From The Beatles, Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.
Through Punk, indie and pops electro and Brit
Britain has produced a whole lot of classic music for such a small nation
but I'm not here to talk about those over talked about bands and artists.
They are great and no question but what can I add to the conversation
about "Yesterday'", "Satisfaction", "Stairway to Heaven", "God Save the Queen"
or "Bohemian Rhapsody".
These songs have been canonized as British standards.
There's nothing more to add.
This series is gonna delve into the stories of classic British songs
that are slightly less well-known
while looking at all the multiple facets and sounds of British music from the last 60 years.
This is retroactively part three as I've previously looked at "Ever Fallen in Love?" by Buzzcocks
and "How Soon is Now?" by the Smiths.
Now for a British song that isn't a question:
Influence is a strange thing.
Just because a band is influential doesn't mean that the band is known because of their influence.
People know Radiohead's OK Computer changed things
People are less aware of Massive Attack's Blue Lines and its aura of influence.
Formed in Bristol in the late 80s,
they made it so dance music didn't have to be all about speed.
That it could be emotive and chilled.
They made serious moves to make hip-hop outside the U.S. a legitimate thing
and most importantly it made it so hip-hop as a whole could seek to be more introspective
in its ideas rather than party hard or political.
While overall Massive Attack and more well known for their 98 song "Teardrop",
their most important single was 91's "Unfinished Sympathy"
While it's unusual structure and genre fusion are elements that get critics interested,
its emotional resonance, its heartbroken vocal and those sweeping strings
have made it resound with listeners since its release
But how did a bunch of, in their words, "lazy Bristol twats"
create one of the most innovative songs of the 90s?
How did one band changed the course two separate genres?
And by chance create a completely new one?
This is the story of "Unfinished Sympathy"
What eventually became Massive Attack was a Bristol based sound system
called the Wild Bunch, formed in the early 80s.
A posse of like-minded individuals: musicians, artists, filmmakers and other creative types
that worked within the same space bouncing ideas and sharing resources with each other.
The Wild Bunch consisted of MC Adrian Thaws aka Tricky,
the graphic artist and lyricist Robert del Naja or 3D,
and DJs Nellee Hooper, Andrew "Mushroom" Vowles and Grant "Daddy G" Marshall.
When the Wild Bunch dissolved in 1987, Hooper left to record with the influential Soul II Soul.
3D, Daddy G and Mushroom would coalesce into Massive Attack
with Tricky and various other Bristol based musicians dropping in and out when needed.
After their first single "Any Love" was released in 88 Massive Attack's signed to Circa,
a subsidiary of Virgin Records, thanks to Swedish-born musician Neneh Cherry.
She took the group under her wing, having previously worked with the Wild Bunch
and referenced them in her worldwide hit "Buffalo Stance".
DJ Mushroom also makes an appearance in the music video.
In turn 3D wrote the lyrics for her top 5 UK hit, "Manchild".
With its mournful strings and hip-hop beats, sounding like a proto-"Unfinished Sympathy".
She paid the key members of Massive Attack a monthly wage
so they could focus and finish their debut album.
The recording of Blue Lines would start in 1990 and would take about eight months.
Daddy G told The Observer in 2004:
They took influence from post-punk, reggae, soul and U.S. hip hop
but also the British dance of Soul II Soul
and the genre-bending style of Cherry's Raw Like Sushi.
This anything-goes approach would mark them out from the rest of early nineties dance.
Its slow, stoned grooves being the opposite of the ecstasy-fueled, yet predictable house music of the day.
Massive Attack's quest to be more than run-of-the-mill dance
was most significantly shown on Blue Line's second single, "Unfinished Sympathy".
On vocals on the track is Shara Nelson
who had previously appeared on the Wild Bunch's cover of Burt Bacharach's "The Look of Love".
The initial spark of "Unfinished Sympathy" was created from a melody Nelson was toying with.
Her working title for the song was "Kiss And Tell" but the band preferred something more abstract
and dubbed the new piece "Unfinished Sympathy", an apparent play on Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony"
Massive Attack have stated that it was a deconstruction exercise
editing the track until only the most essential elements remained.
The backbeat consists of two elements:
First the beat which is sampled from JJ Johnson's "The Parade Strut"
off the soundtrack from 70s blaxsploitation film Willie Dynamite
This is augmented with bell-like percussion inspired by Bob James' "Take Me to The Mardi Gras",
a song previously sampled by Run DMC on "Peter Piper":
The last actual sample is a vocal sample.
The "hey hey hey" that can be confused as merely a vocal ad lib by Nelson,
but is in fact taken from Mahavishnu Orchestra's "Planetary Citizen".
Note that "Unfinished Sympathy" has neither a traditional baseline nor a chorus.
What it has instead is an ever-mounting orchestra swell.
Recorded live by a 40-piece Orchestra at London's Abbey Road Studios conducted by Will Malone.
Despite writing the strings composition, Malone does not have a songwriting credit on the track.
Originally they had tried to fill the gaps with synthesized strings.
The strings recording was not in the album's budget
so the group had to sell them Mitsubishi Shogun to recoup the cost.
The lyrics are loose.
With a narrative being hard to surmise listeners can interpret whatever they want to the song,
but most interpretations come down to some form of heartache,
some misunderstanding between Nelson's protagonist and her lover.
It doesn't have a chorus where a song would usually refine its message into a repeated statement of intent.
The song, as its title suggests, is unfinished.
The orchestral swell that ends the song is in a way an ellipsis, a dot dot dot.
When you're in the midst of a relationship issue, you don't know how it's gonna go.
It could be fine, it could be the end.
The completed "Unfinished Sympathy" sounded like nothing else
in the dance and hip hop genre up to this point.
As NME put it in their 1991 review of Blue Lines:
What is almost as iconic is the song itself, is the music video that accompanied it.
Rather than staying in Bristol, the group shot the video in Los Angeles,
due to the dank rain soaked Britain not having the golden sunshine
that would make the video look the way it does.
Directed by Bailey Walsh who was tasked with creating videos for the whole of the Blue Lines cycle,
"Unfinished Sympathy"'s clip follows Nelson walking down West Pico Boulevard
oblivious to her surroundings.
The idea was about you know it was very personal in the sense of
that thing where you walk down a road and someone's hurt you, or you're obsessed with something
and you don't notice anything from the moment you set off
so that was the idea. I just wanted this unbroken thought really
which is why it became one take.
While one shots had been used throughout the history of cinema
rarely had they been utilized in music video.
Dan Kneece was the Steadicam operator on the shoot, best known for his work on Blue Velvet.
He did the sequence six times before being too exhausted to do a seventh.
The one-shot nature of the clip and Nelson's presence front and center
makes it so the video reveals new details on each new viewing.
For example: the amputee on the skateboard, the dog with sunglasses
and the kissing couple that Nelson is visibly upset by.
The rest of Massive Attack are peppered throughout the video,
at various points following behind her albeit out of focus
The video has influenced others including The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony"
itself a play on Massive Attack's song title.
Due to the Gulf War happening at the same time,
the band chose to remove attack from their name for this single,
believing it might be too violent and
could possibly scupper the chances of getting radio airplay.
Still despite their temporary name change the band were an oddity.
Their previous single "Daydreaming" had featured rapping with regional British accents
something that had not been a thing in hip-hop before.
"We were literally talking in our colloquial Bristol accents you know"
"Which was at first it was kinda 'Bloody Hell, listen to those guys.'"
"Unfinished Sympathy" with its more soul vocal made more sense as a pop single
but still had elements of hip hop and dance.
Music critic Simon Reynolds had said that Blue Lines made a definite change for dance and electronic music:
The track reached number 13 in the UK charts
"Unfinished Sympathy" and its album Blue Lines quickly became touchstones for this new Bristol sound
This became known as "trip hop", a term first used in print
by Andy Pemberton in an article in mixmag in 94.
He described it thusly:
While he mentions the Dust Brothers and DJ Shadow in his piece
Massive Attack were the basis for this sound or at least the first group to combine these elements.
Later one of the many Bristol based musicians that was helping with the recording of Blue Lines
Geoff Barrow formed triphoppers Portishead and released the landmark Dummy in 94
Bjork was also inspired by Massive Attack's sound, both on Debut and more intensely on Post.
So much so that Nellee Hooper and Tricky helped her production duties.
Her most "Unfinished Sympathy"-sounding track was "Play Dead"
filled with sweeping strings and slow sampled hip-hop beats.
Fat Boy Slim wanting to write a dance track that could endure
was inspired to create "Right Here Right Now" based on the Massive Attack song.
Radiohead, TV On The Radio and UNKLE have also stated Massive Attack's massive importance.
As well Kanye West's 808s and Heartbreak has its origin here.
It could even be said that any hip-hop artists that the adjective "chill" can be applied
owe a debt to Massive Attack.
Even this girl...
And while innovation and influence is one side of the music criticism coin
"Unfinished Sympathy"'s bittersweet synthesis of cold mechanical beats and
warm human orchestration and vocals made people "feel" on the dance floor.
As groundbreaking and exciting as "Ride On Time" and "Pump Up the Volume" had been
they meant nothing lyrically, never conveyed emotion beyond "party".
As BBC music stated in 2004:
That's what Massive Attack brought at the table and their legion of followers is a testament
to how much people were missing that human element within dance music.
Ultimately, listeners needed that sympathy, finished or otherwise.
Thanks for watching
What do you think about the new series?
What tracks do you think need their own episode?
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