Massive Attack's Blue Lines

Ian Bourland

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501339707
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

In 1991, a loose-knit collective released a record called Blue Lines under the name Massive Attack, splicing together American hip-hop and soul with the sounds of the British underground. With its marauding bass lines, angular guitars, and psychedelic effects, Blue Lines built on the Caribbean soundsystems and nascent rave scene of the 1980s while also looking ahead to the group's signature blend of epic cinematics and lush downtempo. In the process, Blue Lines invented an entirely new genre called trip hop and launched the career of a rapper named Tricky. Ultimately, Blue Lines created the sonic playbook for an emerging future: hybrid, digital, cosmopolitan, and rooted in the black and immigrant communities who animated the urban wreckage of the postindustrial city. Massive Attack envisioned an alternate future in sharp counterpoint to the glossy triumphalism of Brit Pop. And while the group would go on to bigger things, this record was both a warning shot and a definitive statement that sounds as otherworldy today as on the day of its release. As Blue Lines 's iconic flame logo spun on turntables the world over, Massive Attack and their spaced-out urban blues reimagined music for the 1990s and beyond.

1

Cider Punks

Anyone involved in the Bristol music scene of the 1980s will invariably bring the conversation back around to a multistory bar at 52 Park Row called the Dugout. With its dingy carpet, orange walls, and precipitous staircase, it was located in the rough geographic center of the city. Now a Chinese restaurant, the former club was a stone’s throw from the university, and served as a crossroads during a time in which subculture had higher stakes—when rivalries among factions meant a Saturday on the town often led to harsh words, or worse. The Bristol of the years 1979–82 was divided by neighborhoods, to be sure, but also by affiliation and affinity. There were punks, skins, soul boys, Rastas, and Blitz-styled New Romantics. There were new-wavers, football supporters, and, as Robert del Naja tells it, parachute-pant-wearing kung fu film fanatics carrying nunchaku. “Bristol was tough on a Saturday night. If you looked alternative you would get your head kicked in! In those days you wore everything on your sleeve—walking home from school with dyed hair and a skinny tie was running the gauntlet.”¹

But the Dugout was where all walks came together, a node where people exchanged ideas, traded cassettes, and watched music videos in a lounge in the back. In the wake of the punk explosion of 1976, places like the Dugout were where the jittery sounds that became synonymous with “post punk” actively cross-pollinated and mutated, where funk horns met the druggy reverb of dub, and where hip-hop breakbeats and b-boy culture would find a beachhead amid young audiences still suffering the long hangover of cock rock and the excesses of prog. Anything without a guitar appealed, and the DIY ethos of punk complemented the cut-and-paste sonic appropriations of turntablism and MCing. In those years before the advent of the producer-as-celebrity or “curated playlists,” the DJ played a crucial role. They were the person behind the record players who laid down the beat, a substrate for new lyrical flows over familiar material. And in places like Bristol, the DJ found their equivalent at a different sort of party—the “selector” who charted the course of the evening at dub sound systems.

The Dugout, open seven nights a week, had their own forward-looking DJ in the person of Grantley Marshall. He was not yet part of the celebrated local Wild Bunch sound system but already developing the blend of styles that would characterize the sessions for which the group would come to be known as they organized their underground parties throughout the mid-1980s. The Wild Bunch, a loose collective forged in the spirit of those early, inchoate years of hip-hop would, of course, spawn the side project Massive Attack by decade’s end. And Marshall, along with Del Naja, is a constant that connects the old days at the Dugout to the auteurish version of Massive that persists to this day. While his tastes were wide ranging, it’s long been said that Marshall brought the hip-hop/reggae side of things to the studio, a complement to Del Naja’s punk enthusiasms.

For all that, it’s tough to overstate the degree to which punk, as an ethos, was a catalyzing force in the Bristol landscape. There were no more hard-and-fast rules; you could do it yourself, even if you weren’t classically trained or well connected. The ur-moment in this worldview was the June 4, 1976, gig that the Sex Pistols played at the Lesser Free Hall in Manchester, attended by a mix of working-class locals and soon-to-be post-punk icons, from the Buzzcocks founders Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto to the Smiths’ lachrymose frontman Morrissey. It was the first of two shows they would play there during that high summer of punk rock, and indeed, the second, better-attended show helped galvanize Factory Records, Joy Division, and an entire history ranging from goth rock to the Madchester rave scene.

The Pistols were not especially good that week—just the opposite. But they showed that an entire generation of kids suffering the privations of unemployment, fuel shortages, blackouts, and the grim prospect of life in England during the 1970s could find creative redemption by building new subcultural worlds. There was the dandyish pomp of clubs like the Blitz in London and the overlapping rosters of reggae, northern soul, queer disco, and youthful punks at pubs and performance halls. They worked collectively in the working-class districts of Hammersmith or St. Pauls, British youth creating their own hidden utopias, their own forms of public address. From safety pins and badges to dyed hair, rococo jackets, and sharp rude-boy tailoring, they alienated their elders and forged new sites of conflict and collaboration. In short, that Sex Pistols gig gave the postwar generation something to live for, and a sense that they could write their own rules. According to the journalist David Nolan, in the summer of 1976, “the audience who were in there that night . . . turned to each other and said, in that Mancunian way: “‘That’s rubbish! We could do so much better than that.’ And that’s exactly what they did.”²

These worlds all converged in Bristol at the Dugout. Rob Smith, later to become one half of the local duo Smith & Mighty, had come from a working-class area to the north, and recalls alighting on the center city during a time when no one seemed to be working. Everyone was halfheartedly trying to learn an instrument, and the Dugout was at the heart of it all:

People complained about it all the time, “Oh, bloody hell we’re going to the Dugout again.” But the truth is, there were so many tribes in Bristol at the time, because there was a lot of scenes going on, there was like the soul boys and the jazz guys and jazz funk guys and the mirror posse—the guys who used to dance in front of the mirror and all that. And then there’s the dreads and punks and goths, rockabillies, and everybody’s thing is in this club. And so, you have this real blending of people.³

The Dugout became a natural hub for the city’s diverse subcultures. But the denizens of early 1980s Bristol had another advantage: time. The welfare state had not yet been hollowed out, and the widespread unemployment that Smith recalls was counterbalanced by initiatives by national grants and local councils and, of course, the public assistance known as the dole. It was much like the hip-hop and punk-infused ecosystem that coalesced in Manhattan’s Lower East Side during that same period. One could live cheaply and the days opened up to wide expanses of listening to records, tinkering in makeshift studios, hanging out until all hours of the night, and drifting from scene to scene on foot.

Smith himself became instrumental in this scene. By mid-decade, he installed two recording studios in his home, which became a rallying point for kids influenced by American MCs and homegrown dub and reggae. He had gotten his start with a so-called YOP (a youth opportunity grant) to put on a reggae musical called “Freedom City,” headed up by local roots musician Reynold Duncan. The grant wasn’t much, but it created a pretext for Smith to learn to play guitar on the job. Similarly, the convivial quality of the Caribbean sound syst em complemented a hip-hop that was still both performative and social. This iteration of the genre was slowly making its way to Bristol clubs in the form of videos and records and even a tour stop by Kurtis Blow, the first MC to sign a major-label deal. Bronx hip-hop, like the strains of Caribbean music that effloresced during the late 1970s in Bristol, emphasized long-hangs, the gathering of community in parks and, later, warehouses to perform, to battle, to “sound” as a show of solidarity and defiance.

This would be the blueprint by the second half of the decade for the Wild Bunch sound system that became Massive Attack: the stylistic catholicism of the Dugout, the DIY spirit of punk, and the appropriative, interactive quality of black diasporic music. For Del Naja, this resourceful spirit was key:

The Pistols said the subculture of punk was dead after 6 months and that it had become a uniform, but for me that uniform was important as it separated me from the parts of society that didn’t really understand. Hip-hop came and merged with that and took over. The idea of the sound system was around as well—build your event, your own show—that was the same kind of attitude. None of us had money or were musicians or had any instruments, so we couldn’t put on concerts but we could put on sound systems and get some booze and lights and put on events in a very DIY fashion.⁴

On this side of the twenty-first century, it’s easy to take for granted the way styles and sounds can crisscross the world in an instant, in an accelerated version of what happened in the 1990s, as hip-hop became an increasingly unified “lifestyle” and punk, by and large, a nostalgic simulation of its own glory days. But in the 1980s, both forms represented a broadside against authority and against institutional pieties. This, and the distance afforded by the Atlantic Ocean, meant considerable freedom to the lads in Bristol. While Massive Attack nominally continued to function as a loose collective, in the vein of the sound system party, it was (and is) anchored by a former DJ and a former punk-graffiti kid.

Before there was a Wild Bunch, Del Naja wandered among the working-class blues clubs and hole-in-wall speakeasies. Passing the time as a kind of West Country version of the Bowery Bum or Jean-Michel Basquiat squatting in Tompkins Square Park, Del Naja and his friends would head to a local barn to top off gallon jugs with Old Cripple Crock Cider. Like gutter punks the world over, they sat in parks like Castle Green—not far from the Temple Mead’s train station—deranging themselves on rough scrumpy and planning missions. These are familiar origin stories, albeit sketched in the very British tones of a coastal town and the verdant hills and plentiful orchards of Somerset and the Cotswolds.

For Smith, the strength of the Bristol scene of the 1980s was a relative sense of isolation. London was several hours away by train but worlds away psychically and dispositionally. Bristol moved at a stately pace by most accounts, which allowed for a sense of openness to where an afternoon or recording session might lead. This sense compounded on itself: he notes that “Nobody was bothered in Bristol. There was no attention from London. There was nobody coming down saying, ‘Oh, you should do this, you should do that.’ It was left alone to stew in its own juice for years and years.” But for all that, Bristol was still a fundamentally a kind of subcultural crossroads.

Settled astride the Avon River on its course to the Bristol Channel, the city has the feel of a port city, an Atlantic entrepôt, its vast network of records shops was said to be first to get their hands on foreign imports during the 1970s and 1980s. Similarly, as a university town, Bristol sees a constant influx of young people from throughout the UK, which consistently generates fresh ranks of both audiences and instrumentalists. Indeed, the University of Bristol has long placed among the best music programs in the country, and specializes in classical and avant-garde composition and even more arcane medieval forms. The DIY zeal of the punk scene was therefore counterbalanced by virtuosic players and traditional jazz hangs. Even now, a quick walk around Bristol—from the hipper precincts of Stokes Croft to the old harbor at Spike Island—reveals a high concentration of stores selling instruments and production equipment new and used. Pubs, small clubs, and large venues dot the landscape: the grand old Colston Hall or the legendary dance club Lakota. As quiet and measured as the city is, it also has the feel of circulation, of a constant churn of people coming and going.

Part of that circulation and churn, of course, is Bristol’s place on the concert tour circuit, which brings musicians from all levels of the industry to the scene. One such group was The Slits, a women-centric band who toured in 1977 with the Clash. They were virtually synonymous with UK punk, up through their major label debut, 1979’s Cut. The Slits’s touring sound op was a young reggae producer named Adrian Sherwood, who would go on to become a legendary industrial producer (KMFDM, Nine Inch Nails). And the group was brought to Bristol by a singer named Mark Stewart, who had formed his own band in 1977 with Bruce Smith (not to be confused with Rob, of Smith & Mighty), a drummer who would occasionally sit in at gigs with the Slits. Smith was also married to Neneh Cherry for a time, who in turn featured on the band’s follow-up record, 1981’s Return of the Giant Slits. For her part, Cherry—raised in Sweden and New York by stepfather Don Cherry, the avant-garde jazz trumpeter—was already immersed in the UK post-punk scene by age 17.

By then, Mark Stewart and Bruce Smith’s band, The Pop Group, was an integral part of what would become known as the “Bristol sound” before that term came to mean trip-hop. That early-1980s sound fused angular reggae guitars, spacey reverb, and funk bass with the complex percussive polyrhythm and chromatic dexterity more associated with free jazz. Stewart’s vocal delivery—by turns yipping and operatic—and politicized lyrical content managed to foreground the emerging New Wave sound. It also echoed the American hardcore scene coming into focus back across the Atlantic. Their 1980 outing for Rough Trade Records featured songs such as “Forces of Oppression” and “Feed the Hungry,” and occupied the same discursive terrain as, for instance, the Dead Kennedys or Minor Threat.

But sonically, The Pop Group’s palette was a rawer, more discordant version of a sound that would be popularized within several years (albeit in a sanded-down, radio-friendly form) by the likes of the Fixx, Gang of Four, and mid-career Talking Heads. Which is to say, The Pop Group generated, seemingly ex nihilo, the sound that acts like Franz Ferdinand are still trying to perfect. Aside from being an early favorite of Robert Del Naja, they were the stellar mass around which a host of other Bristol groups emerged during those pivotal years. One was the drum-heavy Mouth, founded by Rob Merrill, Andy Guy, Nellee Hooper, and Jamie Hill and based out of the Hill’s apartment in the Clifton neighborhood.⁵ Mouth toured with t he Slits and the celebrated roots-reggae band Talisman.

Another group, Rip Rig + Panic, was named for a record by the midwestern free-jazz titan Rahsaan Roland Kirk and formed in 1980 as a telescoping lineup of former Pop Group members (Gareth Sager, Bruce Smith), featuring Cherry on vocals. Cherry recalls falling into the Bristol scene as a “dazed and confused” teenager, still rebelling, but soon connecting with RR + P, “people who were into the music I’d grown up with” but also able to channel a spirit of simultaneous chaos and innocence: the “whole punk thing was very important.”⁶

If this is all starting to read like a tangled web, it is—and that’s the point. At the dawn of the 1980s, Bristol, a town of under 500,000 people, had become a vital hub. It was not only home to a range of cosmopolitan sounds from the underground, but served as a petri dish where they could hybridize and multiply. These new sonic pathways were synonymous with what we call post-punk, and, more distinctly, they fused together diasporic musics such as jazz, reggae, funk, and (certainly by 1983) the two-turntable model and lyrical meter of American hip-hop. The Dugout, with “Daddy G” Marshall at the helm, would be one site of this admixture, as were the free-wheeling Wild Bunch sound system parties that took up the mantle of the Dugout upon its close in 1986.

While they were primarily a vehicle for live performance, the Wild Bunch did record for a time. Their first major release, 1988’s Friends & Countrymen starts as garden variety fare of the sort one might have heard back in New York, but gives over to something else altogether—“The Look of Love,” with its loping, chiming beat, orchestral scratches, and a haunting female vocal line. The song was by then a soul standard, written by the prolific pop-orchestral composer Burt Bacharach in 1967 and popularized by Dusty Springfield for the Casino Royale soundtrack. True to form, the record-scratched horns of the Wild Bunch version call back subtly to the modish, Ian Fleming-infused verve of the original, and presage the Portishead template with funky aplomb.⁷

As sui generis as it was, Friends & Countrymen was released even as key members shifted their attention to other projects. Ironically, it in some ways marked the disbanding of the group as a sound system. Yet, that final section of the record also looked ahead to the tonal quality of Blue Lines and the stylistic hallmarks of Smith ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Track Listing
• Introduction
• 1 Cider Punks
• 2 Five Man Army
• 3 The Coach House
• 4 The Tricky Kid
• Interlude: Living in My Headphones
• 5 The Cherry Bear Organization
• 6 Flammable Materials
• 7 Daydreaming
• 8 Big Wheel Keeps on Turning
• Notes
• Also available in the series
• Copyright