Massive Attack say that the live music industry is a sector “which has a lot to say about climate change, but unfortunately it’s not doing much about it”.
The band have been addressing the environmental impact of their own shows for years now. They began working with the Tyndall Centre For Climate Change Research five years ago, commissioning and publishing a report that set out a roadmap for “super low carbon live music”.
“It's been five years and no-one’s shown much interest” in that work, the band’s Robert Del Naja tells the BBC. “A couple of bands, a couple of promoters, but very little interest. In fact, most other promoters say ‘we've got our own report’, which is slightly ridiculous because those reports are written by their own team. So that’s been really quite frustrating”.
These comments were made ahead of the mini-festival Massive Attack is staging in Bristol this weekend, which has been set up to “trial new standards for the decarbonisation of live music” and hopes to be the lowest-carbon concert of its scale ever held.
The official blurb for this weekend’s show - which also features sets from Killer Mike, Lankum, Sam Morton and DJ Milo - positions the event as “the culmination of 25 years of climate activism on the part of the band and a first physical fruition of their collaboration with climate scientists and analysts”.
There will be an assortment of measures in place at the mini-festival to keep the environmental impact of the event to the minimum. All the food served onsite will be plant-based, all the toilets will be compostable, the site will be powered by renewable electricity and there will be no car park.
No car park is required because a lot of effort has been made to encourage people to travel by foot, bike or public transport. Five special trains have been scheduled to take people home after the festival and there will be free electric shuttle buses to and from Bristol’s two main railway stations.
Of course, other festivals and concerts have employed some of these tactics to become more environmentally sustainable, with the A Greener Future initiative tracking and celebrating a lot of that work. Meanwhile Coldplay, like Massive Attack, have gone out of their way to reduce the carbon footprint of their tours, sharing what they have learned along the way with the rest of the industry.
However, Massive Attack are concerned that there is a lot more talk than action in parts of the live sector, and that there is a tendency for big players to commission new reports on this topic rather than implementing the findings of existing reports.
According to Del Naja, another frustration is “that there’s a whole cluster of NGOs that have been built over the last ten years that take a lot of public money to talk about how they may reduce emissions in the future, and to do impact reports. We’ve already done an impact report. It’s publicly available, external. You don't need to do another impact report”.
“We don't need any more pledging”, he adds. “We don't need to take more public money to do this. It already exists. The best thing to do is put it into action. So I find that frustrating”.
The constant commissioning of new reports, he reckons, means the bigger players in the live industry “can just keep parking” the issue “another five years, another five years, while we write another impact report. So we've tried to bypass that, leap over it all and just put it as much into action as we possibly can”.
Despite Del Naja's frustrations, some of the measures recommended by Massive Attack’s report are now being implemented more widely, and events like the one this weekend continue to put the spotlight on the full range of measures that can be taken, and how everything fits together.
“The more that we can see all the pieces of the puzzle in place, and what that looks like, it really does help show other events what's possible - without necessarily assuming that everyone can do all of it straight away”, Del Naja concludes. “Someone needs to go first in putting all of the pieces of the puzzle together”.