A January 1995 episode of Top Of The Pops came up on the repeats on BBC4 recently including this performance of Protection, Tracey Thorn and Massive Attack in imperious form. Protection is one of the 90s best songs, a genuine jaw dropper on first and subsequent listens and a song its impossible to turn off once it starts. Tracey's voice is perfect for the song, her singing a perfect blend of strength and hurt and her lyrics, switching the gender around mid- song, spin the song around. Protection, the album, came out in September1994. Following up Blue Lines was never going to be easy but Protection mainly manages it with the title track and others- Karmacoma, Sly, Better Things, Three and Spying Glass, some of their best songs. The cover of Light My Fire less so maybe. But Protection is the towering achievement, a song that even mid- 90s Top Of The Pops can't ruin.
Tracey's songs and recordings outside Everything But The Girl, both solo and with other people, are many and various. I thought, having listened to Protection a few times and then heading to the Andrew Weatherall remix of Tracey's Sister from 2018, that a Tracey Thorn solo/ collaboration mix might work. And it does.
Protection came out in 1995, one of the singles/ songs of the 90s. The 12" came with this Brian Eno remix, a ten minute ambient affair. It had already been the lead song on the album Protection, released in 1994 and an obvious choice for a single.
Raise The Roof was a 2007 Tracey Thorn single, and on her solo album Out Of The Woods. Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve, Richard Norris and Erol Alkan's psyche outfit, twist it into new shapes and spaces.
Sister was the lead single from Tracey's 2018 album Record, a song with Corinne Bailey Rae and Warpaint's Stella Mozgawa on board. Tracey sings the line 'And I fight like a girl' and makes it sound like the toughest, most menacing line she's ever sung. Andrew Weatherall 's remix (and the dub version too) are ten minutes of late period Weatherall brilliance, chuggy, dubby remix splendour.
Moving Dub is from No Protection, the Mad Professor dub version of Massive Attack's Protection. Moving Dub, with Tracey on vocals, is Better Things sent through the dub blender.
Night Time is a cover of a song by The Xx, released as a standalone solo EP in 2011. It has husband Ben Watt on guitar. The Xx asked Tracey to cover it for a compilation of covers of their songs by their favourite artists they were planning. It never happened except for Tracey's cover. Drums, programming and production were courtesy of Ewan Pearson.
Ryuichi Sakamoto died earlier this week aged seventy- one. He was a member of legendary Japanese group Yellow Magic Orchestra and a master in many areas of electronic music. He's probably best known in the UK for his soundtrack work- Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence and The Last Emperor (and The Sheltering Sky too to some extent), records that crossed over from the rather niche world of soundtrack albums into the popular consciousness. In the 80s soundtrack albums had an appeal to me that were a little at odds with the rest of my listening habits. I bought quite a few and found something in them that records by bands didn't offer. The Last Emperor was one of those albums.
Here are a pair of bonus tracks from his vast back catalogue as tribute, that work well together as well as individually. First is Aqua, four minutes of Ryuichi playing piano, taken from his 2020 album Playing Piano For The Isolated, an artistic, poetic and emotional response to lockdown and isolation.
Second is a remix of Massive Attack from 2010, Fatalism, where Massive Attack's creeping 21st century unease is underpinned by some ghostly piano, fractured beats and chopped up, distorted vocal by guest singer Guy Garvey which eventually becomes clear and to the fore- an unearthly and singular remix.
A Dot Allison mix for Sunday, entirely songs from the post- One Dove years (a One Dove mix is something for another Sunday I think, maybe quite soon). It was only when I started thinking about this mix properly that I realised how many songs she's sung on with other people since One Dove, not to mention her various solo albums (Afterglow in 1999, 2002's We Are Science done with Two Lone Swordsman Keith Tenniswood, 2007's folky singer songwriter Exaltation Of Larks and 2021's Heart Shaped Scars all exist in one format or another round here). In the end, once I decided to include the Lee Perry remix and her two songs with Wigan guitarist Mark Peters from last year, it turned into a fuzzy, hazy Balearic, leftfield kind of selection- I tried some of the songs from We Are Science but they just didn't fit with the mood.
Switched On and Sundowning are both from Mark Peters excellent 2022 album Red Sunset Dreams with Dot on vocals. Switched On is a version of Switch On The Sky, the first single from the album, and Richard Norris remixed Sundowning twice for a follow up single, one ambient and one with drums.
Love Died In Our Arms was from a solo EP, Entangled, out a year ago. Lee Scratch Perry's remix was the final thing he worked on before his death. Dot had assumed Lee had died before being able to remix her song until she was contacted by Lee's widow and told otherwise.
Dirge was on the 1999 Death In Vegas album The Contino Sessions, the opening song and a single too. Apologies if the Adrian Sherwood remix version in this mix is a bit quiet- from memory I downloaded it from the Death In Vegas MySpace page (!) circa 2007 and it's a low bitrate compared to everything else here. You may have to turn the volume up.
Aftersun was recorded with Massive Attack in 2005 and included in the film Danny The Dog but not the CD soundtrack. It was available from Dot's website.
Mo' Pop was on Dot's debut solo album Afterglow and a single too. It is late 90s soul- pop perfection, with a superb Henry Olsen bassline. Message Personnel was on Afterglow too and also a single, which came with this very nice Arab Strap remix.
Liz Fraser's voice, whether with The Cocteau Twins or guest appearances with other artists, is a unique, almost miraculous thing. Trying to describe it is fairly pointless. It swoops and soars and has a magical, otherworldly quality. Sometimes it's gossamer thin, distant and a part of the shimmering, hazy swirl of the Cocteau Twins records, the lyrics difficult to work out and impressionistic. Sometimes it's much bolder and in the foreground, clear and insistent. Here's this week's half hour mix (actually thirty eight minutes) of Liz Fraser's voice, variously with Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, Ian McCulloch, Massive Attack, Harold Budd and Felt.
This week's Sunday half hour mix comes from Bristol courtesy of Massive Attack. It's difficult now to remember exactly the impact Massive Attack had back in 1991 when Blue Lines was released, instantly switching on the heads of people to the reggae/ dub/ hip hop (soon to be trip hop) sound. Ravers, house heads, indie kids, almost everyone, was suddenly listening to something else. They went on to make some stunning songs and records after that but maybe with slightly less of 'the shock of the new' that they had in spring '91 (a time when they also dropped the word Attack from their name due to the bombing of Iraq by the US led coalition). Protection and Mezzanine both had outstanding songs and moments (plus the various remixes and versions, not least Mad Professor's dub of the whole Protection album). After that my interest came and went and I've dipped in and out (dipping back in for the remixes from Heligoland and 2016's Ritual Spirit EP.
The thirty seven minute mix below tries to avoid the obvious mixes even if it goes for some of the big hitter songs and has a dub vein running through it, ideal for making your Sunday breakfast too. I realised putting it together that it could be three times the length without any drop off in terms of quality. It takes in vocals from Horace Andy, Tracey Thorn, Liz Fraser and Hope Sandoval, remixes by Brian Eno, Mad Professor, Larry Heard and Gui Boratto and has the combined talents of Smith And Mighty, Johnny Dollar and Nellee Hooper at the producer's desk.
I'm a bit raw at the moment so I'm just going to stick to some music until I get my thoughts together. Thank you to everyone who sent messages ahead of the funeral on Friday, to those of you who wrote posts and to JC (The Vinyl Villain) who came from Glasgow to South Manchester, in his words, to represent the blogging community.
This Norman Cook remix of Trouble Understanding is a very nicely understated thing indeed, from a man who isn't necessarily always known for restraint or understatement. There's a Massive Attack Teardrop sample in there too. A gorgeous five minutes of sun coming up Balearic/ indie- gospel.
This is Massive Attack's Teardrop dubbed out by Mad Professor and Elizabeth Fraser making another appearance on these pages after the Ian McCulloch song a few days ago. .
Since posting Massive Attack's 1991 single Unfinished Sympathy I've been listening to my fairly battered copy of Blue Lines and some of the 12" singles that surrounded it. There's no getting away from the brilliance of the album and especially it's final song, the whale sound, Buddhist, ecology trip hop/ ambient beauty of Hymn Of The Big Wheel. The heartbeat drum opens it, there's didgeridoo and then the sound envelopes the room before Horace Andy begins his wonderful, androgynous vocal. The lyric, a man talking to his child, about life and its cyclical nature, the weather, inequality, cities and factories, the sunset, the need to have one's soul mended. It's breathtaking stuff.
Nellee Hooper did a remix not too far removed from the album version but more breakbeat- led and with a heart stopping piano part. Co- written (and sung on uncredited) by Neneh Cherry, if you needed another reason to love it. They can play this at my funeral.
'The big wheel keeps on turning On a simple line day by day The earth spins on its axis One man struggle while another relaxes'
Like yesterday's Gary Clail song, this song was inescapable in 1991 but is cut from superior cloth, a genuine contender for Best Song Of The Decade etc.
Describing the constituent parts of the song doesn't really do it justice or come anywhere near identifying what gives Unfinished Sympathy its power. The scratching at the outset, as soon as the needle hits the groove, some studio voices and the tsk tsk tsk of a hi- hat, locate the song in Massive Attack's roots as a 1980s hip hop collective, the programmed drums roll in, and then we're off, the strings rolling ominously, the 'hey hey hey' sample (John McLaughlin and Mahavishnu Orchestra apparently), leading into Shara's 'I know that I've imagined love before...'. For the next few minutes the strings and Shara swell and soar, drama and emotion building, and little touches like the piano rundowns and more scratching keep the song firmly rooted. It sounded 'classic' the first time you heard it. It's never really sounded dated. It can still silence a room.
The stings were added afterwards by Will Malone. Massive Attack tried synth strings but they didn't cut it and so opted for a full orchestra, having to sell a car to pay for it ( a Mitsubishi Shogun fact fans).
Nellee Hooper's 12" mix is pretty smart, re-arranging it for the dance floor, opening with piano and pushing the piano and drums to the fore. Less dramatic and less deep than the album mix but when those extra vocals come in around three minutes it's all arms in the air and spines a- tingling. Plenty of scratching, some chanted backing vox, thumpier drums- its all good.
The video is famous, filmed in a suburb of Los Angeles with Shara shot in one take as she struts through the streets, ignoring everyone around her. The group, 3D, Mushroom and Daddy G are all there briefly. Some of the other people in the video are extras and some real residents of the area who wouldn't get off the streets. The main reason they went to L.A. to film the video, 3D said, was for the light, a golden light you don't get anywhere else. It's a brilliant video, the perfect accompaniment to the song, and much copied. This map pinpoints Shara's walk should you find yourself chasing the golden light and in L.A. with the desire to recreate it.
Blue Lines was a stunning album, a record I don't think they've come close to matching in the years that followed. That's not really a criticism- nobody else has come close to it either. It was a genuine crossover record, growing through word of mouth, passed on from hand to hand by cassette through the spring and summer of 1991. From the opening paranoia of Safe From Harm to the slow- slow- quick- quick- slow rapping of 3D, Tricky and Daddy G, to the groove of Be Thankful For What You've Got, the zonked out calm of Daydreaming to the closing beauty of Hymn To The Big Wheel, whale song, liquid beats and Horace Andy's vocals.
This is post number four thousand at Bagging Area, the four thousandth time I've written a few words about pop music. Without wanting to blow my own trumpet too much, that's a lot of posts and some kind of achievement- possibly also a sign of an obsessive nature and as Drew sometimes points out a tad self indulgent too. But still, four thousand.
Some musical maths for you. I was thinking about trying to do a Countdown style randomly selected set of numbers (in song titles) and seeing if anyone could use them to calculate 4000. But I've just spent 48 hours living in a field in Lancashire with a group of 14 year olds as an end of the school year experience and I'm quite tired so the maths is staying very simple and involves these artists- Massive Attack v Burial, The Charlatans and The Gentle Waves.
Tracey Thorn's new single Sister, described by TT herself as 'an eight minute feminist groove anthem' with vocals from Corinne Bailey Rae and drums and bass from Stella and Jenny Lee from Warpaint, is out now. As the player below shows there are also two remixes from Andrew Weatherall, both long and spacey. The dub mix is particularly intense.
While we're here Tracey's vocal for Massive Attack's Protection is right up there. All the mixes and versions are among the best things Tracey and Massive Attack ever did. This version, the Eno mix, from the 12" single is nine minutes of ambience, warmth and protection.
1991 spoilt us in many ways musically, not least with the release of Massive Attack's Blue Lines, a real melting pot album. Dub's basslines, reggae's sound systems, hip hop's rhythms, punk's DIY attitude. Unfinished Sympathy gets all the plaudits (quite rightly, it's an astonishing record) but Safe From Harm is a huge and brilliant song, led by the driving and tautest of basslines (sampled from Billy Cobham's Stratus) and then overlaid with 3D's paranoia rap and Shara's vocals. The long version from the 12" is has more of everything that's good about this song.
Massive Attack's new songs are sounding good. The Swede posted one over at his place recently, a collaboration with Young Fathers and an eye-catching video to boot. And now there's Ritual Spirit. Deep and unsettling music as per usual but the vocals from Azekel (pictured above) take this elsewhere, somewhere otherworldly. The video has Kate Moss, dancing in the dark with a lightbulb.
I got in last night without a clue about what I was going to do for the blog today- nothing at all was coming up, I imagined I'd be sitting drumming my fingers on the keyboard. Out of nowhere this song popped out of my subconscious. Any Love was Massive Attack's first single, self released in 1988. Co-produced by Smith and Mighty it's an absolute belter, a rough and ready cover of a Rufus and Chaka Khan song, driven by a hip hop breakbeat and a stunning vocal from singer Carlton. I didn't hear it until after Blue Lines came out and the first version I heard was on the Hymn Of The Big Wheel e.p. (confusingly titled Massive Attack). The version on there was a remix by Larry Heard and this is the one I always go to first- slightly smoother with a clubland bass and the vocal pitched down a bit and the tempo up a tad. There's a great, excuse me, juxtaposition in this remix- lyrics that are critical of a single man going out and pulling because 'any love will do' up against the slinky, sexiness of the sound of the song.
Shara Nelson was the voice of two defining 90s singles (Massive Attack's Unfinished Sympathy and Safe From Harm. You knew that I'm sure). In 1993 she started a solo career, having fallen out with Massive Attack over royalties or writing credits or something similar. Her debut single was this, Down That Road, a Massive Attack-esque piece of decent soul-dance pop wrapped in a Massive Attack-esque sleeve, although it didn't exactly set the charts alight (number 19). The breakbeat, the sweeping strings, the piano tinkles and the voice all make it a bit nearly-but-not-quite.
This time of year always brings me a strong sense of time whooshing by- we are a few days short of the GCSE and A level exam season starting, the end of the football season is imminent and another World Cup about to start, in two and a half weeks it'll be the May half term holiday, then the long downhill slope to July, the summer holidays. Another school year done, another year older, September and autumn... Then I have to slap myself and stop imagining the time away.
This song's combination of crickets, whale song, sonorous strings, the lazy breakbeat and Horace Andy's beautiful vocal was the perfect closer to Blue Lines and is a bit of a tearjerker.
It's a bit difficult to imagine now the impact Massive Attack had back at the turn of the 90s. Their debut lp, Blue Lines, had people who never normally bought that kind of thing listening to little else. On top of that, here was a British group, doing breakbeats, reggae, soul and rap properly. With Bristol accents. Almost all of that first lp is top stuff- Safe From Harm with it's massive sampled bassline (from Stratus by Billy Cobham) and paranoia, the gorgeous Hymn Of The Big Wheel, Horace Andy singing Be Thankful For What You've Got, the lighter than air Daydreaming (with Tricky).... and Unfinished Sympathy- contender for greatest British single of the decade ever, I'd have thought. This one ain't too shabby either-
I don't think they've ever pulled it off again in such style, although the songs Protection (especially) and Teardrop are as good as anything on Blue Lines. But as a whole the subsequent albums didn't repeat the trick for me. Protection has good songs but doesn't feel as whole. Fallings out and shedding members they then became darker and darker, not enough light to balance things up. Angel is superb, a trip-hop Joy Division, but Mezzanine was an oppressive listen. Whereas Blue Lines was a joy from start to finish.
This looks good- Massive Attack versus Burial on heavyweight 12" vinyl, Burial re-working 4 Walls and Paradise Circus; crackle, bass, spectral samples, general air of spooky foreboding. It's out today for pre-order, available from next Monday and limited to 1000 copies so don't hang about. Get it here or here.
Yesterday's trip hop heroes Portishead remix Massive Attack's Karmacoma, also from 1994, turning it all spacey and spooky. Or even more spacier and spookier. Portishead also stick a great big phased Hendrix style guitar solo in the middle, for no particular reason other than it sounds good. I suppose it explains why they called the remix Portishead Experience. It's a very good example of the art of the remix.
The lyrical refrain goes 'karmacoma, Jamaica aroma', misheard for years round our way as 'karmacoma, d'you make her in Roma? Duh.
Massive Attack's recent album Heligoland, like all their albums since the still astonishing Blue Lines, was a bit of a mixed bag of guest appearances, some good songs, some padding and the strong whiff of jazz cigarettes. Paradise Circus (featuring Hope Sandoval) and Pray For Rain (featuring TV On The Radio's Tunde Adebimpe) were two standouts. A bunch of remixes followed the album, and this one is the best- Tim Goldsworthy sends the song out clubbing (a cool club though, not a city centre 2-shots-for-quid type of place).
I've been listening to quite a bit of dub recently. Some of the proper Jamaican variety but also the post-punk and 90s dance variety. There was an Ashley Beedle mix for Beats In Space floating around just before Christmas, with this track on it. It also had a dub of The Pogues on it. Dub-Irish folk-punk. The whole Massive Attack vs Mad Professor lp is good, one of those cases where buying two versions of one album made sense. Adrian Sherwood did a similar job for Primal Scream on the Vanishing Point album. This is the lead track off the No Protection album- the dub version of Protection featuring Tracey Thorn. Nearly nine minutes of echo, bass, snares, sound effects and Tracey's vocal chopped to bits. It gets into a serious groove about five minutes in. Top track.
