'Make the change' Massive Attack act to cut gig emissions

As pop stars fly on private jets and haul stage sets around the world, with their fans generating significant emissions via their own travel to gigs, Massive Attack's Robert Del Naja has said "it's time to act" and address the environmental damage wreaked by live music.

- Greg Cochrane

A home-town Bristol show tomorrow, titled Act 1.5 - a reference to the 2015 UN climate treaty that asked countries to keep global heating to under a 1.5C threshold will be 100% powered by renewable energy, in what the band say is a "world first" for an event of its scale. Thirty thousand fans will attend the one-day festival, which also features the US rapper Killer Mike, the Irish folk group Lankum and the actor Samantha Morton's solo music.

Del Naja describes Act 1.5 as a "climate action accelerator", adding: "Some people think the whole point of our sector is to tell people about [the climate crisis], as if it's not one of the most widely reported issues globally of our time. We don't need to talk about it - we need to act on it."

The environmentally minded show was conceived in 2018, and announced in 2021 - a scheduled performance in Liverpool was pulled owing to the venue's links to an arms fair. Then rearranged plans were shelved because of ill-health in the band.

"It's been a long journey; I was a young man once," jokes the show's lead producer, Mark Donne.

He detected in Massive Attack an "intense frustration with their sector", which had, he claims, "a sort of intransigent attitude to anything other than the decorative or superficial. Our plans became practical very quickly."

Massive Attack, who formed in 1988 and defined the UK's trip-hop scene with hits such as Unfinished Sympathy and Teardrop, commissioned a report by the decarbonisation specialists Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, which the group shared as a publicly available roadmap to super-low carbon live music.