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Anarchic roots and a healthy disregard for Western democracy surround Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja, aka 3D. Better known for his contribution to the music scene, 3D’s artwork has featured on all of the band’s releases and he still holds his own in the current climate of the contemporary art world. One of the originators of the UK graffiti explosion, it wasn’t through the go-to channels of Wild Style and Subway Art that his experimentation with spray paint was sparked. Taking his cues from early punk album artwork, 3D was one of the first to experiment with stencils in the street. Once considered an outsider to the scene, his cutting-edge approach to graffiti paved the way for a new wave of stencil artists in the UK.

3D’s initial love affair with spray paint began with his interest in early MTV videos and punk music artwork. “I went out one summer evening in 1983 down on the Hotwells Road. There was a big derelict site down there that I’d had my eye on for a while. I had no idea what I was getting into though, in a way. I didn’t know how it was going to work in the conditions and if I was going to get caught. All I had seen up to that point had been snatches of graffiti art in the magazines and a little bit on video, you know, The Clash’s Radio Clash vid with Futura 2000, Malcolm McLaren’s Buffalo Gals and some of the early hip-hop videos.

“The Dugout used to have a video bar and it was the only place in Bristol I knew of where you could watch MTV, ‘cause nobody had satellite TV at home then. There was a Wild Bunch night on Wednesdays, which Nellee [^Hooper], Milo [^Johnson] and Daddy G and I used to go to and hang out at, and where me and Claude [^Williams] used to do a rap thing. Thursday was 2Bad and then you had Gary Clail of Tackhead doing guest slots on the reggae sound systems too. So it was quite a good little scene. You’d go and catch all the early rudimentary hip-hop videos that were surfacing in ‘82, ’83. It was called electro back then, before it was even christened. That was where you got snatches of the graffiti art scene from; that was pretty much it. Pre-Wild Style, pre-Subway Art.”

As the explosion of graffiti in the US crossed the water and caught the imagination of the UK’s youth, a young Del Naja picked up fanzines and other New York street publications. Hungry for more information on the scene, he sought more knowledge on some of the characters behind the movement, avidly following the swirling, interlinked art and music scenes of the time.

“It was the first time I got a real glimpse into that world. Before that, for me, coming from the punk thing, Futura2000 had been the first graffiti artist I had ever heard of; he worked with The Clash and then he named Ramellzee and then there was Basquiat who, of course, was gaining massive attention as a big crossover artist. But obviously he had his roots as Samo in the graffiti scene, so it was all connected, and then that linked back to the whole Warhol, Keith Haring, Pop Art scene. There was this whole kind of Bronx-meets-downtown NY art scene. Punk had blossomed and then suddenly died so quickly, music had changed so fast. New wave, reggae, ska, the New Romantics, electro music and then hip-hop. It was such a crazy time and I think we had all gone from looking at London as being the capital of the world to New York.”

The passion and thirst for painting in the street was primarily fuelled by punk politics, a raw, DIY initiative that was kicked off by the sleeve art of early anarchic bands in the UK. “I remember getting records from Crass and The Clash, they put stencils in their sleeves that you could use to paint on your clothes and all over the walls and stuff. That was pretty much my first introduction to stencilling back in 1979, 1980.”

These initial forays into the essence of graffiti were swiftly followed by an altogether more studious interest in technique and form. “It was within a few months that The Z-Boys started putting pieces up. It really was interesting, ‘cause I’d go out there with Milo and Nellee. We’d really study a piece and look at the detail… In those days, what seemed like a lot of detail was really simple, but you were seeing how they got the shadow on a piece of a letter, or how they got the shine in the right place to give it depth and make it stand out. It became quite competitive pretty quickly - it was kinda fun.”

With new inspiration flooding in every day, the biggest benchmarks of influence came from the US in the form of a couple of films that instantly acquired cult status, rocketing the rest of the art scene forward with a surge of inspiration. “Wild Style came out a year after we’d started. We went down to the arts centre on Stokes Croft to watch it and everyone was out. We went down to see it three or four times in a row, just trying to absorb everything, you know what I mean? Then, of course, Subway Art came out and that completely changed everything. You could sit there and study the work and it became a form of imitation as flattery.

“I can remember looking at people’s sketches and tags pre-and post-Subway Art and there was a giant leap in terms of style, quality, Wild Style imagery and characters. We started to go to London more as The Wild Bunch, DJing at a club called Krush Groove and spinning for Tim Westwood back when he used to do a column for Blues & Soul magazine. Me and Ian Dark linked up and went to paint his bedroom as well, which was quite amusing, where he had all his tunes, it was on the Observer Music cover. We started to admire the London work as well; people like Pride, Mode2 and Zaki Dee and The Chrome Angelz. It was a step up on what was happening in Bristol and we started to put on some parties with Newtrament and some of the London sound systems.”

Meanwhile in Bristol and Birmingham, things were also taking off; 3D, Nick Walker, Pride and The Z-Boys joined forces with The Wild Bunch to put on a show at the Arnolfini in 1985, meeting with young artists Goldie and New Yorkers, Brim and Bio. 3D worked with Brim and the TATS Cru to produce the Bombin’ documentary, before moving on to help Goldie curate the ‘Rockin’ the City’ graffiti show in Birmingham in 1987.

However, with the heightened public exposure, there also came the increased attention of the law: “I think by ’87 I’d been busted twice. Also, a big anti-tagging campaign called Operation Anderson had started. They were regularly visiting my house, the
pub I lived in with my family, showing me sketches and asking me if I knew anything about anything, it was quite ridiculous, really. Obviously they were quite keen to get everyone at that time.”

Leaving school halfway through the sixth form - “I was kicked out actually, I got suspended from school” - Del Naja developed his homegrown art form through a youth scheme magazine project, falling back on the British benefits system to tide him through the more threadbare moments. “We were trying to get into graphic design, I guess, and that didn’t really get me anywhere, so I spent quite a bit of time on the old ‘rock’n’roll’ Ca.k.a ‘dole’ or social security] - about six years. I think for me the punk sleeves and the paste-up ethos of making your own art was translated into making your own flyers, and when we did The Wild Bunch thing, it was almost an instinctive sense of what to do.

“I spent a lot of years in the photocopy shop, first the black and white ones and then when the colour ones came out, I thought, ‘wow this is amazing’. I used to take photos of the paintings that I was doing at home and then I’d take them down and invert the colours on the copier. Before PhotoShop, that was my favourite tool, then I’d take them back home and start painting on the inversions. Because I’d been colourblind all my life, people always felt I had a strange way of seeing colours and I was always fascinated by the inversions -orange became blue, and that blew my mind.

“Photocopy shops became the place where you could get everything done. We’d take rough artwork in and get 500 flyers done, cut them on the guillotine and then we’d go and hand them out. That was all part of putting a show on in those days. It was like a small industry of everybody coming together to work on an event. Organising everything from the generator to the sound system to getting booze from the cash and carry, to getting flyers done, getting someone to run the door, getting the wall space to put a painting on - it was all part of the night. It was different from the punk scene in one respect, because the punk scene was quite London-oriented. Although there was a big Bristol punk scene, and there were a lot of good Bristol bands like Disorder, Chaos UK, Vice Squad and Lunatic Fringe. But I think when hip-hop happened for us and The Wild Bunch, it suddenly felt like we owned our own scene, like we could create something from scratch. Even though it was totally based historically on the reggae sound system and The Blues Club and what was coming out of New York, that collision of those two cultures was what made The Wild Bunch.”

For 3D, his street artwork reached a pinnacle in the late ‘80s, when he felt he had mastered Wild Style lettering and characters: “In 19871 probably painted my most cognitive graffiti work. That’s when I was hanging out a lot with Inkie and we used to spend nights in sketching. I had learned quite a lot about the Wild Style by that point - how to form the alphabets - and I think I hit that kind of peak for myself at that point. Then the music thing started to take over a bit.”

Finding some space in the garage of Dave McDonald, co-owner of the Dug Out, he was able to use it as a studio and gallery. Ever the misfit, Del Naja wanted to pursue a different direction now the graffiti movement was in full swing. Influenced by Basquiat’s spontaneous style, he then began looking at Warhol’s repetitive images and studied stencilling and screen-printing.

“No one was stencilling at the time, it just wasn’t on the radar at all. So I started doing these stencils of Marilyn, Maggie Thatcher, Robert De Niro, Mike Tyson. I did a Mona Lisa one, which was the one I put in the ’87 show in Birmingham that had mixed reception from the lads (laughs). They were, like, ‘what are you doing?’ It was almost like poison in the graffiti world at the time to be using a stencil; it was like a toxic piece (laughs again). Someone actually tried to rip off the canvas. There were rumours after that it was John Nation from the Barton Hill Youth Club, which I was quite flattered by, because I thought he was taking it home. But at the time, I thought that someone had ripped it off because they hated it so much and they were trying to destroy it. I was quite paranoid about this stencilling thing.

“Back in Bristol I started working on it and did a small show in London in ’89 at the Black Bull Gallery in Fulham. Around that time, Massive Attack signed to Virgin and we were getting our demos together. I started thinking about sleeve designs and I went back to punk for that. I was looking at the Stiff Little Fingers logo and books on industrial and medical logos and it became a big part of my repertoire; the idea of being able to paint freehand in a more abstract, Basquiat way and then being able to drop stencils on top of it as a total contrast. That came to be the way I used to paint throughout the early ‘90s.”

The later album artwork of Heligoland harks back to the work of the ‘90s, with a minstrel-esque image taken straight out of a tour flyer created by the Japanese promoters for The Wild Bunch tour. “It had these really badly racially stereotyped images of, I think it was meant to be Claude and G, as almost, like, cartoon black people from Tintin. We were shocked by it and highly amused and that was what they were using as promo for us. So we all kept these flyers ‘cause we were amazed that’s what they would do for us. With Heligoland I wanted to try to create a cross-cultural image of a character with this whole identity crisis going on in terms of media perceptions of ourselves and our cultural boundaries and that was totally influenced by the ’86 experience I think, you know. It’s funny, you do new things but it’s hard to escape your past…”

While Massive Attack continued to grow commercially, 3D found the response he got from creating music more stimulating than the buzz of painting the streets. However, as the band grew, so did the opportunities for exploring new forms of artwork and the advent of the digital era brought with it more advanced computer-aided design programmes and fresh avenues for 3D to explore. The analogue ideas behind Blue Lines were discarded for a more hi-tech interface with which to engage the increasingly digital-savvy public.

“With some of the images I was creating - some of the Eurochild characters and the monkey-type images - we started to create some computer versions, which began to appear on the Protection record and then defined the way we took our sound system show out. When it came to Protection, we wanted to create something more multimedia. So we started to try to recreate a sound system show but illustrate it. We tried to work with a virtual reality company and if you remember at the time in ’94, it was around then that the ‘Oculus Rift’ came out.

“Lawnmower Man infected me and destroyed the VR-moment, ‘cause it suggested that with a headset on, you would have that sort of experience and it was nothing like that. There was a sense of total disappointment, so instead we created a real environment in a room. We filled it with camo netting, lighting and built these giant sculptures in Bristol. It was pretty much an extravagance really. There were five of these full-size Eurochild fiberglass and plastic sculptures, which have been dispersed around the country now. I think James (Lavelle) might have one actually. James has got a pretty good collection of everything (laughs). We decided to make a VR reality of our sound system where you’d go into a room and it would be like, ‘what the fuck?!’ It was totally uneconomical and we didn’t really have the tour bus and tour truck potential to pull it off. We were probably trying to pull off a show that belonged in an arena and we were putting it on in nightclubs.”

The studio album, Mezzanine, turned into a monster; selling over 3 million copies and a launching a gruelling 18-month tour. The 2003 release of 100th Window spawned a new’ visual live show, incorporating a starker, more austere use of stock exchange-style LED light displays. Fully immersed in the internet age, the artwork took on a more binary and political format. “Sometimes it was a bombardment of information and, at times, at odds with the music; some of the music would be doing one thing and what it was doing with statistics and numbers was completely the opposite. But in fact it created a really interesting, provocative collage, you know? But in retrospect a lot of these things did remove me from the art scene quite dramatically.”

At the same time, something odd was happening to the graffiti scene Del Naja knew and loved. “When I look back at the art scene, it was changing quite radically. Graffiti had been christened ‘urban art’ and it had become another major force to be reckoned with in the commercial art world. But the quality of the artists had just jumped dramatically - there were so many great artists to be recognised internationally. It was a different world, you know?”

True to his anti-establishment ethos, 3D’s socially conscious punk aesthetic still found a creative outlet, such as when the band became involved with Occupy Christmas, squatting the UBS Bank Christmas party. He was also a staunch vocal opponent of the 2003 Iraq war. Del Naja still enjoys working with organisations on the front line, his conscience reminding him not to become too complacent and comfortable. “I’m always attracted to organisations and people that seem to be fighting against the established ideas, you know what I mean? I always find that intriguing and I always find that admirable. I think it’s really important for us, as a band, having been able to travel the world, to offer something - even if it’s only a very small part of it - back.”

Broadly taking a hiatus from his personal art, 3D sporadically his toes in and out of the art scene, releasing prints with Pictures on Walls and, more recently, working with Lazarides. The POW Santa’s Ghetto events became an annual call to arms for his painting, but it wasn’t until Banksy’s Cans Festival and James Lavelle’s U.N.K.L.E. War Stories album sleeve design, that Del Naja became interested in a more analogue form of expression again. “I put some pieces together for the artwork because the three previous projects had been very digital and obviously it was amazing working with people like Nick Knight and Tom Hingston. We had a really nice thing going on; we all understood what we were trying to get out of it. So going back to painting meant changing that up a bit and breaking away from that.

I guess you get into comfortable places, whether it’s a studio or in an art studio, in terms of the lifestyle, you start to be drawn towards your areas of comfort, and sometimes it takes other people to push you out.”

Heligoland was quite obviously based on references to the slave trade, and the colonial history of Bristol, opening the wounds of some debates that continued to rage on in the city over Colston Hall and the legacy of the Merchant Venturers. Never one to shy away from controversy, Del Naja stirred up a small hornets’ nest when he realised the independent Mayor of Bristol, George Ferguson, was a paid up member of the Merchant Venturers. Challenging Ferguson’s stance, Rob sent him an open letter about his membership and opened up a debate, sending him a slave-themed piece from POW for a charity auction, prompting the mayor’s suspension of his membership as a Merchant Venturer and a continuing relationship in which the two continue to discuss city developments.

Under Ferguson, Bristol’s liberal microcosm seems to keep dipped developing as a city that has produced See No Evil - the yearly street art festival spearheaded by Inkie - as well as anomalies like The Peoples Republic of Stokes Croft and the experimental community currency, the Bristol Pound. A healthy discourse on the direction of the city continues, with the somewhat negative aspects of the riots and an unwelcome reception to Tesco in the area turning into positive conversations. “It’s keeping the debate in the air about the city’s inhabitants and its politicians have a responsibility towards each other. At the same time, it is a creative city and because it’s not London, it’s slightly independent and it’s a satellite to that giant hub, which runs at its own speed.”

3D continues to work with Massive Attack on studio records and is currently collaborating with Adam Curtis on some exciting new live show and production ideas. The live shows are still a huge draw for Del Naja, as they have been since he first put on warehouse parties on the Frontline in St Paul’s 20 years ago. But for 3D it’s always been more about the process. “As much as putting your record out is an attractive proposition, or putting on a show at a gallery, I don’t know what it is about these kind of events, but I’m really drawn to them. Not just the night itself but the process of getting everything, every bit of detail, the flyer, the presentation, the music, the art, do you know what I mean? Maybe I’m in the wrong business, man. Maybe I was meant to be in theatre, maybe I was in the wrong place. There’s still time…”

Continuing his own artwork as 3D, he concludes a chapter of that with the release of a book later in the year: “I think putting that book together is a good reason to close the page on everything I’ve done so far, shut that book now and then start on something new. That’s going to be a big challenge for me, I think, okay you’ve done all the early graffiti work and abstracted forms and stencilling and you got into the digital age and went into LED and all this stuff, you know? And you’ve gone back to painting in the way you knew instinctively, maybe, but I think doing something completely different now is the challenge.”

Noting that the book is a retrospective of his work, he considers the span of it, putting the whole spectrum into a time capsule that really indicates how far this journey has taken him. “It’s 1983 to 2013, so that’s 30 years, which is pretty scary…”

Written By Roland Henry

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A new Massive Attack album is always an event, and this year’s 100th Window was perhaps the most eagerly anticipated yet. Like its predecessor Mezzanine, it was co-produced and co-written by Neil Davidge.

The city of Bristol is synonymous with acts such as Portishead, Kosheen, Roni Size & Reprazent, Wedding Present and PJ Harvey, but most of all Massive Attack, a group who have helped redefine dance music. Their 1991 debut album Blue Lines blended hip-hop, new wave, reggae, early house and techno as well as giving us the memorable single ‘Unfinished Sympathy’. The follow-up Protection, featuring Tracey Thorn and produced by Massive Attack and Nellee Hooper, was an equal success, cementing their position as a pioneering musical force.

Then came the difficult third album Mezzanine. By the time they recorded it, the band had crossed paths with singer/songwriter/remixer and producer Neil Davidge, with whom they had worked on a number of soundtracks (including Batman Forever) and special project mixes like the HELP album. The collaboration has since flourished and helped draw together what was becoming a fragmented working relationship between the founding band members.

“Mezzanine was a pretty sketchy album in terms of the way we worked,” recalls Neil, “because the band, as reported a lot at that time, were not getting on. So I’d be in the studio working with one of the members and someone else would come in, then the person I had been working with would leave and I’d have to change the track I was working on because they didn’t want to work on that track, they wanted to work on something different. Sometimes I’d be working on perhaps four different tracks in one day, which was a pretty messy way to work.” Mezzanine had shown the band taking a new, guitar-led direction, which established the writing and production liaison between Neil Davidge and Robert Del Naja, better know as 3D or simply D. With founding member Andrew ‘Mushroom’ Vowles’ departure following Mezzanine and Grant ‘Daddy Gee’ Marshall’s current sabbatical, D has increasingly become the driving force behind Massive Attack.

“Originally I was going to be programmer/engineer,” recalls Neil, “but we got on so well that I ended up co-producing the album and co-writing. The only reason Mezzanine hung together as an album was because the two of us drove it through, and there’s a similar scenario to the new album 100th Window. If there were neither one of us in the studio then nothing would happen.

D has a very unique way of seeing a project, be it a musical one or visual one, and I’ve got the ability to turn what he’s talking about into actual musical form, so it’s pretty essential that the two of us are both in the studio.”

The fact that Davidge used to be a graphic designer and D is renowned for his artistic vision within Massive Attack both musically and with artwork design is another point of reference. “We communicate in a very similar way — we talk about visuals when it comes to a piece of music. It’s about the picture it makes — it’s all about textures and contrasts and is a very visual language. A lot of more traditional producers don’t necessarily communicate in that way, which I think D has found difficult in the past. When we started talking about records we loved we just found that we were talking the same language, which is essential.”

100th Window has been three years in the making, mainly because of the band’s initial approach to the recording process. Off the back of touring Mezzanine the live band decamped to Ridge Farm Studio, where three Pro Tools rigs were set up to record their every move as they jammed around pre-prepared loops. “We had one multitrack Pro Tools rig recording everything and one playing the loops,” explains Lee Shephard, the band’s engineer and Neil’s right-hand man. “We then had another machine just recording the stereo out of the desk, so that we had a constant monitor mix of what we were hearing to reference. I had to keep doing drive changes, running down to the machine room to swap a drive and then back up.”

“As a technical exercise it was quite an achievement,” continues Neil. “We spent a month doing that, recording every single note that was played, because we wouldn’t actually play the band anything before they started recording. We ended up with about 80 hours worth of material to sift through and to piece together as an album. It worked really well on the basis that we got some great performances, but sadly, when you took things out of context they suddenly didn’t work.”

As a concentrated effort the band had spent around six months working like this before realising it was not going in the right direction, even though at that stage they weren’t sure what the right direction was! Only one part was eventually used from those sessions, a guitar riff by Angelo which can be heard on ‘What Your Soul Sings’. Back at the band’s Bristol studio they made the difficult decision to go back to basics.

“We literally scrapped the whole lot and started again,” confesses Neil. “And we started in more of a way that we’d been familiar with, where you would start with a sound, and that sound would become a part, and that part would become a loop or small musical arrangement, and then you’d start building over the top of that. Again, because me and D both see music as a very visual thing, the textures have to be there — we have to have those contrasts, whether we start with a small synth part and then put some crusty guitars against that, or start with some beats and create a picture from that.

“We needed to start from that very simple basis, sketching out an idea and then filling it in. It had to be a building-block kind of process for us to actually feel that it was what we wanted to try and do, otherwise it was too out of control. We could appreciate the music that the band were making, it was very exciting, but you couldn’t take one single part and say that was the core of it — it just didn’t hang together. The bass line might work well with the drums, but you’d take the bass line on its own and it didn’t sound that great. So it was only when we wrote a bass line that we wanted to hear on the record that we started to get to the core of what we were trying to do on this new album.

“I guess it’s always been an abstract process with Massive Attack. There’s never been logic to it, it’s always been a gut thing — I don’t approach things from a cerebral point of view — it’s always whether something does it for me or it doesn’t. And wherever I am dictates where I’m going.”

This intuitive and cavalier approach helps give the tracks on 100th Window a real sense of natural movement untouched by formulaic or standard structures. “There are structures in the tracks, but it’s always what comes before that dictates what comes after,” explains Neil. “I think people, especially these days, get four bars, build that up and find another four bars to go with it — then one’s your verse and one’s your chorus — and I don’t find that particularly inspiring. I like things to grow, in the same way that in a conversation you’ll start at one point but you’ll end up somewhere completely different, and it will be a surprise and exciting because who could have predicted that you would have ended up there? In the same way I think that music has to have an element of surprise, there has to be a sense of natural progression even if you suddenly drop a huge drum beat over a nice synth part. It has to seem like that was the right move to make, but you can’t get there before you’ve done the nice little quiet bit. It has to make sense as a journey. Too much music these days doesn’t pay attention to what music should be about, which is communicating ideas and feelings. If you get that bit right then you can write unconventional structures and melodies that work.”

The free-form nature of the new tracks is also a direct result of the band fully embracing Pro Tools as a writing medium and abandoning sequencers, samplers and MIDI. “On the last album we used Cubase Audio and the Akai MPC3000, but these days samplers and MIDI are hardly ever used.

I think the fact that we haven’t used MIDI or samplers has affected the sound of the album,” admits Neil, citing the strings on ‘What Your Soul Sings’ as an example. “That started when we brought in a violinist friend of ours, Stuart Cordon, and he played just a simple three-note two-chord thing. I used Pure Pitch to rearrange the notation and create the arrangement, rather than get a sample CD of string notes and then use MIDI. It’s only through the context of Pro Tools that I can fully realise things like that and it’s an essential part of the way I work these days.”

Neil has a passion for making things sound like anything but what they are, like the weird and randomly fluctuating keyboard sound on ‘Small Time Shot Away’. “The reality of that is that it was just a single chord held on ajuno playing a sine wave doing an arpeggio, but I actually went through using Wave Mechanics’ Speed plug-in to create different textures. It was just a one-bar loop but I love it when you take something, slow it down, take it up or down an octave and just keep pushing it until obviously it’s unusable as sound — but always going right to the very edge before you come back and say ‘Well, I’m going to use that bit.’ So the keyboards on that track were created through that process and then re-editing all those parts to work as a performance.

“If you’re making music and you know what’s going to happen next then it just becomes boring. I love the part of it where you try something, you don’t know what it’s going to sound like, press go and it either sounds a complete mess or it sounds amazing — and that’s the bit I get off on. If you’re surprised by what you’re doing then people listening to it will be even more surprised.”

There are also some intriguiging effects on the intro to another track, ‘Butterfly Caught’: “That was from one of those all-night sessions that I did! I think they were originally some cymbal sounds, and again, I stretched them until they became something completely different and the harmonics within the sounds themselves became the more dominant features. Then I took those harmonics and created the notation using Speed to alter it beyond all recognition.”

Similarly, there’s a bass line on ‘Butterfly Caught’ that was originally a vocal part by D: now it sounds more like a Moog bass. “We pitched it around, put it through Recti-Fi and various other plug-ins to create that texture, and then edited that to create the bass line. With the amount of processing available nowadays, especially on Pro Tools, if you wanted to you could make a complete orchestration from a cymbal sound.

You can warp sounds until they become something completely different. A percussive sound becomes a melodic instrument, for example the drums on ‘Everywhen’ — that was just a kick, rim shot and a hi-hat but put through various delays, Doppler effects and CRM pole filters that basically created a melodic backbone for the track. A lot of people think it’s guitar noises but there’s not a single guitar sound on that track.

“I like turning sounds on their head — it’s a challenge and by setting yourself that challenge you’re using your ingenuity, something that’s very personal to you, based on your experiences, your view of the world, so it becomes unique.”

100th Window was mixed, in the traditional way, at Olympic Studios with the aid of Mark ‘Spike’ Stent. His job was to enhance the tracks and give them the right perspective, because much of the material had in effect been mixed already as part of the recording process.

“A lot of the sounds were committed, edited, re-committed and then edited again, so you’d almost have to use what we’d done here, although we always gave ourselves the option to go back if we needed to,” recounts Neil. “For the last three years we’ve been backing up everything we record, and we’ve now gone past the Terabyte [ 1,000 Gigabytes] mark on our backups.”

“Often we’d work with bounced material,” adds Shephard, “and when we wanted to change things we would follow the trail back to when it was originally mixed, find the Pro Tools Session and get that up. I use Retrospect, a Mac-based program that does incremental backups, and it’s got a comprehensive search facility so that you can search for things using keywords and dates. Often I have to find things that were done two or three years ago, maybe something that was done for another track that they want to put in the latest track. So I have to hunt it down using all the clues available.”

For Neil Davidge the arranging and mixing process never stops, it’s an ongoing thing that is taken right up to the last moment — even when mastering. “We mix down on to 192 and the stems will comprise of a stereo drum track, stereo bass track, stereo vocals, stereo guitars, keyboards and strings — so we’d probably end up with four or five stereo tracks which would comprise the mix. We did a fair deal of re-EQ’ing at the final cut [utilising their new newly acquired Sony Oxford EQ plug-in] to the point where I was arguing with Tim, the cutting engineer at Metropolis, that perhaps he should get some kind of mixing credit on the album!

“The way we did it was to do the basic stem tweaks here in Bristol, mainly rides and a bit of rearranging, and then we’d go to Metropolis and EQ and fine-tune some of the rides at the cut. I think that’s going to happen more often — a lot more people are going to be going in and cutting from stems. We did it on Mezzanine, although at that point it was a lot more basic. As a basic system for cutting from it makes a lot of sense — the only benefit you don’t have is the overall compression that you might have at the mix, but you can always hire in an outboard compressor for that.,/p>

“We spent three days cutting this album. The first day we went in listened through to everything and did some overall tweaks on the EQ, then the next day we started tweaking individual things because we’d find that by EQ’ing the whole track the vocals would get lost and we’d need to EQ other parts to compensate for that.”

Neil has definite ideas about how stereo should be used to create a compelling mix, and uses a lot of movement and phasing effects. “It creates a wider picture,” he explains. “I guess it’s from a point of view of trying to create a picture, again, that’s interesting — so you obviously want movement in it. It turns your speaker system into less of a window and more of a theatre for the sounds, and the music wraps around you as you listen to it. I’ve never liked records where you feel like you have to put your head between the speakers to get the full benefit — I like records that come out from the speakers to greet you in the room. Then the room is more of the environment, which is much more engaging from that point of view.”

100th Window, the title taken from a cult electronic security book written by Charles Jennings, is an intense and multi-layered album. One of the band’s self-imposed briefs was to create an album that was warmer than Mezzanine but not softer.

“We tend to set ourselves these impossible tasks: ‘bigger but smaller’, ‘warmer but not softer’,” laughs Neil, “and we talk about it and get excited about the concept, but there’s always the practical aspect of how you can physically make it work. I’m pretty nocturnal when it comes to making music, I work through the night a lot of the time, and it’s then that these conflicting ideas come together and actually make sense, but it’s not easy. It’s a bit of a tall order to make an album that’s good and different. Especially these days it’s almost an impossible task because nothing is completely original any more — it’s just not feasible. So you’ve got to go to other places and set yourself almost impossible briefs to get somewhere different, which is what we definitely did with this album. We ( challenged ourselves in many different ways.

“This album’s not going to be an album that you listen to once and go ‘Wow, I totally get this.’ It’s going to have to be an album that you listen to half-a-dozen times before it starts to make sense. Most of my favourite albums, and the ones that I continually go back to, are the ones that took me a while to get into in the first place. After we’ve finished an album I can’t tell if it’s genius or just OK — I won’t be able to tell you that for maybe another six months. You just try and put all your positive energy into it whilst you’re making it and hope that it represents what you were going through at that point. And it does represent where we were at creatively through the making of the album.”

THE RED LIIGHT’S ALWAYS ON

Massive Attack albums are renowned for their carefully chosen guest vocalists — these have included Shara Nelson, Tracey Thorn, Tricky and Liz Frasier, and now on 100th Window the band have finally got to work with Sinead O’Connor.

“I think it was on Protection that the band first considered Sinead as an option,” recalls Neil, “so it’s always been in the back of everyone’s mind that at some point Sinead might be a good person to collaborate with. We originally tried Liz [Frasier, of the Cocteau Twins] and it just didn’t work out because she wasn’t in the right place to be writing again — she’s got some conflict at the moment as to whether she should be writing or performing — which is a real shame because one of the highlights of my musical career was sitting in a room recording her, especially on ‘Teardrop’, it was really quite a moment. So I was disappointed and tried to encourage her into the studio for the best part of a year and I got her in a few times and we got some things down, but she just didn’t have whatever it is in her to go to the next stage. So in the end we had to call it a day and started panicking about who was going to sing on this album.

“Sinead’s a very different singer to Liz. Liz is quite a perfectionist when she sings — we’d be looping round a section and I’d hear her working out the timing of her vibrato on single words! Sinead’s a totally different kind of performer — it’s more about the emotional context and the lyrical aspect of it and if you’ve got her in the right frame of mind then that’s the take. It might have a few wobbly bits in it but that’s her personality. She’s a very outspoken but nice person to work with.” Massive Attack’s studio space at Christchurch has no live or vocal room: instead, everything is recorded in the control room, an aspect that Neil uses to his advantage. “I like working with vocalists in the control room. There’s a certain communication that you need to have, not necessarily a verbal one, but to see what they’re doing and how you can help them. From a production point of view I prefer singers to sit down, to be relaxed, even though there may be certain problems that you get with breathing. It seems to suit the Massive Attack sound to have them sat down in a very relaxed scenario to perform, because you get a presence and a conversational kind of thing. I love that in great singers, you listen to the record and you feel that they’re talking to you, singing to you — I don’t like it when you’ve got a voice at the back of the mix drowned in reverb, it doesn’t do anything for me.

“I like to capture the moment in the studio and tend to record everything that someone does, ending up with hours of material of which you’ll only pick out 30 seconds — but I prefer to work that way rather than say ‘That was a great part, practise that and then we’ll go and record it.’ The moment’s lost as far as I’m concerned — it happens once and that’s it. We’ve got a scenario set up in the studio where we can record everything that’s going on, with large removable drives we can just keep going for hours. And that for me is most important: there’s magic that happens in the studio. It might be purely accidental, but if you’re recording as those accidents are happening then those accidents can become the track. Usually people only start recording when they’ve decided what they’re going to do, which for me is a definite no-no. There’s also a certain confidence that a performer has whilst they’re rehearsing a part, which is lost when they know the red light’s on — so to get over that phobia, the red light’s on all the time. As soon as you walk in the room, the red light’s on, so you get used to it and it’s the norm.”

THE VOCAL PATH

Lee Shephard’s working relationship with the band often requires him to take sounds created by Neil and make them work within the context of a mix, a process that will quite often include reprocessing, EQ and compression. There’s also a particular routing when it comes round to recording vocals.

“It begins with a Neumann M147 valve mic which goes straight into the Avalon. I don’t use any compression or EQ at that stage, just use it as a preamp. Then it goes from there into the Drawmer 1960, on which I really like the compressor at the number 6 setting. I used to use the Focusrite, but the things evolved during the making of the album and I settled on that chain, which has a lot to do with the compressor on the Drawmer. Then the signal goes out of that straight into the Apogee Trak 2 and that’s it. We don’t tend to put any EQ on, just keep a consistent sound and EQ in Pro Tools if we need to.”

The chain is something that Lee’s developed over the last three years and works well with most voices including D’s, which has a particular raspiness and airy quality. “I will double-track certain things but a lot of that is inherent in his voice,” says Neil. “It depends on when you get him — if you get him after the pub, and we tend to record most of his vocals late at night, he’s probably been talking all day and his voice has got to the stage where it is quite raspy anyway. I’ll normally record half-a-dozen takes with him, comp together from those and find a take that represents his vocal sound the best. He’s always got something to say, lines in his head that come out there and then. If you’d sat him down with a paper and pen he wouldn’t have written it in that form.”

RECORD FIRST, WRITE LATER

As mentioned earlier, Neil Davidge is very much a producer who will ‘record first and ask questions later’, and this means he often ends up recording vocals before the song in question is fully written.

“I have a way of working with artists, although Sinead O’Connor didn’t fit into that category, where I like to get people to sing a song the way it feels right at that point, and it doesn’t necessarily depend on them having the structure of the song worked out. If the mood is right and they’re in the right frame of mind I’m quite happy to get the vocal down, In the same way as with guitars or any other sort of instrumental performance. And generally that tends to be at the time when they’re writing the thing itself and so I like them to finish off the writing process whilst we’re recording, because that’s the point at which the magic occurs.

“But obviously the down side of that is that sometimes the structures aren’t wholly thought out, so it may require that I go in there and re-edit the performance to work as a song. Equally there are times when melodically it might not make sense because the structure’s not there and you don’t know if you’re going to go up on the last line or keep it down. So from time to time I will change a melody to make it work as a song structure, and I quite often use Pure Pitch to do that, which i tend to use more as a writing tool than a pitch-correction tool. I think a lot of people slap Auto-Tune over the whole performance and that’s it — I don’t like to do that and I don’t like it to sound like you’ve severely pitched someone.”

One instance where Neil took this method to the limit was when working with long-time vocal contributor Horace Andy. “We had a simple melodic structure, D would write the lyrics and then I’d get Horace to sing round the one line constantly going round and round, recording different ways of singing that line. Then I constructed the song afterwards, choosing the lines that worked best and that seemed to flow naturally, which was a very abstract way of working. I’d always get him to start quietly and then build to a crescendo and the come back down again. I’d usually use the line after he’d sung in full voice, once he’d settled back down and after he’d got the classic, trademark gated/tremolo vocal effect out of the way.”

Luckily Horace didn’t object to this way of working. “When we were doing it he was very suspicious, and it took a lot of coaxing to get him to do that, but once we’d done it and after I’d comped the tracks and rearranged the vocals then played it to him, it blew him away. I guess it takes a lot of trust for a performer to let someone do that, but I used to be a singer so I come at it from that angle.”

Written By Nigel Humberstone

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As a graffiti artist and painter, Robert Del Naja was the obvious choice to handle the visual direction of the band he co-founded, Massive Attack. As the band’s popularity grew, so did the scale and ambition of their sleeve artwork and live shows, both conceptually and in terms of process and presentation. This month sees the publication, by The Vinyl Factory, of a monograph of Del Naja’s work for the band. He sat down with Vinyl Factory Creative Director Sean Bidder to discuss his influences, ideas and the art of Massive Attack.

Where did the idea of Massive Attack’s flame symbol originate?

The flame logo was stolen from and inspired by the Stiff Little Fingers album sleeve Inflammable Material. SLF were the first band I saw play live, in 1979, in the Colston Hall, of all places. That had a big impact on me. I was 14.1 fell in love with that album; it’s such a powerful record. The sleeve always stood out. In amongst all my punk records nothing was quite as graphic as that, as simple. The transformation of John Lydon from The Pistols to PiL also had a big impact on me musically and stylistically. Turning the band literally into a brand was brilliantly ironic and inspiring.

How did your background as a graffiti artist affect your approach to making artwork?

With no formal graphic training, my experience was limited to early self-publishing: do-it-yourself flyers, Tippex, Letraset and a scalpel. Back then for me publishing was quite literally hanging out in a photocopying shop. But it gave me confidence as you got direct feedback from your peers. Instant art, homemade, ‘fucked up and photocopied’. The cut and paste approach is very apparent in the artwork for Protection.

How did the emerging aesthetic of hip-hop influence your artwork?

The music I had been influenced by shared an aesthetic. Punk, new wave, dub and hip-hop: alternative and independent. The art taken care of by the bands or the young labels. The labels were like studios and the artists were part of bigger crews, the producers were also curators. The graffiti artists gave the new hip-hop scene something new visually: new forms of calligraphy. One of the most influential sets of sleeves was the Celluloid 12” series of releases with Futura 2000 and Phase 2, Fab Five Freddy. The backs of the sleeves created one large Futura 2000 painting. It was something that we aspired to. We went to Circa Records with the intention of doing it ourselves.

We’d finished the Blue Lines demo, but had no idea of what was coming next. Cameron McVeigh, who was managing us and producing the album, introduced me to [stylist] Judy Blame and Anthony and Stephanie at Michael Nash. I had no experience of that level of artwork and design, we weren’t using powerful computers back then, no Photoshop; it was very analogue. So I went into their studio and they had all these cameras and scanners, it was very exciting!

And considering that the London fashion media and art scene can be quite arsey, they were the opposite, they were really friendly and inclusive. Me and Mushroom used to go to their studio regularly and just talk absolute rubbish to them for days on end. Judy Blame had a very strong visual identity and he really helped me to develop themes, from the sketchbook to the final product. I became totally hooked on the process.

What was the thinking behind the hand that appeared on Unfinished?

I’d started painting with stencils in the mid-80s, inspired by Warhol repeats and industrial symbols. One of my favourite icons was the ‘medical hand’ - I had used it on various paintings including a series of monkey characters. The hand stencil got me thinking about the cover of Unfinished. When we were shooting the video in LA, it was the build-up to the first Gulf War.

We had major issues with the attack on Iraq personally and the press had begun to go loopy. I wanted to create an image using the hand but covered in oil as if in surrender with a bandage on it, mimicking one of the medical hazard symbols. It somehow suited the song. We ended up famously removing the word ‘attack’ from the album sleeve because of the association with the tabloid catchphrase ‘a massiv attack on Iraqi’ Which was horrible.

And the first vinyl issue of Blue Lines had a screenprinted cardboard cover…

It fitted with the DIY ethos and was influenced by PiL’s Metal Box album package. We used a more downmarket cardboard box idea! As soon as we’d sourced som< boxes with the flame logo on them and laid them al out we decided that no other material was going to be as effective as this. So we tried to use the material in the most authentic way possible.

That was different from what everyone else wa\ doing with record sleeves at the time - which was more polished, more slick…

A notion had built around us at the label Circa that the emphasis remain on us being from Bristol, independent from the mainstream music business: something coming from its own corner of the world. We weren’t being pulled apart by high-end design studios and letting other people manage us or art direct us. The approach crossed over to the videos too.

When we met with [director] Baillie Walsh, we had all decided that everything had to be shot on film, everything done in camera, it didn’t fit with everyone else’s notions of a pop video at the time. It had to feel like authentic movie-making. It all became quite obsessive.

Around this time, an abstract human character began to emerge in your paintings and artwork…

I’d been heavily influenced by Basquiat. I was introduced to his work directly through hip-hop music and the NYC graffiti scene that included Fred Braithwaite and Futura 2000.
I’d stopped painting illegally after two arrests and I’d moved into this garage-cum-studio under the Montpelier hotel. The arrangement with The Mont’ was perfect. I got somewhere to paint in return for decorating the big upstairs pool room: my own evolving gallery! I saw Basquiat’s work in the flesh in Japan and it inspired me to break away from the calligraphy of the traditional graffiti art form.

I tried to paint more boldly and spontaneously as opposed to methodically creating layers with aerosol.

Did you go to art galleries as a kid?

To be honest, no. Apart from school trips! Now you can spend a day on the internet and collect visual information on any artist but back then it was very much magazine culture. You were lucky to find anything, or you had to go to an art book shop and stare at the pictures like a camera, trying to memorise them. As a kid I was a mad comic fiend, I was obsessed by artists like Jack Kirby, and John Romita. My school exercise books were literally covered with superhero sketches. The comic shop was my gallery I guess….

The band’s second album, Protection, saw you evolve your artwork into new areas… The Eurochild character emerged.

We wanted to use the artwork and imagery as a starting point for something more bizarre and expansive using computer graphics. And VR. Something that we could use as part of the soundsystem live show. At the same time we didn’t want to polish it. We wanted to keep it quite lo-res. The Eurochild image on the cover became quite omnipresent for a few years. It started as a painting for The Face magazine about new Europe, about the re-emergence of neo-fascists. The character was like a fascist fast food logo, complete with cutlery and swastika. It was a little childish to be honest. I dropped the swastika for obvious reasons.

The packaging of the album was important too…

This was the middle of the CD era, the 90s. I could never get my head around the fact that I wasn’t creating everything on 12X12. The CD format didn’t interest me whatsoever. It was always the vinyl that you aspired to design as the final product; it felt like an object, whether you wrapped it in cardboard or plastic, as opposed to a jewel case CD that would just fall apart. This was an attempt to make the CD into an object. We were also in a battle with the record company back then about product packaging deductions. We were on some pretty poor deals, we had the lowest cut of the cake, including packaging deductions. It felt is if you were penalised for good design, even when we were in effect doing the marketing for them by creating desirable products!

But we were like ‘fuck it’, we’re always gonna make it as good as we can. By then I was obsessed by the final product: that was the exciting bit. We continued with cardboard and started using plastic too. We turned the tour into a multimedia event, built a military set with sculptures and TVs, a futurist sound system which was reflected in the sleeve that Steve Bliss created for the Mad Professor remix.

Massive’s third album, Mezzanine, feels like a clean break with the past, musically and artistically…

lean break with the past, musically and artistically… Blue Lines had been the sum total of all our cultural history, from the soundsystem to the band. During this transitional process there’d been a lot of conflict in the band. Everything seemed to be changing, especially in the relationship between me and Grant and Mushroom. In a sense, the communal way of working had gone. Me and Mushroom had become more singular, withdrawn very much more into creative spaces. So when it came to the third album this conflict was probably at its most heightened. It meant the artwork had to completely change.

I was introduced to [designer] Tom Hingston and we struck up a new working friendship. I’d taken Tom a load of blown-up photocopies of beetles, Rorschach patterns and images of spiders; I was interested in the patterns on their backs, and the symmetry. The Rorschach thing was influenced by the character of the same name in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s graphic novel. That wasn’t quite effective as a sleeve idea but he’d shown me Nick [Knight’s] car crash images which he was doing, and at the same time Nick said he was interested in going to the National History Museum and photographing some of their catalogue of insects. That was much more exciting than the photocopies which were a throw-back to the world of paste-up. The idea of starting from scratch really appealed to me. I was very keen on keeping it in monochrome. Me and Tom wanted a lurid orange disc inside - one piece of colour. At this point we’d given in to the idea that the main format was a CD, so we wanted to make the CD format really striking.

I didn’t have any idea that Mezzanine would be so successful. We’d come out of Protection and there’d been a bit of criticism with the height of expectation: it was time to do something different. I wanted to take a more aggressive approach to music, to go backto the punk approach to making music, instead of looking at American hip-hop, old soul and jazz. And I wanted to do the same with the sleeve, to almost go back to a black and white fucked up aesthetic but with brand new materials, which is what we did. There’s also a bit of JG Ballard to it, sexual dark undertones, which was definitely in the record - this repression, sexuality passive-aggressive.

At what stage of making your fourth album, 100th Window, did you begin thinking about th artwork?

“We’re two thirds of the way through the album, by this point Mushroom is no longer in the band, G and me weren’t speaking at all because we’d fallen out over something. So making the album had become an almost autocratic process. My relationship with Neil Davidge, who co-pro-duced Mezzanine, became the only solid ground. I was speaking to Marc Quinn, who was making amazing rainbow sculptures. We talked about working on something, but it never materialised. I began thinking about how we could make sculptures out of crystal and shine a light through them. Tom had shown me some pictures Nick had created shooting ballistics material through frozen flowers and catching their explosions. I started to imagine how the process would work with glass objects, but not on a miniature level. So ‘let’s make life-size glass humans and blow them up’.

Luckily for me at the time Mezzanine had been such a success that the record company were totally cool with that. So we met a glassblower in Brixton and he agreed to make these nine different coloured glass figures and we went to a studio that Nick had set up to photograph with the shutter sychronised with the gun so it would capture the ballistic high points. We spent a day destroying these glass geezers. And it worked for the sleeve. It was the most fractious time in the band’s history.

Touring this album was the first time you worked with UVA, right?

I had felt that although our two-year Mezzanine tour had changed us from DJs and MCs into performers (I use that word only in the loosest sense!) I felt no sense of visual satisfaction and I had hardly painted at all for eight years! In fact it was really James Lavelle of UNKLE/Mo Wax fame and Banksy that kept that candle burning by getting me to collaborate on projects in-between. I had met Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima, who creates brilliant LED artworks. I had hoped to collaborate on the live show, but it soon became apparent that it would be too costly to commission him.

I wanted to use LED in its pure form, for data, pixel by pixel. It would also be an opportunity to transmit information for the first time. To illustrate the songs and confront some of the issues of our times in a provocative way. And so between us we worked out a load of scenes. Matt and Chris from UVA came to me with a presentation and created software specifically for this - and we put a show together.

What was the appeal of data?

It followed on from that idea in the packaging, the idea of keeping it pure. The idea for the show was similar - how do we break down all this technology and present it in its purest form as data, as information, as pixels, as numbers, as binary. And turn that into a visual spectacle. It was the first time that there was an opportunity to take a lot of the idea of sampling, of data storage and sharing, the information age, the internet and modern media being all-pervading, and present all that in one show. And also deal with all the political issues that seemed to be surrounding the band from the beginning - the first Gulf War, which is when we’d burst onto the scene, now the second Gulf War which was manifesting itself around the release of 100th Window, almost to the week. It was like history repeating itself.

This system gave us a great ability to present our feelings about the war and to reflect what was happening in terms of what information was being shared, and published, about the war and geo-politics in general. We were able to translate the show into local languages and copy stories from the local papers. During three days in Spain the text went from Spanish to Catalan to Basque. It was a massive operation in terms of its ambition.

What was your role in deciding what was presented on these screens?

Once we had decided that it was only going to be data and not video, we made a list of all the issues we wanted to confront - from politics to the environment to commercialism, consumerism. The job was then to apply that list to scenes in the songs. Then we’d look at things we could take from the press, media stories, tabloid stories. Then, in situ, we’d work out which songs they’d work with, in the studio, using backing tracks. And then we’d get to the gigs, do a couple of days production and start to hone it. Then, during the show, we’d change it again - me having watched it on stage, feeling what was working or not. It could be altered and updated everyday, the opposite of an arena rock show. We’d have translators so we could use the local language and be mobile and relevant as we travelled.

Back to Massive, how did the artwork for ‘Collected’ come about?

When we finally agreed to do a ‘best of’, which was against our better nature really but we’d signed a contract to do so, we treated it like a new project. I thought we could go back and look at Nick’s flowers. I remember one of the album’s I nicked off my mum, this Moody Blues album with a gatefold sleeve with these faces in the clouds like a James Bond-esque title sequence collage. I wanted to turn one of these flowers into a collage and this sleeve that I stared at as a kid. We also thought we’d lay out the entire archive in a warehouse, everything we’ve ever done that still existed and photograph it like an autopsy in an aircraft hangar.

By the time you started work on your fourth album, Heligoland, you were back into painting…

I was very aware during the Collected artwork process that I’d taken the digital medium to its max and wanted to go back to my roots a little. A painted cover image would need to depict a symbol of some sort to become iconic. The Heligoland hybrid character came out of that. It was fucked up enough to represent the contradictions in modern culture, the chaos of cultural identity. It was also referencing Bristol itself. We’d had a load of political rows with the council.

The Colston Hall was being updated and it seemed outrageous to us that given Edward Colston’s legacy of slave ship building that if you were going to modernise the building you wouldn’t give it a new name….one that felt more relevant to the present day and acknowledge the exploitation of the Bristol merchants and the origins of the city’s wealth and the ethnic diversity of the citizens. I hoped to present that information in the paintings. The minstrel and the slave plane seemed to get to the nasty heart of our institutions and history. And as Banksy said, it was ‘just the right side of racist’.

Let’s talk about your latest project, the Massive Attack vs. Adam Curtis collaboration that premiered at Manchester International Festival in July 2013. What did you set out to achieve from a visual perspective with these shows?

I wanted to try and create a live show, a visually arresting experience that actually had some meaning and wasn’t just eye candy. Every band and DJ show has started to look alike - hyper pyrotechnic visual, but no food for the brain. The question was whether we could create a new type of show that could tell a story cinematically, politically and musically in the form of a gig, while actually remaining coherent! A drive-in movie on acid with issues…. The way we started to make music with samplers was in effect making collages of new songs and melodies over old artefacts from the past. I felt a strong connection to Adam’s films. Like our music, they also used the past to conjure up something new or uncanny. He could cut and paste history to show you the world you thought you understood in a new way. He is also a great DJ, the songs he places in the films are always bang on. I’d been to Manchester International Festival a couple of times and seen the work Damon Albarn had done with them, which was amazing.

In 2011,1 met Alex Poots and he suggested creating something for MIF 13.1 immediately suggested a collaboration with Adam Curtis. I also wanted to work with UVA on the show as I felt the combination of our visual languages would suit the project. A lot of the things that I had tried to capture during the past Massive Attack shows over the last decade, the bigger issues and themes, Adam does that in a different way. He tells stories and uses central characters. There’s a tragic and romantic side to his films. That can come across with our music, but never quite with our visuals, which have always been in stark contrast to the songs (which is a strength in itself). The visuals might be based on statistics and information but the music’s telling an emotional story. The contrast works. But I’d felt we’d delivered that and it was time to do something more expansive and adventurous.

I have never seen anything like the new show which, in 2013, is pretty cool.

Up until five minutes before the first show no-one knew if it was going to work. For the first time in my life I had no idea how the audience would react. It was a bizarre feeling but it felt like a natural progression as an artist and for Massive Attack.

It seems to be a continuation of the artistic experimentation that’s at the heart of Massive Attack…

It’s always been a collage, and I reckon it always will be. When I was working with The Wild Bunch people would comment on how strange it was to see a group of such incongruous people. The way we looked, our musical identities, our personal histories, we were a strange collage ourselves. That was what made it interesting. Even though we were effectively a sound system, rooted in ideas from New York and Jamaica, we redesigned it in Bristol. Like Massive, we felt that people understood that it never had to be static, that it could always change. None of us knew what would happen at the beginning and I still have no idea how the future will turn out.

Written By Sean Bidder

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MIF’s flagship show is a tantalising team-up between moody musical pioneers Massive Attack and The Power Of Nightmares’ Adam Curtis. The band’s Robert Del Naja tells Rob Fitzpatrick about venturing into the unknown.

Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja likes to live dangerously. With just a few weeks to go before the opening night of his band’s highly anticipated collaboration with master documentarian Adam Curtis, the actual content of the show is still completely up for grabs. Just after we talk, Del Naja -AKA 3D, or these days simply D - is off to meet Curtis to nail down some specifics. There are, he says, “a lot of different options and ideas on the table”, but the fact remains that they still don’t really know yet how it’s all going to sound or look. Isn’t he a little bit concerned?

“No!” he laughs. “That’s exactly what makes it all so exciting. I believe this is totally in the spirit of the whole Manchester Festival. This is a place where people come together and fantastic things just happen.”

D’s confidence is understandable. It may all seem a little touch-and-go at the moment, but Massive Attack are working with a team - Curtis, regular Massive collaborators United Visual Artists, Punchdrunk’s Felix Barrett and stage designer Es Devlin - who have a track record of delivering head-scrambling, preconception-busting, visually stunning live art. The centrepiece of the show will be a five Massive Attack performance - their first in three years - but even the music they will play is yet to be decided upon, and may not be exactly what you expect. “I will tell you this: we are going to be doing something we’ve never done before and we will be messing with music we’ve never even gone near before.” Massive fans know better than to expect a grudging run-through of the band’s best-known songs, but the MIF show will find them voyaging way off the map. “There’ll be other people’s music,” reveals D, “some classical pieces, the like of which we’ve never attempted and I’m still not sure how we’re going to actually play! You can see how many different ways there are of thinking about it all.”

The show will have a cinematic feel, with D and Curtis focused on telling a story through issues and ideas (“It’s actually a lot of stories with a lot of possible endings,” he clarifies). With films such as The Century Of The Self and The Power Of Nightmares, Bafta award-winning Curtis has proven himself to be one of Britain’s most visionary filmmakers, someone able to weave gripping narratives from the complex series of events that shape all our lives. Over the last few months he’s been a regular visitor to Massive Attack’s studio in Bristol.

“We hang out,” confirms D. “We listen to things and watch things. We’ve become almost like two DJs putting a playlist together. It’s quite fun and I’m learning from him all the time.” Interestingly, D says his new partner’s musical knowledge is incredibly extensive, admitting it’s Curtis who has the wider knowledge of popular music. “As Massive Attack, we’ve always been attached to particular ideas. Adam has a much more global understanding of music and culture. It’s been an extracurricular education for me, like evening classes!”

Two years ago, D was up in Manchester watching Damon Albarn unveil his Dr Dee creation when MIF director Alex Poots asked him if he would like to create his own show. “I just looked at him and said, ‘Dude, I’d love to do something with Adam Curtis.’” Poots texted Curtis immediately and the wheels were quickly set in motion. D had just watched Curtis’s BBC documentary All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace and was hugely excited about the idea of working with him. For Del Naja, Curtis is someone who fills in a lot of blanks; someone who can expand what you think you know about current events and world history, opening your eyes to the hidden connections you may never have even thought about.

“Like most people,” says D, “my opinions are based on having just enough information to get by. Consequently, my arguments normally unravel when anybody asks a deep and meaningful question.” One of Curtis’s key roles in the project is to provide some journalistic weight to the recurring themes in Massive Attack’s lyrics.

One of those themes is what D calls the “whole nowness of today”, of living in a hi-tech era when rapid advances in science, understanding and information-sharing mean that “we are always on the cusp of tomorrow. It’s amazing, but there’s a danger that we can become passive. We have so much information, so much news - so why would you bother to look back, to consider how we got here?”

On Massive Attack’s last tour, he says, the band became almost like an app, presenting a view of the world through a barrage of statistics flashed at the audience on a giant UVA-designed LCD screen. “As much as I love that form of information gathering, there’s something more powerful about a story being told through the history of different people, about how the decisions we make in the past end up trapping us in the future. That’s the great thing about being human: the unknown.”

D has described the concept for the show as a “collective hallucination”, while Curtis says it’s about “the power of illusion and the illusion of power”. It’s easy to extrapolate those sentiments into a darkly conspiratorial web of political lies and deceit, but both of the statements could just as readily be applied to a band appearing on stage. Popular culture is built on the idea of theatricality; while we may like the idea of a band representing something raw and real, lights, backdrops and amplification all separate them -and us - from reality.

“Absolutely,” agrees D. “As kids, we thought of hip-hop as being like punk - it was very raw and it didn’t need to be an occasion, because the creation was the occasion. But once you take it into a new environment, you have to obey different rules. All bands have to understand the theatrics of what they do, and you have to succumb to it, because you’re dealing with the perception and expectation of an audience. But, yes, the whole thing is a grand illusion.”

The piece will be staged at the Mayfield Depot, a giant Edwardian building that started life as a overspill for Piccadilly Station around 1910. It closed in the 1960s and was later converted into a parcel sorting office, but it’s been closed - and abandoned - for nearly 30 years. “It’s big and dark and damp,” enthuses D. “It’s atmospheric, to say the least.” After its Manchester run, the show will move on to partner venues at Germany’s Ruhrtriennale arts festival in August, and New York’s Park Avenue Armory arts centre - a vast former barracks -the following month. In each case, the venue itself is a crucial element of the show.

When they started out in the late 80s, Massive Attack were just a bunch of West Country DJs looking for connections between the funk, hip-hop, reggae, punk and soul records they all loved. A quarter of a century later, slimmed to a duo of 3D and Grant Marshall, AKA Daddy G, they are one of the most globally recognisable names in British music, respected for their political convictions as much as their famously moody sound. Crucially, though, there was never any grand plan - and there still isn’t. “That’s the great thing about being in this current situation,” says D. “There’s no clear objective, no idea at all where we will go. Every time I stop touring or get out of the studio, I don’t know what I’m going to do tomorrow. So I really don’t know how the next record’s going to sound. Meeting with Adam and working together was an unknown, a chance moment.” Now it’s happening, though, D sees it as a crucial staging post in the Massive journey. “This show feels to me like a part of Massive Attack’s timeline, a part of our history. The strange thing is that I have this sense of nostalgia, as if I’m already looking back at it, even while I’m doing it.”

A welcome side-effect of the project is that it has sparked a burst of serious Massive Attack-tivity. D reckons they’ve done more recording so far in 2013 than in the previous two years combined. “There’ll be a new record next year,” says D, confidently. “We might put out a series of EPs, but we always say that and then eventually we just package it as an album anyway, with our tail between our legs!” Freshly enthused by the idea of working with new collaborators, he adds: “I think artists need to wise up and get in the fucking market, because everyone would get a better deal if we were more honest about what we want to do. We all hide behind our managers and A&R people, which just creates this false veneer of creative freedom and that ends up choking us.”

D says that in the three years since the last Massive tour, he’s completed five or six different mix projects and hasn’t been paid for any of them. “You have to give it away now. It’s part of your participation in the culture. And it’s fun, you know? The days when you used to get 25 grand a remix? Man, they’re fully in the past.”

For D, this creative sharing is an intrinsic part of a wider peer-to-peer attitude within the current music and art scenes that puts him in mind of Massive Attack’s earliest days. “I’m often reminded of how it used to be when we were starting out, when we made it up as we went along, when we still blanked out our record labels so no one could see what we were playing. I think that’s really what this show is for, in whatever shape it will take. It’s a way for us and Adam to share all our ideas without having to follow anyone else’s rules or agenda.”

Written By Rob Fitzpatrick

MASSIVE ASSISTANCE

Emily Mackay profiles Massive Attack’s Mayfield collaborators

ADAM CURTIS - A second MIF outing for this intellectually rigorous, visually lyrical documentary film-maker, best known for The Century Of The Self, which examined the effect Freud and his theory of the unconscious had on PR and advertising. His work is akin to being on a socio-historical waltzer, as seemingly disparate concepts and historical incidents are dazzlingly threaded together by portentous archive clips.

UNITED VISUAL ARTISTS - London-based design collective who initially came together working on live performances by the likes of Leftfield, Massive Attack and Chemical Brothers. Comprising experts in the fields of architecture, design, production and computer programming, they’ve now diversified into work such as 2011′s Origin, a giant cube of reactive lighting wedged between Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges to reflect New York City back at itself.

ES DEVLIN - Stage and costume designer whose award-winning work spans theatre, fashion, music, opera, dance, TV and film. She’s acted as creative director on tours for Lady Gaga, the Pet Shop Boys and Kanye West - for whom she’s created sets based on eruptions of gold polygons, and, for the Watch The Throne shows, two colossal ego-sized cubes.

FELIX BARRETT - Artistic director and founder of Punchdrunk, the adventurous theatre company known for pioneering the idea of “immersive theatre”, leading audiences on interactive romps through intricately constructed physical worlds, such as The Crash Of The Elysium, a save-your-own-world Doctor Who experience that ran at MIF 2011. Barrett has also directed a world tour for Shakira.

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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