Bristol band Massive Attack has boycotted a Liverpool venue and cancelled its gig because the exhibition centre is due to hold a major weapons fair next month.
AOC Europe 2021 is currently set to take place at Liverpool’s ACC Exhibition Centre in October. A demonstration was planned to campaign against the fair, which took place on Saturday.
Natalie Bennett, a Green Party peer and former leader of the party, tweeted her support for the march. She wrote “#StopArmsFairLpool. Great messages around the @LiverpoolGreens banner. #Liverpool” accompanied by four images of banners, one of which read: “If you host an arms fair, you’re the weapon”.
Robert “3D” Del Naja, a founding member of Massive Attack, said: “The one-off testbed show planned for Liverpool involved design, planning and relationship building on a scale that dwarfs any conventional tour, so it’s really disappointing that for reasons way beyond our control we can’t pull it off.
“But showing solidarity with the people of Liverpool at this crucial moment supersedes that.”
He added: “We can rearrange a testbed show, but applying a wider focus, I can’t imagine a more graphic example of the psychosis of the systems we live by than what’s playing out in Liverpool.”
The National Union of Students (NUS) has also shown solidarity with the people of Liverpool by cancelling an event that was supposed to take place at the exhibition centre.
It called the hosting of the electronic arms fair “completely deplorable”.
The statement read: “We strongly condemn their role in enabling the sale of weapons used to destroy the lives of civilians across the world.”
It added: “Should they [ACC Exhibition Centre] fail to cancel this event, NUS will not book them again in the future.”
Image: Tomáš Malík on Unsplash