Every year just before Christmas the UK music media goes into that much of a frenzy about what next year’s band to be, album to listen to and trend to follow will be, that sometimes they forget about the guys who really matter, the musicians who changed the game, who wrote the blue (line) prints and who created the music that will forever be in the mind and soul of a whole generation of music lovers. 15 years after they first appeared in Lodown, just before the release of their outstanding second album Protection, 18 years after they first pushed the sonic boundaries with their debut album Blue Lines, Bristol’s one and only Massive Attack are back with their fifth, much anticipated studio album Heligoland, scheduled for release in February 2010.
 
And it’s Massive Attack with Daddy G back in the fold, so after the more or less solo-released 100th Window, Massive Attack mastermind 3D reunites with his old friend. Once you talk to them, it seems he’s never really been away, but we were still eager to find out what exactly is up with the mighty Massive Attack just before the release of the wonderfully titled Heligoland album, so we made our way to the Berkley Hotel in Soho to meet the original Bristol Wild Bunch.
 
After a bit of confusion – we were supposed to talk to Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja because he’s obviously of particular interest for a magazine like Lodown, as he’s also one of the original and most influential UK graffiti/street/guerilla artists – we went to meet Daddy G first. An imposing presence at almost two meters height, Grant Marshall, the man known as Daddy G, immediately comes across as a friendly and genuine person, and despite having a nasty cold, he quickly engages in a fascinating conversation about Massive Attack times past, present and future.

It’s been 11 years, since you personally released a Massive Attack album. How is it being back, after not being involved in the 2003’s 100th Window album?

It’s really good to be back, it’s just good to start being creative again. I had a bit of a time off with my little kid, you know.

It’s probably a reunion a lot of people like to see, I mean it’s almost back to the old original line up. How did you guys get back together?

It was very personal. We had a bit of a meeting and talked about some things and I realized that I have known 3D for 27 years. I mean, you can’t let anything like that die. 27 years! The Wild Bunch has been going since 1983, I’ve known D since the early 80s, really. If you have known someone for that long, it’s just hard to walk away from him forever. We are more like brothers than…sisters, hahaha.

Musically, from the last album you’ve been involved in, Mezzanine, to this one here, what has been the main musical development?

Good question. I think 100th Window was slightly over-layered with sentiment and music and it is hard to kind of penetrate it, so it came across as quite a cold album that you couldn’t really be part of. It wasn’t so intimate and it wasn’t so easy to get close to it and I feel that this album is a bit more intimate. There is a lot more soul, there are a lot more intimate songs and the production is a lot warmer, at the same time it’s quite minimalist, which is more in keeping with the way we worked before, where it was a bit more simplistic. There have been a lot of layers but we’ve actually stripped quite a lot of that down… to get down to the meat of what the songs are, you know.

The title Heligoland is obviously particularly interesting for us Germans, because Hel(i)goland is this weird little island north of Germany. Where did the title come from?

D was listening to something on the radio and it was about this island called Heligoland, where nobody lived from 1945 to the early 1950s. And I think the Royal Navy let off a bomb or something… and as far as they were concerned they were kind of happy to let the island sink, if the experiment didn’t go that well. To D that seemed like quiet a fascinating subject and quite wasteful that people could actually plan the destruction of an island and not really worry about it. I mean it was somewhere where people used to live, and that was what caught D’s imagination, how purposely wasteful people are. He talked to me about it and I looked it up, found out a lot about it and it seemed like a good idea.

Was the creative approach of recording the album different to previous records? What was the process of producing Heligoland like?

The funny thing is when we came on tour last year, previous to that, shift yourself a year and a half before that, me and D had been working on tracks for this album. I had been working with these guys called ‘Robots’ and D was working with Neil Davidge and the idea was to bring the tracks together. It was just after 100th Window and we were treating each other with kid gloves really. These are the tracks that we took on tour last year, some are mine, and some are D’s. We’ve always made music that was studio based, but for the last tours we got more involved with musicians and we’ve evolved from the sound system into the band, so with quite a lot of the tracks now, there’s always one ear on ‘I wonder how these tracks would sound live’, so that’s also an influence on how we make music. At that point we felt that quiet a lot of these tracks didn’t have this apparent cohesion, so we went back to the studio, stripped all the tracks down and started working in D’s studio in Bristol. We built a lot of these tracks back up again from nothing.

Continue reading on next page.

It was almost like a reverse process?

Yeah, to a certain extent, and we kind of collaborated quite a bit on those tracks. To us they now sound like they’re coming from one place rather than before where they sounded like they are coming from one brain as such.
 
In general, the atmospheric, at times hypnotic sounds are still there. I mean you’ve always made the sort of music that transports you to a slightly different place and that you want to listen to again and again and explore properly…

Our thing is with Massive Attack music, it’s a case of sometimes you have to listen to our records three or four times before you can actually get the gist of what we are talking about, whether it is the lyrical side or whether it is the musical side. That’s the whole thing there. We like to do that, take people on a journey. It seems to be a bit boring if a track goes up, stays linear, comes down. There is a nice thing to be actually swept somewhere else, whether it is Damon Albarn singing Saturday Comes Slowly to you or Guy Garvey with Flat Of The Blades or Hope Sandoval with Paradise Circus – these are tracks that really take you on a journey. It seems boring not to use that aspect to take people on a journey.

What are the key tracks that you came up with?

Paradise Circus, Saturday Comes Slowly and Splitting The Atoms are three of the ones I perceived.

What was the inspiration behind Paradise Circus, that’s a beautiful song on which Hope Sandoval really shines…

She is amazing. That’s a song that I initially did with these guys ‘The Robots’ in Bristol and we also got involved with Tim Goldsworthy (DFA). He did some beat programming with us. Originally it’s another one of those songs that started off as a demo, so we just took it with us on tour and when we got back we fixed it up. You know that’s the funny thing about it, we work with people and sometimes it’s kind of hard to get into their brains, but with Hope it was a case of being evil and good and being caught up in something which is helpless, where you can’t find help for it.
It seems to be about the juxtaposition between the good and the evil.
Yeah, it’s that sort of thing where she is trying to be a good girl but is pulled from side to side with evil thoughts and things like that. It is thought provoking. What we like to do is work with people who add something… a bit of personality, a bit of mystique. Hope has got this real fragility, which works so well. She’s almost on the edge of breaking up and there is always this fraught thing in her voice. It always sounds really troubled. I like that, the fact that you are listening to her voice and it’s not the happiest of people, it’s almost like it’s coming straight from her heart and there is this thing about being quite vulnerable. And her songs are that way, where you have this empathy and just want to pick her up and hold her, and comfort her because it all seems quite close.
There has always been that thing where it is quite a masculine based environment that we work in and to have someone with that fragility like Liz or Hope, it adds a bit of a smooth to the rough element.

Splitting The Atoms is another great track, a bit more of a hip-hop beat and again collaboration with Horace Andy. How did that track come together?

You know that Damon Albarn is on it as well? That’s a track we did in the studio, it started off with a beat that we had and Damon came on and played the organ, because D was looking for some off-kilter waltzy thing. Anyway, the thing about working with Horace Andy is, it’s a brilliant testament about what Massive Attack is all about because that was always our ethos about working with people and taking them out of their comfort zone. Horace was a traditional reggae singer and to work with someone like Massive Attack - which is a completely different entity to what he was used to - and actually taking him out of his reggae environment and putting him into ours always results in something really unique. He was actually singing an octave higher, you know. He didn’t quite understand it at first, but we kind of helped him and coached him into it and we had great results. I mean working with Horace is great. He was our first singer that we ever got involved with really, and it has worked out so well and he has become a friend.

Continue reading on next page.

Again the lyrics on that track, especially lines like ‘I’m letting you know I know what you need, I turn you around this beautiful town and then believe in your eyes and deceive you’ are quite thought-provoking, you know the idea of deception and…

It’s about deception… but it is also about Bristol as well, the fact that Bristol is quite a deceiving city, where there is a kind of underbelly to it and that there is a late night thing about it. You know ‘I love you and I take you around the city and show you around’, yet the city is kind of evil, but when I take you, you are going to have a good time.

It’s almost like a love-hate relationship you have with the city…

Well, we love Bristol, but it’s kind of a love/hate song in itself, you know what I mean. And the title ‘Splitting The Atoms’ is a metaphor really for Massive Attack and what we have been about and the ideas that we have used and the fact that we always try to split the atom and try out something else.

How did you get together with Damon Albarn for the Saturday Comes Slow track?

It was so simple. It’s a simple beat that we had, a simple tribal beat that we started off with and it seemed like one Damon would be good for. I mean we know Damon and he is a fucking genius. He is a friend, he is family and he wants to be known as family and that’s a beautiful thing. You know D has worked with him before in the studio in Bristol and we wanted to get Damon involved. We made some suggestions how to write the song, but the funny thing is YOU don’t give Damon Albarn suggestions on how to write songs. HE writes songs, you know what I mean! So he kind of ignored our ideas and it didn’t take him that long to come up with something incredible. It’s a track where he really put his soul in, he really loves it and we love it too.

I saw you live at Bestival, where you had these incredible visuals, these big LED messages with pretty clear political messages. How important is it to you to make these political and social statements?

It’s always has been important. We’ve been working with UVA now for three or four tours. I mean, it’s all been driven by D but there has always been a social or political aspect to Massive Attack, a social awareness. To be honest, it’s only a social awareness that most people should have. Most people should have an idea of what’s going on politically. We’ve always been into backing the underdog, like the Palestinian thing we do, the Hoping foundation. It’s pretty obvious really, these people are occupational prisoners and the bottom line is, it’s a great thing to support. You forget that they are people like us, me and you, that are in a situation where they’ve had everything cut off. Their whole lifeline has been cut off, their whole restriction of movements has been cut off, and all their privileges have been cut off. They are people who are basically stuck in one place. It’s kind of easy sometimes to forget the human suffering, the human aspect of what’s really happening on a grassroots level. And when you actually become aware of it through the Hoping foundation, you can’t help and have empathy for them. It’s really about all the injustices going on in the world, which are quite a lot, sometimes a bit too many to mention, that actually aren’t brought to the forefront because they are not fashionable or topical.

It’s a sad state of affairs really, isn’t it?

It’s sad in a way because news is like fashion items, really… and it recycles itself around the same issues sometimes and even things that are going on for instance in Sudan or places like Darfur, it’s sadly enough not en vogue anymore.

Let’s talk about the Bristol heritage, how important is that background, the fact that you started with the Wild Bunch in the early 80s and became some sort of sound system and musical pioneers here in the UK?

The good thing about it is that we never actually had to jump on the London gravy train… we might have got swallowed up or got lost in the past being in London. The fact that we were from Bristol and we had something to say, we had our own little thing going, and if you are in London everyone is really complacent and there is a lot of competition. In Bristol we had enough time to breathe and formulate our ideas and our own thoughts about what we wanted to do. Bristol runs at a different pace to London. But that being said, it’s not that we couldn’t run with the big boys and we proved that we can, so you don’t necessarily need to be in London to make things work. And nowadays technology doesn’t force you to be in London, you can do what you want in a nicer environment and Bristol is a lovely place, it’s quite green, it takes an hour and a half to get out to Devon where my caravan is, so it’s a beautiful thing. What’s also important is the fact that Bristol has always had a quite heavy Jamaican community and that’s played a really big influence on the music scene. It’s very bass-orientated and this is where we got our ideas for the sound system from, from the Jamaican heritage. When Wild Bunch started as a sound system it was a total, a direct copy of what the Jamaican sound systems were. The thing is we used to play punk music, reggae, hip-hop and all kinds of stuff, which made us slightly different to other sound systems… that eclectic vibe. And Massive Attack was a multi-racial thing, so we had a diversity of cultures as well, which was brilliant because we were all drawing from different backgrounds and that made it quite interesting and our aesthetics and way of thinking was kind of different.

Continue reading on next page.

Finally, when you sit back sometimes and look at your back catalogue, at the fact that you put out two of the most important UK albums with Blue Lines in 1991 and Protection in 1994, and think ‘Fuck we really have achieved something’?

It took us nearly eight years to make that first album, you know all the aesthetics and all the influences that we had waiting to make the first album, so as far as we were concerned that was it. We never actually looked beyond that one. To know that we have been going for this long now – (laughs) I have to admit our album output isn’t the strongest – but in Bristol it’s always been the case that it is about quality and not quantity which is a bit of a get-out clause, really. But yeah, it’s a good thing to look back and think ‘Maybe we might make a mark’.

Next up was a cab ride from London’s plush Knightsbridge area to East London, where Daddy G and 3D had to go for a photo shoot. Sitting in a car not only with one of the most influential musicians in the UK, but also one of the true graffiti pioneers and still one of the most respected artists around, is a pretty inspiring position to be in.

Let’s talk about the new album first. How is it having Daddy G back on board?

It’s been interesting. I was very keen to make a record different from 100th Window. It was a very – I wouldn’t say lonely experience – but it was very different from the communal Massive Attack albums of the past and this is more communal again. 100th Window was very textured and layered and I’d never go to that place again. It was a good experience but it was a counter reaction to Mezzanine and this again is the counter reaction to that. So it was about simplifying everything.

It’s definitely a warmer sound…

Yes, it is. Mezzanine was a difficult album to make because obviously I was pushing in a direction that wasn’t popular… because I felt with Protection we had explored a very electronic avenue and it didn’t really conjure up my memories of the music history in Bristol, whereas Mezzanine was more about that time, but we still did a lot of sampling and it was still based on that kind of hip-hop ethic where it’s all about a quite anarchistic approach of taking a bit of something and building something on it. After getting sued for the umpteenth time for Mezzanine we thought ‘fuck sampling’. On Blue Lines sampling was a limited procedure, you had short memories on samplers, you could only sample a small amount of a record and you would make a whole record out of a loop and it was great. It was anarchistic, it was the new punk really, but as soon as the lawyers got in touch, as soon as they caught up with the process, it became difficult. Anyway, I’m digressing. Mezzanine was a tough record and 100th Window was a counter product to that. It was textured, it was layered, lots of complex arrangements and with this record I was very eager to keep it simple. When it came to the final production, I was stripping of reverbs, I was stripping of effects and delays, breaking things down, just the dry sounds, keeping it very dry or very wet or in contrast with each other, so you felt that every instrument you heard was in the room with you.

Did you want it more accessible for a wider audience?

Absolutely. It’s always a challenge to try and draw people into the whole graphic shape. To me the music is like, the way it comes out of the speakers, it’s almost s if you can feel it coming out this way or that way, and you want to sort it go over your head and free you a little bit and you want some sounds to be right there in front of you and some sounds to go right over you. It’s always visual as well I think, the way you do that. You describe music, you describe the image of the speaker, or the image of a track, because it’s the best way to really come to terms with what you can explain what your ears hear, because we are all very visual creatures, aren’t we.

Where did the title Heligoland come from?

I’ve got it from ‘Shadow Of The Vampire’ and I really liked the word immediately. I looked it up and found out the history and the meaning of the word and I love the anagrams that it creates as well. It creates so many anagrams…

Like ‘Hell I Go Land’…

Exactly, and Legoland as well, hahaha. It would be a great place to have a gig. It’s really sparse and hardly anyone lives there, it’s just a bit of a weird place really.

Exactly. I want to go there. I wonder if you could do a gig there, or if we could do a festival in Heligoland, a two-day festival. That would be cool, really.

Continue reading on next page.

Let’s talk about some of the tracks on the album. ‘Babel’ to me is an interesting track, because it’s got pretty tough beats and a sort of hallucinating feel. How was it working with Martina Topley-Bird and what was the idea and inspiration behind that track?

That track was a demo that had been lying around, we had a whole set of demos that had been lying around in the studio, almost discarded. It’s when Martina came into the studio and we sort of tip-toed around each other and we said ‘Shall we do it, shall we try something?’ you know, without knowing if it will work or not and probably the fear of failure being a pretty strong deterrent if you want it to work so much. She picked up on a track and sort of sang quite a poppy version of a bluesy song. It was quite odd to hear her juxtaposition, she said ‘I’m writing like a teenager again’. It worked because it was such a contrast to the sharp and jerky beat in there, it’s a really graphic sounding drum and Neil played a really mad bass on it. A really loose, wobbly bass, it was really fucked up, it sounds so fucking out of time, it’s brilliant.

Has the title Babel any reference to the film?

No, it’s just another reference to language. One letter can end a relationship, one letter gets us in the wrong car. I’ve sent a wrong e-mail to someone once and I finished a relationship, it was just one letter, man. So it’s about semantics and when you say something to someone what you actually mean or what you do.

Another track that you sing on is Rush Minute. Explain the lines ‘I want to be clean, but I want to be high, good to be here because I hardly come by. You bring pain because you’ve got game. Needles and pins a man can’t take’. Is it about the fight between the good and the bad side within you?

Exactly. That song is also a very ironic look at the culture of getting wrecked, you know, which I have been around for a long time. And I watch the younger generation of now. I mean I still have my occasional moments of getting completely fucked up. But as a whole, watching the new generation of Bristol people doing what we did in a kind of hardcore way, and just watching them, the paces they go through and their justification for it all is interesting, and it made me think about misspent youth… and also the fact if you didn’t do that, where would you be, if you know what I mean. And the fact that now, it eludes to the fact that a lot of people I talk to this day and age they might say ‘Yeah, I might go into recovery’, and I find that ridiculous. It’s ridiculous that you can even say that without sorting your own shit out. You know what I mean, it’s like ‘I’m going to get fucked up so much I have to go to recovery and they will sort it out for me’. What the fuck!

The beat and the dark underlying feel of the track are classic Massive Attack, really…

It’s an interesting mix of having quite a motoring rhythm to which it moves you forward all the time. It never sticks but at the same time some quite nasty chords underpin it. It was a good battle to get it right. The beat almost is a reference to the Bauhaus track The Ghost Is Dead.

Another track that you sing on and that has a subliminal political message to it is Atlas Air. What’s the track exactly about?

Atlas Air was going two ways. It’s a collision of two songs. Man, the backing track has been changed so many times. It’s been called Marrakech last year… first I took all the music away and started re-writing the song over the beat and then realized I was writing a completely different song. I thought ‘Fuck it, just leave that song where it is on the shelf and write something new’. But some of the sentiments of that song were about falling in love with a porn star online and this sense of being a slave to it. But then I started talking about the rendition experience, and about the rendition monologues, about how prisoners were taken and treated and then about security and the way we are monitored and how the Internet is used against you as well as for you. It started to become quite confusing and I think the track changed in the last minute and made it much more about rendition and about being taken and it really is an abstraction of the idea of what it would be like to be someone who may have just be following a path on the internet and find himself that the path is leading to a fucking underground hole somewhere in the Middle East, like in Afghanistan, you know what I mean. And it’s about the way people get drawn into these worlds by information, disinformation and the consequences to that and how fucking scary that is. The idea that there is a body outside our power that really has the ability to whisk you away anywhere you want – that’s why I called it Atlas Air, because it eludes to the mountains outside Morocco, but it also eludes to the fact that if you had an airline, you would call it Atlas Air because it can take you any-fucking-where you want without any itinerary and no accountability… I mean that is quiet scary.”

Continue reading on next page.

The political messages and social commentary, not in a preachy way but somewhere in the sub-context of your lyrics, have always been important to you. What has always driven you to stand up and comment on the injustices in the world?

As a citizen it’s your responsibility to speak up. We are all active in this community, here we are in the centre of it right now (at this point we are passing the Houses of Parliament in the taxi ), and it’d be mad to ignore it. I think disenfranchise and get disharmonized by it all… because the party politics in this country just don’t mean anything anymore and the way the economy has been run, the sort of greed and the way capitalism sort of fell upon ourselves, it’s a hard one. But it’s very difficult to get people motivated for anything political because they feel they will be let down like so many times before. In Splitting The Atoms we talk about the fact that ‘here we go again on the merry go around’, that was the 80s with Thatcher and it is very much referencing The Specials in terms of its sound-scape. And here we go again possibly entering a new era of governance, maybe it will be the Conservatives, maybe the Labour party, but does it really fucking matter? Does anyone really care anymore? What’s next? I think it’s important. The other track that’s political on the record is Flat Of The Blade with Guy Garvey, which is an abstraction of the idea of what it means to be a warrior back home. And it is not really referencing recent wars, or old wars, but all wars and how important the family unit is to protect you and what you do to protect it and the connection between what someone goes to war for and what to protect and what they get when they get back and what it all means. Again, it’s done in a very British, subtle way.

The good old British subtlety works wonders sometimes, doesn’t it?

Exactly, and there are people who already did that. The Clash and Stiff Little Fingers wrote really political songs and you would be stomping around to them and pogo to them and I was like ‘that was it, that was anthemic protest music’. I really dug that. That was my childhood, my early teens. It is very difficult to write like that as well and we’ve always been about the subtlety and it’s always about other people. It’s never about just one man’s opinion, so you have to be very careful how you construct everything because if you would have to take all the people in the commune of Heligoland on this record, they will all have different opinions. You will find a lot of common ground spiritually and politically but also a lot of different approaches of how you want to do something.

How important is the live show with these really powerful political LED messages? I mean at Bestival people were really talking about it a lot because you really get a message across.

After touring Mezzanine in a very rock’n roll way, with 100th Window I was very keen to make it much more artistic in a sense visually, so that it had a connection to what I felt Massive Attack was about. The years of working on the visuals and the sleeves, you know when we did the Protection tour we did a sound system, with all the images of the Euro child and all this crazy stuff we were doing, all the projections and I felt we had lost that a bit on and I wanted to get back into that with 100th Window. Basically I was into Tatsumi Hajima, but it became apparent that it would be hard to make it work over a whole show, so I thought ‘fuck it, I use LED’s and take it to another level’. I worked with UVA and we thought we’d just use data and information as opposed to video to make it very pure and we stuck with that principle all the way through and even if we do these video images, we try to do it in a very purist form by using contrasts to words to use something soft against something hard to get that kind of texture to changes in the set. And we wanted to make it very cinematic… but also you want to highlight the strange information age that we are all in. We are in the middle of this information overload, waterfall, avalanche or whatever you want to call it where you choose which bit you want to absorb and which bits you discard and what you are left with. Like that Heligoland-thing is probably an anagram of what’s real and that is what the show is meant to portray, that kind of strange anagram, and everyone will come away with a different one on the night: what words they noticed and what things resonated and what didn’t. Some of it might be trivial and some of it really serious and that’s kind of like reading the paper or being surrounded by news bars going up and down or from left to right when you are watching the news channels, where you might have something very serious on with something really trivial framing it and it’s like ‘Fuck, it’s very hard to know how to feel in these situations’. And I think at the gig we’re part of the process. We are traveling, we are in the middle of this information age and we are part of it by nature of what we are doing, by performing in this scenario and I would feel very uncomfortable not to be able to emphasize that and highlight that kind of strangeness with the show. It all changes though, and it develops as we go from place to place, from gig to gig. New ideas will come, change this, add this, supplement that, change the language here and there, it really is interesting and it makes the gigs evolve. We’ve had a bit of a moment this year in Milan, I don’t know if G mentioned it, about that kid Stefano Tucci, who died in police custody in Milan. In ‘La Republcia’ there was a story that he got busted on a minor drug charge, like he had some cannabis and something had happened in remand and it got buried a little bit and the papers wanted the truth about Stefano. So we put it on the screen because it was that day’s news and it seemed important. And of course they all went crazy in the audience and people filmed it on their cameras and posted it on You Tube and ‘La Republica’ picked it back up and posted it on their news sites… and for two days all the national agencies and papers used the image of the words on the screen on their news channels, and then the Ministry of Justice made a statement that they were going to investigate the whole thing – whether that was a direct connection to what we did or whether that was just part of the process I don’t know, but regardless what it means, it shows that the recycling of information is really interested because it could change everything.”

Continue reading on next page.

D, you are obviously not only a massively influential musician, but also one of UK’s graffiti pioneers and also the guy who has created Massive Attack’s visual side through the designs of the cover artwork. I really like the new cover, especially the way the letters spread. What was the idea behind the artwork for Heligoland?

The thing with the letters of the word Heligoland and the anagrams you can create with it – there are ten different options and you can go on forever, moving the letter from left to right until you reach that point where you’ve got to be ‘That’ll do’ because you get bored with it. The cover image is a kind of strange collage of a very confused man, culturally, physically, and sexually. What am I? What do I represent? What is it about me? Who represents me? Where do I live? Where is my flag? What does that flag mean? It’s again another consequence of the collage that we all are, that it is very hard to really define ourselves and what we stand for.

How has it been for you to juggle these two careers as a musician and a graffiti/guerilla artist and how important is the art side as another creative outlet?

It’s really important. I guess, being someone like my mum said who is ‘bloody minded’, just as the graffiti thing started to take off in the UK, in Bristol, around the mid-90s again - 12, 13 years after I was doing in, and then especially around 2000 when Banksy really started to really come to form - I started to work strictly photographically with Nick Knight. I didn’t do any paintings whatsoever. We did everything by collage and photographs, and we destroyed the glass figures and on Mezzanine we did the Beatles. I hadn’t really done any painting for a while. I had kind of got a little bit bored of it for some reason. I found out there was a new freedom in doing it photographically, you know, doing something else. And it was James Lavelle who started me again, I mean I had done some paintings for James for his Headz albums but he really wanted me to do something for UNKLE, so I was like ‘Okay, let’s try it’. I wasn’t sure if I was up to it or not and I spent a month painting and we worked on that sleeve and all those images… and it worked out really well. It gave me very much a kick up the arse and a boost of encouragement because I got a little bit bored of what I was doing with graffiti. I felt from doing the paintings, I got bored of the graffiti thing, the New York style thing and the stenciling. I mean I was doing stenciling in 1987 and then the whole thing started to get popular, so I automatically in my happy fashion rebelled against that. I was like ‘Fuck that, I’ve done that’. So James, who was a real fan of what I did - he was a big fan of the history of graffiti in general and he always went back to Futura - he really started me off again. And you know what, it was an honour for me to work with James, I knew how much it meant to him.

Some of your new artwork is represented through Lazarides Inc, a lot of it is in very striking red, black and white colours. Why those colours?

The funny thing with those images is that James insisted on working in red, black and white so it gave me limitations. I had done a lot of things in colour so we colour-corrected a lot of things and then I started painting some more red, black and white. I think they are very much the colours of the political posters, aren’t they. May 1968, the Black Panthers, everything… think about all those eras, the Soviet style posters. It’s all got this striking look and those do spring to mind. The whole thing culminated in something that we did down the Southbank for Meltdown where I did this thing called ’Favourite Nations’ where I tried to get as many of the colonial British flags, the flags of the colonies and distorted them, making them all sort of red, white, grey and black. They were almost like anarchist flags but with each country’s crest or insignia, which was really nice. It was the case of taking this idea all the way and I was a little bit worried, because obviously I was going to offend quite a few people. It was going up right in the middle of a major Arts Centre in London and then we had Somalia and Israel and Palestine and Iraq and I was like ‘Fuck, loads of countries where people aren’t exactly very happy about the British interventions’.

But again a nice political statement…

It was nice and subtle. It had good intentions, whether it was successful, I don’t know.

How do you feel about your position as one of the pioneering UK graffiti artists, I mean people like Banksy have cited you as a major influence. Do you feel honoured by that?

I think so, yes. (laughs) It would be nice to earn some sort of money like Banksy, though. But to be honest, I made my choices. People have asked me to do exhibitions for the last 20 years and I was always ‘No, I’m too busy touring or doing music’, so I must love this. But it is nice to be referenced and recognized. Banksy always says complementary things to me and I always tell him that he’s a great flatterer. But to be honest, he is unique in what he does, where he came from, how he approached it, what he has done with it, his vision, his sense of humour and how he captures a lot of things in one image. It’s just totally unique and like all great surrealist, he’s a great satirist as well. I mean some of his images, the image at the show in Bristol of the Klansman hanging from the tree, it’s just so perfect, it’s so obvious. When I went to that show in Bristol, it felt like I had seen it all before, because it felt so classic. It felt like I was in the future looking back at a classic show you are going to visit 100 years later. It felt that interesting and the work has got so much imagination, it was so right, so when he says I’m an influence on him, it’s a very minor one.

Continue reading on next page.

Just before it turns to 2010, it seems like you are in a great and happy place. You are about to release your fifth album, you create loads of art. How does it feel to be such an influential figure and to be still at the helmet of two creative movements that have influenced so many people?

It feels great. And there’s plenty more to come. At the moment I try to finish the artwork for all the different formats… we want to create really interesting books out of it and there are so many images to work with. Then we have a lot of tracks for a new EP, which we want to put out in May. And we’ve got a big tour ahead of us with loads of more visual ideas. Especially the end of the show is nuts because it goes into a collage of subliminal advertising, all the logos of every company you can imagine intermingled with the flags, it’s completely nutty. Well, and then we have to move studio, which is quite mad. It will be new era because Neil and me have been sharing a studio for the last ten, twelve years, so that’s a big change.

But Bristol is still your home, right? I mean Massive Attack is Bristol and Bristol is Massive Attack.

Absolutely. Man. Absolutely. It will be mad to leave friends. We’re having the luxury and the privilege of going out and spending enough time to see other places… so Bristol is a good place to return to.

<sub>Heligoland / album / EMI
www.massiveattack.com

Words & interview: Goetz Werner</sub>