Massive Attack castigate music industry over climate inaction: ‘We don’t need to talk. We need to act’

As pop stars fly on private jets and haul stage sets around the world, with their fans collectively 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.

A home town Bristol show on Sunday, 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.

The Act 1.5 festival is enacting the recommendations of the report, and will address the key emissions areas of transport, food, energy and waste. As the travel of concertgoers makes up the highest proportion of an event’s emissions, local people were prioritised with presale access to tickets, and free electric shuttles will serve transport hubs – intentionally, there is no car park. Ticket holders have been incentivised to travel by train – some specially chartered for the show – with a VIP (“very important process”) bar and toilets.

The band’s own travel setup has been massively slimmed down. “At blueprint level it was: how do we design an exciting show that doesn’t take 25 trucks to move from place to place?” Del Naja says. “Now our haulage is down to two trucks, and I feel the show is more confrontational, provocative and visually dynamic. It hasn’t lost anything – it’s gained more.” Made with the documentary film-maker Adam Curtis and the lighting/staging collective United Visual Artists, the band have billed the show as “a transgressive leap” from their earlier work with those collaborators.

Unlike many other outdoor shows of its size, stages will not be powered by diesel generators, but by huge rechargeable batteries. “I’d like to think that next year all the big stages at all the big festivals will be powered by batteries, because that’s the look,” Del Naja says.

Vendors on site – many from local postcodes – will sell only plant-based food and bars are encouraging fans to bring their own reusable cups. No waste from the festival will go to landfill, and a new woodland of 19,000 native oak trees will be planted 40 miles from the festival site.

Massive Attack are not the only artists addressing the emissions of their touring. By Billie Eilish’s request, the O2 Arena in London only served vegan food during the singer’s 2022 residency, and she has announced an array of climate actions for her next tour. In June, Coldplay reported that a 12-point sustainability plan had led to a 59% reduction in carbon emissions compared with their previous global tour.

“It’s important to keep reminding ourselves … you can tour, and you can travel by train when you can,” says Del Naja.

Local and national government may have their own role to play in future – in order to get a licence a UK festival has to work within a framework set out by the local authority, and those instructions could include conditions around renewable power or greener transport.

However, Del Naja says concert promoters should not wait for regional, national or international authorities to update their policies – and therefore be told what to do on emissions. He argues the technology and strategies to decarbonise a live music event are already available, and should be utilised.

“This isn’t us trying to point the finger at the consumer,” he says. “It’s more about the promoters, who hold the power in this sector, who need to do more. They have the ability to make the change; the finances. What’s frustrating is knowing that people are sitting there on their hands, waiting for legislation to happen.”

Donne insists Act 1.5 will be profitable, and hopes it will be an exemplar to the rest of the music industry, even as an experiment. “We’ll be transparent; record where things didn’t work,” he says. “[This is about] showing how far you can move quickly – if you choose to.” Del Naja says it will inform what Massive Attack themselves “can do working with other promoters domestically and abroad”.

Writing on Instagram, the group said Act 1.5 “may be the last time we play Bristol” – though Del Naja isn’t quite as emphatic today. “There’s a sense that once we’ve done this we probably won’t work on this scale again in this city,” he says. “It’s the big one for us, and whatever we do next will be different.”