Is this Massive Attack concert the gold standard for a green gig?

BRISTOL, England – When the British trip hop collective Massive Attack were halfway through a US West Coast tour in 2019, flying from show to show, their rapper-singer Robert Del Naja had a moment of crisis.

Given all the carbon emitted by moving the band and their equipment around, he recalled wondering: Can I justify this any more?

Not long afterwards, the group made a decision. They would work with climate scientists to develop a model for touring that made as little climate impact as possible.

On Aug 25, Massive Attack staged a day-long, 35,000-person festival in their home city of Bristol, England, to showcase the carbon-cutting measures they have developed with the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, a British organisation, and A Greener Future, a non-profit focused on lowering the music industry’s emissions.

Whereas other music acts, including Coldplay, have staged attention-grabbing stunts to draw awareness to the industry’s climate impacts, they have sometimes ignored the main sources of emissions from gigs, such as audience travel and venues’ power supplies.

Meanwhile, Massive Attack wanted to show how to tackle all the polluting parts of a show.

In an interview a few days before the ACT 1.5 event, Del Naja, 59, said that previous music industry efforts to cut emissions had not been in line with the United Nations-agreed goal to stop average temperatures rising more than 1.5 deg C.

“If what you’re doing’s not 1.5-compatible, it’s irrelevant,” he said. “It’s simply a gesture, an idea. It’s not doing anything.”

Del Naja then gave a tour of the festival site, pointing out metal boxes filled with batteries charged by wind and solar power that would provide all the electricity, as well as electric trucks that would ferry equipment between stages. All the catering, including backstage, would be vegan, he added.

At one point, he walked up to a row of portable toilets. “Have you seen the compost loos?” he said. “They’re really cool.”

The band would send some of the event’s waste to a firm that extracted phosphorous from urine, he added.

The on-site changes will make some difference, but much of a show’s pollution comes from elsewhere.

In 2007, British band Radiohead published a study showing that audience travel was responsible for more than 80 per cent of emissions for their tours.

Since then, few artistes have had success tackling that issue.

American singer Billie Eilish’s team, for instance, e-mails ticket holders about public transit options before her gigs. For a recent Los Angeles album launch, it worked with LA Metro to increase services to the venue – though many fans would have had to first drive to a station.

Massive Attack tried several measures to encourage sustainable travel on Aug 25, including offering Bristol residents the first chance to buy tickets because they were more likely to walk or cycle.

The band also negotiated with a local train company to provide extra services. And it hired a fleet of electric coaches to take attendees to and from Bristol city centre to the festival site.

The Tyndall Centre will publish a report this autumn detailing the event’s climate impact, and Massive Attack will incorporate lessons from the study at coming gigs.

Del Naja said he hoped that promoters and venues would also learn something from the experiment. But he was realistic: In places like the car-loving West Coast of the US, he said, bands needed lawmakers to overhaul transit systems to make it easier to avoid flying and driving.

The need for change is becoming pressing, because fans are increasingly travelling long distances to see their idols.

Numerous American fans of Beyonce, Taylor Swift and Adele flew to Europe to see those acts after failing to secure tickets closer to home. “The music industry has to work out a solution to that trend,” Mr Christopher Jones, a Tyndall Centre researcher, said, “otherwise emissions are going to keep going up.”

Despite Massive Attack’s efforts, a handful of festivalgoers said in interviews that they had come from outside Britain.

Mr Andres Henriquez, 26, waiting in line to buy merchandise, said he had flown from Miami in the US to see the group and that he felt “selfish” about it.

Teacher Marianne Hagstrom, 56, and her husband had travelled by train from Gothenburg, Sweden. “We need to switch the way we are thinking,” she said. “Train travel must become cheaper for people to stop flying.”

Around the sprawling site, not everything was low-carbon. Many of the vegan food stalls, for instance, used portable gas canisters, rather than renewable energy, to power their grills.

Del Naja said he knew that the event was not perfect, but he added that the band would learn from the festival’s failures to make future events even more sustainable.

His greatest fear, Del Naja said before the show, was that the batteries for the power supply would fail midway and that the music and lights would be cut. Others in the music industry would then dismiss the festival as a failed experiment, he said.

In the end, his worries proved unfounded. At the concert, the lights flashed and music boomed throughout, and the crowd seemed happy with the vegan burgers, despite the long lines.

The only problem, it turned out, was rain. At about 8.30pm, as spotlights flashed across the crowd, Massive Attack walked onstage and launched into Risingson, a dark electronic track that opens their 1998 hit album Mezzanine. As the band played, many fans cheered, but others were too distracted by a sudden storm and desperately rifled through their bags for ponchos.

Massive Attack had done all they could to combat climate change, but there was nothing they could do about Britain’s weather. NYTIMES