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    Is This Massive Attack Concert the Gold Standard for a Green Gig?

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    Coldplay and Billie Eilish have tried to drive down carbon emissions while touring, but the British band Massive Attack has tried to take the efforts even further.When the British band Massive Attack was halfway through a West Coast tour in 2019, flying from show to show, the rapper and singer Robert Del Naja had a moment of crisis. Given all the carbon emitted by moving the band and its equipment around, he recalled wondering: Can I justify this anymore?Not long afterward, the band made a decision. It would work with climate scientists to develop a model for touring that made as little climate impact as possible.On Sunday, Massive Attack staged a daylong 35,000-person festival in the band’s home city of Bristol, England, to showcase the carbon-cutting measures it has developed with the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, a British organization, and A Greener Future, a nonprofit focused on lowering the music industry’s emissions.The concert on Sunday was powered by batteries charged from wind and solar energy.Sandra Mickiewicz for The New York TimesFans were encouraged to travel to the show by walking, cycling or using public transportation.Sandra Mickiewicz for The New York TimesWhereas other bands, including Coldplay, have staged attention-grabbing stunts to draw awareness to the industry’s climate impacts, they have sometimes ignored the main sources of emissions from gigs, such as audience travel and venues’ power supplies. With its show on Sunday, Massive Attack wanted to show how to tackle all of the polluting parts of a show.In an interview a few days before the event, Del Naja said that previous music industry efforts to cut emissions had not been in line with the United Nations-agreed goal to stop average temperatures rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 Fahrenheit.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      ‘No Need to Worry,’ Says ‘Wallace and Gromit’ Film Studio, After Clay Supplier Shuts Down

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      Rumors that Aardman Animations, the makers of stop-motion films, had lost their supplier worried fans. But fear not, the studio reassured, there is plenty of clay.It might have been an existential question for the creators of the beloved stop-motion animation characters Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep: What would happen if they ran out of clay?Fans spent the weekend worrying about the fate of Aardman Animations when the British newspaper The Telegraph reported that the studio, based in Bristol, England, would be facing its “hour of knead” after the only manufacturer of the special clay used in its creations had closed its doors earlier this year. Having bought what it could, The Telegraph reported, the studio had enough clay left to make only one more film, a new “Wallace and Gromit” feature coming next year.But no, the studio’s foundations are not crumbling. Aardman Animations said on Monday it had plenty of clay to keep molding.Fans had “absolutely no need to worry,” the studio said in a statement. The studio has “high levels of existing stocks of modeling clay to service current and future productions,” it said.The manufacturer of the clay, Newclay Products, announced last month that it had stopped selling its products in March. The company had become known for Lewis Newplast, a Plasticine beloved by animators that is malleable enough to mold but strong enough to keep its shape during filming. Newclay Products did not immediately respond to a request for comment.“Shaun the Sheep.”Cinematic/Alamy Stock PhotoBut its directors, Paul and Valerie Dearing, told The Telegraph that they were retiring and had decided to close the company’s doors after they couldn’t find anyone to take it over. They said Aardman had bought about 400 kilograms, or almost 900 pounds, of the remaining Newplast stock.More than a ton of modeling clay is ordered for each of the studio’s feature films, and about half that is used to shape the characters, according to modelers for Aardman.Aardman on Monday sought to reassure fans, telling them that once its supplies of Newplast were gone, it had plans to transition to new stock.“Much like Wallace in his workshop, we have been tinkering away behind the scenes for quite some time,” it said, referring to the eccentric inventor who is one of Aardman’s most beloved characters.The studio is famed for its signature Claymation style, producing hits such as the “Wallace & Gromit” franchise, the spinoff series “Shaun the Sheep,” and the 2000 film “Chicken Run.”A sequel, “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget,” is set to be released on Netflix on Dec. 15, and the studio will also release a new “Wallace & Gromit” film in 2024, premiering on Netflix and the BBC. More

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      in Music

      Mark Stewart, Fiery British Rocker, Is Dead at 62

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      His band, the Pop Group, was anything but pop, blending anti-authoritarian fury with a ferocious mix of punk, funk and experimental jazz.Mark Stewart, the incendiary frontman of the British post-punk band the Pop Group, whose explosive mix of funk, noise rock, free jazz experimentalism and anti-authoritarian rage made a mockery of the group’s sunny name, died on April 21. He was 62.His death was announced in a statement by his London-based recoding label, Mute. It provided no other details.The Pop Group emerged in Bristol, England, in 1977, as punk rock was shaking the foundations of the British music scene. Mr. Stewart found inspiration in punk’s iconoclastic fury. “There is the arrogance of power,” he once said, “and what we got from punk was the power of arrogance.”Onstage, the band created a cyclone force that put many punk bands to shame. Gyrating manically and barking rebellious lyrics through his pouty, Jagger-esque lips, Mr. Stewart whipped audiences into a frenzy with songs like “We Are All Prostitutes,” the band’s best known single, from 1979, which reached No. 8 on the British indie charts. The lyrics include these lines:We are all prostitutesEveryone has their priceEveryoneAnd you too will have to learn to live the lieLive performances by the Pop Group hit with “such indomitable force and such sudden visceral rage that I could barely breathe,” the musician and writer Nick Cave wrote in a tribute on his website, The Red Hand Files, after Mr. Stewart’s death.Righteous fury was as intrinsic to Mr. Stewart’s personality as it was to his music. “Mark taught me many things about life,” Mr. Cave added, including the idea that “sleeping was a bourgeois indulgence, and that the world was one giant corporate conspiracy, and that one way to win an argument was to just never, ever stop shouting.”The band scarcely made a dent commercially, but that made sense, given its contempt for all things capitalist. As Mr. Stewart put it in a 2015 interview with The Arts Desk, a culture site, “The Pop Group were really that Situationist idea of an explosion at the heart of the commodity.”Mr. Stewart performing onstage in 2012 in Leeds, England. After the Pop Group broke up, he remained prolific, collaborating with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, Tricky and Massive Attack, and releasing a string of eclectic solo albums.Andrew Benge/Redferns, via Getty ImagesMark Stewart was born in Bristol, in South West England, on Aug. 10, 1960, one of two sons of an engineer father and a mother who worked with children with learning disabilities.Bristol in the 1970s was a rough town, Mr. Stewart once said, and his towering stature — he was already 6 feet 6 inches tall as a preteen — made him a tempting potential recruit for local boot-boy gangs. But the thug’s life was not for him; music was his passion — even though he and his friends considered themselves musical misfits, scouring junk shops for obscure jazz and funk records, wearing mohair sweaters inspired by the Sex Pistols and staging punk shows at a local youth center.“The local gangs really, really had it in for me,” he said in the Arts Desk interview. “They wanted me to join their gangs but didn’t realize I was only 12. They thought I was about 20. So they’d smash all the youth club windows. I had to climb out of toilet windows.”Music was a way out. “If there’s not too much going on in the town you’re in, you dream,” he said in 2014 interview with Vice.Mr. Stewart formed the Pop Group in 1976 along with the band’s original members: John Waddington (guitar), Simon Underwood (bass), Gareth Sager (guitar and saxophone) and Bruce Smith (drums).The band’s name came from Mr. Stewart’s mother. “I think she said, ‘Oh, Mark’s forming a pop group,’” he told Vice. And at the outset, he said, “we thought we were.”The band’s first album, “Y,” which was released in 1979 and produced by the British dub master Dennis Bovell, made little commercial impact.“These heavyweight journalists thought we were being deliberately obtuse,” Mr. Stewart told Vice, although NME, the taste-making British music publication, called the debut “a brave failure. Exciting but exasperating.”The Pop Group did anything but mellow on its second album, “For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?,” released the next year; it crackled with angry denunciations of Thatcher-era England. Though some dismissed it as “self-righteous soapbox agitprop,” the critic Simon Reynolds wrote in “U.K. Post-Punk,” a 2012 collection of his essays, the album, like “Y,” came to be a considered a classic by many.In a look back at the album upon its rerelease in 2016, the site Punknews.org observed: “This is the noise of a collapsing society caught on tape, running through the gamut of paranoia and death. Dig it.”The band broke up not long after the second album’s release, but Mr. Stewart remained prolific, collaborating with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, Tricky and Massive Attack, and releasing a string of eclectic solo albums over the years that, characteristically, were as subtle as a bazooka.The first, “Learning to Cope With Cowardice,” from 1983, was rereleased in 2006. It inspired the music site Pitchfork to note the single-minded intensity of this “possible madman and authority-critiquing refusenik that was marginalized in his own time, only to later be viewed as a seer.”Little is publicly known about Mr. Stewart’s personal life, and information about his survivors was not available.In 2010, he reunited with the Pop Group and released two more albums, “Citizen Zombie” (2015) and “Honeymoon on Mars” (2016). Both its albums and live performances showed that the band, and Mr. Stewart, had not lost a flicker of their fire.“It was good to be reminded of how singular and beautifully abrasive the Pop Group could be,” Ben Beaumont-Thomas of The Guardian wrote in a review of a 2010 London performance, “and how dreadfully conservative most rock music since sounds in comparison.” More

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      in Television

      David Olusoga Wants Britain to Face Its Past. All of It.

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      For more than a decade, the historian and broadcaster’s work has focused on bringing his country’s uglier histories to light. Recently, more people are paying attention.LONDON — In December, when a British court cleared four Black Lives Matter protesters of criminal damages for toppling the statue of Edward Colston, a 17th-century slave trader, in June 2020, it was thanks in part to David Olusoga’s expert testimony.Olusoga, a historian whose work focuses on race, slavery and empire, felt a duty to agree to address the court on behalf of the defense, he said in a recent interview, since “I’ve been vocal about this history.”At the trial in Bristol, the city in southwest England where the Colston statue was toppled, Olusoga, 52, told the jury about Colston’s prominent role in the slave trade and the brutalities suffered by the African people Colston sold into slavery.The closely watched court decision was greeted with concern by some in Britain and relief by others, and Olusoga’s role in the defense offers just one recent example of his work’s impact on British society.Olusoga’s comments in court are consistent with a frequent focus of his wider work as one of the country’s most prominent public historians: that long-forgotten or buried past injustices can be addressed in the present day in public-facing, accessible media.Olusoga in a scene from the docu-series “One Thousand Years of Slavery” on the Smithsonian Channel, for which he served as an executive producer.Smithsonian ChannelOlusoga’s latest TV work is “One Thousand Years of Slavery,” which premieres on the Smithsonian Channel on Monday. The show, which he executive produced alongside Bassett Vance Productions, a production company helmed by Courtney B. Vance and Angela Bassett, takes a wide-ranging, global look at slavery through the familial stories of public figures like Senator Cory Booker and the actor David Harewood.One of Olusoga’s best-known projects is “Black and British: A Forgotten History,” which explored — through a BBC television series accompanied by a best-selling book — the long and fraught relationship between Black people and Britain, introducing many people to Black communities here that date back to the Roman times.“I’m interested in the histories we don’t tell. I’m not interested in retelling stories that we’ve told a thousand times,” Olusoga said. “I’m interested in telling stories that are unfamiliar.”Olusoga, who is half-Nigerian, traces this focus to his mother telling him when he was a child that Nigerian soldiers served in World War II. In that moment, his interest in history overlapped with his attempts to understand his Black and British identity, he said. “It made me realize not just that there was more to this for me, but also that I wasn’t being told the whole truth,” he said. “And a lot of what I do is from that moment of realization.”The historian was born in Lagos to a Nigerian father and a white British mother. He moved to Britain as a child and grew up in northeast England with his mother and siblings. In the book “Black and British,” he spoke of the racial tensions of the 1970s and 1980s and a campaign of racist abuse his family experienced, which forced them to leave their home.Olugosa’s “Black and British: A Forgotten History” explores the long and fraught relationship between Black people and Britain.Despite having a difficult time in school — Olusoga was diagnosed with dyslexia at age 14 — there he developed a love of history from a favorite teacher and the television he watched. He studied history at university but opted for a career in TV over academia. For Olusoga, “history was naturally public,” he said. “I chose very deliberately to leave universities and go into television in order to make history.”After 15 years in TV production, he started appearing in front of the camera. He’s now a fixture on British screens presenting shows like “A House Through Time,” which each season tells the story of a British house and its inhabitants over the centuries. In 2019, Olusoga was awarded an Order of the British Empire for services to history and community integration (which he struggled to accept because of its association with the violent acts of the empire).In an email, Mary Beard, the author of “Women and Power” and a professor of classics at Cambridge University, praised Olusoga’s skills of persuasion. She remembered that, when filming “Black and British” with Olusoga in a rural English village, an older white woman said she was “proud” to know that one of the earliest inhabitants of her village had been Black after being presented with a reconstruction of that ancient woman’s face.“That is the Olusoga effect,” said Beard, who is another one of Britain’s best-known historians. “He has a real gift for telling stories straight and winning people to seeing things in a different way. It is a very rare gift.”This is also evident in the impact of “Unremembered,” a 2019 documentary that was made by his production company, Uplands Television. The show, presented by David Lammy, a Black Member of Parliament, brought to public consciousness that African and Asian soldiers who died in World War I were not commemorated in the same way as their white comrades, and many lie in unmarked graves. The program ultimately led to a public apology from Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government.In recent years, Olivette Otele, Britain’s first Black female history professor and the author of “African Europeans: An Untold History,” has seen a shift in how the Black experience is included in British and European history, which she credits in part to Olusoga.“In academia, we do all we can, but to be able to democratize, to reach wider audiences has made such a huge difference, so much so that it’s becoming normal to engage with these topics,” Otele said in a recent interview.Olusoga studied history but opted for a career in television over academia, as he believes history is “naturally public.”Alexander Turner for The New York TimesFor Olusoga, this shift was surprising. “I’ve been telling these stories on radio and television, and fighting for them to be told, for my entire career, and I’ve done nothing different,” he said. “I think what’s happened is the world has changed around me and I think people are more interested in listening.”At the same time, since the 2020 murder of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter protests, there have been contentious debates about what gets included in Britain’s public history. In late 2020, following the toppling of the Colston statue, the British conservation charity the National Trust released a report exploring links between some of its sites and colonialism and slavery. The report was dismissed as “woke” by some conservative politicians and many in Britain’s right-wing press.Yet Olusoga said debates like this show that certain segments of the population reject the uglier elements of British history. The past is sometimes used to make British people feel “that we were magical people from a magical island that’s always been on the right side of history,” he said.But, “if you only want to tell yourself the positive stories from your past,” he said, “then that necessarily means you cannot have an honest reckoning with your past.”He added: “And that’s Britain’s issue.” More

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      in Theater

      ‘Dr. Semmelweis’ and ‘The Glow’ Reviews: Tales From the Asylum

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      Two new plays offer very different experiences of the sanitarium, one starring Mark Rylance and the other spotlighting a fast-rising actress.LONDON — “Wash your hands! Wash your hands!” That plea has sounded the world over in recent years, and it lends a topical potency to “Dr. Semmelweis,” running through Feb. 19 at the Bristol Old Vic, a beautiful 18th-century playhouse in southwest England.Its urgent speaker is the titular medic, a Hungarian-born doctor in 19th-century Vienna who pioneered antisepsis only to die in 1865, at age 47. It was left to subsequent physicians like Joseph Lister to pick up his work.The play tells the time-honored tale of a man against the system, in this case a visionary whose desire to reverse a high mortality rate among young mothers comes up against a largely heedless establishment. Worthy of Ibsen and chronicled before in a Howard Sackler play that circled Broadway but never got there, Semmelweis’s story here emerges as a star vehicle for Mark Rylance. The much-laureled actor (three Tonys and an Oscar) co-wrote the play with Stephen Brown.The director, Tom Morris, runs the venerable Bristol venue and has given Semmelweis’s too-short life a busy, bustling production that includes actors spilling from Ti Green’s turntable set into the auditorium on occasion, with musicians and dancers on hand to amplify the discordant emotions of the piece. The dancers, choreographed by Antonia Franceschi, give swirling physical expression to Semmelweis’s increasingly disordered mind and to the mothers who lost their lives to hygienic neglect. The Salomé string quartet weaves among the events, playing snatches of Schubert and lending a high-art sheen to some grave subject matter.If all this sounds like a lot of embellishment, it’s fair to say that the first act in particular feels as if stage business is being used to disguise some fairly boilerplate writing. The play begins at the end, with Semmelweis in Hungary recalling, alongside his calm-seeming wife, Maria (Thalissa Teixeira), a climate of contamination in Vienna that did irreparable damage to the doctor’s psyche.How can a vaunted “city of new ideas” not be more responsive to the investigations of a young maverick who comes upon the disinfectant potential of chlorine? This grocer’s son has determined that death rates at the world’s largest hospital — as Vienna General then was — are three times higher at the doctors’ clinic than at that of the midwives. “Cadaveric particles” are posited as the culprit, passed on by unclean hands from the autopsy room to the delivery ward and turning the hospital into a de facto slaughterhouse.Rylance’s character in “Dr. Semmelweis” is, in time-honored fashion, a visionary whose desire to reverse a high mortality rate among young mothers comes up against a largely heedless establishment.Geraint LewisThe locals aren’t having it. “Nuts by name, nuts by nature,” one of Semmelweis’s colleagues remarks dismissively, referring to this upstart’s first name, Ignaz. Never mind that the insult doesn’t make a whole lot of sense given that these people were probably not speaking English.After the intermission, the baldfaced, expository nature of the writing continues. If Semmelweis is right, we’re told, “the entire future of medicine will be changed.” There’s a line, too, about the possible efficacy of bleach that draws thumping parallels to one of the more, um, peculiar proposals to defeat the current pandemic.Through it all, Rylance is a springy physical presence. He brings a stammering restlessness to the role of a radical thinker whose thoughts at times outpace his words. You have to smile when this protean actor — acclaimed across TV and film, but devoted first and foremost to the stage — speaks in passing about “not wanting to waste time in the theater either,” and it’s nice to find among the supporting cast such fellow theater stalwarts as Alan Williams, in stern form as the obstetrician Johann Klein, Semmelweis’s nemesis.More than anything, “Dr. Semmelweis” whets the appetite for Rylance’s return to the London stage in April, reprising his seismic performance in the Jez Butterworth play “Jerusalem,” first seen at the Royal Court in 2009. That same London address, an important one for new writing, is currently hosting an Alistair McDowall play, “The Glow,” that really is nuts, albeit intriguingly so.The title character of “Dr. Semmelweiss” died unappreciated in an asylum, and McDowall’s time-traveling drama begins in one two years earlier, with a dimly lit figure fearfully inhabiting a windowless cell. That figure, a woman (Ria Zmitrowicz), is then glimpsed in any number of settings and centuries, ranging from the 1300s, in the company of a warriorlike personage (Tadhg Murphy) who might have wandered in from “Game of Thrones,” to 343 A.D. and forward to the 1970s and beyond.From left, Ria Zmitrowicz and Rakie Ayola in “The Glow” at the Royal Court Theater in London.Manuel HarlanWhat in heaven’s name is going on? You might ask McDowall the same of his 2016 play for the Royal Court, “X,” which was set on Pluto.Shouty and apocalyptic only to turn rapturously poetic in its closing monologue, “The Glow” is best viewed as a sensory experience in which lighting and sound conjoin with the writer’s freewheeling imagination to summon up a lonely and difficult world that nonetheless allows for the warmth of the title. The intermission, only 40 minutes or so in, gives audiences ample time to ponder what they have seen.The more literal theatergoer will be driven to distraction by the play’s apparently willful opacity, but that in itself tracks with the experimental bent of a theater defined in part by the playwright Caryl Churchill, whose own inquisitiveness and disregard for convention may have offered a beacon for McDowall.For myself, I have to commend the full-throttle production of Vicky Featherstone, the Court’s artistic director, in tandem with a design team in which Jessica Hung Han Yun’s mercurial lighting reigns supreme. Fisayo Akinade and Rakie Ayola offer sterling support as more recognizable participants in a world to which Zmitrowicz’s initially mute woman has a hesitant relationship. Seen first as a spiritualist medium — yes, you read that right — Ayola also gets to display a lovely singing voice.With the mysterious spectral figure at the play’s center, McDowall has offered a gift to Zmitrowicz, a fast-rising actress who has come to attention of late largely at the Almeida. Alternately sullen and feverish, indrawn yet eloquent, this performer rivets our attention throughout, even when the play she inhabits is ricocheting every which way around her.Dr. Semmelweis. Directed by Tom Morris. Bristol Old Vic, through Feb. 19.The Glow. Directed by Vicky Featherstone. Royal Court Theater, through March 5. More

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      in Television

      Christopher Walken Destroys Banksy Painting on BBC Comedy Show

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      A genuine painting by Banksy, the street artist whose work has sold for millions, was gone in seconds as the actor painted over the artwork as a gag on the show.With a few swipes of a paint roller, the actor Christopher Walken wiped away a real Banksy painting from the side of a building in England on an episode of BBC’s “The Outlaws” that aired Wednesday night.Though Banksy’s work has fetched millions of dollars at auction, Mr. Walken unceremoniously painted over the artwork on the comedy-drama series, which is set in Banksy’s hometown, Bristol.A spokesperson from Big Talk Productions, the show’s production company, confirmed that the artwork was “an original Banksy,” and that Mr. Walken painted over it during filming, “ultimately destroying it.”Mr. Walken plays Frank on the BBC comedy show “The Outlaws.” Stephane De Sakutin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe production company offered no more details, and a representative for Banksy did not respond to a request for comment.Banksy, a street artist and one of the world’s most expensive artists, has rigidly maintained his anonymity. He has often manipulated the news media with stunts, notably in 2018 when a painting self-destructed moments after it was sold for $1.4 million at auction. That painting, retitled “Love is in the Bin,” was recently resold by Sotheby’s in London for $25.4 million, a record for the artist.Big Talk/Four EyesIn the BBC show, directed by and starring the comedian Stephen Merchant, Mr. Walken’s character, Frank, is ordered to perform community service. He and several other characters don high-visibility vests as they clean up graffiti from a wall on the side of a building in Bristol.Mr. Walken’s character, fulfilling his duties, knocks over a board leaning against the wall, revealing a painted black-and-white rat and two canisters, recognizable in Banksy’s style even if the word “BANKSY” weren’t spray-painted on the wall in orange.“Look at this rat I found,” he says to his supervisor, played by Jessica Gunning, who, thoroughly uninterested, spends her supervision reading with her back turned to the wall.Big Talk/Four EyesAfter he explains it was a graffiti rat, not a real one, she responds: “Council said paint over any graffiti, so crack on.”“It’s awfully good,” he protests.“Less debating, more painting,” she shoots back.Mr. Walken shrugs, and then the camera zooms tightly on the artwork as he covers it entirely with six strokes.The BBC did not immediately put a clip of the scene on YouTube, but it made the episode available to watch on its iPlayer service for those in Britain. More