Unfinished Symphonies

Dancing for Freedom at LIDO — Massive Attack and the Politics of Sound

Photo Courtesy: LIDO / Photo by: Sophia J Carey

East London is alive with contradiction. The former warehouses of Hackney now double as galleries, studios, and DIY spaces, and for one weekend, a corner of it becomes LIDO Festival. LIDO, hosted in Victoria Park, is a festival with both musical and social purpose—its programming and politics are as intentional as its lineup. The lineup is tight, intentional. Massive Attack’s headline spot isn’t just a musical choice—it’s a political one.

The atmosphere feels charged. There’s a sense that the music happening here isn’t separate from the world outside the festival gates. It’s connected to Gaza, to climate collapse, to protest movements from Belfast to Bristol. It feels right that Massive Attack are taking the stage in a moment where art and politics are colliding in increasingly urgent ways.

LIDO itself reflects that urgency. The show was powered by 100% renewable energy from on-site batteries, supported by Victoria Park’s national grid connection and cleaner alternatives like HVO biodiesel and green hydrogen. It’s a vision of what live music can look like when care is built into the infrastructure.

Massive Attack have long made music that exists in tension with the world around it. From their early 90s output to their more recent political interventions, the band has never settled for escapism. They’ve insisted on confrontation.

In 2024, they launched Act 1.5 in Bristol—an ambitious, carbon-conscious performance powered entirely by renewables. No diesel, no greenwash. “The only way to act meaningfully in a climate emergency is to change your behavior, not just your marketing,” they said.

That same year, they backed out of Coachella, citing environmental concerns and corporate complicity. In May, they publicly supported the cultural boycott of Barclays-sponsored events in solidarity with Palestine. “Our music is for sale,” they wrote, “but our humanity and morality is not.”

This positioning isn’t isolated. It’s part of a larger wave of artists using their platform to resist—and to imagine. Just weeks before LIDO, Kneecap played a packed-out show in London’s festival Wide Awake. Their presence was not without controversy—banned from performing in several venues due to their unapologetically political stance, the group has become emblematic of how censorship still stalks politically outspoken artists. Their radical, Irish-language rap has electrified a new generation, and Massive Attack have expressed vocal support for what they’re doing.

Music has always been used to challenge empire, to tell truths in rhythm. From Belfast to Bristol to Gaza, it’s a tool of resistance—and maybe also a tool for rebirth.

When Massive Attack take the stage at LIDO, it’s not with fanfare—it’s with focus. The visuals are stark, the lighting  is deliberate. Screens flash with silent messages, Palestinian flags,  fragments of headlines, death toll statistics. Everything speaks.

Before the band even begins, actor and activist Khalid Abdalla delivers a searing speech. He quotes Nelson Mandela: “Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” He calls the Palestine solidarity movement the civil rights and anti-genocide movement of our time, and welcomes those new to the cause—reminding them that it will always be a space to learn.

Then the music starts, and we are dancing for freedom.

The set is built like a narrative. Tracks bleed into each other, creating a continuous, low-frequency tension. At times it feels like standing inside a warning siren. At others, like a kind of shared mourning. Songs like “Angel” and “Inertia Creeps” aren’t just fan favorites—they’re sonic architecture for rage, grief, and endurance.

“Teardrop” brings a quiet wave of emotion. Tears are shared in solidarity. During “Unfinished Sympathy,” the mood shifts again—we are dancing, yes, but the joy feels sharpened by purpose.

The visuals juxtapose the sound. One moment, a chilling statistic from Gaza. The next, a scathing critique of billionaires, luxury, and political apathy. Faces flash on screen alongside professions and ID numbers—an invitation to reckon with dehumanization, to feel the weight of abstraction. There’s a quiet genius to that visual cue: asking us not just to mourn the dead, but to remember that they had names, jobs, futures.

Palestinian flags wave through the crowd. The air hums with something bigger than fandom. This is presence as resistance.

Photo via: @massiveattackofficial

And yet, a tension lingers. As the lights fade, the audience seems split. Some are stunned into silence. Others murmur frustrations—too political, too heavy. But for those who get it, who want to get it, who came to dance and remember, this was never just a gig. It was a reckoning.

What does it mean to be reborn through protest—not in spite of the world’s crises, but through them?

In the final moments of Massive Attack’s set, it becomes clear that this isn’t just a concert—it’s a blueprint. For emotional survival, for cultural refusal, for collective reimagining. Their sound is not hopeful in the conventional sense. It’s grounded, grief-aware, politicized. And maybe that’s what makes it powerful.

Rebirth, here, doesn’t mean return to innocence. It means waking up with your eyes open. It means building again with full knowledge of collapse. 

The rebirth Massive Attack gestures toward isn’t individual. It’s relational. It requires showing up, tuning in, refusing to forget. It’s what Kneecap raps about in Irish, what the crowd at LIDO understands in their bones—that music can be more than escape. It can be memory, resistance, and yes, a kind of beginning.

Sources:

• “Our music is for sale, but our humanity and morality is not.” — Massive Attack (2024 statement on Barclays boycott)

• “The only way to act meaningfully in a climate emergency is to change your behavior, not just your marketing.” — Act 1.5 press release