01 February 2010 (Music Interview)

It's 8.30am on a cold Monday morning, and I'm standing outside Bristol Airport marvelling at the fact that the tiny building seems to be positioned smack-bang in the middle of a moor. Of course, the fog rolling over the hills doesn't help matters much, but without succumbing to ridiculous 'country bumpkin' stereotypes - is this really where some of the finest musical acts of the last twenty years grew up?

You see, I'm in the West Country city to talk to one of those musical acts – or specifically, one half of one of them. Back in 1988, there was no such genre as 'trip-hop'; that hazy, sluggish middle ground between loose hip-hop beats and experimental house music. That is, until acts like Massive Attack came along. Borne through a DJ collective called The Wild Bunch, three native Bristolians formed a group that would prove one of the most influential on the UK's music scene over the next two decades. Back then, it was Robert '3D' Del Naja, Andy 'Mushroom' Vowles and Grant 'Daddy G' Marshall who became pioneers of the trip-hop scene that included Portishead and Tricky, thanks to classic albums like 'Blue Lines' and 'Protection'. Today, it's 3D and Daddy G who remain under the Massive Attack banner, and they've got a new album to promote. 'Heligoland' is the first time the pair have recorded together since 1998's 'Mezzanine'; although Marshall never officially left the band, 2003's '100th Window' was effectively a solo project for Del Naja. As it happens, however, their fifth studio album is a return to form, an explosion of tense collaborations and spaced-out grooves.

The duo cut imposing figures as they walk across the city centre hotel lobby, not least the 6-foot-plus Marshall, a man in possession of a black trenchcoat, a steely glare and a look that suggests he may be on his way to a contract killing. He's who I'll be talking to today. Gulp. And what am I supposed to call him? I haven't exactly thought this through. 'Daddy' doesn't seem like a great idea for a multitude of reasons. 'G' sounds too familiar. 'Grant'? Nah, I'm not his mum, and 'Mr. Marshall' makes me sound like a bank clerk. As it happens, it matters little; we're barely introduced before the first interview of the promo season kicks off. Sipping a Coke, fiddling with his laptop, the 50-year-old – that's right, 50 – proves an amiable, if somewhat fidgety interviewee. And he's just dropped his son off at school, too. How 'ard can be possibly be?

OK, well, firstly, congratulations on the album. To say it's long-awaited would be more than a slight understatement.

Hey, listen – quality not quantity, as we say in the West Country.

You haven't released anything in seven years, but it's not like you've been away. You've toured quite a bit, released the Greatest Hits collection, curated the Meltdown Festival in London… but why the delay with new material? Is it true that you scrapped sessions to re-do some of the songs?

Yeah, y'know… 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. That’s not really the main thing, though. But it was kind of weird, because we use the internet to help us, and you come back and it does more harm than good. 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.

Did playing the new songs live help you come to that decision – as in gauging how well they went down with crowds, etc.?

No, the crowds reacted really well to the songs. We went out and played four or five new songs upfront, and we came back and just fancied putting more life into the tracks. We stripped quite a lot of them back. We went to New York, to Williamsburg, to meet Tim Goldsworthy from DFA Records. We brought him in to help us with some beats, and on reflection, we kind of thought it'd be good to make the beats a bit more uptempo. So there was a bit of a different approach to how we've made them before.

You recorded with one of your collaborators in Williamsburg too – Tunde Adebimpe from TV on the Radio.

Yeah, that's right. Williamsburg seems to be the trendy place to be in New York at the moment (laughs). There's quite a few great musicians who have studios over there. It was once cheap, too, but not any more. And we met Tunde through Dave (Sitek), their producer [and TV on the Radio guitarist]. That was about 3 or 4 years ago now – that vocal was put down for that track about 3 years ago. It was just a matter of getting around to finishing it, with our busy schedules.

Was it ever a cause for concern, especially with so many young bands trying to emulate what you do these days, that your fanbase would get tired of waiting for new material?

No, not really. I think the fans who've been into Massive Attack are aware of the pace that we work at. But we've kind of been omnipresent, it's not really like we've been away, really. I mean, we've done three tours since 2003, and like you said, we had the 'Best Of – Collected' album, and we've curated Meltdown. So there's always been that omnipresent thing. It's not like we can afford to be away, creatively, or even financially from the scene. It's not like we haven't been in peoples' minds, hopefully.

You personally had little to no input into the last album, although you were involved with the subsequent tours.

Tell you what, I have as little input as possible if I can help it. I hate studios.

Why?

'Cos they're claustrophobic, and… I love making music, but it's just not really for me. D [3D] loves it, it's his second home, really.

Is it just that you find it hard to write or be creative in that sort of environment?

Yeah… I can only work in studios 2 or 3 days a week. After that it just does my head in. Whereas D can camp in there from Monday till Saturday.

What was it that changed this time around, that made you want to be more involved with the studio process, then – even if it was minimal involvement?

Well, to be honest, with me… I've known D for years, and it's well documented that we fell out around about the time of recording '100th Window'. For me, it was a life-changing thing. I'd just had my first baby born, and my priorities kind of changed, really. I wanted to be at home and take this all in, rather than be in the studio. It didn't seem like a very happy place to be at the time, so I thought being at home would be better. What brought me back? Well, the fact that I've known D for… we've known each other for 27 years. We have these brotherly hiccups every now and again, whether it's brotherly love or brotherly hate, depending on what the season is. And it was just one of those things that… well, I just wanted to be back working again. Simple, really. That's all I know, so it's hard to be away from it for too long.

Didn't you feel alienated at all during that period – especially since 3D was doing a lot of soundtrack work with [erstwhile collaborator/producer] Neil Davidge at the time?

As far as I'm concerned, it's never been that sort of thing with me and D. From 'Mezzanine' onwards, it's not as if we've really worked together solidly in the studio on things. It's more the case that one of us will initiate something, and if we get to the certain point where we need the other person's help, we'll call on them, whether it be vocal input or creative input. It's not as if we live out of each others' pockets when we're making records, or making tracks. And even for the 'outside' thing… I mean, after Massive Attack, I DJ quite a lot – that's my main obsession, really. And D's obsession is making soundtracks, and stuff like that. So it was never really that we were going to work together outside of Massive Attack, as such. We like to do our own thing. It already takes up enough of our time being together with Massive Attack as it is!

Let's talk about the new album. Like your other albums, 'Heligoland' seems to be one of those albums that takes time to slowly seep under your skin. Do you agree that it takes a couple of listens to click with the listener?

Yes. I'm glad you said that, 'cos that's always been what we try to do. I hate when you get a record, especially a Massive Attack record, and you 'get it' the first time. It's not really for getting the first time, because there's so many different layers, and each track has its own personality, so it takes a bit of time to break that down.

So it's a conscious thing, to make music that's slightly challenging like that, rather than simply the way you happen to write songs together. Albums like 'Blue Lines' and 'Protection' have aged extremely well – that can't be a coincidence.

Well, it's the way we make music – but the thing is, with us, we try not to choose the obvious. With 'Blue Lines', as far as we were concerned, that was not the obvious – that was as far away from anything that was going on at the time. And that's what caught peoples' imagination – that it was 'What the fuck's this?' – and they couldn't really decipher it (laughs). Y'know, we weren't trying to make out that we invented a new type of music, as such, because we take our inspiration from a load of other things that we've heard in the past, and regurgitate them ourselves. Especially with 'Blue Lines', we actually did more than just take inspiration, we made the whole album with samples, basically (laughs). But y'know, it's the ideas that we had that made it unique. So we've never tried to repeat the formula on each album that we make. We try to make something that's thought-provoking, whether it's musically, or whether there's a message there – if there is a message. It's not conscious, we just make our own music. It's like making a good friend. All your best friends are the ones you hate the first time you meet them, until you get to know them (laughs) Well, mine are, anyway.

We mentioned you collaborating with Tunde Adebimpe earlier, but he's just one of the guests on 'Heligoland'. It's probably the most diverse group of collaborators you've drawn from to date – everyone from your old pal Horace Andy, to Guy Garvey, to Damon Albarn and Hope Sandoval.

Well, to be completely honest with you, the reason there's such a wide base of people is because when we first started making the album, and D started making the first template of the album in his studio, he was working with Neil Davidge originally, and I was working with these guys called The Robots. And those were the tracks that we were initially making to submit. And those are the artists that I went for – Damon, Hope Sandoval, Horace Andy… and there are ones that D went for, so when we got together to make the album, this was what's left.

Is it true that you tried to get Tom Waits and Bowie on board?

Yeah, we were talking to Tom Waits about coming on board – in fact, there's been quite a few people mooted for this album. Mike Patton was working with D, but those tracks are still in the can. Tom Waits was somebody we were trying to get on '100th Window' originally, actually. Patti Smith was another person. These are people whose door we knocked on, but for whatever reason – they were too busy, or never got back to us (laughs). No, no… it was a case of time schedules, stuff like that. But that's what we've always been about – that's the diversity of people that we work with. To us, Massive Attack is a moving base. We get other people, great singers that we've loved for years, to work with us. That's just coming from our music admiration roots, really. As we grew up as DJs and musicians, there was always people, before we even got to a studio, that we always wanted to work with.

So, you must keep your finger on the pulse to some degree, to see who's available, who's currently on top of their game, who's writing great music… what sort of stuff is on your iPod these days?

Me? Nothing! I try to pretend that I listen to all these things…. I don't listen to anything, really.

Nothing? Hasn't your taste in music changed over the years?

I have no idea. Talk to D, he's the one who buys things off iTunes all the time. I've just always lived off a healthy diet of reggae, really. That's always been my first love, and it still is. Because I'm a DJ, I listen to a lot of shit music with no substance whatsoever, really (laughs). That's the escapism of making intensive music – you can listen to music that isn't that meaningful, really (laughs). But no, there's bands like TV on the Radio that we love… The Black Keys, I listened to, and thought it was absolutely amazing. Flying Lotus, stuff like that, and a lot of the Warp acts. That's a great label. I like the fact that they're not from London, either – it's Sheffield, isn't it? That's a bit like Bristol – it has its own identity, really.

Speaking of Bristol, you're both still based here. It's a city with quite a reputation for unleashing some stunning music onto the world, but have you ever been tempted to move to London, for easier access to things, to be more a part of the hub? Or is Bristol an inherent element of the Massive Attack sound?

It's part of Massive Attack's make-up. There are certain factors. We've lived in Bristol for a long time. We're DJs, and there's a place called St. Paul's which was quite an unlawful place in the '80s and we did a lot of parties down there… basically, we were kings of our own little pond, really, and it kind of felt nice to be like that. So moving to London – it didn't really feel like we'd have as much control over our destiny as we would in Bristol. And y'know – it's worked to our benefit over the years. The world is too small now – London doesn't even come into it. The fact that we're still in England is more to the point, really.

Listening to some of 'Heligoland's lyrics, it seems like you've come full-circle in a way – many of today's societal problems are similar to the ones you wrote about when first starting off in the late '80s. Do you have a different perspective on them now, though? Peoples' lives, and personal circumstances, and world views, to a degree, are bound to change somewhat over a 20-year period.

That's a good question. I think our songwriting just reflects, in some respects, the times that we live in, to a certain extent. There's a lot of subconscious messages, or conscious messages that are flying around in things that are going on – whether it's politically or socially, stuff like that. And I think that's what comes into play when we're writing songs like that. It's kind of weird, really, because when you look at when we first released Blue Lines, there were a certain few things that were going on in the world, and zoom up to this one 20 years later, and it almost seems like the same things are all going on again! The Gulf War, we had the Thatcher government which was pretty shitty, now we've got the Labour government now, we thought things were gonna change once we had a socialist government. But within the margins of what the Tories did and what we did, there's not been much change, y'know? It's the same set of circumstances that seem to have been transported to 20 years later.

We seem to be writing about the same things – the domestic situation in England, the war, unemployment, crap governments… so it's unfortunate that the subject matter hasn't really changed for us, it's still the same old shit really, unfortunately. But y'know, it's obvious that we've had a different approach to making this record. The first ones were studio-based ones, and they were coming from our DJ roots, really, more sort of along that soul, reggae inspirational pool. And one thing that's unique about Bristol, actually, is that we've actually got quite a unique West Indian community here, and that's contributed quite heavily to the sound, because we're all about basslines and things like that. Things have changed over the years, but that was the original inspiration. With these last albums, from Mezzanine to 100th Window to this one, they're all leaning towards the fact that we've evolved from the DJ thing, the soundsystem thing we did with Massive Attack too, we've evolved almost into a full-on band. So when we go into the studio, there's a little bit of an eye on 'I wonder what this track would sound like if it was live'. Hence the reason we brought guitars and things like that in, since Mezzanine.

Finally, you've reached the point of your careers now where you're starting to pick up 'Outstanding Contribution' awards (which Massive Attack won at last year's Ivor Novello Songwriting Awards). Where do you think you can go from here, balancing your experience with staying relevant?

(Laughs) Well, to be honest, it's a funny thing. As far as we're concerned, because we're not the archetypal musicians as such – y'know, we can just about play a couple of notes on a keyboard – so to actually get the Ivor Novello award is a really big achievement for us. It's quite funny actually, because it seems like we've been ingratiated into the musicians' club, which is quite funny, cos we've been blagging it all this time, y'know, and it's worked! There's this whole thing about imagination, and having ideas, and taking them to fruition, and that's what Massive Attack have also been about. And hopefully, that's what we'll continue to be about for the next 20 years, too.

 

- Lauren Murphy

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'Heligoland' is released on EMI on February 5th.

 

 

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