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Sitting at the control desk of Massive Attack’s studio, which lurks on an unpre-possessing Bristol industrial V estate, Robert “3D” del Naja lets out a sigh. No, he says, the album isn’t exactly finiished yet. Actually, he can’t exactlysay how finished it is. Six years after Massive Attack last released an album, its followup is“in a kind of state of flux”. It’s nearly done. They’ve had a lot of collaborators in. There was Guy Garvey from Elbow, Damon Albarn. Tunde Adebimpe from TV On the Radio and the California singer Hope Sandoval, the last of whom seems to have left what you might most politely describe as a lasting impression. “You ever seen ‘Hope Sandoval?” asks the other half of Massive Attack, Grant Marshall, in his soft West Country burr, before exhaling heavily. “Fuckin’ ’ell, mate.”

Booming from the speakers, the results sound amazing. “There’s a rumour that we actually make all our albums in the last six months before they’re released and the rest of it is procrastination,” says Del Naja, wearily. “That’s what the manager says. Six months to make an album, the rest of it’s just fucking about.” He looks a bit pained, perhaps remembering the common public perception about Massive Attack, in which a certain marijuana-scented languor figures heavily. “I work really hard,” he protests. “I’m dividing my time between being here, painting in the garage next to my house, trying to finish the sleeve, then we’ve got rehearsals over at Bath. Average day, I work from about 11, 12, ’til about 10 at night.”

The problem, such as it is, he says, is one of perfectionism. They’ve actually recorded “about three” albums in the last six years, then binned two of them. And then there’s the way Massive Attack work: “We don’t have a solid format, a group of people we work with. After touring an album, you have this strange void that follows it. Where you feel slightly displaced, like you’ve just finished with the circus and you’ve got to find a new job. You think, OK, what shall we do next. And you’ve got all these options. You don’t know where to start.”

Marshall mutters something about playing table football, and the two of them dissolve into laughter. Whatever the state of the album (it’s out early next year), at least the duo seem in high spirits, which makes a change. Every time I’ve met them previously, Massive Attack seemed not just to be troubled, but teetering on the verge of total collapse.

The first time was in 1999, just before the release of Mezzanine, when they had a reasonable claim to be called the most influential band in Britain, at least judged on the sheer volume of music you heard on a daily basis that sounded like them: you couldn’t walk into a bar or turn on a television without hearing something audibly in thrall to their 1991 debut Blue Lines tinkling politely in the background. This is not, it has to be said, a state of affairs that brought Massive Attack themselves much joy (“It was never off the telly,” protests Del Naja weakly today. “You’d hear all these records and think, ‘Oh. fucking hell, here we go again’”), but then again, joy was a commodity pretty thin on the ground in the Massive Attack camp.

The Five Man Army, as they bullishly styled themselves on Blue Lines, had already lost two members amid varying degrees of acrimony. Shara Nelson, the vocalist on their first hit, Unfinished Sympathy, had departed in 1993 – after a rumoured row over money – while the brilliant, mercurial, volatile rapper Tricky had left a year later and had taken to being deeply uncomplimentary about his former colleagues in his admittedly gnomic interviews.

During Mezzanine’s torturous gestation, however, relations had soured to such a degree that the remaining three members refused to be interviewed together. Of the trio, Andrew “Mushroom” Vowles seemed the most visibly dispirited, openly complaining that the band was moving too far away from its hip-hop roots. Despite the album’s success, he left the band shortly afterwards, an event so laden with bitterness it clearly still haunts Marshall and Del Naja a decade on: “You forget how long we were working together, how intensely we worked together. I have really random dreams where I’m still working with Mushroom,” Del Naja says. The closest they’ve come to contact with their fellow founder member recently, says Marshall, is when their cars passed in Bristol, “and we looked at each other, which was pretty bizarre”.

The next time was in 2003. and I only met Del Naja. Partly because we were there to talk about the way he had become caught up in Operation Ore. The infamous child pornography investigation – a week before, Avon and Somerset police had dropped their investigation into him -and partly because he was now the only member of Massive Attack left to talk to: Marshall had baled out during the recording of their fourth album, 100th Window. Del Naja said he was hopeful that Marshall might return, but in reality, he says today, he was consdering retiring the Massive Attack name entirely. “It got to the point where it was feeling pretty flimsy as a concept. There are times when you think, ‘Fuck it, what is actually left?’ You question the point of it.”

But Marshall did return, joining a tour to promote the album that was, apparently, so technically complex the band lost money. Six years on. the pair laugh together easily, but you can still detect the faintest hint of unease in their relationship. Nowadays, says Marshall, they “try not to argue” in the studio, because “ if we did argue, that would be it, so we try and avoid it. We just know each other too well. We’ve known each other 27 years, and for two males to stay together for 27 years is quite an achievement. Things have come and things have gone, but there’s still a deep sense of bonding that we have. On the other hand, there’s a sense we’re quite opposite poles.”

“When we do row, it’s easy to push each others’ buttons.” nods Del Naja. “And those buttons are attached to some deep old organ. t hey tend to oscillate at a higher rate, you know what I mean?”

He wonders aloud if they’d even be friends had it not been for the weird cultural mix that was Bristol’s music scene in the wake of punk. “Where we came from, that whole bloody Bristol melting-pot of the 70s and 80s. people were very different, but they were hanging together. That was the great thing about that time, everything was changing rapidly in that punk to hip-hop era. Everybody was in everybody’s faces, everyone got a taste of everything, we were thrown together in that world. Without the Wild Bunch thing we weredoing, we probably wouldn’t have ended up in the same band. Because G was coming from a reggae and soundsystem angle, I was from a punk angle, completely different aspects. It was hip-hop that brought us together.”

Certainly, they present strikingly different characters in interview. Both are friendly, but Del Naja is voluble and rather intense. Marshall, who at almost 50 looks eerily unchanged from the figure peering out of a nearby 1986 poster advertising a wnu mini 11 snow 111 japan, him ioiis a joint – “I’ll just have a little one-skinner,” he says to himself then lapses into virtual silence. What responses he does give display a marked tendency to tail off apparently midway through: “When the volume dips away,” he advises, “the answer’s finished”. He is, he says, not a great fan of inter views. When talk turns to the musical genre he apparently labelled the new tracks with, he looks totally baffled. “Phantom funk? Who said that? Me? Did I fuck.” He sighs. “This is why I hate doing interviews, you see. Someone like you comes along and quotes something back to me, which I’ve said after a couple ofspliffs and completely forgotten about.” He tuts. “Phantom funk!”

On a couple of occasions, Del Naja tails off in mid-sentence when he notices Marshall looking at him. “I’m trying to decipher his eye contact.” he smiles. “I can’t work out whether he’s giving me the shut-the-fuck-up eye contact, or the carry-on eye contact.”

A lot of Del Naja’s conversation is consumed with politics. One of the most striking t hings about Massive Attack in recent years is how politically engaged the band who spawned trip hop – not a genre much noted for its man-the-barricades attitude – have become. It began with Del Naja and Damon Albarn’s attempts to mobilise musicians to protest against the invasion of Iraq, which met v/ith surprisingly muted response.

“I thought it might not stopthe war,but it might have an effect on the next possible war. It might cause a debate and change the way the media tackles the issue, which seemed to be slipping towards it being this inevitability. It was quite strange to cast a lot of nets out and realise that very few people were coming back in.”

Now  it seems to have seeped into every area of his life. A question about the uncompromising nature of Bristolian musicians leads him to an impassioned harangue about the city’s architecture: “I was up on Brandon Hill yesterday, looking over the waterfront and it’s a fucking mess – it looks like eastern Europe in the 60s. There’s not a single building on the Bristol skyline that’s been put there in the last 50 years which is of note, which is legacy-building.” He starts out talking about the artwork for the forthcoming album, and ends up complaining that “no one was interested” in his idea to have Bristol’s Colston Hall renamed: “They’ve spent 10mil on it, and our point was, if you’re going to rebrand Colston Hall, don’t you want to think about changing its name so it’s not named after a slave-ship builder? You could just alter it, so it’s called the Colston Hall and the Sierra Leone Centre, or the Freetown Centre. You don’t have to erase Colston, you just add something about West Africa to the equation, so when people come to Bristol, it’s not hidden. We’re just trying to address some of these things, un-Tippex them, so that it changes the way people look at the city.”

Del Naja is articulate and impassioned, well informed and self-deprecating: perhaps uniquely among the firmament of rock stars, when he talks about politics, you don’t immediately wish he’d change the subject. Nevertheless, he concedes, it is not always an easy mix. When Massive Attack curated the South Bank’s Meltdown festival in 2008 they began their own performance with a speech by Clive Stafford Smith, the legal director of the human lights campaign group Reprieve. This was, as Del Naja notes tactfully, “one of our stranger decisions in terms of crowd atmospherics. There’s an anticipation that we’re going to walk on stage and instead Clive came on and talked about Binyam Mohammed and Guantanamo Bay. Still, in terms of what it set out to achieve, getting the Reprieve message across, it worked.” As the car arrives to take Massive Attack to their rehearsal in Bath, Del Naja and Marshall start pondering the band’s longevity: the fact that, despite the endless upheavals and rows , they’re somehow still here. Marshall thinks it might have something to do with their leisurely approach. “If you get bored, you don’t do anything for a bit,” he says. “I mean, some people say, is that a detrimental thing?’ If we’d packed it all into the first 10 years, maybe it would be over now.”

Besides, says Del Naja, he hasn’t found anything he’d rather do. He tried film scores for a bit, but that wasn’t rewarding. People kept interfering: producers, the distributors. “You put all this effort into it, and then the film comes out and you realise that the interest in the music is so limited, it’s so homogenised. You look at the poster and think, fucking hell, what did we have to do with it?” He rolls his eyes. “You know, it would be easier to make another record.” And Massive Attack dissolve into laughter again.

Written By Alexis Petridis

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With its moody, ominous sound and pioneering mix of beats, samples and strings, Blue Lines, the debut album by the Bristol collective Massive Attack, defined a new 11 musical genre, trip hop. Released in April 1991, the landmark album con-tained three hit singles – “Unfinished Sympathy”, “Safe From Harm” and “Hymn Of The Big Wheel” – spent the next 18 months in the British charts and became part of the soundtrack of t he early Nineties alongside grunge and Britpop.

As well as establishing Massive Attack, Blue Lines launched the careers of their collaborators, the singer Shard Nelson and the maverick figure of Tricky. Alongside his coproducer Cameron McVey, the musically-minded and gifted producer Jonny Dollar played an important part in helping Robert “3D” Del Naja, Grant “Daddy G” Marshall and Andrew “Mushroom” Vowles, the founder members of Massive Attack, realise their vision and bring the project to fruition.

“Jonny was really important,” Del Njya said. “There was a chemistry between us which made the first album. We were bringing the DJ world we were coming from – how we used _ to present music, cutting up on decks on a sound system, chucking instru-£ mentals with vocals, very much a hip-hop way of sampling small pieces of music – and then linking them and making them into whole tracks. It was a completely new way of working. Jonny and Cameron were vital because they took something very raw and helped to fashion it into something a lot more sophisticated.”

Dollar also worked with McVey on the Neneh Cherry albums Raw Like Sushi (1989) and Homebrew (1992), and co-wrote the anti-racist message song “7 Seconds”, her haunting duet with the Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour, which became a worldwide hit in 1994. Five years later, Dollar produced several tracks on Gabrielle’s chart-topping Rise album, in particular t he single of the same name which featured a sample of Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and went to No 1 in Britain.

Born Jonathan Sharp in Cornwall, Dollar met McVey, a model turned producer and manager looking after his partner and future wife Neneh Cherry, who had just scored a major hit with “Buffalo Stance”. The couple were looking for collaborators to complete Cherry’s first album. Sharp came on board alongside McVey – billed as Booga Bear – Vowles and Del Naya.

“Cameron liked what he heard,” Del Naja recalled. “He thought it was a good idea for us to work with Jonny. We all camped out in Cameron’s house in Kensal Rise, in London, for more than six months, pretty much all in one room, working on a few synths and early samplers. We were a very loose bunch of characters with very disparate ideas, not very fully-formed either. We had a lot of concept and not a lot of experience, and Jonny brought some much-needed experience He was more musically literate than us and he had the skills to see an idea through.”

Having submitted a few tracks to Circa, the label distributed by Virgin, Massive Attack secured a record deal and finished what became Blue Lines with McVey and Dollar, who co-wrote the group’s debut hit, “Unfinished Sympathy”. Accoixling to Del Naja, “it started out as a jam in the studio in Bristol. It was just break beats, a percussive line. Jonny started playing a keyboard, just a couple of chords, and we developed the song. When we got to do the vocal, we removed the chorus and wc decided to fill the dead space with strings. That’s how it changed from a conventional pop song into something sort of symphonic. Jonny got in touch with Wil Malone and he helped to score it out. We recorded the strings at Abbey Road. A lot of the beauty of the track was in the arrangement and the removal of certain parts was as vital as the writing of other parts. We had that philosophy about taking things out. We’d write more than we wanted and remove it, leave the bare bones. That was the way we wanted to hear the music.”

As well as programming and keyboards, Dollar also played guitar but most of his guitar parts didn’t make the final mix. “Sometimes he was simply helping us articulate what we were trying to do and other times he was having more input in, particularly on ‘Hymn Of The Big Wheel’,” Del Naja recalled. “Jonny worked really hard on the string quartet motif. He was really integral to the whole project. He was the person who provided us with the key to finishing several tracks. Jonny had a very dry sense of humour which suited us because we’re a bunch of piss-takers really. He knew how to handle us, he could take it and give it back.”

Massive Attack considered continuing with Dollar and demoed some of Protection, their next release, with him, but since he and McVey were hard at work on Cherry’s second album, they ended up working with Nellee Hooper, their original partner from the Wild Bunch sound system days.

Throughout the Nineties, Dollar was an in-demand mixer and remixer for Carieen Anderson, Depeche Mode, EMF, Galliano, Kylie Minogue and Pulp. The Polydor president Ferdy Unger-Hamilton, who collaborated with Dollar on the Gabrielle album, called the producer an unsung hero and innovator. “As committed and driven a producer as I’ve ever met, I literally had to take the tracks by force back off him, he was so determined to make them perfect. The result was a No 1 single and album, Rise. He was as tough artistically as he was gentle a person.”

Ashley Newton, now at Sony but one half of the Circa team which signed Cherry and Massive Attack, recalls Dollar as “this incredible sonic shape-shifter. He was a man of few words but had a beautiful and almost hippy outlook on life. We all grew enormously fond of him. I vividly remember listening to Blue Lines with him, Jonny with those intense dark eyes, spliff in hand, totally immersed in the art. He’ll be much missed.”

Dollar wras diagnosed with cancer last August and died at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London.

Written By Pierre Perrone

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There was a time when recording an album meant hiring a studio at a cost of tens of thousands of pounds. Now, in the age of individualist consumerism, you needn’t be in the studio at all -£2,000 will bring it to your PC.

Latest developments in Virtual Studio Technology (VST) mean that you can have a professional, multi track recording studio on your computer screen with no compromise on sound quality and almost all of the facilities you would expect from a traditional recording studio. Would-be pop stars, as well as signed professional acts, are enjoying the creative freedom provided by VST. The Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Radiohead, Bush and Massive Attack are just some of the bands whose current albums were recorded using VST or similar programs.

Massive Attack’s highly acclaimed album Mezzanine was produced almost entirely on an Apple Mac. As Neil Davidge, the band’s producer, explains: “The computer’s role as a recording and writing tool in music today is central to all stu dios, whether working with pop bands or orchestras. The Apple Mac, with Cubase and various other types of software, is the heart of my studio. As a tool for writing, recording and even mixing it is totally flexible and allows me to go anywhere my imagination takes me.”

Computers are not new to the music industry, having entered the scene as long ago as 1983. Never before, though, have they offered this level of uncompromising professional sound at an affordable price. VST is not only destined to rock the music industry, it could also fundamentally alter the way we all consume and treat recorded sound.

It all started in the early Eighties with the introduction of Midi (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) sequencers. You simply played the synthesiser and the music was transferred on to the computer as a set of commands. The computer could follow the commands and play the music repeatedly. Automation soon took over, where, for example, instead of creating a varied drum part, a short synthesised drum pattern was recorded and repeated for the duration of the song. The same was done with the other instruments, hence the mind-numbing. repetitive sound. As the computers of the time could be triggered only by synthesiser, recording directly into them was limited to the sounds synthesisers had to offer.

Recording live instruments and vocals on to the computer was possible with systems such as Digi-Design, but it was the preserve of big studios only. “Musicians’ demand of computers’ processing power is greater than in other art form.’’ explains the record producer Ofir Kry. When a designer applies a Photoshop effect to an image, he can wait for minutes for it to complete.

“Real-time processing is crucial for music-making. You either have it or you don’t, in which case you do not even try. You need to hear what you play as you play it.”

The introduction of the Power Mac meant you could do just that. Its improved processing power also meant that hardware had caught up with music software programs such as Emagic Notator Logic, Digital Performer. Waves and Cubase VST. which were ahead of their time. At last, you could run a virtual, 32-track recording studio without the need for expensive external hardware. The attraction for musicians was clear.

“With affordable hard disk recording, you can capture those rare moments of inspired performance that happen when a musician first hears the track.” says Neil Davidge. “You can keep these safe while striving for the perfect take, then go back, review all the performances, and combine the best into a master take. This is impossible with traditional multi-track recording unless you have a budget the size of a small country and the patience of a saint.”
A program such as Cubase VST gives the ability to multi-track and over-dub instruments. Any computer these days is equipped with an audio input facility as standard, so instruments are recorded directly into it. You can record any instrument or vocals at any time, or several together, and cut and paste any section of the recorded material.

“Most of Mezzanine was recorded directly into the computer.” Davidge explains. “Tracks would usually start with a simple looping idea, which we wrould develop by recording the band or various mus icians jamming along. It would then be a matter of sifting through the performances and picking out those moments of magic, and weaving them into an arrangement.

“We would then try out vocal ideas, which we would rearrange again straight after they had been recorded, adding the final touches before beginning mixing. While mixing. we still kept everything virtual so that we could alter arrangements as the mix developed.

“On the whole, the process of making the album was unpredictable, but the method wrould not have been possible without this technology,” Davidge says.

The program’s capabilities are extended further with plug-ins. Recognising the changing face of the recording industry, these are being developed by traditional recording studio names such as Yamaha. Korg and lexicon.

With 1.000MHz and even 2,000Mhz computers soon to hit the market, we are on the verge of a music revolution, with budding musicians everywhere having the ability to release their PC-created tunes.

“As more and more individuals who have little or no experience of these traditional practices are finding their own ways of making music,” Davidge says, “they are, in turn, influencing the next development. This is based on a whole new philosophy, and will prove to be as revolutionary as rock’n’roll, punk and hip hop ‘

The possibilities are limitless. With better Internet connections, rewritable digital media and bedroom recording studios, you could (technically speaking) have Pat Metheny adding guitars to your recording via the Internet, with you in London and him in New York.

With album recording budgets a fraction of what they once were, the recording industry’s clear advantage over the individual is likely to become their power to promote. True, we could all place our little PC creations on the Net for the world to hear, but we would still need to create awareness of them.

“There is now a level playing-field from which to challenge the established hierarchy,” Neil Davidge says. “It is the mayor labels who arc now having to play catch-up, with the future of music being decided by the in dividual with a copy of Cubase VST and access to the Internet in his or her bedroom. Where this will lead us, I am happy to say I don’t know.”

Written By Hannah Gal

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Directing the 15th Meltdown is Massive Attack’s biggest burst of activity in years, and one that paves the way for the album expected in 2009. The trip-hop titans’ main intention was not to one-up previous directors such as Jarvis Cocker and Patti Smith but simply, as leader Robert “3D” Del Naja has said, “not to be the first to fuck it up”. A modest enough aim, but with a couple of their choices, they are sailing close to the wind: second-tier 70s punks Stiff Little Fingers and four “silent disco” novelty nights, anyone?

But their stint will probably be better remembered for enticing proto-synth-poppers Yellow Magic Orchestra to play Britain for the first time since 1980, and booking-of-the-moment Seattleites Fleet Foxes. Forty-year-old acid rockers Gong contribute, too, and there is a night of modish dubstep. No one genre prevails, but the lineup reflects Massive’s no-boundaries tastes.

As for their own festival-opening show, Del Naja tells the audience that it’s an “experiment, which is make it up as you go along, basically”. But the man is being disingenuous. The impressive visuals (a dot matrix screen that generates jagged red bolts of light and words while the stage remains dusky) and crack backing group are evidence of thought having gone into this. They have also bagged the striking American folkie Stephanie Dosen as ethereal backing singer, and for their part, Del Naja and co-leader Grant Marshall are as sharp as tacks when the time comes to menacingly whisper their vocals. The trick is to make it seem as if the entire company are moments from collapsing into a stoned heap when they are actually on snappy, sparky form.

They are ushered on by human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, whc fits a reference to George Bush into his introduction. Politics resurface at the end, with Inertia Creeps and new tune Marakesh dominated by messages on the screen (“42 days — worse to come”), but between the two is 90 minutes of narcotic meandering.

Songs from the new album are debuted: Marooned is dubby and lovelorn, and All I Want sounds like a dark and stormy riight, with bass pulsing thunderously and soul singer Yolanda creaking and sighing. They fit seamlessly alongside Teardrop — through which Dosen tiptoes while percussion rattles like a truck driving over corrugated iron — and an encore of Unfinished Sympathy, which retain; its string-driven ferocity. Massive Attack still have it going on, and their return is a welcome one.

Written By Caroline Sullivan

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It has, says Robert del Naja, been a “fucking horrendous” year. In these days of tabloid confessionals and celebrity magazines, the sound of rock stars complaining about their lot has become a familiar one. Yet it’s hard not to agree with Massive Attack’s vocalist. For him, 2003 has been horrendous. On February 25, two weeks after the release of their fourth album, 100th Window, and on the eve of their first world tour for four years, Del Naja was arrested in his home town of Bristol as part of Operation Ore, a crackdown on child pornography on the internet. As is usual in these cases, the police raided his home, removing videos and computer equipment. A month later, on March 25, his property was returned: Avon and Somerset police had dropped the investigation.

As Del Naja walks into a suite at London’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel, it is difficult to draw conclusions about how recent events have affected him. You could say that he seems nervous – he talks in a low, rapid mumble and dispatches three bottles of lager in an hour. Then again, he talked that way and drank that way when I met him five years ago, and the only problems in his life then were the perpetual upheavals and power struggles within Massive Attack. He looks exhausted – unshaven, dark-eyed, sallow-skinned. But Del Naja always looks a bit like that: he is famous for partying hard. “Didn’t go to bed last night,” he says. “Out and about in Bristol.”

Nevertheless, every time the conversation drifts on to other topics – the lukewarm critical reception of 100th Window; the departure in 2000 of the band’s founder member Andrew “Mushroom” Vowles: his role as celebrity cheerleader for the Stop the War coalition – it inevitably ends up back where we began. He has, he says, “started to notice weird coincidences … everything seems connected to something”. The cover of 100th Window featured life-size human figures made of glass being shot by ball bearings: “That’s perfect right now, the whole notion of human fragility, watching my whole life get shattered in the same way this year – set up, then shot down.”

The video for the forthcoming single, Butterfly Caught, features Del Naja turning into a moth: “It’s not deliberate, it’s the director’s vision, but it’s another self-fulfilling prophecy isn’t it?” he says, laughing grimly. “I’m not going to martyr myself with what’s happened this year, but I will turn into a moth. I will become uglier and darker and lonelier and more undesirable, because that’s the way it’s got to be this year.” Perhaps this sort of thing is further evidence that Del Naja is, as he claims,
“quite a paranoid person”. Or perhaps that’s just what happens when you make an album obsessed with voyeurism and the invasion of privacy, featuring a title that refers to computers’ vulnerability to surveillance and a song about child abuse called A Prayer for England. You find yourself facing allegations of internet child porn offences two weeks after its release. “I thought I was being subjective at the time of writing the record,” he says. “It all came back to me, as if to test me, as if people were saying, ‘Right, you’ve set this up, let’s analyse it properly with you as the subject.’”

Del Naja says he was “caught in the sweep” of Operation Ore, the investigation into internet paedophilia founded on a list of 7,300 UK-based credit card numbers passed on to the national crime squad by the FBI. Del Naja’s credit card number was among them. In 1999, his card had been charged $3 by a website – he doesn’t remember which one, he says, but probably some porn site. “The company that it’s attributed to owns hundreds of websites, all different, some of which are absolutely vile, hideous. I was away in London and somebody phoned up and told me they’d been let into my house by a mate of mine. They took everything, every video, every memory stick, every hard drive, spent a month analysing it and found absolutely nothing.”

Always one of rock’s most disarmingly frank interviewees, Del Naja has never denied being an enthusiastic consumer of pornography: “I love having sex and I love watching people have sex,” he told one interviewer in the mid-1990s. In 1999, he even collaborated with The Prodigy’s Liam Howlett on the soundtrack to the hilariously titled Uranus Experiment, an American porn film that featured “the world’s first zero-gravity cum-shot”. “I’ve always been open about porn,” he says. “Some people’s careers, if you mention they’ve been involved in porn, their respectability could be on the line, but I’ve got nothing to hide. My views are on public record. When the police were interviewing me, it was funny, I was answering the generic questions that they ask people in cases like this, but I kept interjecting with my opinions about what I felt about abuse in society and my views on pornography as well. I kept telling them, look, I’ve done the music for a porn film. I’ve got nothing to hide. And no, I’ve never seen anything as vile as that. I said to them, this is absurd, gave them access to every part of my life, no problem: have my life, get on with it.”

He claims that despite the fact that no charges had been brought against him, the police informed the Sun newspaper about his arrest. “The whole thing became this kind of publicity joke. Someone in the police force called the Sun directly, said we’ve arrested so and so, we haven’t charged him. The police shouldn’t be giving that information to newspapers. They’ve got this campaign going on, [Sun editor] Rebekah Wade’s taken it on as her mission.”

Has he considered suing the police? “We’ve talked about what I can do about it, but it would be a long-drawn-out, expensive scenario. I don’t want to get involved in it because I don’t want to spend my life focusing on it. I don’t want to spend my money on it.”

Del Naja was bailed and made a brief statement, confirming his “total faith in the justice system” and asking observers “not to judge me prematurely”. He admits that, at this stage, he considered “just going away. I already felt odd about putting a record out and touring with the whole war situation going on, then this on top, it just made me feel like, ‘What is the point?”’

However, he continued planning the Antipodean tour. On March 5, the Sun followed its initial story with the news that Massive Attack’s projected dates in New Zealand had been postponed.

Del Naja claims that the Sun called the New Zealand and Australian embassies: “They spoke to them, told them about the allegations – which were only allegations, there weren’t any actual facts – and they cancelled all our visas,” he says. “We thought, Tucking hell, this is getting really heavy.’ We had to rearrange our tour dates, which cost a lot of money, caused a lot of heartache and disappointed a lot of people out there. There was no reason for them to do that, other than the fact that there wasn’t actually a story there. Nobody believed the allegations, basically there was never a case. We got letters back from the consulate apologising, saying we’ve been misinformed, we never should have cancelled your visas, but the damage is done.”

Eventually, the tour went ahead. “It was the hardest time in my life. I had to go on tour with those allegations in the air, which was horrendous. I didn’t want to wallow in self-pity or martyr myself on stage. I decided not to get involved with making comments in the press, so I made a statement to the audience each night – ‘If everyone’s here, I guess you don’t believe these ridiculous charges’ – which got a big cheer. That’s how it went down.”

Back in England, the gossip internet site Popbitch – not, it must be said, the most reliable source of information – reported that Del Naja had been taunted by “a group of English lads’ in the audience at Massive Attack’s Sydney show, who allegedly waved an oversized baby’s bottle at the stage and chanted “nonce”. Del Naja refutes this. “No. I’d know about that. If I’d been at a gig, the first gigs that I’d played for four years, and there were people taunting me, I think I’d remember it. If there were selected people shouting abuse, then maybe I didn’t hear it, but I don’t really care about them. They’re going to find some excuse to shout stuff whatever, they’re going to be in the audience for that purpose. It was hard, but it was amazing how many people rallied around me. The music industry on this occasion was really honourable. Obviously, I’m not party to the conversations that went on behind closed doors, in bars or in gentlemen’s toilet cubicles, you know what I mean? But, on the whole, what we were getting back was really positive. Then, when we were in Melbourne, the war started and my problems seemed even more insignificant.”

Ah, the war. Alongside Blur’s Damon Albarn, Del Naja was the most vocal and high-profile musician to back the Stop the War coalition. Undaunted by the lack of support from other musicians – “we stepped out into the light, looked back and there was no one else behind us” – the duo financed and designed anti-war adverts in the NME and lobbied Parliament.

For some conspiracy theorists, who took to the music press’s letters pages, the timing of his arrest was almost too perfect. Del Naja isn’t so sure. “I’d say that wouldn’t come from the police, although the tabloid thing, the cynicism of it, could be somehow connected,” he says. “Because my opinions are considered anti-establishment, it would be a great way to knock me off my perch. No one likes anything more than to see a hypocrite toppled, which makes it all the more ironic if the Sun thinks it’s the one to do the toppling.”

The longer-term effects of the allegations on his career remain to be seen. On the one hand, Massive Attack are about to play five consecutive shows at London’s Brixton Academy: evidence that, more than a decade after their debut album Blue Lines unwittingly gave birth to the chill-out movement, their popularity and influence shows little sign of abating. On the other, sales of 100th Window dropped 57% in the weeks after it debuted at number one, although whether that’s connected to Del Naja’s arrest or the album’s relentless uncommerciality is a moot point. For his part, Del Naja notes that the allegations have had a positive effect on the volatile personal relationships within Massive Attack – “Me and G [rapper and producer Grant Marshall, who did not contribute to 100th Window] have really bonded, we’ve spoken more in the last couple of months than in the last three years” – but is perceptive enough to realise that he has become another victim of what journalist Mark Lawson calls the “nudge-nudge culture”.

“It makes your general existence much more difficult in a way I’ve never really experienced,” he sighs. “Now I walk into a shop or a pub and I can’t really be myself. I have to look at everyone twice in the eye. I have to confront almost everyone: if you’ve got something to fucking say to me, come out and say it, let me fucking hear it. I’m quite a paranoid person anyway. I walked from my house to the studio today and it felt like there was a huge arrow bobbing above my head. Considering that the allegations were false and there was never a case, it doesn’t make any difference. I’ve still been pointed at that way You can say that it’s a load of bollocks, but once it’s written down, it’s written down. It could come up in my obituary. All the things I’ve done in my life and that might come up. What’s that all about?

“I feel shattered, but you learn from it. When I wake up in the morning I get that sinking feeling, you know? But you have to deal with it, you have to go forward. It’s given me a lot more resolve to do what I want to do.”

Written By Alexis Petridis

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The pop star who swore at the Duchess of York in front of a global audience on live television was brought up to be a “well-mannered child who never got into trouble”, his mother said yesterday.

Ann Del Naja, whose son Robert is better known as 3D from the group Massive Attack, said she wondered if he had been plied with too much to drink and “was not really compos mentis” when he made his outburst.

Mrs Del Naja, of Sneyd Park, a quiet residential area of Bristol, shattered her foul-mouthed son’s street credibility by exposing him as a well-behaved boy who had enjoyed school and came from a comfortable family.

She said she was appalled by his language and would be telling him to amend his behaviour the next time they spoke on the telephone.

The incident occurred on Thursday night at the MTV awards in Milan when the Duchess presented Massive Attack with the Best Video award.

She offered her hand but the gesture was rejected and Del Naja announced: “Someone’s having a ******* laugh, **** you very much.”

The Duchess attempted to laugh off the matter but approached the band backstage and asked: “What’s all this about?” Del Naja, 32, retorted: “**** off.”

Asked later about his behaviour, the singer said: “What the **** has she got to do with music for a start? If somebody had told us that was happening, we would not be here at all. It’s just ******* ridiculous.”

He said the band would have preferred to have received its award — for the video to the song Teardrop — from someone more representative of youth culture.

But Del Naja’s mother said her son had been brought up to behave properly. “He was very well-mannered and never got into trouble,” she said. “He has never been to prison or anything ghastly like that. He was wonderful as a boy and quite happy at school. I suppose he was a bit rebellious as a teenager but then what teenager isn’t?

“I am very shocked that he should have done this. I can only wonder if they were plied with drink during the Ceremony and that by the time they went up to collect their award they were not really compos mentis.

“I understand from the record company that they were upset because their award was presented by the Duchess of York rather than one of their peers in the industry.

“Perhaps they thought that people were somehow making fun of them; but whatever the reason it was no excuse.”

Franco Del Naja, the singer’s father, said his son’s outburst might have been a publicity stunt to sell tickets for a forthcoming tour.

Mr Del Naja, 60, said: “This is not the way he was brought up and his mother is not very happy. I am very surprised by his behaviour.” The Duchess had agreed to take part in the awards ceremony at the personal invitation of Bill Roedy, president of MTV, who is a supporter of her charity work.

She attended with Con-stanza, the 12-year-old daughter of her close friend Count Gaddo della Gher-ardesca, and mingled backstage with Madonna, George Michael, Robbie Williams and members of All Saints and the Spice Girls.

A spokesman for MTV said Mr Roedy was “very upset”. He added: “MTV obviously regrets what happened, but we don’t have any control of what any individual artist says to another on stage.

“We are certainly very sorry if any offence was given to the Duchess. We were very happy to have her on the show.”

A friend of the Duchess said she had been taken aback by the band’s language but added: “I spoke to her this morning and she was very good natured about it.” Apart from the swearing incident, the Duchess had enjoyed a warm reception.

Written By Sean O’Neill

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Summer in the city and the living is weary, notion isn’t advisable, lungs contract in the thick viscous air — like trying to breathe in lungfuls of soot-filled honey. Stifling humidity seems to seep into everything — bodies, technology, thoughts. In the space of a few days both my video recorder and my amplifier give up the ghost, as if a gust of malignant air or a surge of bad electricity is playing tricks with my circuits. I feel too drained-out and sun-damaged to do anything about it; instead I daydream about letting everything wind down into unsalvageable disrepair; a house emptied of sound and vision, swarming with the spectres of dormant electricity.

Allen Toussaint is in town, and as it happens the perfect soundtrack to the urban summer haze is his haunting Southern Nights LP. Thanks to the demise of my amp, I can only listen to cassettes; as luck would have it, I own a tape copy of this masterpiece, which I found on sale in a shabby little electrical shop in Dalston over ten years ago. I play Southern Nights over and over again — little else seems to make sense, seems to fit the weather, the mood. A few other records seem apt: Bark Psychosis, early Dr John, Ali Farka Toure with Ry Cooder, Lee Perry, Tricky’s two astonishing 45s “Aftermath” and “Ponderosa”: music that doesn’t so much seem to move horizontally down the narrative tracks of conventional rhythm so much as spatially compose>decompose> recompose itself in the humid air like some kind of sonic mirage…

And just then, as if by sympathetic magic, an advance tape of the new Massive Attack LP arrives. The music on Protection is as slow, stoned, spatial, spectral, special as ever: music to gaze into, to draw sustenance from, to float away on. New words, new worlds, new configurations. There is something about the Massive vibe (collectively achieved by the group’s core members, Mushroom, 3D and Daddy G) that has a slight edge of timelessness to it. Like close musical neighbours One Dove and St Etienne, they produce music that is distinctly British; music whose elements can sound simultaneously neoteric and archaic. Two sides to every story. It even ‘reads’ (even on CD) like a two-sided work. Five tracks a side, featuring in this order: Tracey Thorn, a Tricky/3D rap, new girl Nicolette, a ‘soundtrack’ interlude, and the veteran JA vocalist Horace Andy.

“Sly” and “Three” feature the sinuous, ultramarine vocals — Billie Holiday relaxing on a Moroccan holiday — of new singer Nicolette. “Karma Coma” and “Euro Child” are the typically Massive overdub raps: tense, absurdest, rapt. “Weather Storm” and “Heat Miser” are movie instrumentals in search of a worthy (British) movie — Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert meets Giorgio Moroder’s Cat People soundtrack. Tracey Thorn — liberated from the slightly too fluffy middle-of-the-indie-road ambiance of Everything But The Girl — contributes two pointedly bittersweet tracks: “Better Things” and the title track, the latter an opus so achingly sublime it achieves the impossible and stands as a worthy successor to “Unfinished Sympathy”.

One idea of Massive Attack’s alchemy might read like this: AIR = Mushroom. WATER = 3D. EARTH = Daddy G. FIRE = the spark of ‘X’ factor ‘plus one’ contributors, be it a certain sample, or mercurial rapper Tricky, or producer Nelle Hooper, or singers like Shara Nelson (on Blue Lines) and Tracey Thorn (on Protection).

In conversation, 3D has a virtual monopoly — speedy, skimming, half-sincere, half-sardonic, and punctuating every other sentence with one of two phrases: “You know what I mean?” or “At the end of the day.” (At times, this makes him sound something like a raggamuffin football manager.) Mushroom says virtually nothing, especially the night we meet, and he has just returned from the hospital with a cast around his neck, suffering a mild case of concussion sustained the day before when the trio got a bit too caught up in a game of Quasar (laser gun) warfare. Daddy G — older, taller, quiet but authoritative — seems to be the wise old man of the Massive massive: their Papa Legba. When I meet them at a photographer’s studio in North London things are sprawled, tired, smoking, hungry, humid.

Things pick up over a tape of remixes (of the new single, “Sly”) that has just been delivered into their hands; but as it turns out this excitement is short lived, and 3D declares a consensual disappointment with the three rejigs. Not for the first time, you (and they) wonder whether remixing Massive Attack is a good idea. Tracks from 1991 like “Unfinished Sympathy” and “Daydreaming” called out not to be tampered with; likewise, Protection’s spread of sonic jouissance may well be just too poised and perfected to admit any modish tampering. There’s an awful lot of amateurish, short-term smudging and fudging about right now under the rubric of ‘Remixed by. . .’ Another plan currently underway sounds a lot more seductive: which is to hand over the entire LP — as an entity — to veteran UK dubmeister The Mad Professor to etch out a Protection Version, just like they used to do in the 70s.

I remember the first time I heard them. (It’s been exactly three years since Blue Lines.) I was the passenger in an open top car — dead heat of summer again — driving up Hornsey Road, a late afternoon breeze cooling us off. The radio was bland, then all of a sudden there’s a track on and it’s ‘What is this?’ It was “Day Dreaming” and I didn’t even get the band’s name. I was vexed, and it was months and months before I found out who it was I’d heard.

I even remember the second time I heard them: I had left the city to go and cool out in the country; rid my body of some city sickness. I was slumped watching some pop show on TV and on came the oddest video and the most uncharacteristically ambitious music: “Unfinished Sympathy”. Cliched but true: I rushed out the other day and bought the 12”. I played it over and over again, for days and days; literally couldn’t
get through a day without waking up with it, falling asleep to it. Its rhythm was my rhythm, its sadness my sadness, its memory my memory. And it healed me. “You’re the book that I have opened/And now I’ve got to know much more… ”

So here we are and its summer 94 and me and Massive Attack are sitting sipping some rum and some beer in West London and trying to cool out.

I flash on a line from the new album: “I drink every day but it seldom cools my temper, no it never cools my temper. ”

These sort of lines are one of the things I love about Massive, I tell them. They can be silly — “Seduce me, seduce me/Dress me up in Stussy”] they can be mordant — “You sure you wanna be with me?/l’ve got nothing to give”] they can be repetitive, piercing, lazy, hazy. Unlike a lot of rap, they admit of an inner (uncertain, perplexed, ambiguous) voice, full of murmurs, ellisions, lacunae. Rather than the ‘Don’t worry, be happy’ UK skank of Soul II Soul, for instance, Massive are far more like, ‘Don’t worry, be gloomy’. They’re not frightened to admit of the absence(s) in their Soul.

The Massive rap is like having a tape of your muddled day played back to you at night in your dreams — some bits are obscure, you’ll probably never clear up what they mean, some bits make perfect sense, are frighteningly intimate and true. Some bits are silly, some bits verge on the tragic. Some bits are social, some bits are where the social crumbles away and all that is left is you.

“That’s right, yeah, that is the vibe,” says 3D. “It’s that stream of consciousness thing — on “Karma Coma” we started with like about 20 tracks of nonsense and whittled it down. That works for us because we’re not really into messages as such. You get some groups who come from a certain angle and that’s their sole angle. With us we’re so different in our beliefs and our views that when we do write things together there is a lot of conflict and contradiction going on which is why you get that quality.

“With the rap tracks the first time [on Blue Lines] me and Tricky used to get together, sit down and actually write it all — we were in the studio all the time and we knew what each other was doing; this time we got together the day before and said ‘What you got?’ It’s got a different quality this time because we’d see each other for half an hour and spend most of the time arguing and shouting at each other and throwing that down and trying to make it work. So you get that vibe — that disjointedness — you feel the tension, which I think is quite nice.”

Massive don’t try and erect some Tuff Rapper pose of living in an urban nightmare; their corkscrew raps are scattered with references to singularly English things. Far more honest.

“It’s tongue in cheek as well, you know what I mean?” continues 3D. “It’s like being aware of how ridiculous it all is creating this kind of scenario for yourself, and tryin’ to live up to it. Like, in the old Wild Bunch [their pre-Massive configuration] days we used to look at record sleeves and dress ourselves by them — you know what I mean? Go out and buy the latest fuckin’ shoes because someone had them on the record sleeve and at the end of the day you end up laughing — you look in your cupboard, look at yourself and think, ‘You’re a joke!’”

Any particular sleeves7 There seemed a point where everyone was trying to look like a Best Of Gregory Issacs sleeve. “Nah! — I wouldn’t look good in Clarke’s shoes!” says 3D.

Daddy G: “I tried to grow the dreads but it didn’t work…”

3D: “I slipped into the Clarke’s shop every now and again and tried a few on — but they were like pasties, you know? Like those Cornish pasties!”

We break up in embarrassed mutual laughter; there follows a discussion about — inter alia — gold chains, Italian clothes, and people who’d rather pay £1 50 for imitation Jamaician casual wear from a certain trendy Soho shop than get the real thing for a tenner at Brixton market.

One of the many reasons I liked Blue Lines was that it sounded like someone playing back an entire time capsule stretch, from my rural soulboy adolescence to London reggae fanaticism and my first sound system experiences to late(r) 80s club culture (Rockers Revenge, Blackbyrds and others are sampled or quoted or namechecked). At this point, we could say quite a lot about sound systems and their pivotal importance in the historical scheme of things, but it’s too much to say… a massive topic in its own right.

“Someone said to me the other day that The Wild Bunch had collectively killed live music in Bristol, ’cos at that time everyone used to go to gigs and we started doing these jams and warehouse parties and everyone started going to those things instead of gigs,” says 3D.

Not necessarily a bad thing… “No, it was a good thing at the time but I think music’s come round another generation since then.”

You seem to have been massively and positively influenced by the whole sound system set-up/culture. You’ve been going a long time now, where a lot of groups have fallen by the wayside and one of the reasons groups do seem to fall apart so quickly these days is that everything becomes loaded onto just one singer…

Daddy G: “We don’t need no real focal point like a singer, so we don’t get that egotistical overexposure.”

3D: “In some ways, it’s much harder to make a record — but at the end of the day you can move on and not be stuck in a rut. Just keep changing. I think if Massive Attack ended up being a formula thing with set ideas it’d very quickly finish…” The ‘live’ track on Protection features Horace Andy toasting a version of “Light My Fire”. Was that a strategic nod to your sound system past?

Mushroom: “It wasn’t deliberate though, was it?”

3D: “It just sort of came about because Horace would warm up with it when he was doing a mic check: he’d start singing “Light My Fire” and it sounded so fucking mad we thought: let’s go do a little live show and let it happen.. People might find it weird, but there’s a long tradition of JA/reggae artists doing covers of the most unlikely hits.

Daddy G: “That’s exactly it. It goes back to the beginning.. . Back in the old days when they used to import a lot of R&B records they decided it was cheaper to do their own sort of copies and that’s how it all sprung up.” I’ve got a great record of The Mighty Diamonds doing “The Age Of Aquarius”. Very odd.

Daddy G: “I’ve got some dodgier tunes than that! I’ve got “Puppet On A String” by Ken Boothe, an old Studio One record — and old Cliff Richard covers and stuff like that.”

Blue Lines has a lot of throwaway quotes from a variety of 70s pop hits: “Take a walk Billy, don’t be a hero…”

3D: “I think that was how we got into the studio really. Doing the live thing, we used to mix up tunes in a weird way and it carried into the studio: that was our real transition from sound system to studio, doing that thing. We were into doing covers originally — when we did “The Look of Love” [as The Wild Bunch] it was the same kind of theory really of doing a really crusty version of something. Originally it was just a little
echo of the past. But Horace doin’ it the way he did it wasn’t even reall a cover version…”

Mushroom: “He’d never even head The Doors one. As far as he Wc concerned he was singing a Jose Feliciano song..

Here is another reason I have always liked Massive Attack: they seem tuned in to the same vibration as me: a certain slov aching, sluggish beat that has always enraptured me: a serpentine lin from from Billie Holiday to Protection. Do they all feel attuned to this certain sort of mood/rhythm?

Daddy G: “I think so, yeah, because even though outside Massive we’ve got different tastes when we’re together there’s that same sort c mood prevails all the way through, and we wouldn’t be happy togethe in the studio without it… It’s weird because we all like listen to a lot c different stuff. Me being a DJ I listen to like rave and Jungle, where Mushroom’s more into moody stuff and so is D.”

Do all your songs start with an idea of a certain mood?

3D: “Even though there is a mood there’s a lot of contrast between the tracks themselves. I think it just comes naturally whenever anyon works with us, and picks up on our vibe. When we worked with Crai Armstrong who played the piano on “Weather Storm” we gave him briefing for “Sly” to arrange the strings — and to sort him out we gave him a lot of influential tracks, a lot of 50s big band music like Les Baxte and stuff and really filled him in on what we wanted. And given like foi or five reference tracks and the groove and the song, he could hav gone anywhere with that, but he picked up on the vibe and came bac with the mood we’re all into..

Daddy G: “We’ve always been laid back — we’ve never really though about going straight for the jugular as such. We always get there in th end… in a roundabout, circular kind of way.”

Ask them how it all began back in Bristol, where they met, what brought them together and as ever the ‘P’ word come to the surface.

Daddy G: “It’s basically the whole punk thing; not strictly speakin punk, but through punk’s amalgamation of reggae. Like, I used to pla the same sort of gigs as Mushroom and D and Nelle [Hooper] and ther was a strong attachment from then, back in the late 70s.”

3D: “I remember going to see Stiff Little Fingers, The Clash, UK Sub: Dead Kennedys — wicked gig The Dead Kennedys, that was one of th all time best gigs. And Bad Brains — remember Bad Brains?”

PiL get a namecheck on Blue Lines, and Massive Attack revive som of those lost micro-utopian dreams of 80s pop: all those PiLs an Heaven 17s and Scritti Polittis who were going to do so much and juf disappeared in a puff of slick marketing. They never quite connected -like some faulty map of the humours, they forgot to put in the hear and none of them ever came within an erratic pulsebeat of a record lik “Unfinished Sympathy” or Protection.

“We supported The Buzzcocks in Chicago the year before last,” sav 3D. “We met them afterwards and they said what we were doing wa brave because it was harder than what anyone else was doing. And was — a fuckin’ sound system tour in stadium gigs!”

How did it go down?

“How did it go down? It went down as well as Diana Ross before th World Cup trying to kick that shot into goal — she was about two foe away from goal and she missed — that’s how our set went down.

“That was the wicked thing about being at the World Cup Final; you’v got the most famous female star on stage in front of you waiting for th teams to come on… and nothing else beats pop stars and media stc but soccer stars. Who’s the most famous person in the world: Maradon or Madonna? I’ll tell you who — Maradona.”

Written By Ian Penman

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NINETEEN NINETY-ONE was a big year for Massive Attack. Their stunning Blue Lines album brought us a distinctly non-cliched mix of dub, hip hop and soul, carving a home for itself somewhere between the dance floor and the car stereo. For the Bristol-based band, it brought no end of accolades and praise from the press, and a Brit Award nomination to boot. Unfinished Sympathy, the seminal symph(ath)onic single that bonded Shara Nelson, a 50-piece string orchestra and that strange vocal drop-in (hey-hey-he-cy-hey!) that sounds, perhaps, just slightly out of key, retains an unsurpassed and stark beauty. It will continue to do so for many years to come.

Three years later, Massive Attack arc back with a new album, Protection, out mid September. They’ve retained their characteristic edge and edginess – stripped dub hip hop, with plenty of space in the mix – but this time we’re closer to car-stereo territory. It has been the proverbial difficult second album, certainly in terms of production. For when Shara Nelson walked down that LA street for the Unfinished video, observed by director Baillie Walsh’s stcadicam, she kept on walking straight into her own acclaimed solo career. Mas-sive’s manager and co-producer followed her lead, leaving the core membership of 3D, Daddy G and Mushroom with a few personnel problems.

Politics aside, genuine artistic reasons account for some of the delay. There has been a learning stage: the band have acquired a lot more gear, and that has required some serious getting used to. There has been a more thoughtful approach to putting the music together, usurping the Blue Lines start-rap-stop feel. But then, of course, they had to wait for the right vocalists to come along…

We’re siding in a hotel in Bristol, and Mushroom is talking kit. He seems to regret that he has become the band’s techie rep. 3D writes a lot of the lyrics, and Daddy G supplies the samples from his massive collection of old funk records; both take turns on the mic. When it comes to writing, ideas tend to come in from all sides. But today, Mushroom is in the hot scat (G joins us later). Although he feels the pressure is on, he has obvious knowledge and interests in technology, clcctromcs and sound.

Don’t take no kit

“When we made Blue Lines, ” he says, “the only bit of equipment we owned was an Ensoniq liPS keyboard and a Numark I775PPD mixer, the one with an on-board sampler. At the time, there weren’t that many engineers who were up on looping. We got through a whole barrage of engineers looking for someone who was good enough. One guy, Jonny Dollar, who’d worked with Neneh Cherry, was really up on the stuff, and he stuck with us for the album.”

Blue Lines was propelled by samples and breaks,
whereas Protection is much more a programming affair. The band only had to clear three samples this time. Weather Storm, a laid back instrumental with a tinkly piano melody, features one of those samples, a bass and drum loop lifted off a 70s* funk record.

“A lot of our stuff, our inspiration – a lot of where we come from – revolves around a record collection,” admits Mushroom. “Compared with a lot of bands, our kit is minimal.” In his eyes, maybe, but not to Joe Musician: Mushroom, for instance, owns a Roland JD-800 synth, Hammond XB2, Crumar Composer (“used on 70s’ scicncc-fiction films like Phase IV”), an Akai SI000 sampler, an Atari with Steinberg’s Cubase MIDI sequencer, a Hohner String machine, a couple of ARP synths and a Yamaha RX7 drum machine.

Leafs it alone

Not every item of equipment gets used, it transpires: “The Hohner is still covered in leaves from when I bought it. It’s just basic stuff,” he’s quick to emphasize, “because sampling is what we’re mainly about.”

Only three samples were cleared, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there are three samples on the album…

“Take Protection,” Mushroom continues, referring to the smouldering, slow burning title track. “The hi-hat is a one-bar sampled loop, then I programmed some James Brown snares and wah-wah over the top, then added some keyboards.” The piano is LA Grand from the JD, underpinning a subtle Roland TB-303 antacid line.

“The whole thing was programmed in my home studio. I just wrote it as a complete piece of music, without a song in mind, then we sent it off to Tracy [Thom, of Everything But The Girl) and she wrote this incredible song over the top.”

Incredible is something of an understatement: it’s unlike anything you’ll find on an EBTG album. The music builds noticeably over a 16-bar loop, while Tracy skips from verse to chorus to verse. She wrote it in just a few days and, according to Mushroom, was so professional that she had the vocal down in 10 minutes. The result could be the Unfinished Sympathy of this album.

Another distinctive voice on the album is Nico-lette, who has worked with Shut Up And Dance. On Sly, the likely October single release (with remixes by Tim Simcnon, Underdog and Future Sound Of London), Nicolette oozes a mix of Billie Holliday and Shirley Basscy’s Goldfinger.

“Docs that remind you of South Sea Islands and James Bond?” asks Mushroom. It certainly docs. “We were going for this ‘spies and waving palm trees’ sound.”

Sly contains a high string part, played by an 18-piece orchestra, which is mildly reminiscent of Bjork’s Venus Is A Boy. That’s not such a surprise when you discover that Nellee Hooper produced the album, as he did Bjork’s Debut. The elusive Nellee goes back a long way with the trio: they grew up together, forming the underground rap group The Wild Bunch in the early 80s, before Ncllcc left to work with Soul II Soul in 1986. The programming, other than what Mushroom did at home, was performed at Nellee’s London suite. “He’s got an E-mu Vintage Keys, a Roland System 100, an ARP 2600 and an OSCar. The synth line on Sty is the ARP 2600.”

The final vocal – excepting the rapping of 3D, Daddy G and long-time collaborator Tricky on Euro Child and the hypnotic Karmacoma – is supplied by rcgg3c singer Horace Andy. Horace, with his exaggerated tremolo wobble and genderless voice, covers Light My Fire. It was recorded live, allegedly: the band wouldn’t just sample off a load of crowd sounds and stick them behind Horacc, would they? “Oh. no, there’s nothing like that!” says Daddy G, a huge grin on his face.

Safe from vocals

There arc two instrumentals on the album: the aforementioned Weather Storm, and Heat .Miser, a pastiche featuring Exorcist-John Carpenter style keyboard lines and spooky asthmatic breathing. Why were they not turned into songs?

“Cos the vibe wasn’t right,” replies Mushroom. “But also, we listen to a lot of house, which is mainly instrumental, so we didn’t see anything wrong with getting them on there. With W’eather Storm, when we met up with this brilliant pianist called Craig Armstrong and got him to record the piano melody, we just felt the track didn’t need anything else.”

“Heat Miser happened through haphazardness,” Mushroom says. “We just floated through it, adding things as we went along. There wasn’t anything really planned. It started off with the Isaac Hayes loop, the piano used at the end of One Love on Blue Lines. A guy came in and did the drums, we sampled him off and tightened it up. The handclaps and bass drum were sampled from records, and the deep breathing is five of us in the studio, slowed down and looped.”

On Heat Miser there’s a touch of Nellee’s Novation BassStation. Mushroom shows great interest in the new bass synths, but thinks he’ll plump for a Deep Bass Nine bccausc he prefers the modular approach. Regarding the deep dub bass on the album, Mushroom says it’s all down to F.Q. “I like to chuck things through a row of parametrics. It’s better to E.Q things on the spot rather than waiting till the final mix: you get a better vibe that way.” That vibe pervades Protection. Mushroom, Daddy G and 3D agree that each song was treated as a separate project, even without the benefits of a vocalist on-hand, and that is dearly in evidence. There’s time yet for 1994 to be massive for Massive Attack. A difficult second album? Yes, but worth the wait.

Hymn to the Big Drumbox

Mushroom is a major fan of the good old Yamaha RX7 drum machine. “The RX7 featured quite a bit on Blue Ones, on Hymn of the Big Wheel and Be Thankful. You can hear It on the Tracy Thom song Better Things: there’s like a dolphin hitting its head against the side of a submarine, it’s like an exclamation mark at the end of each chorus.”

One of the instruments tuned right (town creates the effect. Mushroom owns up to an RX7 gunshot in the Ugm My Fire ambience too.

I started with an RX7, which I reckon is one of the best drum machines that’s ever come out really, for the editing. There are classics like the [Roiand TR) 808 and 909. but I think Yamaha tried to put a weird angle on that drum machine, like endless decay on some of the sounds.”

Live Attack

Massive Attack don’t play live, but that’s not going to stop them touring with a show later in the year. And what a show it’ll be.

“We’re making an effort to use our artwork interactively.” explains 30. creator of Missive’s colourful screen print images. setting on the floor of his art studio. “We want to make the images more direct. So we’re hoping to put on an exhibition which will tour with a OJ sound system, possibly with the two running together. People can meet us and talk to us. surrounded by our bits and pieces. And virtual reality machines.*

Virtual reality? Was this Virgin’s idea, in the wake of the publicity around Peter Gabnel’s X-ptora 1 CD-ROM?

*We approached them. We’ve always been pretty hands on with all the new tech. No one knows what you can do with VR. where you can got it and how much it ail costs, so we re trying to get our hands on as much tech as poss. with backing from Levi’s. If you took into it. you can get quite involved in VR. and It’s not as expensive as you might imagine.’ In this way, they hope to spread the understanding that there’s more to VR than a few arcade games and a crap film about lawnmowers.

But this isn’t the virtual MIDI control that Thomas Dolby talked about in FM 17. Massive want to exploit their visuals: the ambiance to such a VR event will be provided by a dub version of Protection, a project to be undertaken by remixer The Mad Professor.

‘The animation is being generated at Elec-tnc images In Soho: it’s the Euro Child image, six spheres representing the chaos found in bringing the people of several countries together.’

3D approves of what Gabriel is trying to achieve with the remixing idea on X-ptora 1. but that’s not the path he wants to follow.

I feel that’s one approach. Hands on with the artist, but we want to be more dynamic. The VR will be more fantasy, more like a game.”

The original Jamaican sound system idea -turntables and a mic – is about a return to the roots of the Massive vibe – the mid 80s Wild Bunch days when Nellee and the boys formed the ruffest crew in town. Mushroom admits the band couldn’t play traditional instruments live, but: “What we’ve always done has been best coming from turntables. They’re instruments in themselves.

Written By Dave Robinson

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They have released just four albums since their groundbreaking 1991 debut — Blue Lines – and have seemingly spent half of their career arguing with each other, so the biggest surprise about Massive Attack’s latest record isn’t so much that it took so long, it’s more that it has arrived at all.

Even by their standards, Heligoland ha,s been a long time coming, yet it is undoubtedly the sound of a band firing on all cylinders for the first time since 1998’s ‘difficult’ third album – Mezzanine – which signalled the departure of founding member, Andrew ‘Mushroom’ Vowles, who was unable to live with what he saw as the band’s betrayal of their hip-hop and reggae roots. Although he toured to promote their last long-player — 100th Window — Grant ‘Daddy G’ Marshall’s role in the making of the album was so minimal that many believed it was little more than a solo project by their one remaining full-time member, Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja, who was considering retiring the Massive Attack name entirely.

Happily, there is no obvious sign of friction today when we meet in a suite on the top floor of The Berkeley Hotel in London’s Knightsbridge. It has to be said, they are a bit of an odd couple. They both (pictured left) laugh a lot more than you would expect, but you can still detect something of a polite awkwardness between them. Marshall is 6 ft 6 and displays a decidedly happy-go-lucky persona, entirely at odds with his mean and moody onstage presence. His partner in rhyme is slight by comparison and talks 10 to the dozen about any subject you care to mention.

Named after the German archipelago of two tiny islands in the North Sea, Heligoland is a more organic song-based album than any of their previous releases, although their sumptuous subterranean sound is still at the heart of their music. Having previously expanded their musical palette by bringing in instantly recognisable voices such as Elizabeth Fraser and Tracey Thorn, Heligoland features an eclectic array of singers including Damon Albarn, Guy Garvey (Elbow), Hope Sandoval (Mazzy Star) and Tricky’s former-muse, Martina Topley-Bird.

The band were formed from the ashes of The Wild Bunch, a Bristol-based soundsystem who got together in the early 80s and built their reputation on their fusion of punk, reggae and hip-hop. Blue Lines introduced the voices of Tricky, Shara Nelson and Horace Andy to the public consciousness, and although it sold well in the UK and immediately received a raft of glowing reviews, its commercial fortunes were limited elsewhere, despite the presence of Unfinished Sympathy and Safe From Harm, two of the most memorable songs of the last 20 years.

Massive Attack produced a seamless mix of soulful melodies, slow-burning hip-hop rhythms and hypnotic reggae grooves that was as innovative as it was influential, with timeless albums like Blue Lines and Protection capturing the Zeitgeist and laying the foundations for much of the music that emerged over the next decade. While their smoky subterranean sound was perceived as dance music, it was undoubtedly music for the head rather than the feet.

When you first released Blue Lines, did you find it frustrating that everyone seemed to be focusing on ‘trip-hop’ at the time?

Robert Del Naja: Well, trip-hop was a phrase which was initially coined by our friend, James Lavelle, and I think it was actually a pretty accurate way of describing something which sat in between hip-hop and psychedelic soul. The music had a different quality to it and took you on a different journey, so it wasn’t easy to pin down, and I thought that made sense.

You seemed to get pigeonholed alongside other Bristol-based bands like Portishead, yet what you were doing was completely different to them.

RDN: The problem for all of us at that time was that, being in a small city, none of us wanted to be in the same game and we all felt that we were the biggest fish in the pond. That was particularly the case for us, because we felt that we were probably the godfathers of the scene and we didn’t want these upstarts in our pond. When everyone started to establish their own identities, it was difficult for us, Tricky and Portishead to constantly have that reference thrown in your face. We didn’t want to be so closely associated with anyone else, so there was a natural reaction to respond negatively to it.

Grant Marshall: It was a generic cage, really. There just wasn’t enough bread to go round in the pond we were swimming in. There was definitely something special about Blue Lines, but it was coming from the inside out, because we thought we were doing something different to everyone else. When we were recording Blue Lines, the whole club scene was all up-tempo house or rave music, and we were the antithesis of that really.

Having started out as a DJ soundsystem, did you find it difficult to make the transition into becoming a fully-fledged band?

GM: Eventually we just naturally evolved from that soundsystem thing into the band situation. We emulated the Jamaican reggae soundsystems for years, but that became quite restrictive, so it was time to move on from working with turntables to bringing in musicians like Talvin Singh to play with us. We were playing a lot of the backing tracks off the vinyl, and if the record jumped, then the drummer is completely out of time, so it was all a total mess. We were heavily involved in the club scene, and we’ve still got that love. You can’t forget where you came from, can you?

RDN: The funny and ironic thing is that initially we came from the DJ thing where you just tore peoples’ music apart, sampled bits of it, looped it and then basically stole it without any reverence to it. You might take eight bars off one track and then go -We’ll have that — and then go and make a tune off of it. To be honest, it was really totally about stealing and it had nothing whatsoever to do with respect. Blue Lines was a series of fucking accidents.. .At best (laughs). We had massive rows and we nearly split up halfway through the making of that record, because nobody knew what we were gonna come up with or what the intention was. Blue Lines was a speculative demo which became what it was with a lot of help from great people like Horace Andy and Shara Nelson, and it then became an album and we suddenly became ‘an albums band.’

Having created such a stir with Blue Lines, did you feel under a lot of pressure to follow it up with something equally different?

RDN: Protection became this slightly difficult record to follow Blue Lines with, and Mezzanine was then a fractious process of trying to do something different and fight against everything we’d been doing previously and that caused a lot of resentment in the group. Mezzanine was conceptually different from the previous two, and by that time, we were stuck in that zone of being ‘a serious albums band.’ There’s always been a pact with the devil to kind of move on from the last thing, whether you like it or not. For us, after each record it feels like it’s all fallen apart and broken away, because it’s such a tenuous thing we do in the sense that it’s so unorthodox and we’re so different. There’s definitely loads of accidents and mistakes and a bit of blag involved in what we do. Sometimes you’re not really sure what you’re doing and you get away with it, but that is tempered with a lot of fucking effort. You might get away with it once, but blagging is not something you can live off on a long term basis, because people will see through it very quickly. Although a lot of politicians get away with it.

Do you think that the power of music has been dissipated over time? The concept of seeing an album as an artefact that you cherish seems to be disappearing rapidly, doesn’t it?

RDN: Well, that’s certainly true. When you talk about an artefact…Something to hold…That process hasn’t really got any weaker for us. For me, the creation of the thing that you first see on a digital ad is as vitally important as the record you listen to, because it’s your gateway into what’s been going on. We’ve been punished by the record company for years, because all of the special things we wanted to do in terms of sleeves and packaging would cost us because it’s deducted from your royalties. Surely there’s got to be a bit of give and take, hasn’t there?

Do you think everything is too disposable to be truly valued these days?

RDN: It’s a very funny time. No wonder people are shying away from it and just getting it any way they can. There is a total devaluation in everything generally in the way that we live today. Everything is fast and disposable, and that’s symptomatic of the human race evolving, the speed at which we travel or the amount of information we exchange. As kids, we used to go out and have to find something, save up for it and beg and borrow to actually get it…Or in some cases, steal for it. Now, even stealing isn’t really exciting, because you can get something for nothing without taking the risks, so there’s no point in even stealing (laughs).

GM: It’s back to that old thing that nobody really wants to pay for anything. I’ve got teenage nephews and nieces, and they don’t really care how they get hold of it so long as they’ve got it. Music seems like it’s less important than it was. We’ve come from that whole background of getting Bob Marley’s Catch A Fire album and going – wow, look at this. It’s a Zippo lighter – then taking it out and looking at it and opening it up. I mean, the first thing ‘D’ does when he gets an album is to give it a good old whiff {laughs). If you do that sort of thing, the whole physical side of it is complete, and I really think it adds to the whole aural experience.

Do you sympathise with the younger generation’s perception of music as something that you download as opposed to something physical that you can hold?

GM: You’ve got to have some empathy for these kids, because it’s just fast food to them. You’ve got an MP3 player, so you haven’t got the room for records and you haven’t got the time to be looking at them either. The people that I know who used to collect records have still got their records, but they’ve got no record player. They haven’t got the space or the time to sit down in front of the fire and enjoy the ritual of playing a record. I’ve got this music room downstairs with all my DJ stuff down there, and I’ve got records wall-to-wall. My litde five-year-old is used to playing CDs, so he looks at these turntables like — Fucking hell… What are these arcane things? He loves getting on the decks, because it’s like travelling back in time. Come and look at these antiques {laughs).

RDN: Come and have a look at daddy’s steam engine, son. You put the coal in there and watch the water heat up, then we’ll get some steam going and
we’ll be off soon. I was brought up listening to albums. It’s a ritual to put a record on, isn’t it? My mum introduced me to The Beatles’ albums, and the punk albums were heaven to me, because they were all powerful. After that, the DJ thing stripped that back into tracks, snippets of tracks and breakbeats, and then all of those things became as important as the album for me.

Is digital music of equal value to records and CDs?

RDN: I buy a lot of my stuff digitally as well as physically, so because of the history we’ve had, it all has equal value for me. I don’t believe that there’s a right or a wrong in terms of how you buy, collect or listen to music, but I think that what it actually means and how people value things has changed. Having said that, that’s not just music…It also goes for film, art and everything else. It’s all changed.

It’s been seven years since your last album. How much material have you actually binned?

RDN: It s not that we scrapped all of the other stuff we were working on — some of it’s been shelved, some has been dismantled and some of it’s just been forgotten. I think it’s a natural process with anything, because you change your perspective as you go along. It’s been seven years since 100th Window, but apart from a few tracks we kept from the past couple of years, it’s only been seven or eight months making it. Modern technology means that you can noodle around forever. With this record we were determined to strip the noodling away and make it sound more personal, so every sound you listen to is very present and clear in the room with you. You’re not necessarily destroying lots of pieces of music, you’re just changing it and building on top of it and stuff is getting buried as you go. I wouldn’t say we’re perfectionists -1 think we’re imperfectionists — because we look for the imperfection in everything.

GM: We were a bit bored of it. There was just a certain lack of energy that we thought it needed, and getting back into the studio, we found that energy. Having taken these tracks on tour in 2008, we kind of felt that the music just needed a little bit of something else and we felt like we had to start again.

Do you have a strong work ethic?

RDN: Well, ‘G’ certainly doesn’t {laughs). I wouldn’t exactly say it’s nine to five, but I actually work really hard. If I get to the studio at midday, I might stay until 10. I go in pretty much every day, sometimes on the weekend if I feel like it. I always feel like I’ve got to be doing something, so if I wake up with a load of ideas, I’ll go into the studio and exorcise some demons. I’ll walk to the studio and try and do all my mundane stuff on the phone, so when I get there, I haven’t got to think about it. ‘G”s phone goes off every five minutes, so he’s always getting distracted by something or other. We’ve both got very different ways of doing things.

GM: I: ’ve got a three-day week… If that. There’s a really weird perception that all we do is sit around taking loads of drugs, but it’s not as if we sit there smoking spliff all day, every day. I spend a lot of time playing table football as well {laughs). I don’t know… Maybe when we were making Blue Lines and Protection we were sitting around and smoking weed and stuff like that. We all know what we all get up to of an evening, but it’s definitely more of a recreational thing and it doesn’t actually hinder the creative process as such.

Would you say that you are quite hedonistic people?

RDN: To be honest with you, I think that drugs have enhanced the spirit in the studio, not necessarily the music-making. We are hedonistic people, but it doesn’t define the way we are or the way we work. There was a time on the tour in 2003 when it was very messy, but this recent tour was the most sober one I’ve ever done. It’s a two-day recovery for me after a big party now, but I can’t imagine anything more hideous and dull than a completely Alcoholics Anonymous/Narcotics Anonymous tour. I’ve seen so many bands go that way, and I think it’s just so boring when things get driven in that direction.

Has your approach to sampling changed since you first started?

RDN: In the last decade, computer power has changed everything. In the mid-80s, we were using samplers to steal things in a completely anarchic and selfish way. We stole whatever we felt we wanted. You worked within your parameters, sampled a few seconds and then you’d be able to make a track out of it. Take a few bars from Billy Cobham’s Stratus…And boom, Safe From Harm was made. We’ve made a lot of lawyers very happy over the years by sampling, so we were like — OK, maybe it’s time to sample our own music.

Are you conscious of the fact that however much it has changed over the years, your music has always been instantly recognisable?

RDN: No matter what you do, you want to do something which sounds like nobody else, but you also don’t want it to sound like what you did yesterday, and if you can achieve that, I think that’s as good as it gets. Our personalities and all of the personalities of the people you work with are vital, because you want to work with like-minded souls, people who you admire, trust and respect. Hopefully, you then end up with an album with a very communal spirit.

What are your main criteria for selecting the singers for each song?

RDN: You often give people the tracks they don’t expect so they’re not in their comfort zone or you’re not in your own comfort zone. I mean, fuck me, over the years we’ve taken Horace out of his own comfort zone on every occasion.

GM: So much so that he can’t even go back to Jamaica now. He gets beaten up as soon as he gets off the plane {laughs). It’s like — You’re making that white man music again.’ Girl I Love You – from the new album — that’s a really good example of taking Horace away from what people might expect him to be doing.

How do you go about taking someone like Damon Albarn out of his comfort zone?

RDN: I don’t think you can with someone like Damon, because he’s already taken himself away from his own comfort zone so many times anyway. When we first met him in the mid-90s, everyone was saying how great Britpop was, but Damon was much more into music from the rest of the world than what was happening in England at the time. His perspective was the opposite of what everyone else thought it was. Everyone was looking in, thinking it was all about London and the Britpop thing, and he was looking over the ocean somewhere else going -You’re looking the wrong way, boys. He was right, and it soon devoured itself, like pop always does in the end, because it really needs to expand and to cross-breed to work, doesn’t it? Any music that in-breeds just becomes weak and then dies…He said in his poncey Darwinian voice. Even Noel Gallagher has now given Damon the respect he deserves, hasn’t he? I think he said that Damon is the real musician and he almost feels like a fake compared to him. The last time you spoke about Oasis, I got confronted by Liam in the toilets of the Met Bar saying that I’d slagged them off. I said — Don’t you mean ‘Daddy G’? Are you sure you haven’t got our names mixed up? And he goes – ‘No, man. It was ‘3D’, not ‘Daddy G’.’ I suppose we’ve both got really silly names, so it’s hard to tell {laughs).

GM: Well, I wouldn’t mind meeting Liam in the toilet with him pointing at me like that. I’ll knock the fucker out, I tell you.

How did you pick the vocalists for Heligoland?

RDN: A lot of them were natural choices and acquaintances of ours, so it was about time to do it. There was Damon, and then Guy Garvey was approached because of Elbow covering Teardrop and us loving Elbow. Hope Sandoval was somebody who we’ve loved for years…She’s the queen of angst. I suppose she was probably the most unpredictable name we worked with on.

Which artists would you like to collaborate with that you haven’t worked with already?

RDN: I think one of the saddest things was probably Jeff Buckley, because Elizabeth (Fraser) had a very strong relationship with him, unbeknown to us. She wrote Teardrop around the time of his death, so it was kind of about him. We were sitting at the table next to him at a hotel in London, but I was too shy to speak to him. That was an opportunity that we will always think was missed. The sad thing about death is that sainthood often follows, but in that case, he was just fundamentally brilliant. Aaron Neville has got a voice we’d love to work with. We have approached him, but it’s never quite happened.

Although you seem to be getting on a lot better than you were around the time of 100th Window, Heligoland still sounds pretty dark, don’t you think?

RDN: Really? It’s funny, because I thought it was much lighter. I think there’s quite an interesting variety of moods and perspectives…Light and shade. In terms of melody and rhythm, it’s a lot more urgent and upbeat, but if you mean dark in terms of the words, then I suppose it is still pretty dark.

GM: It’s the same dark times as when Blue Lines came out. We haven’t really achieved much as far as the state of the country goes, have we? The same key elements are still high on the agenda — shitty government, recession, the rise of fascism – so you can’t help but take those things on board when you’re making a record. When we did Blue Lines we were writing about things that were happening to us every day and things that we saw on the news, and so we just took all of those elements and wrote about them.

You have always been a political band, haven’t you?

RDN: The fact that we come from the margins of a multicultural city which has a strong history in the slaving business and also the fact that we got together in the 80s in the middle of Thatcher’s Britain and what was happening at the time with things like the Bristol riots is an important factor. That whole history is our history…We come from that. Lyrically, our music is political, but it’s political with a small ‘p’. There’s lots of lyrics which are just about being alive now and how fucked up and mad it all is.

When you and Damon Albarn tried to mobilise other artists into protesting against the invasion of Iraq, you were met with widespread indifference, weren’t you?

RDN: It was a very inert time. We couldn’t get any really well-known musicians behind us at all. Who knows why they were so reluctant to get involved? People just seemed to be paralysed by the fact that they didn’t know the answer. People were going – If I support the anti-war movement, am I pro-Saddam, and if I don’t, am I pro-war? To me, it was about being anti-war and anti-death. If you’re not a humanist, there’s no point in believing in environment issues or saying ‘save this’ or ‘save that’, ’cos if we don’t save ourselves from ourselves, then what’s the point in anything? Like a lot of people, I didn’t believe the 45-minute claim, and although we didn’t believe that having a million people on the streets protesting against the war that day would change anything, it seemed the right thing to do as a citizen of this country. We thought it might make the next government say -‘actually, this isn’t what the people wanted.’

Can you believe that it’s been almost 20 years since you released Blue Lines*.

GM: It’s scary, like people showing you pictures of yourself when you were a little kid. You pretend you remember them, but you don’t at all. I think it’s a bit like that with Blue Lines, because people keep telling us what a masterpiece it was and what a seminal album it was, but to be honest, we don’t look at it like that. It was just our first album, and it was great, but now we’ve moved to the next thing.

RDN: You don’t feel that different, you still feel that you’ve got the same energy and the same ideologies.It’s quite surreal. When Tricky came to the soundcheck in Paris the other day, we hadn’t seen him in about five years, and as I watched him walk up the stairs I thought, ‘Oh fuck, it’s Tricky’. What are we gonna talk about? And he was just like,‘Alright, Jack? How you doing?’ It took me right back to the beginning, because nothing had really changed.

It must have been difficult for you when ‘Mushroom’ left the band after you released Mezzanine.

RDN: It was tough, man…Really tough. After all this time and effort we’d put in and all of this friendship, all these moments were suddenly gonna be taken away. It wasn’t the fact that he left that was upsetting…We came to the conclusion that everyone was going in different directions and we just couldn’t work together any more.

GM: I didn’t find it at all upsetting when he left (laughs). After Mezzanine, it didn’t feel like we could work together again as a three-piece, so Heligoland proved that we can move forwards together.

Would it be fair to say that you wanted to broaden your musical horizons and he wanted to continue doing the more hip-hop based material?

RDN: Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes you’ve got to make it confrontational in order to get a response and to create something, but we got to a point where there was a reluctance to even clash heads anymore. When you’re not doing that as a band, there’s no chemistry and no energy left. It was the contrast between the individual people in the band which brought us together in the first place.

GM: It was totally fire and ice, wasn’t it? You get brimstone off that, don’t you? It was a black and
white, oil and water sort of thing…And that created the sparks and the whole dynamics of what we were doing. The different pull on sounds and personalities has always been where we’re coming from.

Do you see each other a lot when you’re not working?

RDN: When you get to Heathrow on the last day of the tour, everyone just waves goodbye and it feels like that’s it. We don’t hang out together that much outside the band, although I actually live at the end of his road. It’s fine, because we get more than enough opportunities to hang out together doing this.

This band has always been always been incredibly important to you, hasn’t it?

GM: I know it sounds corny to say this, but me and ‘D’ have been to the lowest depths working menial jobs and stuff like that. When you actually get into something that you love and it’s given you the lifestyle and it’s opened the doors that it has for us, you’re not gonna turn your back on it easily. The more we do it, the more passionate we are about it.

RDN: Every record we’ve made has had at least one gigantic conflict in the middle of it which maybe actually defined that record. There has always been a history of conflict in the band, but this is the first record we’ve made without all the arguments. We’ve known each other for 27 years, so it’s a bit like a partnership or a marriage. We’ve had our moments of bitter feuding and resentment and all that crap, and then you realise it’s unimportant in terms of the big picture. Like they say, blood is thicker than music. At the end of the day, we’re family.

Heligoland is out now on Virgin Records. A deluxe triple-gatefold 180gm vinyl edition is available from The Vinyl Factory (www.thevinylfactory.com)

Written By Jonathan Wingate

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It’s a duality Massive Attack combated at last year’s Glastonbury as 3D cajoled us to “dream on” across acres of mud and miles of cloud to the grinding backdrop of “Risingson”, the first single to appear from Mezzanine out this spring. Edgier, deeper, moodier, heavier, their third album finds Massive dislocating from reality altogether. Strung out on a limb both emotionally and musically, it’s the last exit to bleary-eyed No Man’s Land. “It’s the idea that you’ve been up all night really caning it. You’re not up where you were the night before but you’re not down either,” is 3D’s explanation. “You’re really spacey. Daylight is creeping in through the curtains and blinds and you’re trying to hide it all out but people are going to work, buses are running, milkmen are doing their rounds, papers are coming through the door and it’s a real freakout. You try and adjust but you just can’t…”

Blending influences as diverse as Erik Satie and Eric B, their seminal 1991 debut Blue Lines, defiantly captured the spirit of the times and irrevocably changed the course of British hip hop soul. From their ’80s soundsystem days as part of Bristol’s Wild Bunch hip hop crew, Massive’s centrifugal sound naturally grew out of the multicultural ragga, roots, hip hop, soul and dub fusion all around them and reconstructed the concept of music-as-soundtrack (just don’t say “trip hop”). But where could they go from here? Potentially drifting towards a mire of “dreary dub”, Protection – luscious, orchestrated and at times profound – instead consolidated Massive Attack’s universal appeal.

Now Mezzanine stretches the Massive Attack canvas even wider. Swelling the band’s hallmark turntable culture with Clash-inspired guitar licks and live instrumentation the band’s aesthetic has shifted from soundsystem to soundclash. Here Horace Andy’s comatose reggae rhythms enter a fracas of guitar turbulence on tracks like “Angel” and “The Man Next Door”. The Cocteau Twins’ Liz Fraser air-kisses the new single, “Teardrops”, with apricot-sweet vocals; new talent Sarah J unashamedly rocks out and 3D, Daddy G and Mushroom cruise uneasily through the inner city paranoia and ruptured beats of “Risingson”.

There’s no doubt that the success of Portishead, Tricky and Reprazent owes more than a little to Bristol’s rich sonic heritage, yet the Massive Attack story goes beyond origin and location. It’s a story about the Anglicisation of hip hop culture and the fusion of rap, jazz, soul, dub, rare groove, 2 Tone and rock.

The original Wild Bunch crew are now dispersed across the globe interconnecting faces and personalities as
diverse as Neneh Cherry, Tricky, Soul ll Soul, Smith & Mighty, Shara Nelson, Tracey Thorn, The Mad Professor, Nicolette and Nellee Hooper. Massive Attack are a global concern who have worked with Madonna and provided tracks for both corporate, blockbusting Hollywood movies like Batman and The Jackal, and more credible films like welcome To Sarajevo. Back home, their label Melankolic is nurturing the talent of composer Craig Armstrong (who appeared on Protection), young soul rebel Lewis Parker and fellow Bristolians, Alpha.

But behind the controls of this sprawling Massive Attack metropolis are three very different individuals. Mushroom: the 30-year-old junior member, aka Andrew Vowles. A talented hip hop head, he speaks in soft murmers, but mostly listens, checks out beats and builds new sounds. Then there’s 3D, the Italian-blooded Robert Del Naja, A lucid lyricist, given to chemical detours, sleepless nights and paranoid dreams; his blond hair is increasingly wild and unbrushed. Completing the Avon trio is Daddy G: the rapper, aka DJ Grant Marshall. Given to frowning in photos, he’s tall and imposing from a distance; gentle and laidback when close up Black and white; tall and slight; wired and reserved, together Mushroom, 3D and Daddy G add up to the obfuscating, city dwelling, daydreaming sounds of the Massive.

Mushroom

Dazed & Confused: There’s a lot of dream imagery throughout Massive’s raps, when did you last have a weird dream?

Mushroom: it was on tour in Japan, we were staying in a hotel half way up Mount Fuji when a monsoon hit and everyone in the tour party that night had a freaky dream but l don’t really want to go into it: it was too full on. We were out there with The Prodigy having a laugh and going to these fashion clubs where all the British models go. Did we hear any jungle? Nah, it was all disco music, KC And The Sunshine Band.

D&C: You’ve been to Jamaica too. What was that like?

M: We went out there to shoot the video for ‘Hymn Of The Big Wheel’ but it never got finished because l think everyone had too much to smoke.

D&C: That sounds like a common Massive Attack theme.

M: It just turned into a bit of a mad free-for-all out there. You’re in Jamaica and the director was heavily into that whole culture. So having to get a big group of people from A to B turned into a bit of a nightmare. Like trying to set up a video shoot in Escapeland. [laughs]

D&C: The new album has comedown connotations. Have you ever had any Mezzanine moments?

M: I don’t really take any drugs or get drunk. But D’s been known to down a few whiskies a day. As my man out of New Kingdom says [raps] I’ve been known to down a few too many

D&C: Are you conscious of being the ‘baby’ in the group?

M: sometimes but only in a jesting way The piss gets taken a little bit but it mainly goes back to the early days when I was just a kid straight out of school.

D&C: What was it that drew you to the Wild Bunch when they were all older and bigger than you?

M: Back then the Wild Bunch were the only crew out there. I’d try and go down to The Dug Out but I was only 15 and the doorman, Chippy, used to tell me that I was far too young so G had to sneak me in. Those were wild times. I think Glastonbury was wilder when I first started going too. There were people with megaphones shouting ‘Acid!’ and ‘Get your hot knives here!’ really loud. I remember going to see Lenny Kravitz. I don’t know where he is now but l do know that he was an all-time genius.

D&C: These days it seems like Puff Daddy rules the airwaves. Do you think he should be celebrated, or should he be dead?

M: Hip hop’s always had its commercial front men. He just takes small pieces of rhythm and makes them really big, which is good because it brings hip hop and black music to the fore, it puts money into the movement and gives it a bit of power. But hip hop just keeps moving on. It has its moments of stagnancy but it’s a pretty strong culture to hold down in one frame, it’s more of a voice, rather than just about dance music and there’s a big political element. D&C: Bristol’s always been a city with a reputation for racial tension, especially after the riots in the early ’80s. Is it something you were conscious of when you were growing up?

M: Bristol is a racist place – but it’s undercover. There was a documentary on telly about a black guy and a white guy both looking for accommodation and it just summed up people’s attitudes. People won’t shout at you down the street but there’s a really horrible undercurrent of racism down here. I lived in Bath for a bit and that was just outright up to your face racism. I was only little at the time, in fact, it was so bad that it’s the reason my mum had to bring us to Bristol.

D&C: What’s the weirdest thing that happened to you when you were recording Mezzanine ?

M: Well we were in the studio one day when this big crate of Bibles mysteriously arrived addressed to us with a note which gave instructions about how we should use them and how we should ‘grasp the Law’ which kind of freaked us out a bit. But the weirdest thing for me is still getting my head around the fact that people actually want to go into shops and buy our music.

Daddy G

Dazed & Confused: The Cocteau Twins’ Liz Fraser is the new Massive Attack leading lady. What was it about her that appealed to you ?

Daddy G: She’s always been top of the list for us to work with ever since we began. And now she’s moved to Bristol six years too late. The brilliant thing with Massive is that we’ve had the opportunity to work with people like Tracey (Thorn), Madonna, Horace Andy and people like that.

D&C: I always imagine Horace Andy as your godfather figure.

DG: He’s a real wise man. We’ve always worked with Horace from the reggae days and that voice is so unique; there’s a real tension going on.

D&C: You’ve produced for Madonna. Did that mean you got to meet her?

DG: Me and Nellee and 3D went over to stay with her for the National Cup because she really wanted to meet us. But we were absolutely petrified about meeting her (laughs). So every time she came to look for us, we’d be hiding under the beds in her huge ten bedroom house so we didn’t have to bump into her. We were there for about ten days and she was real pissed off on the last day when we were leaving without saying hello. So she rang us to ask what we were doing trying to avoid her in her own house. And that set the precedent for us to work with her.

D&C: Don’t you think it’s ironic that Massive Attack have come out of this multicultural background. And yet we’ve got government ministers claiming that multiculturalism undermines Britain’s traditional heritage?

DG: But that’s always been the case in England. I remember when I was a little kid in the late ’60s, when they really clamped down on the immigration laws; they said that anybody who’d been living in the country for less than seven years had to reapply for immigration. Quite a lot of my dad’s friends didn’t qualify for that and some of them had to go back. Even my dad and mum were going around trying to make sure that they were all right.

D&C: So for a minute there, we might never have had a Massive Attack.

DG: Yeah. But when I go to Europe, it reminds me that England’s quite mellow in comparison. When you go to the continent you don’t see the same mix of people. We go abroad, you think the youth are the same as they are in England. You go to Manchester, or Liverpool or Leeds and there’s a unification of youth culture in a way which I don’t think is vastly explored or exploited in this country. I don’t think the government gives enough to young kids.
You’ve only got to look at Bristol. The amount of shit going down doesn’t reflect the music that’s coming out of the city, we’ve created so much publicity for the city through bands like Massive, Portishead and Tricky, that it makes me resentful there isn’t any money put back in for funding studios and media facilities.

D&C: You were supposed to play at the first ‘Japanese Glastonbury’ on Mount Fuji but it got cancelled. What did you get up to instead?

DG: Well it was cancelled because of a big typhoon. So we were staying in this hotel where no one was there because of the typhoon – except for us and Lee Perry. It was like a ghost hotel and so we spent the whole night in audience with him. He’s very spaced out to say the least. Some of the things he came out with were quite thought-provoking but I couldn’t help but think, “Is he all there?”

D&C: when was the last time you had a really big fight?

DG: In the band sometimes they get really passionate about one little drum or what they wear. I’m not really like that and I’ve never been in a fight all my life. Because l’m so big, I don’t need to be aggressive. I’m just an easy going type of guy. But when it comes to music I’m a frantic obsessive. We all are.

D&C: So you’re not bothered about whether you’re wearing Adidas or Nike?

DG: At the end of the day there is that thing about tribalisation because you get affiliated to a certain way of thinking. You’ve got your circle of mates but I think there’s still a lot of individuals within that. That’s one thing about London which I don’t really like. The Verve swept through London. But as soon as one sect of
people like it, there’s pressure on everyone else and you just get swept along.

D&C: Daddy G says, ‘Don’t believe the hype’.

DG: Hype is massive. The last really big thing we were all into was when hip hop came aibng. We just took on all these other experiences from where we came from like punk, reggae and soul. What’s the point of talking about Magnums and stuff that doesn’t relate to us. We’re in England. So we’re talking about, l dunno…

D&C: How ‘getting a visa card these days isn’t hard’?

DG: Yeah, things like that that. I’m not trying to imitate Americans. That’s where the pitfalls of hip hop come really.

D&C: I really like the line in “Risingson”. Toylike people make me boylike.

DG: That track was about two different things. For 3D, it was about being out at night, drifting through this party and trying to connect with it all. For me, I don’t want to go to that party. It’s more personal, about being in a relationship with someone that’s not working and how sex can be really destructive.

D&C: The wild Bunch sound system parties you were throwing in the ’80s have become the stuff of legend. Don’t you ever wish that you could go back to those heady early days?

DG: I think certainly, if people go to Bristol they’d be quite disappointed, it doesn’t necessarily cater for what
people are actually saying about what’s happening there. It’s supposed to be the centre of music at the moment but there’s nothing down here.

D&C: The whole thing about Blue Lines was that it set new standards for British hip hop. Who do you think has successfully followed your lead?

DG: I think Lewis Parker is the freshest artist to come through. But at that time there was definitely a sense of excitement in Bristol that something was going to happen. Hip hop at the time was something fresh and new. But punk was the thing that gave us insight into hip hop. The first time we saw breakdancing was through Malcolm McLaren. He’s always been a catalyst for taking on different cultures and trying to amalgamate them and that’s what Massive Attack is all about.

3-D

Dazed & Confused: How do you make the connection between that kind of west Country boy existence and being this international player who produces Madonna?

3D: Player! [laughs] I dunno. Bristol’s either lazy, unmotivated, unambitious. Or, after travelling, seeing loads of cities, coming back to Bristol is really nice.

D&C: That sounds pretty schizophrenic.

3D: Yeah, it’s good because you can be two people at once. I’d hate to be just stuck in Bristol and if I was just in a band I’d hate not to be able to go back there. Part of the privilege of being in the music business is the whole kind of glamour thing. You do get a chance to be schizophrenic and it’s legal. Everyone’s got that in them. That kind of fantasy world and that real world. To be able to do it, to realise it, is amazing. The only other thing I can think of like it is to be an actor.

D&C: well it seems like your chum Tricky has taken up both.

3D: Obviously we watch what he does and he watches what we do. See how his acting career’s getting off. [laughs] I see him occasionally and that’s cool but l lived with him for a year and that was enough.

D&C: Do you keep in touch with the rest of the Bristol crew?

3D: Yeah I bump into Roni (Size) and Nick (Warren). I don’t see much of Geoff (Barrow). Roni used to live up the road from me. G lives on my road now. Liz (Fraser) lives in Bristol now, which is brilliant. Bristol’s mad actually. It’s changed a bit though, there’s millions of students. That’s not always a bad thing, it just means it’s different.

D&C: My brother’s a student in Bristol. He thinks he’s Men Behaving Badly.

3D: I use that excuse, to be honest. When I go out playing football, l don’t make any excuse for my behaviour, which is based around drinking and football. I can become anything I want and talk about anything l want and get away with it because it’s Saturday and I’m pissed and it’s football. My life is full of rituals. When I haven’t got any rituals, I panic. I can’t just sit there and think calmly because my mind starts going round in
millions of circles. Rather than just getting all my thoughts into one fucking area and sorting it out, I just freak. Then l go back round and start going insane. I catch myself repeating lists like a madman.

D&C: when was the last time you picked up a paintbrush?

3D: I’ve been really fucking lazy, it really pisses me off when I think about it because my mind is full of so much I can’t just seem to sit down and paint any more, i like John Squire’s artwork actually, we swapped paintings recently.

D&C: There was talk of Massive Attack remixing OK Computer. Where did all that come from?

3D: I don’t know. Where’s it all gone? it really was an ambitious project. A nice thought, but I don’t know how relevant it is now.

D&C: Do you think the moment passed when you got the Mad Professor to remix Protection?

3D: You know that was a laugh. But the reality is that everyone’s got their own contracts, their own problems and their own life, if you did everything you said you were going to do, you’d lose all sense of reality. Good fun chatting about it, though!

D&C: How many times a week do you argue?

3D: We don’t bicker. We end up having disputes which is really hard work sometimes but I can’t imagine any job where that doesn’t happen. People always ask us why we work with girls. We need to work with girls to get that balance otherwise it becomes too ego, too male. Maybe we’re all just really selfish people, it’s weird, though, because we’ve never really had this front person mentality either.

D&C: Just don’t say ‘collective’.

3D: I hate that word, I really fucking do! [laughs] We were described as that in 1991. We’re a group, an outfit. Even though it puts us in a difficult position where, say, most magazines can’t use us without having one person up front. My favourite bands have always been based around that. My mum got me into The Beatles and that was always different voices so you never had to listen to just John Lennon, you had McCartney and different tonal things happening. Then it was The Clash for me because you had Mick Jones and Joe Strummer.

D&C: Would you say you were a ladies’ man?

3D: l think it’s different working with women to getting on with them personally. But I’ve definitely found myself increasingly getting on with women in an unsexual way. As soon as anything else gets into it, it becomes a real
problem for me. Just generally. You meet someone and you really get on with them and you fuck it up and then, I dunno… women are weird, though, because I find that these days, they seem to expect more from men.

D&C: Well, yeah…

3D: The amount of times I’ve seen women and not wanted sex and they think it’s strange and you feel under pressure. Whereas in the old days it was the other way round. It’s really confusing.

D&C: You showcased some of the new material at Glastonbury last year. Are you a big fan of muddy fields?

3D: It was messy there, wasn’t it?

D&C: It’s that thing where you arrive and it’s raining and all your stuff is wet and you haven’t even put your tent up and everyone’s in a bad mood. Then you chill out. have a smoke and…

3D: Yeah, I remember it was getting so fucking late and I was pissed, because I’d been drinking since I got there. The gig was over really quickly and all of a sudden, it was 2.30 in the morning and then we started taking loads of, you know, nosebag. The next thing, it was like eight in the morning – and that was the ‘mezzanine’ period of the day. [laughs] The best thing for me was the day after when l got some pills and went to watch Neneh Cherry on the main stage. I blagged it backstage and we kind of got the second wave of the posse together, it was mad meeting Neneh because l hadn’t seen her for quite a while. Then we went to see Radiohead. Watching it from the back of the stage, you could see all the lights over Glastonbury.

D&C: Don’t you find, though, that there are times when it all gets too on top and you just have to disappear to a more reclusive kind of oblivion?

3D: We went to Cornwall to write some of the album. We went in the winter, which I loved. The water’s clear… it’s just great to hear the wind just banging on the window. And it’s only a couple of hours drive from Bristol. We should really make the most of all that.

D&C: When you look back at Blue Lines, how do you feel about it now?

3D: 1991… It’s not just because we were there then but there was something particularly interesting about that year. There was The Stone Roses, Primal Scream, our album, Soul II Soul from the year before. It was that late ’80s, ’90s thing, it always reminds me of summer. When I think of ’89 to ’91, it’s sunshine all the way through.

D&C: How do you feel you’ve moved on since then?

3D: What we did was draw on more of our life experiences. I think that’s the really different thing about this album. We naturally moved on from two turntables and sound system shows to becoming more free on stage.

D&C: And Massive Attack now get to rock out with guitars, right?

3D: I was really into New Wave in the old days, so when we started to put guitars in, it seemed right. The tracks l really like are the ones that start off like they’re just in the studio with a drum machine then they build up as if you’re at a gig and it’s really loud and then by the time it’s ended, there’s one little beat going and it’s like switching a drum machine off in your bedroom again. D&C: Can you imagine a fourth Massive Attack album?

3D: Yeah. I think because Massive Attack is so unorthodox, we’ve got to learn to sort out our differences and be honest a bit more and learn to do more things both as individuals and as a group. We’ve just got to have that respect and loyalty for each other while giving each other space to do our own things.

Written By Rachael Newsome