Heligoland Interviews & Quotes Compilation

With Heligoland’s release imminent any day now, the anticipation among fans has been fueled even moreso with a raft of interviews Massive Attack have conducted with various press and media to promote Heligoland within the last month.

I’ve gone and gathered together a group of quotes from a few of these interviews to present here, to highlight some of the more revealing info gleaned and also offering you the links to read all the interviews in full. Enjoy these words of wisdom from the band!

• A song known as “Invade Me” with Martina Topley-Bird on vocals narrowly missed the final cut of the album. – “There was one track called ‘Invade Me’ with Martina (Topley Bird) and we cut it with it on and with it off. It’s difficult to know if it was one track too many, not in terms of the length of album but in terms of mood.” – 3D (State.ie)

• A remix album of Heligoland by Burial is very unlikely to happen. This rumor was started by G in an interview last year, where he expressed his appreciation for Burial’s music and how it would be his wish for Burial to remix the new Massive Attack album. By G’s own later admission his statement was taken out of context, to mean that Burial actually was remixing Heligoland, when in fact he was not. – “I think I might have had too many drinks the night I made that statement. I started a fire, didn’t I? It was our total admiration for Burial, that’s what it was; it sort of spilled into enthusiasm about him doing something for us.” - Daddy G (The Skinny)

• The current plan is to release an EP with the leftover material from the Heligoland sessions at some stage this summer. One track in contention for that EP is Red Light, a song co-written with Guy Garvey, which the band have been working on now for over 2 years and still haven’t quite perfected yet. An early demo sample of Red Light can be heard on this video extract from the film “In Prison My Whole Life”, courtesy of NeilDavidge.com. – “It will probably be made up of tracks that we didn’t put on this record and maybe some new stuff as well. We’ve got this one called ‘Red Light,’ which we wrote with Guy [Garvey], which we’ve been playing live for two years and we still can’t finish it. To be honest, I still can’t make the promise it will be finished because it seems to be a really evasively hard thing to capture. Some songs are like that. Some happen instantly and some continually trouble you.” - 3D (BBC6 Music)

• 3D first heard mention of the word “Heligoland” in a 2000 film know as Shadow Of the Vampire. – “I actually encountered it on the movie Shadow of the Vampire. Part of the film was shot there and it just says ‘Heligoland’ at one point and I just thought, ‘I love that word’. Initially it’s just really intriguing.” – 3D (BBC6 Music)

• The oldest track on the album is Pray For Rain, whose vocals were recorded with Tunde Ademipde at TV On The Radio’s studio in Brooklyn back in late 2005. – “The Tunde track was a completely different song originally when we took it to New York and then it stayed on the shelf for like two years before we went back to New York and Tunde re-did a vocal which was completely different from the original vocal, which then informed how we finished the track, arranged it, re-arranged it, cut it up, changed the middle section.” – 3D (EMI.DE)
  

• Of the collaborators on Heligoland, Hope Sandoval was the only vocalist who did not actually meet with the band, with all communication with her being conducted electronically. – “But he [G] sent over a great backing track for her to work on and we went from there. We never got to meet her, it was all done long distance.” – 3D (CrackerJack)

• Atlas Air, originally went on for a further 5 minutes during its climax and more closely resembled the live version. It was also the final song to mixed and finished for the album. – “Well we had a version that was twice as long, we loved it that much and I was like ‘fuck I don’t care’ it all has to go on. The ending went on for five minutes and I thought it was a 12-inch dance tune but when it came down to listening to the record it started to feel slightly indulgent and it didn’t really show respect to the other tracks. We wanted more of a song-type structure so that it fits, when you get to the end of it you haven’t forgotten the rest of album.” - 3D (State.ie)

• The track now called Babel, grew out of an amalgamation of two very different songs – “The track that ended up as Babel began life as two songs, one about falling in love with a porn star and the other about extraordinary rendition, but they ended up joined together.” – 3D (Sunday Times)

• What the image on the front cover of Heligoland’s means – “The painting is of a culturally disorientated character or collage of things we’re being forced to look at by superimposition. Instead of being able to make our own minds up, the idea is is projected into us.” - 3D (The Skinny)

• On the direction they are approaching the music videos to accompany the Heligoland songs – “We want to give the directors we work with a different space for it, so if we give you a small budget as opposed to a big budget and you make the film you want to the track you choose, and you can pull the track apart, we’ll give you the stems, you can do what you want…it’s just more interesting now. So the films we got are the directors personal visions, done on a very tight budget in a very lo-fi and intriguing way – possibly never to be seen outside of the internet.” – 3D (EMI.DE)

• On the tragic death of Jerry Fuchs, who played drums during the recording sessions for Heligoland – “It was awful news. We heard while we were still on tour. It was atrocious. He was the sort of person who lit up a room when they came in. He was a really lovely, warm guy and a brilliant drummer.” - 3D (CrackerJack)

• The reasoning behind going back to the drawing board after the 2008 tour – “I think we became victims of our own success in one respect, because it’s the first time the internet has impacted on us. We came back from our tour, and as far as we were concerned, the album was dead, ‘cos it had already been blasted all over the internet. And we just got bored with the tracks, to be honest. Either way, we felt that it didn’t have the cohesion that we wanted, and we wanted to put a bit more pep into the tracks.” - Daddy G (Entertainment.ie)

• On how hooking up with Damon Albarn in his studio in late 2008 changed the course of the album – “It was a different energy and a different environment. We started to strip everything back and build it back up again. That feels like the start of what the album is now. The first incarnation didn’t have that. After we went into Damon’s studio it started to feel rounded. This record is a series of events — working with Damon, Guy Garvey, Martina, and so on — where chemistry came right.” - 3D (Telegraph)