Blue Lines: Massive Attack's blueprint for UK pop's future

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/oct/28/massive-attack-blue-lines-remaster

Version 0 of 1.

The three members of Massive Attack were invited to do a DJ set on a French radio programme some time back in the early 90s. Having written about and befriended the group back then, I was lucky enough to receive one of the few cassette-only recordings of the set. It offered an illuminating glimpse of the musical undercurrents they'd drawn on in making their groundbreaking debut album, Blue Lines, released in 1991.

Buy it from

Alongside rare hip-hop and soul tracks their set threw up some surprising choices: the pioneering Chicago house tune Can You Feel It by Mr Fingers; the brooding spoken-word track Sons and Daughters by the Neville Brothers; the discordant Poptones by John Lydon's post-punk collective Public Image Ltd.

With Soul II Soul's Club Classics Vol. One (1989) and Young Disciples' Road to Freedom (1991), Blue Lines is now seen as an album that marked the coming of age of British dance music. More than that, it highlighted the breadth of the group's influences and suggested a range of compositional and textural possibilities that resonate in popular music to this day. Now, 21 years after its release, Blue Lines has been remastered and repackaged for a seemingly inexhaustible pop heritage market in both a regular and deluxe edition. It's brighter, clearer and sharper, but the standout songs still sound utterly unlike anything before or since in their seamless merging of propulsive beats, brooding melodies and dark atmospherics. You can marvel again at the epic sweep of Unfinished Sympathy, the defiant thrust of Safe from Harm and the narcotic sway of Daydreaming, songs that have influenced two generations of electronic musicians, from Radiohead, Moby and Unkle through to Air, Hot Chip and Burial and on to such disparate contemporary artists as the xx and Emeli Sandé.

"Massive Attack and Blue Lines are part of the UK's musical DNA," says Labrinth (Tim McKenzie), the young English producer and artist. "The group have had a huge influence on UK production. They've influenced music around the world, of course, but the UK more than anywhere."

Much to the dismay of its creators, Blue Lines is also viewed in pop historical terms as the prototype of trip-hop, a downbeat genre that merged elements of American hiphop, funk and Jamaican dub reggae into a somnambulant, skunk-fuelled soundtrack to British inner-city life. It certainly paved the way for two acclaimed debut albums in the trip-hop vein – Portishead's dense and sometimes overwrought Dummy (1994) and Tricky's darkly mesmeric Maxinquaye from 1995 – as well as the more well-mannered beats of acts such as Morcheeba and Zero 7.

When Blue Lines came out, though, it sounded – despite its knowing nods to the older genres of funk, jazz fusion, old-school hip-hop and dub reggae, and its relatively faithful cover of William DeVaughn's 1972 smooth soul classic, Be Thankful For What You Got – like the birth of something new: a merging of the rootsy and the sophisticated, the soulful and the state of the art, the past and the future.

Massive Attack emerged out of the 1980s sound system scene in Bristol, part of a generation who came of age as hip-hop came overground. Before they were Massive Attack, the three core members – Robert "3D" Del Naja, Andrew "Mushroom" Vowles and Grant "Daddy G" Marshall – belonged to Bristol's Wild Bunch sound system crew, an extended collective whose members also included Tricky and future Soul II Soul member Nellee Hooper, both of whom would contribute to Blue Lines, as well as lesser-known local characters DJ Milo and Willy Wee. 3D was also a graffiti artist of some repute.

The Wild Bunch DJed at the Dug Out club and at street parties in Bristol alongside Smith and Mighty, a duo that produced the first Massive Attack single, Any Love, in 1988, featuring local singer Carlton on vocals. (The track was later reworked for Blue Lines, with new vocals by Tony Bryan.)

The very first inkling of what would be dubbed the Bristol sound was the Wild Bunch's spartan treatment of Bacharach and David's classic The Look of Love, released in 1988 on 4th & Broadway. It remains an intriguing song, a sketchy template for what was to follow. Listening to it now, you can hear traces of the enduring reggae style called lover's rock – the romantic song, soulful vocals of Shara Nelson and the pared-down beats. What's missing is the urgency of Massive Attack's best music. That would come later, after the Wild Bunch imploded in the wake of one too many petty feuds.

From the off, Massive Attack were an effortlessly odd bunch. They seemed, on first meeting, to be utterly lacking in direction, much less ambition, content to drift on their own instincts and slo-mo energy. Trying to interview them in any depth was futile: they avoided direct answers, lapsed into the kind of coded conversations that only the closest of friends can indulge in, made jokes and took every opportunity to turn the conversation to anything but music. Mushroom, in particular, seemed tuned into a frequency all his own. I remember he seldom said much, but listened intently to everything, often laughing at something he alone found amusing. When he spoke, it tended to be cryptic. He referred to everyone as "Jack" and would ask questions like, "So, Jack, how much do you think the moon weighs, then?"

Years later, when I mentioned our early encounters to Daddy G, he happily admitted that the group had no idea what was expected of them in terms of press and were genuinely uninterested in fame or attention. It was refreshing but frustrating.

Yet from the start they drew a succession of like-minded souls into their orbit, the first being the singer Neneh Cherry, and, soon after, her partner, the producer Cameron McVey. (A very young Mushroom appears as a DJ on the video for Cherry's 1988 hit Buffalo Stance.) Cherry immediately saw the possibilities of Massive Attack's cut-and-paste music, because it chimed with her own aesthetic. She had attitude to burn, though, while the Bristol crew were content to drift, their work rate informed by the slow pace of their native city and by what might be called the spliff consciousness that determined not just the bass-heavy pulse of their music but the worldview of their lyrics, which often tended towards the insular and the paranoid.

"We were lazy Bristol twats," Daddy G would say later about the protracted gestation of Blue Lines. "It was Neneh who kicked our asses and got us in the studio. We recorded a lot at her house, in her baby's room. What we were trying to do was create dance music for the head rather than the feet."

The album's production is credited to Massive Attack, Cameron McVey and the late Jonny Dollar, to whom the new remastered version is dedicated. He died from cancer in 2009, aged 45. Who did what remains a mystery, but Dollar's role was integral, not least because he shaped the group's often vague ideas – samples, beats, raps – into something cohesive and often dramatic.

Staying true to the crew ethos of hip-hop, Massive Attack were not a pop group per se. Like Soul II Soul and various constantly fluid rap outfits, they were a collective who did not play any instruments themselves and employed other artists to augment – and in some cases – define their electronically driven sound and vision. For the recording of Blue Lines, Tricky was still in the fold, rapping and co-writing on three songs. (Twenty-one years on, the extent of his contribution remains a source of friction between him and the group.) Nellee Hooper showed up from time to time with advice and the odd richly hued remix, but Mushroom and Dollar seem to have been the technicians and main orchestrators of the Massive Attack sound.

Listening to Blue Lines now, I can hear all kinds of echoes: from Brian Eno to Ennio Morricone, Lee "Scratch" Perry to the early electro hip-hop of Man Parrish, but what strikes me most forcefully is how the best songs are those that feature the extraordinary lyrics of Shara Nelson and her equally dramatic delivery of them. In September, 1990, while working for the now defunct style magazine, The Face, I was sent a pre-release press-only 12 inch single of Daydreaming, which I took home and played incessantly, entranced not just by the downbeat rapping style but by Nelson's dreamy, dislocated coda – "I quietly observe standing in my space… daydreaming". Everything from the dramatic cover designed by 3D – an orange flame against a deep blue background with the group's name in bold letters – to the seamless blending of musical styles, suggested an already fully formed aesthetic.

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 50-piece orchestra to accentuate the song's dramatic surge. Again, though, it's the emotional intensity of Nelson's voice and lyrics that define the song as much as the production or the musical bricolage, particularly in the heartstopping chorus: "Like a soul without a mind/ In a body without a heart/ I'm missing every part". 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 1991, 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 1992 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 met them, again, at the filming of another Baillie Walsh video for Be Thankful for What You've Got, which consisted of a stripper doing her act while miming the song in Raymond's Revue Bar in Soho, London. 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. You can now see the video online but, unsurprisingly, it was never shown on MTV or the BBC. 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.

They are not, though, the Massive Attack that made Blue Lines. Tricky departed amid some rancour not long after the release of the album, as did Shara Nelson, their first and greatest singer, both claiming they had not been given enough recognition for their contributions to the Massive Attack sound. Since his extraordinary debut, Maxinquaye, Tricky has followed his own increasingly erratic path, while in a sad development Shara Nelson became deeply troubled and was last year given a 12-month community order for persistent harassment of the Radio 1 DJ Pete Tong, whom she claimed was her husband and the father of her child.

Other great guest vocalists worked with the group following Nelson's departure, beginning with Tracey Thorn on the title track of the group's equally brilliant second album, Protection, and erstwhile Cocteau Twin Liz Fraser on the hypnotic Teardrop from their third album, Mezzanine. Then Massive Attack splintered again when Mushroom, the great oddball musical genius behind those albums, departed for reasons that remain clouded in mystery but probably had something to do with the smalltown claustrophobia of the Bristol scene and the inevitable clashes of ego and direction that beset all great groups at some time or another. (I spoke to him by phone a few times last year when he was finishing his long-anticipated solo album but have not heard from him since. He seemed in good spirits.)

Massive Attack endure in the form of 3D, Daddy G and a proper group playing proper instruments that accompanies them when they play live. The collective ethos has been abandoned for something more rigid and functional.

The original idea that was Massive Attack – the collective, elastic, shape-shifting but essentially tight-knit, identity that helped make Blue Lines such a groundbreaking album has long since evaporated. The album, in all its newly polished glory, remains: a testament to a time when their vision was a truly collective one that challenged the notion of the pop group as well as the pop song. It still seems odd to me that the lumpen, guitar-fuelled Britpop years followed its release, the old order re-establishing itself in the most conservative fashion as if Blue Lines had never happened. Twenty-one years on, those guitars still sound old and all too familiar. Blue Lines, though, is like a blueprint for a different kind of pop future: stranger, richer, day-dreamier.

Blue Lines: 2012 Remix/Remaster is out on 19 November as a CD, download or deluxe box set (EMI)