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Mayfield Depot, Manchester

It's an irony, given his obsession with our surveillance culture, that if you were to cast the voice of Orwell's Big Brother, Adam Curtis would be hard to beat. The BBC documentary-maker – justly celebrated for series that include The Century of the Self, The Power of Nightmares and All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace – speaks with such paternal conviction, such stylish wisdom, that given half a day in a film archive you suspect he could have you believe pretty much anything. This Manchester international festival collaboration with Bristol-based trip-hop pioneers Massive Attack is billed as a playful showdown, a versus, in the manner of a rap contest or a prize fight; the vast derelict train depot in which this battle is being staged over 10 nights offers a suitably raw-boned backdrop for the high-decibel stand-off – earplugs are given out at the door – but it quickly becomes...

At July's Manchester festival, the boundary-breaking band and radical film-maker will tackle the perilous state of democracy in a show that redefines the notion of a gig

Back in May 1991, Massive Attack released a groundbreaking single called Safe from Harm. It merged sampled beats, a definably British rap style and a stirring soul vocal into a radical musical collage that resonates throughout pop music to this day. Twenty-two years later, the song's title has also become a kind of shorthand for the central theme of the group's most ambitious project to date: their imminent live collaboration at Manchester international festival with the radical documentary film-maker Adam Curtis.

"We are exploring a subject that has long interested us both and that we have been talking about, on and off, for two years," says Curtis, whose vision is driving the project, at least until Massive Attack step on to the stage. "It...