To the crunching beats and fire-scorched guitars of United Snakes, a list of political parties flashes across a thin raised strip of the stage-wide screen, starting off mainstream and gradually descending into comical farce: “Pity party”, “Classy Jingoism party”, “Navel-Gazing Apathy party”.
Over the next 90 minutes we’re bombarded with hysterical Brexit newspaper headlines, slogans from leave and remain, consumerist logos and moving images of refugees. It’s like Twitter, after a particularly trying week, has invaded the stage for a very public breakdown.
Bristolian trip-hop pioneers Massive Attack seem determined to pack all of the politics of this year’s British Summer Time – Hyde Park’s leafy annual series of themed one-day festivals – into the opening night; their visuals, like their music, reflecting the chaos engulfing the outside world.
They’re not alone. Earlier, Patti Smith’s set of passionate folk-punk and proto-REM rock resonates with an earth mother’s despair. She implicates Brexit while saluting the people of Istanbul with a cry of: “We can’t separate ourselves from the great human family”, injects a grief-stricken spoken-word tribute about “little purple flowers” into a sombre cover of Prince’s When Doves Cry, and dedicates Pissing in a River to birthday boy Julian Assange.
Weighty stuff, leavened by Smith’s occasional slips into feral growling as if she secretly dreams of fronting a gore metal band, or her jubilant standing as a unity candidate for humanity to put Angela Eagle to shame.
“Feel your freedom!” she yells over the battle folk of Beneath the Southern Cross or, more obtusely, she entreats us to raise our hands and “shake out the ghost!”, a tactic that might have shaved a merciful half hour off The Conjuring 2.
Massive Attack’s message, meanwhile, is branded on to our retinas.
Introducing Eurochild, a 1994 elastic dub piece written “at the birth of the European Union; we didn’t realise we’d be playing it as a requiem”, Robert “3D” Del Naja insists: “We must not let the bigots and racists back into this situation.” But their combination of dank maelstroms and portentous visuals – torrents of computer code, a gigantic airport departure board with every flight cancelled – is just as powerful.
The band’s tendency to drag by in a narcotic dub stupor live is tempered tonight by this fresh political fury, and a modernising guest-fest. If the old school are overjoyed when Tricky emerges, 20 years since his last appearances with Massive Attack, to drip distorted devil vocals over Take It There or long-term collaborator Horace Andy is wheeled on stage with a broken leg to sing Angel like the reggae Dave Grohl, it’s guest spots from east London’s Azekel and TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe that help Massive Attack chime with the neo soul of the day. When Young Fathers appear for four songs, by turns stoically defiant and dancing like Scots-rap Norman Wisdoms, their crank Arabian dub and intricate rimshot-and-foghorn raps mesh perfectly with Massive Attack’s dark-dimensional urban aesthetic, like cogs of barbed-wire. They even dedicate the future rock’n’roll of Shame to “Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, lying fucking bastards”. Torch passed.
It ends with a full orchestra adorning Unfinished Sympathy beneath pictures of refugees and the slogan: “We are in this together”, a sour national mood brilliantly bucked. Follow that, Florence.
