No Future in England's Dreaming

Issue 01: Getting Ghosted

Massive Attack and the Sound of a Changing Britain

Photo credit: Andre Pattenden

I. SELF

Night in Bristol. The sky hangs low and bruise-purple above the Downs. The grass is slick, plastic pint cups sinking into mud. The stage is a black rectangle on the horizon. Then it isn't.

First, a white screen. Not empty, just white like a migraine. On-screen projections blink to life. Casualty counts intercut with drone footage of scorched cities, their people rendered as heat signatures, an aerial view that chops the night into grids. An ugly synth note appears and holds, sniffing the air for danger, then accelerates to humid panic. Rain needles the back of my neck. Somewhere between this and the smudged, trembling horn sample that follows it, a line from ‘Mezzanine’ drops without ceremony, and it's as though the past has ambushed us. For a second I feel teenage, invincible, bedroom stereo turned too loud. Then the present rushes back in: data farms, drone wings, server racks full of my unanswered emails.

I have fucked to Massive Attack, and I did it because their music demands surrender. Despite their insistence, the politics isn't in the slogans on screen. It's in the vibration. In the hope that bodies connect despite the screens, despite the alarms. As the music kicks up, it presses its body into your ear, a wet mouth against the shell, letting consonants spit, and spilling vowels into the hollow of your skull; granular, lubricious. Desire (more plainly, sex), here, is inseparable from Massive Attack's politics. Both hinge on exposure, on stripping you down to the most vulnerable nerve. To listen is to feel the sound work its way inside, a rhythm already embedded in muscle, urging motion, urging collapse; you're left marked, flushed, vibrating with something’s unfinished desire; one that leaks through compression, a mouth parted on the downbeat, hips stuttering in the half-time pause. Every note drags the body into pulse and ruin; no metaphor, no distance, just skin, breath, beat.

The low end teaches a lesson no manifesto dares to print: sometimes the only answer is rupture (a reminder that sound itself can dismantle the architecture of obedience). Because beneath the velvet textures, there is always the throb of insurgency; the sense that to live fully, to desire fully, is already to accept that some structures should not be reformed but destroyed. Our future will not be negotiated. It will be taken. Resistance is not polite, not orderly, not patient. It is a demand made with body-heat and rhythm. And if conservative thought fears this music (as they did in the soundsystem era following Massive Attack's birth), it is because the music remembers what they want you to forget: that danger shares the same architecture as desire. Who you kiss, who you fuck, who you shelter. Pressing yourself against another body while "love, love is a verb" tumbles through speakers defies every apparatus that would prefer you cold, compliant, untouched.

Listening now, in the age of missiles over Gaza and AI servers humming in remote fields, the music doesn't predict so much as crystallise a future that was always already happening. Its erotic charge doesn't vanish in that context, but intensifies, because to feel anything close to pain or desire is a refusal of annihilation. On screen at the live show, the feed makes everything feel just as urgent and abstract, flat and screaming. If there is a politics of sound now, it lives in spectrograms and sonic abrasions, and those conducting it will ask: Who needs music when the drone hum is already in C minor?

II. OTHER

Living in Britain at the end of the twentieth century, I imagine, meant learning to live in an uncertain place, as the nation’s post-war story (the welfare state, council housing, full employment, "we're all in it together") was being rewritten. That's where Massive Attack started: with the sense that something was ending. The social democracy that shaped their parents' lives was being dismantled in real time; the cities they grew up in were being hollowed out and sold out from under them piecemeal. Once Thatcher divided the nation and auctioned off its public goods, the story went that meaning could only really be found in the individual. We search for it in the "other": in romantic partners, in the immigrant neighbour, in the imagined enemies who are "ruining" Britain, but never in the systems that actually govern our lives. In that landscape, the body becomes one of the few territories people feel they can still control. If you have the idea that you can no longer change the world, all you've got left is to change yourself. Therapy, gym, self-help books, podcasts, skincare, SSRIs, microdosing, yoga, sober curiosity, gender journeys, productivity hacks, all neatly filed in the portfolio of the self.

My therapist tells me I'm often caught in a confusing place, right now between wanting to rot in bed and wanting to run away and escape altogether, rather than learning to sit with my own uncertainty, with the palimpsest of my own overwritten identity. I keep trying to make myself familiar, something easily graspable, rather than allowing my own complexity to be known. Simplify the self, and you reach "certainty," surely? Something complete. I want my inbox empty, my habits consistent, my moods stable, my personality a coherent brand. Maybe then I won't be so depressed. If I just "finish" myself. Wrap up the to-do list. End a single fucking day feeling satisfied.

The illusion of being "done" feels uncomfortably like a national fantasy. Britain pretending to be a finished thing, with fixed borders and tidy textbook narratives. When psychotherapy's insights were co-opted to build the modern machine of public relations and advertising, selling desire instead of products (marketing the hole in your life that the product will fill), how can I fully trust that therapy hasn't become one more product to fill myself with when I feel empty? Depression, for me, lives in the body long before it turns into thoughts. Tight jaw, dead legs, static in the chest. I can't journal it away. I can't pomodoro my way out. The dominant story about depression is that it's a personal defect to be solved individually: with pills, affirmations, routines, productivity systems. Some of these are literally life-saving. But if you never name the conditions - the precarity, isolation, racism, misogyny, homophobia, border violence, climate dread, transphobia - you're essentially telling people their pain is a managerial problem.

Therapy can only help you live within the contradictions of a changing society, trapped between the unfortunate rationality of capitalism and the fuzzy promises of socialism, or a planned economy that never fully arrived. Britain's music, in the late twentieth century, grew in that gap. Massive Attack's music hits differently when you accept that your sadness is not a bug but a reasonable response. Yes, it is this bad. No, you're not alone. Yes, there's still desire in here. Yes, there's still beauty. No, that doesn't cancel anything out.

The Downs are ringed with food stalls and compost toilets, but the power is coming from a vast battery, a pilot attempt at decarbonising live performance: no diesel generators, no film of fumes in the throat, no background growl of engines. There's a sense of experiment, of trying to figure out how culture might exist after the oil runs out. The projections (created by United Visual Artists along with Adam Curtis) dissolve the border between band and backdrop; bodies are silhouetted, doubled, smeared into data, into the same luminous plane, reminding us how nostalgia and doomerism are both just ways of refusing the future.

At a panel elsewhere in the festival, Matt Clark from UVA talks about a "programmable architecture" that terrorises our instinct to find patterns in chaos. It presents you with more information than you can comfortably process and lets your brain scramble to draw meaning from it. That scramble is where something like politics might sneak in. Because once you notice that you're sorting, choosing what to focus on, you might also notice that you could choose differently. If perception can shift, maybe the world will slide with it. When a familiar track comes - ‘Safe From Harm’, ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ - it lands as something more complicated than "oh I love this song," as I watch a crowd remembering what it feels like to be part of something bigger than their own individual crisis.

Curtis has said, elsewhere, that there's a whole layer of "good-thinking people" who just want everything to shut up and go back to "being nice" again. That under the climate movement's abstraction, there are everyday people for whom poverty today is more urgent than the firestorms of tomorrow, and you can't blame them. When "free" becomes a branding word for "free-thinking" contrarians rather than a demand for a free Palestine, a free migrant, a free anything, you can feel the language thinning out. We fall back on heuristics and vibes. The abrasions of daily crisis - rising bills, petrol prices, grocery costs - leave us too panicked to picture anything beyond the next hour. In that context, British music becomes a kind of speculative fiction. Soundsystems, rave, trip-hop, jungle, grime: each scene tried to sketch a new social body out of people who no longer believed in the old institutions. Before our generation, when you were part of a church, a trade union, or a political party, you had the sense that what you did would go on beyond you. Being part of a musical collective - a band like Massive Attack, a loose constellation like the Bristol scene - I feel, has a similar pull. Influence begets inspiration and so on, and it's a way of believing your actions exit your own lifetime, even if only as vibration.

For me, as someone who is only half-British, half-of-this-land, that’s valuable. Tricky once talked about "othering" himself, refusing to be neatly folded into a tidy story of Englishness. A lot of the Bristolians around me carry a similar double exposure. There's the green and pleasant land of England I saw growing up overseas, and then there's the other England: where the country turned stranger long before Brexit, built on a fundamental misunderstanding of slogan politics. If looked at through its musical movements, it's easy to see how Britain's sixties' free-love and radical attitudes swung into the self-cannibalism of Britpop; meanwhile, the paleness of indie rock flattened punk into a safely historicised tantrum. Massive Attack and artists orbiting them threw new light on that idea of Englishness. They showed how much of it has always been defined by what it lacks: the futures it couldn't imagine, the people it refused to see. In another, less damaged version of England, that would be a boringly obvious point. In this one, it feels subversive. Does Britishness grow like a rash, or a garden?

In the middle-class district of Clifton, Bristol's slaving history is present largely in semantics; in the boutiques of Whiteladies Road and Blackboy Hill and the beautiful Georgian terraces that were once neglected to be commandeered by the students and artists squatting there, now thriving with baize lawns while the frame-throttled city sprawls below. Massive Attack’s music came out of a city that ran with a thorough-minded, inexorable division, where polite surfaces of heritage are underwritten by centuries of brutality, and the ghosts in the water are the sense that the present is an aftertaste of something done to you a long time ago.

III. MASSIVE ATTACK

It's hard to say whether Massive Attack ever really existed as a band in the traditional sense, or more like a leak, an emission, less interested in the individual than the collective, state violence, and amnesia. Voices shifted and multiplied (as Tricky later shed skins, and collaborators joined only transiently) so that what you heard was a scattered body lodged in this unmoored, plural, impossible sound (no author, no I, only signal). Their records don't anchor them so much as absorb them, each album a kind of heat map of who they were at the time, and who they could no longer be. Their sound once felt like the echo-track of power's nightmares; now, power itself moves with that rhythm: Bristol is now harbourside prosecco and Banksy tours, and the ultra-right wears the aesthetic of collapse, without the irony of recognising that they were the ones who brought it all about.

But before there was Massive Attack, there was just a room above a club in Bristol, and in that room, the sound was too slow to dance to. Not wrong, just lagging. Suspiciously patient. The story goes that hip-hop records were spun at 33 instead of 45, melted into lovers rock, R&B, and electro. The MCs had nothing to do except wait for the beat to catch up or lean against it. That was The Wild Bunch: a condensation of scenes, a pressure system, rubbing West Indian soundsystem culture against Thatcher's rusted-out England, sketching the origins of the "Bristol sound". Because Bristol wasn't London. That mattered. It slept beneath CCTV halos, dreaming in pixels like wires threaded through rain. Ghosts marched on the M4. No future there but the rhythm of collapse: the dream is already over, and what you call hope is just a loop. What you call freedom is only the bass left rattling the ribcage.

Out of that wreckage, Massive Attack built a kind of cracked ornamentation. Strings crawl out of feedback-hiss like ivy curling through scaffolding; delicate top-lines dissolve into rusted breaks; choirs appear and vanish inside the grain of a snare drum. Harpsichord ghosts, choral smears, glacial synth pads: all that old European splendour, dragged through waterlogged dub; a sunburst on peeling plaster. Even in a part of the country stitched together by retail parks and cold storage units, there are still intervals where the light hits at a mad, impossible angle.

Seeing Bristolians with two hands in the air, reaching for something they'll never grasp but because the music makes them feel like they can is the image I'll keep from this night forever. So many of us grew up using hedonism as armour against the stale beigeness of middle England: weekend binges, cheap flights, ketamine in someone's mum's kitchen. Music, especially electronic and dance music, became a medicative space. Club culture is about yearning for togetherness, a way to briefly step outside the story of yourself as an isolated economic unit. I'm interested in dance and music as a means of escape, but also in how often that escape loops you right back to what you're running from. Monday morning always comes. The overdraft is still there. The certainty was only temporary. Still, whilst you're in it, you feel something like a cut being made. A desire path through sound and genre, shortening the half-life of whatever story you've been handed about who you are and what's possible (depression, in that light, is not just serotonin misfiring but what happens when you've seen glimpses of another story and have to keep returning to the old one). Massive Attack's music, with its dub-dragon crawl and slow, suspicious beats, is one long attempt to carve that path: away from this country's official narratives, away from the certainty that there is "no alternative", towards a future that hasn't fully been scripted yet. Even if we can't see that future clearly, the music insists on the fact that the present is not finished. That we, too, are not finished.

upright ruins / light cuts the skin

wet breath / eyes in delay

no voice, only flesh

only the slide of heat in stereo

only the sound of you / inside the sound

no future in England's dreaming

only the beat, only the night, only now.