Massive Attack live at The Olympia, Dublin

I’d hate to be a Massive Attack roadie. Not only do they have four vocalists, six banks of synths, live guitars, drums and percussion to worry about, but there’s a huge ticker-taping video screen to put up and take down every bleedin’ night.
Basically, this is a stadium-sized show shoehorned into a theatre, which the Wild Bunch last visited on April 15 1998 when Mezzanine was a little baby.
Their new album may have been postponed (again!) until early in the New Year, but that doesn’t stop 3D and Daddy G from kicking off with two deliciously dark new songs, ‘Bulletproof Love’ and ‘Hartcliff Star’, and then bringing support act Martina Topley-Bird back on for a third, ‘Babel’, which despite its unfamiliarity has everyone in the stalls rocking. Resplendent in a red candyfloss ball gown, Topley-Bird later gets the biggest cheer of the night when she absolutely nails ‘Teardrop’. Liz who?
The second loudest cheer greets the arrival on stage of “the man who needs no introduction” Horace Andy, 58-years young and still the owner of the sweetest voice in reggaedom.
That honeyed tremolo of his is put to superlative use on yet another newbie, ‘16 Seeter’, which one of my more anally retentive friends reckons is a re-working of a song called ‘Girl I Love You’ that graced his 1974 Skylarking album. It’s another Massive Attack classic in the making.
‘Future Proof’ – dedicated to “absent friend” Sinéad O’Connor who sung the original – is the signal for the video screens to switch into overdrive. Along with a reminder that the CEO of the Bank of Ireland gets paid rather more than an Ethiopian social worker, we get a list of British MPs expenses, a Hunter S. Thompson quote (“freedom is something that dies unless it’s used”) and loads of random binary flashing.
Sister Deborah, a classic R&B belter in the Aretha mould, squeezes every last drop of emotion out of ‘Safe From Harm’ and ‘Unfinished Sympathy’, before the whole crew reappears for the double-whammy climax of ‘Marakesh’ and ‘Karmacoma’.
“That was even better than the Pixies,” proffers HP designer & snapper Andrew Duffy and, you know what, the young pup is right!