The Spoils
Three days in Paris that ran as one continuous set, and the track that closed it
By rafi Mercer
The first room was underground and you could hear the ceiling. Low, close, the sort of space where a bassline has nowhere to travel so it goes into the walls and comes back up through the floor into your feet. You feel that music before you hear it.
Then a stairwell made of glass, rising through the middle of the building, and the sound changing on every landing — the bass falling away below, something brighter arriving from above, the two of them briefly in the same air.
Then the roof, and it all opened out. Music with no walls to hold it sits differently: thinner, further away, floating just above the tables while the city carries on underneath. Paris on a warm evening with the lights coming up. Somebody laughing. Nobody in a hurry.
It felt like going somewhere. That's not quite grammar and I've never found better.
That was one hour of three days.
I was there for work. Head of digital for a business building cashless payment systems for festivals, invited over for Rock en Seine — a day of showing the product, then two more days in the city with everything open. The festival ran cashless that year, wristbands mandatory at every bar, the system built by Weezevent, and the same chip that held your money held your permissions. I'd been out to San Francisco more than once by then, sat in rooms with Eventbrite explaining what we were doing in the UK and what we thought we might do in the States.
All of which meant one thing on the ground: no door ever closed in front of me for three days. Not a queue, not a rope, not a wait. And what that actually bought — the thing I didn't understand at the time — wasn't access. It was continuity.
Most people get one night of a city. They arrive at nine, they hear one room properly, they go home. I got seventy-two hours without a break, moving from room to room to street to field, and the whole thing ran as a single set. Nothing ever stopped. The bass in the basement handed over to the roof. The roof handed over to a taxi. The taxi handed over to somewhere with a proper system and someone behind it who knew what they were doing. Then the street, then the sky going pale, then another room. Day and night stopped being separate categories. There was only what was playing.
You hear differently at hour forty than at hour four. Everything gets closer. The room stops being a room and becomes a set of surfaces doing things to the sound. You notice where the treble dies. You notice which corner of a bar the system was actually tuned for, and you go and stand in it. Tiredness strips out the analysis and leaves the listening, which is why sound at four in the morning goes straight in without asking permission.
The festival itself sat out at Saint-Cloud, in a park laid out by Le Nôtre three hundred years before anyone thought to put a chip in a wristband. Open ground, big sky, sound behaving the way it only does outdoors — travelling, arriving late, thinning at the edges of the crowd. Massive Attack headlined that weekend, and by one French account it was the hottest night of the festival and they cooled the whole field, with Tricky appearing unannounced part-way through the set. Cold music in warm air. That's a specific physical sensation and there aren't many bands who can do it to twenty thousand people standing in a field in August.
Then it was over, and I was more or less ejected. Someone put me in a taxi on the third day and the taxi went towards an airport, and for the first time in three days nothing was being asked of me and nothing was playing that I'd chosen.
The driver had the radio on, low.
"The Spoils" had been out four weeks — released at the end of July 2016, five minutes and forty-six seconds, Daddy G and Stew Jackson, with Hope Sandoval singing for Massive Attack for the third time after "Paradise Circus" and "Four Walls." A car radio is a terrible listening environment. Small speakers, road noise, a driver's EQ settings. It shouldn't have worked.
It came in like weather. That voice arrives from somewhere behind the music rather than in front of it, and the track doesn't build so much as sink — it goes down, not forward, and it takes the road and the light and the whole of the last three days down with it. Three days of everything being open, and then this, in a moving car, arriving without being summoned.
A fortnight later they released the video: Cate Blanchett's face, motionless, altered again and again until it ends up something close to mummified, directed by John Hillcoat. I saw it much later. It fits.
The wristband came off somewhere around the gate.
Ten years on, I can still put myself in the back of that car. Not the whole trip — the trip is fragments, a glass stairwell, some strangers smiling, a field going dark. But that five minutes is intact, in full, with the road under it.
I've spent a long time since then in rooms built specifically for listening, with systems that cost more than the taxi, and I know exactly what they're for and why they matter. It's still worth saying that the best thing I heard in Paris came out of a radio I didn't choose, at the end of three days of hearing everything, when I'd finally stopped moving.
A few quick questions
What is "The Spoils"?
A Massive Attack single released on 29 July 2016, featuring Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star. Written and produced by Grant "Daddy G" Marshall with Stew Jackson, it came out as a two-track release alongside "Come Near Me," which features Ghostpoet, and followed the Ritual Spirit EP from earlier that year. The John Hillcoat–directed video starring Cate Blanchett arrived on 9 August.
What else sits alongside it?
The slower end of the Massive Attack catalogue — "Paradise Circus" from Heligoland, which was Sandoval's first collaboration with the band, and most of Mezzanine. Beyond that: Mazzy Star's So Tonight That I Might See, Portishead's Dummy, Tricky's Maxinquaye. Records that move downward rather than forward, and all of them better late than early.
Where does listening like this happen in Paris?
Not at festival scale. The city has quietly built a set of rooms tuned for detail rather than volume — cellar bars in the 11ᵉ, a listening room off Rue Vivienne with private booths, places where the system is the axis the evening turns around. Our Paris guide covers them.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe.
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