He was originally hired to provide a dub remix of a track but after Massive Attack heard the results the Mad Professor* was commissioned to remix almost all of their last LP, Protection. The results being released in 1995 as No protection.
As my dad was a big dub reggae fan** I knew of the Guyanese British producer’s work growing up. Mostly because my dad owned, or borrowed a few of his LPs and collaborations and they always had great cartoon covers, so I remembered his name.
No Protection does come with a great cartoon cover of the band and Mad Professor smiting their enemies. It’s what swung the purchase of the album at a time when I quite literally had no money at all, I remember making the choice between buying food, or No Protection on 23 March 1995 on a cold grey Leeds morning.
It was worth it.
I love that every track has been renamed and reordered from ‘Radiation Ruling The Nation’ (Protection) to ‘Backward Sucking’ (Heat Miser). The former transformed into a warm, rolling, roiling wave and the latter into a nightmarish claustrophobic creep, but in a good way!
The percussive ‘Bumper Ball Dub’ (Karmacoma) is an absolute winner, as the drums are turned up, re-emphasised and all vocals dropped. The song morphs from a chilled slouch into something much more assertive and immersive, Mad Professor conjuring whole strata of sound. It is my preferred version of the track by far.
‘Trinity Dub’ (Three) brings Nicolette’s vocals back into the mix and the track becomes more propulsive and abstract whilst retaining some of its shape, the vocals being chopped, changed and curled to the point where they become another layer in the cake.
The beautiful ‘Weather Storm’ stretches out into ‘Cool Monsoon’, the piano notes functioning as cooling droplets at the edges of the pulsing insistent bass. Whereas ‘Eternal Feedback’ (Sly) really does become a blunted Bond theme, grandiose yet introverted.
Today the best track on No Protection is ‘Moving Dub’ (Better Things) where the already minimal track is pared back even further, Tracey Thorn’s voice leading us through the gentle void white rabbit-like. I could listen to this track do deceptively little for hours; nice to hear Ben Watt’s guitar a little more too.
The jangling ‘I Spy’ (Spying Glass) is yet another goodie, it has a real sense of purpose and momentum to it, bustling in a decidedly non-dubby-yet-totally-dublike manner. Listen to it, you’ll get it. I promise I’m not just typing pretentious non sequiturs ici; Pretentious? moi?
By the time No Protection ends with, you guessed it, the sound of backwards sucking, you really do have to stop and wonder at just how far out from the core of Protection Mad Professor has taken us. It is a really good album in its own right, easily the superior to the myriad chill out LPs that seemed to clog the nation’s arteries at the time.
To call No Protection a remix LP is to belittle it somewhat. Mr Neil Professor Fraser used snippets of beats and vocal lines to weave his own bubbling, pulsating coherent aesthetic. Everything about No Protection is deep and resonant sounding, no gimmicks, no novelties; remix it might be but it is very much a strong work in its’ own right.
The amount of skill and originality needed to create that should never ne underestimated.
In closing let me just say that I can vouch for No Protection sounding particularly good in the dark. Trust me, I’m a professor.
1224 Down.
*Neil Fraser to his mum.
**6’3” to be precise.
I respect the buying of vinyl vs. food. I remember those days well. My parents can attest to the fact that I came home and raided their freezer because the money I earned on a part-time job was just enough to buy beer, tickets, music, gas, and maybe a bit for my girlfriend.
That was a bit out there.
Massive Attack are my favourite Non Rock Band. I Love Love Love them. And this is the good stuff right here.
I think I can remember you saying; did you stay the course with them after Mezzanine? I tried but none of it made much impression on me.
Kinda. Mezzanine was magnificent but I kind of fell away after that one. Heligoland is pretty good