LIDO 2025: Day 1

Headlining the very first day of Victoria Park’s brand new LIDO festival, Massive Attack brought their Act 1.5 live show to London on Friday. Following their pioneering eco-friendly day festival on Bristol Downs last year, Victoria Park had turned green - serving vegan food and powering the main stage with solar-powered batteries. Massive Attack and their band also travelled by train to the festival and had encouraged others to do so too. Ushering in a new era of festival management, the line-up consisted of similarly boundary-breaking artists.

Everything Is Recorded, the brainchild of Richard Russell, XL Recordings boss (Fontaines D.C., Radiohead, King Krule), opened the second stage. Featuring an all-star band (including singer and percussionist Georgia) and guest appearances (including Mary in the Junkyard’s Clari Freeman-Taylor), the group performed to an enthralled audience. An electronic experience with interpolations of R&B and soul, each and every track worked as well live as in studio versions. Though the bass was a little high over the vocals, the performance was a very solid opener to start the day with.

Mad Professor followed up on the second stage, playing a selection of tracks from Massive Attack albums Mezzanine and Protection in dub. With bass reverberating through bodies and live steel pan instrumentals, the crowd truly became alive. Not a single soul in the tent was still. By far the most upbeat artist playing on the day, Mad Professor rehashed the crowd’s favourite songs in his own unique and recognisable style, seamlessly blending genres into one big dance party.

Perhaps the most surprising addition to the line-up, Yasiin Bey (fka Mos Def) and The Alchemist brought their new project Forensics to LIDO. Premiering their new album in the United Kingdom, the set consisted of unreleased tracks due for release sometime this year. Sadly the set started fifteen minutes late due to a technical difficulty with sound equipment, but Yasiin’s majestic performance over the glittering instrumentals of The Alchemist more than made up for this delay. The set started with Yasiin Bey walking onstage in a trench coat, sprinkling rose petals as he walked, before spray painting on a sheet draped in front of the DJ table. Singing into a handheld retro microphone, his vocal performance consisted of a mixture of rapping and singing, though the mixing on this stage was pretty awful. Still, Yasiin performed to the best of his ability and commanded the stage with grace. I was disappointed with the sound quality overall in the tent but it was impossible not to enjoy such an incredible (and elusive!) collaboration.

French electronic duo Air warmed up the main stage before Massive Attack, playing a hit-heavy hour-long set. The first half of the set consisted of songs from Moon Safari, with the rest dedicated to tracks from across the group’s discography. Contained within a rectangular box that only filled a small fraction of the stage, Air’s daylight performance did not do them justice. The lighting (which in a darker environment would have worked perfectly) fell flat, and the atmosphere as a whole was lacking in animation. As expected for a London park festival, the sound system was rather quiet beneath the chattering of the audience. Even during hits like ‘Sexy Boy’ and ‘Cherry Blossom Girl’ it was impossible to completely concentrate on the music due to the noise divaricating from the crowd. That said, Air played to a splendid standard. Getting through perhaps more coffee cups than songs, the group fabricated an ethereal listening experience (to those who could hear!) which transported spectators back two or three decades. The set closed with ‘Don’t Be Light’, arguably their best performance of the evening, before members Nicolas and Jean-Benoit (and drummer Louis) bid the crowd goodbye to great applause.

Prior to Massive Attack’s arrival on-stage, poet Inua Ellams and actor Khalid Abdalla took to the stage to speak to the thronging crowd of thirty thousand. In a moving 5-minute-long speech dedicated to the people of Palestine, Abdalla called for solidarity and for the end of the suffering in Gaza. Emotional calls of “Free Palestine” reverberated across the park as a cohort of Palestinian flags assembled between the stage and the sound desk. One of (if not the) most politically active bands of their size, Massive Attack have consistently advocated for struggling and suffering minorities, both through fundraisers like their shirts in collaboration with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and during their live shows.

Massive Attack took to the stage as the sun went down (albeit behind the cover of clouds) to a cover of Gigi D’Agostino’s ‘In My Mind’, before performing ‘Risingson’ to a clamour of whoops and cheers. As usual, the light show was nothing short of incredible. An array of LED lights made up a screen behind the band fronted by Robert “3D” del Naja and Grant “Daddy G” Marshall. Staying congruent with the political messages advocated for just beforehand, this screen displayed harrowing statistics on American investment into Israel and death tolls of modern conflicts, interspersed with videos of current conflict zones prior to and in the aftermath of warfare. When not displaying poignant imagery, the screen lit up with Black Mirror-esque graphics - capturing a live feed of the crowd in a mock facial recognition system. The audience were graced with a plethora of special guests: Horace Andy, Elizabeth Fraser and Deborah Miller came out to perform vocals on tracks throughout the show. Granted, the setlist was almost identical to the one Massive Attack have been touring for the last few years, but nonetheless each and every song performed left the audience in awe. And, much to everyone’s surprise, Yasiin Bey made an appearance to perform ‘I Against I’ for the third time ever. Ditching the trench coat in favour of a bulletproof press jacket, Yasiin’s melancholy allusion to civil war remains as relevant as it did on its release two decades ago. Victoria Park’s hard 11pm curfew meant that both ‘Karmacoma’ and ‘Group Four’ were dropped from the setlist due to time constraints, but the haunting vocals of Elizabeth Fraser on ‘Teardrop’ provided a fitting end to a contemplative performance.

Each and every musical performance on LIDO’s debut was of an excellent standard, with masterful musicians creating empyrean instrumentals over which skilful vocalists intricately wove their lyrics. Musically, I could not fault the festival at all. However, I felt the mixing was a little sub-par throughout the day (other than during the headliner), which detracted slightly from the overall listening experience. A relatively chatty London crowd combined with typically expensive festival food options and lengthy toilet queues also somewhat dampened the goodwill generated by the sustainable initiatives of the festival. Better things were perhaps hoped for from the first ever iteration of LIDO, but it was a fun day out nonetheless, and a pleasant start to this year’s festival season for many.