After a 20-year career providing the soundtrack to stoners as they macraméd themselves into couches across the world, British trip hop pioneers Massive Attack came to Melbourne Saturday night to promote their fifth studio album, Heligoland, at the Myer Music Bowl.

And while the drug-smoking has abated little – if the Melbourne crowd is anything to go by – the inclination to listen to Massive Attack in the reclining position was absent. Rather, for the full 90-minute show, the crowd was on their feet, swaying, bobbing, and yes, even jumping around and dancing, as they were wowed with a visual and aural spectacular.

There has always been – to varying degrees – something detached and slightly remote about Massive Attack’s music; in turn it was left to the vocalists to bring the music back down to earth, to tether it to something more soulful and accessible.

This they have done in abundance, with song after song after song of warm, glowing vocals from a range of MA members and collaborators, from Neneh Cherry, Deborah Miller, Horace Andy, Tricky, Martina Topley-Bird and MA’s own Robert del Naja (3D), and Grant Marshall (Daddy G). So to see, in a single show, live vocal support from Miller, Andy, Topley-Bird, 3D and Daddy G, the audience was treated to a living history of the band.

It was through these vocalists – accompanied by a brilliant live band and vivid, creative and spectacularly choreographed visuals – that the warmth and joy at times absent from Massive Attack’s studio albums was delivered in spades to the adoring crowd.

The band entered the blue-lit stage through a thick haze, and immediately kicked off with an energy not normally associated with Massive Attack. From that point, the crowd was putty in their hands. Topley-Bird, with her buttery smooth, sugary sweet voice (there’s a baking metaphor dying to escape), delivered Babel stunningly; the drawn-out synths and staccato drums provided the driving force over which her vocals soared.

What followed was a range of songs spanning MA’s entire discography. Deborah Miller, filling in for original vocalist Shara Nelson on Unfinished Sympathy and Safe From Harm, soulfully delivered both tracks, the latter of which descended into a thumping, heaving crowd-pleaser.

Even the tracks from Mezzanine, an album towards the chillier, edgier end of Massive Attack’s opus, were rendered with a warmth that was enveloping. Teardrop, from Topley-Bird, was as hauntingly beautiful as ever. Never before has a performer so adored seemed so alone as Topley-Bird did during that song. Angel, sung by reggae legend Horace Andy (as on the album), was both sharp and melancholy, his thin, high-pitched voice piercing the night’s sky as he incanted “to love you, love you, love you, love you” over the seething guitar riffs.

For his part, del Naja was a cheerful ringleader, gracious and funny. He continuously thanked the crowd, big-upped his band-mates, and riffed this way and that on a range of topics. His most popular line of the night, showing a shrewd populous streak, was his offer to “take Michael Clarke and Lara Bingle if you’ll keep fucking Pauline Hanson.”

Nor were the band’s deep-seated political roots far from the surface at any time. During Babel, a green-lit number scroll stretching the stage showed the costs in fast counting dollars of the Iraq War, pollution and poverty. During Inertia Creeps, the crowd was treated to a range headlines that included the banal, the ridiculous, and the tragic: ‘Pauline Hanson to Emigrate’, ‘Pot smoking man puts baby in oven’, ‘Peter Andre removes tattoo of Jordan’, and in what was obviously a popular theme, ‘Bingle: who bloody cares?’

The encore, in keeping with the night, spanned three albums and left nothing behind. First was Miller’s timeless Unfinished Sympathy, followed by an energetic and full-throttled Girl I Love You off Heligoland. And to send everyone home, happy and sated, Daddy G and 3D finished the night off harmonising the dubbiest of MA tracks, Karmacoma – giving the crowd, stoners and teetotallers alike, everything they had hoped for.