Massive Central

We were lazy Bristol twats. It was Neneh Cherry who kicked our arses and got us in the studio … what we were trying to do was create dance music for the head, rather than the feet. 

Daddy G

January 1993, I had finished university and was living on my own in Leeds in a nice flat that basically cost me almost every penny of my meagre wages*. In my memory it rained constantly and I was tired, hungry and very down when, one day after work, I put on a tape that my friend Matt had sent me.

It wasn’t just a mood changer, Blue Lines by Massive Attack, was a game changer for me, possibly even a life changer**.

The first time I heard the album it was like I was discovering something I had always known, rather than hearing something for the first time. It resonated deep inside; still does.

I was looking back to see if you were looking back at me
To see me looking back at you

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In our information saturated age it sounds quaint discovering an LP that had been out for 18 months, but hey this was medieval times, we had only just stopped communicating through the medium of tapestry. True story.

Massive Attack cited Billy Cobham, PIL, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Isaac Hayes, Marley Marl, Herbie Hancock and Stiff Little Fingers as influences and you can hear and see^ them all here. Perfectly chosen samples propel the album, everywhere the bass sounds like Jah Wobble’s finest. Massive Attack just meld it all together perfectly, adding extra dub, nu soul and so much of their own smoothness that listening to Blue Lines can be like a fractal; you can enjoy the pattern for what it is, or you can spend hours marvelling at the intricacies of all the components.

What Massive Attack did best were the vocals, without these Blue Lines could just have ended up as a fun, smorgasbord of sounds, but, lazy twats they may have been, they were never so about the vocals. The soulful contributions from Shara Nelson and Horace Andy are just perfect; intense and immense. It’s a neat trick.

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That first track that tilted my world off its axis? ‘Safe From Harm’, where Shara Nelson preaches a gospel of strength and self-reliance against a claustrophobic urban paranoia^^. Her voice is balm for any bruised soul and her heartfelt refrain of ‘If you hurt what’s mine I will retaliate’ chimes exactly with my own views. Add in that incredible bassline in a soundscape constructed from Billy Cobham ‘Spectrum’, Herbie Hancock’s ‘Chameleon’ and some Funkadelic and no wonder it makes me levitate with joy.

Reggae all-star Horace Andy steps up to the mic on ‘One Love’ and just sweeps us elsewhere, while the music just swoons and chunters beneath. Then we go full Bristol with the brilliant title track, laid-back way beyond horizontal, the guys trading clever lines referencing so many different songs it’s a fun game to trace them all. My favourite couplet:

Excommunicated from the brotherhood of man
To wander lonely as a puzzled anagram

The R&B cover of ‘Be Thankful For What You’ve Got’ is another wonderfully smooth departure, pure butter. Launching straight into the spliffed-up dubtastic ‘Five Man Army’ is just sequencing genius, the group’s accents coming over loud and proud. I just love every line of this one.

Blue Lines switches up again with the otherworldly ‘Unfinished Sympathy’, which is about as close as music can come to giving me a genuinely religious experience^*, the orchestral backing giving such weight and depth to Shara Nelson’s vocals. It is quite unlike anything else I have ever heard, properly moving. It is no coincidence that I had to talk my son out of getting the line ‘you’re the book that I have opened’ tattooed about his person.

You can hear a whole genre being born during ‘Lately’, it is the sound pirated by a zillion crews in the 90’s. There’s nothing wrong with that when the blueprint is this good, except a lot of the ersatz copyists failed to realise that what makes this so good, isn’t just the beats+girl singer, but lies in how percussive those beats were allied to how sublime Nelson’s vocals were.

I never really liked LP closer ‘Hymn Of The Big Wheel’ much, I have always found it a bit of a blemish on Blue Lines. There is something a bit Lion King-y about its simplicity, although there is a later mix of it where it is much improved.

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Blue Lines is regarded as the birth of trip hop*^ and I get that, the laid-back nocturnal sound, the rolling beats and the guest vocals were all copied by lesser souls ad nauseam in the years to come. Listening to it now the genre that I would post it under would be soul, there is so much feeling, so much yearning in these grooves that despite the dub, the beats, the wonderfully indolent rapping, it is the soul elements that come through louder and clearer.

Listening to Blue Lines now, as always, instantly transports me back to a rainy Leeds evening 28 years ago, lying on my bed, awestruck, all hardships docked; safe from all harm.

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Blue Lines is a tricky LP to photograph, so much of the cover art relies on gloss, texture and juxtaposition. As Mr Dury sang, there ain’t half been some clever bastards.

1134 Down.

PS: this is definitely a Top 3, occasionally even a Top 2 LP for me.

*in all honesty describing my wages at that time as ‘meagre’, may actually be insulting to meagre. In which case and before the British Meagre Society contact me with a writ, I apologise wholeheartedly and unreservedly to meagreness.

**although I freely admit, the baked potato and cheesy baked beans I was eating at the time may have also tweaked my serotonin nozzle.

^they appropriated the logo from Inflammable Material.

^^not to be confused with claustrophobic urbane paranoia, which the OED defines as ‘a gentleman in a tweed suit stuck in a lift wondering if it was on purpose’. True story.

^*well, outside Faster Pussycat’s oeuvre that is.

*^pronounced by my mate Richard and I as ‘try-fopp’. It never quite caught on but I’m still trying to make it happen, it’s pretty fetch.