Green energy, vegan burgers – and £7.50 pints. Is this the future of live rock?

Sensitive readers might want to look away now. On a crisp night on the banks of the Mersey, Massive Attack went big with a sweeping display of progressivism, during the first of a series of concerts designed to showcase Liverpool’s status as an environmentally innovative city.

Thanks to a partnership with the clean energy provider Ecotricity, the Bristol group entertained a busy M&S Bank Arena for two hours while coughing out only a fraction of the carbon emissions normally associated with similar shows. The gig finished at 10pm, too. Not because their audience is getting on a bit (aren’t we all), but to encourage ticket holders to travel home by train. Out on the concourses, the merchandise stalls were selling fair trade t-shirts rather than “fast fashion” tat; at the concession stands, the only food available was vegan. The revolution was monetized, though – pints of lager were £7.50 a throw.

The concert itself was both special and strange. Never mind the three decades or so that have elapsed since the trip-hop majesty of Massive Attack’s debut album, Blue Lines. In Liverpool, they still sounded (and looked) like the future. With the musicians quietly backlit like extras in a black and white movie, around them, a multi-media production (designed by Robert Del Naja, filmmaker Adam Curtis and the United Visual Artist group) emphasised visual images – including of Gaza, Ukraine and Bosnia, and a munitions factory in Oklahoma – and berserk headlines running riot on chyrons. “90 per cent of voters have no idea that Joe Biden is a robot,” read one. With its information-age-currencies of paranoia and unease, it was like stepping into the pages of a Don DeLillo novel.

Certainly, it wasn’t your everyday arena rock show. The strange hypnotic delicacy of songs such as Inertia Creeps and Teardrop, for example, straddled the divide between the immersive and the downright nerve-jangling. As a kind palate cleanser, a spirited rendition of ROckwrok, by Ultravox!, was sufficiently out of character with the rest of the set that for a moment it sounded as if Massive Attack had metamorphosed into Motörhead, or even the Ramones. The only recognisable nods to convention came with the arrival of the hit singles Safe From Harm and Unfinished Sympathy in the evening’s closing throw. But these bangers weren’t token rewards for an audience whose patience had been tested over the course of an immersive and unpredictable evening. Not a bit of it: the room was with them from first to last.

Two moments in particular will stay with me. The first was a montage of black and white images of hundreds of audience members rendered in individual boxes floating on the screens at the back of the stage. “Oh my God, that’s me!” mouthed one, while the question of how so many people could so easily become objects of surveillance hung quietly in the air.

Stranger still, late on, was footage of a bird trapped behind a pane of glass. At most arena shows, toward the end of the night, music and showmanship conspire to persuade audiences that they can fly, and be free. The point is to send ‘em home happy. For this band, though, life is more complicated than this. Amid a production that at times looked like the War Room from Dr Strangelove, Massive Attack provided a soundtrack for our gravely troubled times.