They’re a dance band who don’t dance, recording stars who rarely record. Yet their sound is everywhere, writes Lindsay Baker
What with one thing and another, Massive Attack have taken their time. Their three albums to date have taken as long to appear as The Beatles’ entire recording career. But, gradually and quietly, their sound has become a blueprint for the music being made by dance, rock and pop acts alike.
They are among the most influential groups in contemporary music. Their albums Blue Lines (1991) and Protection (1994) have a habit of popping up in those top-albums-of- all-time charts. Protection also sold 1,1-million copies.
Their slow-motion, cinematic sound came about by an unorthodox route – evolving from the Eighties and their years as DJs and MCs with their sound system, the Wild Bunch. They are not musicians in the traditional sense: their music has emerged from the magpie school of sampling and electronic whizzkiddery, and has gone on to engender a new musical genre, dubbed trip-hop.
Massive Attack’s slow-burning torch songs, spacey raps and mellow grooves are soulful, seductive, anthemic even, and their first two albums encapsulated, but also outshone, the dance music of the early Nineties. In 1994, the band won a Brit Award for best dance act, even though – as they pointed out at the time – none of them knows how to dance.
The distinguishing feature of their variety of dance music is that you don’t dance to it. Unless it’s a very slow dance.
Now they have just released a remarkable third album, Mezzanine. The record has been much anticipated (it’s been four years since the last one, after all). They admit themselves that they are easily distracted, and Bristolians are renowned for their slacker, slow-paced approach to life. Then there was the endless negotiating. “It’s not a harmonious thing with us,” explains Grant. “It works more in an individual way, with all the pieces making a whole. We’ve begun to realise that we’re all completely different.”
The three of them have in common the distinctive Bristol burr and Bristolisms (they all call each other “Jack”), but they are, outwardly at least, quite unalike.
Andrew Vowles, known as Mushroom, has boy-like features and flawless, caramel-coloured skin (his father is South American, his mother white and English), and favours a New York homeboy mode of dress. He’s softly spoken, with an expression that hovers between amused and bemused.
Grant Marshall, at 38 the eldest of the three, is an imposing-looking figure: lean, black and very tall (people sometimes assume he is a basketball player). His manner is warm, easy-going, composed; he’s an elegant dresser – minimalist and retro (with a touch of Prada).
Robert del Naja, known as Delge, is an Italian-English fast-talker – usually clothed in (designer) combat trousers and T-shirt, twinkly-eyed, deliberately ill-shaven, with angular features and a Sid James laugh. They’re all charmers.
The three of them have been together, in one way or another, for 15 years. All three members of the band gravitated towards Bristol’s comfortably multi-racial, anglicised hip-hop scene, each fuelled by his own obsessions. It was Marshall and Nellee Hooper who, in 1983, first formed the Wild Bunch crew, named after Sam Peckinpah’s epic western. Soon, Miles Johnson joined them, along with Claude Williams and graffiti artist Delge (“They hated me at first, but I won them over with me personality”).
Although they were picking and mixing from other people’s records, the sound they created – switching between two turntables, and rapping over the music into microphones – was identifiably their own seamless blend of disco, hip-hop, soul, reggae and pop.
The Wild Bunch were so hip it hurt – and also Bristol’s most-likely-to-succeed. They were the masters of cool at Special K’s cafe, where the city’s style-conscious subculture used to gather – along with a handful of university students the group had befriended (myself included). It was here, also, that Mushroom acquired his nickname, a reference to the cafe’s Centipede computer game that he played incessantly, the object of which was to “eat” as many mushrooms on the screen as possible. There were other DJ outfits in the city – 2 Bad, Def Con, Fresh 4 – but the Wild Bunch ruled the roost, taste- makers and aesthetes par excellence with their hi-tech mountain bikes, Japanese digital watches, Vivienne Westwood shirts and customised name buckles from New York. The long-haired, baby-faced Hooper (now producer to Bj”rk and Madonna) was the wheeler and dealer, Filofax in hand, while Johnson was well known for his looks and his pool- playing. They were expert poseurs.
But what made their name was the Wild Bunch’s unerring ear for music. They played at warehouse do’s in London as well as in Bristol, impromptu outdoor gatherings on the downs in the summer, and house parties. They had a regular slot every week at the dingy, sticky-floored Dug Out club (something of a Bristol institution), and they played every summer at St Paul’s festival and at Glastonbury.
Mezzanine, the new album, was co-produced by the band and Bristolian Neil Davidge, and is more visceral than its smoother predecessor. A few years back, the band had approached Liz Fraser – formerly of the Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil – to work with them, but she had turned them down. This time, however, she was keen to collaborate. The voice that had ethereally warbled its way through such Eighties indie hits as Sugar Hiccup and Song to the Siren has proved an excellent foil for Massive Attack – particularly on the poignant single, Teardrop – and she still sings in what sounds like her own private language (indecipherable and vaguely Gaelic-sounding).
All the band were shaped, Delge says, by the music of six specific years – between 1977 and 1983. “We all carry it around with us all the time, that period.” For him it was the “darker stuff” that appealed.
Marshall’s years of experience as a DJ have played a major part in shaping the Massive Attack sound: he has spot-on musical judgment, and an instinct for what people want to hear. In fact, he still DJs, sometimes accompanied by Mushroom – he says it helps keep him on his toes (he recently played at the London party for Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown). From the start, he’s been an exponent of the “rough and smooth” sensibility in music. “We always wanted to find the roughtest, most rugged beat, and then put a sweet vocal over the top. We need to have a woman’s voice to make that work.”
Mushroom has a studio in his house. Music is all he does, he says. He is something of a purist (he doesn’t smoke or drink), and looks upon touring as “pimping”; he’d rather be in the studio, creating new music. He loves “that first moment when you put a groove together, that initial seed”.
Three can be an awkward number. And it’s not as if they’re a conventional band, each with their designated role on bass or drums or guitar: Delge and Marshall both contribute lyrics and vocals, and all three put the beats together. There are no job descriptions, and each is fighting his own corner.
Although the name Massive Attack may be well-known to followers of British pop, the individuals are not – and that is the way they like it. On stage, says Delge, “You feel like a bit of a twat. Anyone who really feels comfortable up there behind their mike or their guitar with their arms outspread, there’s got to be something wrong with their mentality.”
By recruiting a series of guest collaborators, rather than a single lead singer, Massive Attack have successfully stuck with the more anonymous DJing tradition.
“None of us has ever been bothered about being that famous or that popular,” says Delge. “If we don’t go up too high, it won’t be such a long drop when it’s over, and hopefully we’ll be able to adjust our lives accordingly.”