Long-time collaborators Horace Andy and ‘Teardrop’ vocalist Liz Fraser front some of the band’s most famous tracks, Andy’s unmistakable rumble bouncing around the event’s perimeter. Young Fathers join them on stage, too, providing some of the higher-energy moments of the performance.

Speaking with promoters and production teams associated with other events, the message behind the 1.5 show – that the music industry is failing miserably to live up to its climate commitments – is certainly being heard. Some in the business don’t appreciate the criticism or feel it is unfounded. Some events – like Shambala festival, which took place over the same weekend – could rightly point to pioneering practices around meat-free menus and cleaner energy generation that they have been pushing for years.

But many in the music industry will hopefully have taken note and seen positive proof of a different way of running a live event of this size. As the publicity around the Massive Attack show has emphasised, there simply isn’t space in the world’s carbon budgets for tours, festivals and gigs that can’t dramatically reduce their impact on the environment.

What comes together on Clifton Downs should be seen as a showcase of what’s possible, and Massive Attack have described the blueprint for the show’s production, and the infrastructure developed and trialled for it, as their legacy to Bristol.

There is some truth in the idea that an iconic, veteran campaigning act like Massive Attack can make things (like bonus trains!) happen that other events might not so easily be able to pull off. And it’s true that a switched-on Bristol audience, fresh from electing a Green MP (who is also on-site and speaking on a panel), are likely to be receptive to a concept like this.

But there have to be some first-movers who push the boundaries and bring everyone else along with them. Massive Attack and their event partners are the first ones to bring all of the pieces of the low-carbon puzzle together. This is what the live music of the future will need to look like everywhere in the end.