Even this didn't prepare me, or anyone else, for the epic semi-symphonic sweep of the follow-up, Unfinished Sympathy, which, legend has it, started out as a studio jam with Mushroom playing around on a keyboard to a spartan drum machine while Nelson sang whatever came into her head.
The recorded version, finished at Abbey Road studios, utilised a piece orchestra to accentuate the song's dramatic surge. Blue Lines , for all the bickering and defections that followed in its wake, is an album that effortlessly transcends the sum of its individual parts. The music writer Simon Reynolds has noted that Blue Lines marked a distinct shift in gear and tone for electronic music "towards a more interior, meditational sound" and that the tracks on Blue Lines move to what he calls "spliff tempos".
That is only partially true. The defiant grandeur of Unfinished Sympathy does not adhere to that model nor does the thunderous charge of Safe from Harm, propelled by its percussive sample from jazz-rock drummer Billy Cobham's furiously complex track Stratus.
Massive Attack's samples are also a clue to their singularity: a snatch of Tom Scott's smooth jazz runs though the title track, and Wally Badarou's Mambo underpins Daydreaming. Both, like the Cobham sample, suggest someone in the group had distinct "muso" tendencies. My money's on Mushroom, who was certainly the most obsessive, oddball and perhaps gifted member. Both Daydreaming and Safe from Harm were accompanied by atmospheric videos by the young director Baillie Walsh who then directed the now famous video for Unfinished Sympathy in which Nelson walks along West Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles, singing the song as if oblivious to the odd cast of street characters she encounters, while the group members fall into step behind her in cameo roles.
The result of a single long take filmed on Steadicam, it remains a benchmark in modern video direction, more a breathtaking short film than a mere pop promo. With the release of Blue Lines in , Massive Attack were on a creative roll but seemed unaware of their impact or the shape of their future. I accompanied the group to Jamaica in early to write a feature for the Guardian around the filming of the Dick Jewell-directed video for their planned fifth single, Hymn of the Big Wheel, which featured the veteran reggae singer Horace Andy on lead vocals.
In between filming, we visited Studio One, met the great reggae rhythm section Sly and Robbie, bought dozens of old and new reggae 45s, went to Prince Jammy's studio, crossed the hills to Ocho Rios, were held up by armed men at a roadblock and bonded over Appleton's rum and the inevitable bags of Jamaican spliff. Despite a budget of around 60 grand, no video ever appeared. I sat with the group in the darkened auditorium, wondering what their role in the video was. They did not have one — unless you count the glimpse of a few shadowy figures exiting the strip club towards the end of the act.
The group seemed unconcerned by these setbacks. They moved to their own unpredictable beat, so much so that I would not have put money on them still being with us today, so laidback was their attitude, so lackadaisical their work rate, so uninterested were they in press or promotion. But Massive Attack, against all the odds, are now seasoned survivors.
I knew nothing about this city but it was, like grunge-era Seattle and the Edinburgh of Trainspotting , a fixture in my adolescent firmament of places where life seemed impossibly cool.
Listening to trip hop made you want to live in a very specific sort of city: rainy and cold and slightly miserable, where waifish kids found solace in dark clubs shuddering with deep bass lines. It was an emissary of this world, an English girl named Cat, who introduced my teenage self to trip hop. I took it home and taped her tape. And even then the good news came in corrupted form, on a third-hand recording that gradually began to hiss and warble as we listened to that battered tape again and again and again.
I have been indulging in quite a lot of trip hop these days, not only out of nostalgia though I have a dominant form of that particular gene and not only because I have run out of nineties artifacts to listen to over the course of this endless pandemic winter there is only so much Dinosaur Jr an aging hipster can take.
It is difficult to classify trip hop as a genre. The whole point of trip hop, in fact, was its destabilization of category, its mixing of disparate genres: electronica, rap, reggae, soul, dub, post-punk. In this respect it was similar to American hip hop, an all-devouring musical form that could incorporate almost anything into its elastic frame. But this original universalizing tendency was rooted in a hyper-local environment. Trip hop should really be remembered as the Bristol Scene or the Bristol Sound, a product of a pre-internet era in which popular music was more directly tied to a sense of place.
But the trio were a combustible mix in the studio and, by , long-simmering tensions within the group had come to a head. The group conducted all their interviews separately for the release of Mezzanine , their landmark third album which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year.
With backing from Marshall and producer Neil Davidge, Del Naja eventually got the upper hand in the unfolding civil war within the group, but not without Vowles landing a sneaky suckerpunch or two along the way.
Mezzanine broke the band in America even as it broke the band full-stop. Vowles left Massive Attack in ; Marshall followed him out in all but name two years later. Each member inherited different tastes regardless of their own family and culture. Massive Attack are best known for forging the genre that became known as "trip hop" and scored one of their biggest hits 30 years ago with Unfinished Sympathy. But circumstances outside of their control could have stopped their career before it even began.
And it was all to do with their band name, which had been i nspired by a piece of graffiti by US street artist Brim Fuentes. Massive Attack were formed in Bristol in , having evolved out of a local sound system called The Wild Bunch. The singer, who had recently had success with the classic Buffalo Stance , became a benefactor of the group, along with her producer husband Cameron McVey.
Their debut album was Blue Lines , recorded over eight months in "with breaks for Christmas and the World Cup", according to Del Naja. Nelson had been toying with a song idea during sessions at Bristol's Coach House studio, which was then known as "Kiss And Tell".
Together with producer Jonathan Sharp aka Johnny Dollar, the trio worked up Nelson's idea into a full song.
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