Robert Del Naja, aka 3D, a member of the groundbreaking Bristol-based band Massive Attack, has long been pushing creative, social and political boundaries, both with his band members and a collective of creatives he calls “the independent artists of Bristol.”

Since pioneering the genre known as trip hop, Massive Attack and Del Naja have collaborated with artists including celebrated documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis and an international lineup of some of the most talented musicians and artists of our time, including Blur, Radiohead, and the late Sinéad O’Connor.

Activism has always been important to Del Naja and his fellow member Grant Marshall, aka Daddy G, and they have used their fame as a platform since hitting the mainstream with the success of their 1991 debut album, Blue Lines. The band have long experimented with how they could lend their fame to the causes they support, using their platform to raise money and their stages and huge audience to raise awareness. Most recently, in the Fire Sale project, artists contributed work to raise money for Médecins Sans Frontiers.

Four album covers for a release by Fontaines D.C., Massive Attack, and Young Fathers

Fontaines DC x Massive Attack x Young Fathers, an album to benefit Doctors Without Borders. Photo: Anthony Tombling, Jr.

Del Naja has been making art longer than he has been making music; he also created the album art for Massive Attack. He has been collaborating with Matt Clark from the London-based group artistic practice United Visual Artists (UVA) since the early 2000s, when UVA did the scenography for Massive Attack’s 100 Windows tour, and they have worked together many times since. Collaboration is at the core of his work as a musician and an artist, and he has worked with a plethora of makers, thinkers, and creatives.

Del Naja and Clark’s collaborative work with programmer Robert Thomas, Present Shock II (2023), is an immersive work incorporating installation and technology including artificial intelligence that explores information overload, misinformation, and context collapse. It was shown at UVA’s anniversary exhibition “Synchronicity” at London’s 180 The Strand in 2023; a second iteration of the work, Present Shock II (2024) was shown at ACT 1.5 in Liverpool in November 2024. The work shows numbers and statistical clocks racing across a screen alongside A.I.-generated news headlines.

Robert Del Naja in concert with artwork projected behind him with text and numerals

Robert Del Naja performing at ACT 1.5 in Liverpool (2024). Photo: Andre Pattenden. Courtesy Robert Del Naja.

This year the band has staged a series of huge concerts and festival performances under the banner of the nonprofit ACT 1.5 that have showcased how live music can be less polluting. The nonprofit stages concerts and festivals with performers including Nile Rogers & Chic, Idles, and Killer Mike; figures such as Jeremy Deller and Motaz Azaiza have participated in panels discussions. In collaboration with the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, ACT 1.5 is creating a blueprint for incrementally lower-carbon live events.

We spoke to the artist about his work to date, the relationship between making music and making art, and how visual art and activism have come into the band’s performances. He also announced upcoming new music and addressed the impact of those pesky rumors that he is Banksy (which he has denied).

 

What was the first medium that spoke to you as an artist?

I’ve never been really a natural musician, or anything, or talented musician at all. It was always drawing and art for me. I guess that’s why I was attracted to the graffiti art movement that I was seeing in the States. I got into that in the ‘80s and then via that, I met people that have become my band members in the Wild Bunch and in Massive Attack.

How has your relationship with art existed alongside making music?

Without jumping too far ahead into the present, or back to the present, technology has always had a big part to play in all of that, whether you want to describe a spray can as a piece of technology, or you want to look at the early samplers which really provided us with the tools to make music. We knew a lot of musicians, but we weren’t musicians naturally, and sampling was the go-to toolkit to start to construct new things out of pieces of audio from the past, and that’s never really changed in terms of my approach to everything we do. A lot of it is to do with collaging, collating, and scraping through the past, re-examining it and representing it.

An artwork with text reading Look my son the weather is changing with an icon for fire

Robert Del Naja, ACT 1.5 (2024). Courtesy Robert Del Naja.

I know you have made album art for Massive Attack and other musicians, but I’m interested to know how your painting existed alongside this.

I’m not the most prolific painter. I don’t paint as much as I should, and I think a lot of that is because I’m not that confident to paint. I don’t naturally pick up a brush or doodle and go, “Well, this is amazing.” In the same way we were talking about sampling, I’ll write a lot of lists and before the internet I’d pick up things, cut things out of magazines and make scrapbooks of things. Then when I decided I was going to paint, I would have all this stuff out and it would become the instruction kit for what I was going to paint next.

Looking at things today, it seems as though you and your collaborators have created an alternative infrastructure in Bristol, born out of the scene you helped create in the 1980s.

That would make sense and I think in a way, hip-hop culture is all about that as well and it was defiance of what modern culture was at the time when it arrived. It created its own absolutely authentic counterculture the way punk did but using technology. Instead of picking up the instruments that were available, which punk did, it redefined technology using samplers and drum machines, changing the way live events happened by just putting on parties yourself. The things that predated raves all came out of hip-hop and sound system culture in that do-it-yourself approach to coexisting within the civic body, but by not going to the clubs that were prescribed, or the bars that were prescribed, and doing something different.

I think that speaks to parts of music culture, which can be so innovative but with this high level of commodification. How do you find the art world in comparison?

It’s always been a commodities market and even the “outsider” gallerists seemed obsessed with the money. The thing for me that was strange at that time was that these ridiculous rumors started about my identity and a couple of people said to me, “This is going to be good for you, right? You’re going to make some money,” and being disagreeable in general, I just thought—fuck it.

Lazarides Gallery was the only gallery that ever represented me and when I left, I pivoted immediately to a DIY platform and started to sell art on a nonprofit basis. The pandemic was catalytic and over the last four years a team of just two people—myself and my printer and partner—have generated over £1 million worth of income and allocated all the profits to a series of NGO projects for food security, Ukraine, and Palestine, with the only costs being production and consignment—no gallery with a premium W1 (London) property to sustain.

My feeling also was that if anyone was taking the rumors that I was Banksy seriously and taking a sudden interest in my work, I’d put that to a good cause, shut down any interest from other galleries, and close the door on accusations of self-capitalization.

But I can see the benefits of the patronage side of it, and it’s not dissimilar to label culture, signing to record labels. In theory, they’re there to help you develop your skills and give you the time to nurture your talents or whatever but in reality, it’s very different because it’s a really bad bank—it’s taking loads of your IP and giving you very little back at the worst interest rates ever designed.

You’ve mentioned your activism around Palestine, Ukraine, and access to food, and you recently staged two large-scale low-carbon concerts in Bristol and Liverpool. What instigated your activism?

From the moment we started touring, we were introduced to a lot of people. I remember meeting the guys from Greenpeace. We went to New Zealand. They were showing us where [their boat] Rainbow Warrior was attacked by the government. So, we met some real frontline climate activists in the early ‘90s and then during the release of our record Blue Lines, it was around the first Gulf War, the second Gulf War and every other war that followed the Balkan Wars… We were very much in music at that time and very aware of how trivial culture would seem in the face of these realities. There was a certain amount of embarrassment about what we’re doing and a sense that there has to be a sense of duty that comes along with it, and I guess meeting a lot of anti-war activists and activists who want to redesign capitalism in a way that benefits everybody and is more fair and equitable, which isn’t as extreme as it is sometimes portrayed.

The climate awareness project we started with Tyndall in 2018 came about through an activist friend of mine called Mark Donne, who I’d met at Occupy many years before and at Hoping Foundation fundraising gigs. I got the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C] in 2018 and a couple of years later, obviously, Extinction Rebellion started to take matters into their own hands, against a backdrop of total inaction from every state on the planet, and that was when we felt, we can’t just carry on touring like this.

We were seeing these people locking down streets, risking their liberty. We’re not going to go around the world on private planes and do what we do as if nothing’s happened. So, we started to take what we do a lot more seriously at that time. We were also witnessing things with our own eyes. We went to Jerusalem and Bethlehem back in the day and saw for ourselves. These aren’t decisions just made based on taking a position.

An artwork showing a stylized human figure and two airplanes flying above

Robert Del Naja, Help Gaza (2020). Courtesy Robert Del Naja.

These messages start to become a part of your gigs and elaborate stage sets. What made you bring your activism into your creative life and work?

It’s just that you start having that opportunity and it would be just ridiculous to waste it and as you said, once you start to feel powerless in the face of what seems to be to adjacent realities to the one which has been delivered by social media and the one you’re seeing in the general news cycle, that frustration, that bemusement makes you want to do and say something and take things into your own hands a little bit. At the same time, we are also very aware, I chat to Adam Curtis about this a lot, that by the very process of editing you’re also doing the exact same thing as everyone else, because you’re making editorial decisions and so you’re also part of the context in which reality is being remixed.

We’re a small but curious bunch of artists, activists, and tech engineers. No institutions to navigate. That makes funding the projects difficult. That means finding commercial partners, which is increasingly difficult due to our political positions, or paying for things ourselves. In the same way, we show solidarity to the Palestinian cause by embedding the behavior into our show content and working with NGOs throughout the tour. Every Massive Attack show that we performed in front of over a million people in Europe over the last year was an articulation of anger, defiance, and frustration at the failure of the international political communities to act to prevent genocide. No need for activism by committee.

An abstract artwork

Robert Del Naja, IRC Ukraine (2022). Courtesy Robert Del Naja.

Collaboration is a huge part of what you do; you started to work with UVA and others like Adam Curtis on your stage shows, and that seems to be when you began to work with film and installation. When did you decide to bring these messages into your live performances?

We started this project together in 2013 for Manchester International Festival. It was really me saying to Adam, how can we be like the house band for one of your documentaries? Is that possible? Can we turn some of these amazing sequences into live entertainment and then switch back to heavy documentary, and then we’ll be the band and we’ll play covers? It was really good fun but then we took it onto the Mezzanine show and it was all about the samples of the album and revisiting the past via films again. Going out to festivals recently was really the pinnacle of the experiment, because it was taking a lot of Adam’s brilliant arguments around people, power politics, and political systems, and presenting that to a young crowd who aren’t really maybe that interested in our band or just seeing us out of curiosity, have no idea what to expect, and seeing if they stick with it and watch it and enjoy it.

And then you brought it into the gallery, taking it from capturing a large audience to an almost one-on-one environment. How did Present Shock come to be at 180 The Strand with UVA? That’s where I first came across it.

Matt was obviously doing the 20th anniversary show at 180, which is such a cool space and some of those pieces were amazing. He asked me if I would collaborate on one with him and I was very humbled by the fact that he felt that our work together 20 years ago was key to UVA in building their identity. So, I was very, very up for doing something which would help manifest that feeling, that choice, that feeling of collaboration over 20 years as a singular piece. There were so many different ways it could have gone because we’ve done so many different versions of our show together. In the end, it really did feel the most representative memorialization of it would be using a mad morass of human statistic data on consumerism, our relationship with the planet and our relationship with consumer capitalism, etc. and then contrasting that with what we normally do with all those real bits of statistical information, with the banality of celebrity culture headlines.

The overload of information we’ve been experiencing the last 20 years, it’s the context collapse, which is to me the most worrying—everything’s fragmented. That fragmentation of information now means that you can read, you can replace it, and that relates back to sampling, chopping things up.

In terms of your practice, your art and your music, do you think that they’ll diverge, or do you see them coming together?

I think they will. We will be playing more, and I think the live show next year will definitely bring everything closer together. We’re talking to all the international promoters about trying to implement and initiate anything they can from the recommendations we created. We’ve managed to reduce our carbon by 27 percent last year on the tour, and we can still do more. We’re going to continue with that portion and the show and the content; the show is going to be an iteration of what we’re doing now, and more Present Shock will appear in the show and become a part of it. So, it will be like a living, growing entity and some new music out next year as well, hopefully!



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