Massive headliners for Beck's Fusions
IF Massive Attack had a motto, CityLife suspects it would be 'Good things come to those who wait'.
Find yourself getting twitchy in the dental surgery when your appointment goes five minutes overdue? Well, forget getting into Massive Attack, because it's been five long years since they last released a record.
Even by their own standards, that's a pretty sizeable wait; formed in 1988 by surviving members Robert '3-D' Del Naja and Grant 'Daddy G' Marshall, they've released four studio albums in 20 years.
The explanation for the latest wait, though, was more familiar: a fall-out. The band's fractured history is fairly well documented - with trip-hop legend Tricky among the band's former personnel - but this time the group's two lynchpins stopped talking. It looked terminal.
Ironically, they reformed at Meltdown. "It was a good way to bond a little," recalls Robert about curating the festival in the summer.
"You start to realise how much of a shared history you have. Choosing a lot of the bands from the past and present highlighted the reasons why we started a band in the first place."
That bonding session talked them back into the studio, where they've been shaping the bones of their fifth studio album ever since.
Three years ago, people starting calling it Weather Underground, but the working title has long since been abandoned. And so, says Robert, might some of its tracks.
Discard
"The amount of things we discard and don't finish, and the amount of things we finish and get bored of..." he laughs, "...there's a lot of it, I can tell you.
"At the moment, we've got a good haul of tracks and we want to take those to the next level.
"Coming from a tour, you get an interesting energy back from people who haven't heard the tracks, you're mixing a set of unfamiliar stuff with more familiar pieces and you create a bit of a drama throughout the whole process.
"It has given us the definite impetus to want to get into the studio and finish the record."
Ultimately, says Robert, the music magnetically pulled them back to band life. "We started from a position of total curiosity and we had no idea how to make a record or a phenomenal success at what we were doing.
"We've kept that philosophy all the way through. Every time we start a record, it's like, `Where we going to start this time?', and even though we've moved on we still have this big question mark every time we start a new project.
"I think not being totally locked into being in a band, taking control of our artwork and the way we're heard, is what's our history is about really. We've tried to carry that with us all the way through."
The name for now remains Untitled, and Robert says he'll probably employ his usual "pin the tail on the donkey" technique to naming the next lot of tracks. In the past, including the group's most lauded Mezzanine album, he called a friend and asked if they had "any interesting words or phrases for some really short song titles".
He reels off interesting forthcoming collaborations - Damon Albarn, Guy Garvey, Horace Andy, Hope Sandoval - with a warning that some (or all) might not make the shortlist. And if he sounds unconcerned it's because he's used to near-misses: Thom Yorke, Tom Waits, Aaron Neville.
"It can be frustrating, sometimes, how things get scuppered by people's time and commitments."
Collaborations
Massive Attack's collective list of collaborations is the result of an equally eclectic approach to music. Robert attributes his and Grant's sound to the musical lineage of punk through reggae and into hip-hop.
But they're a well-travelled band, too, whose journeys to the Middle East and Eastern Europe come through in their rhythms and song structures.
The other issue is control. "We signed to a small label and the guys knew we wanted to be in control of every aspect of what we were doing. By the time the term `brand' came into popularity, we really had a strong idea of our own identity and we were very keen not to use ourselves as personalities to sell it.
"In the nineties there was a lot of support for that attitude. We were given time to evolve, so it wasn't a one or two-record thing, it was a five-record thing. People tried to force us onto daytime radio and popular TV and we were never into it.
"With the weakness of the industry everyone's talking about special packaging being really important.
"We wanted special packaging for the first single we had out, we had all these ideas about how to wrap something to make it special and spent years battling for that.
"We came from an era where you bought music set on vinyl and you used to study every inch of the sleeve, the inner sleeve, the vinyl itself, you'd know every scratch and dent, and it was really something you loved.
"But now, because it's all digital and anonymous files, people need something to enjoy. People still want to pick up papers, books and visual media because they have a sense of something tactile."
Castlefield
It a multi-discipline eye for detail that spills over into the band's live show. This weekend, they headline the Beck's Fusions event in Castlefield, and they're trying a once-in-a lifetime performance. It could go down in pop history.
"The light show transmits information from the most ridiculous to the most important, and a lot of it's a commentary on the saturation of the information age," explains Robert.
"But we're going to try and make this show into a cinema piece that becomes a live show. At the very top of the show is something we've never done before where the whole show starts in 2D and then becomes 3D," he enthuses as CityLife looks increasingly more bewildered.
He laughs. "So that should be quite interesting."
Accompanying this will be a host of new music - maybe as many as nine pieces from the forthcoming record. It's so exciting that it's encouraged Robert to break his self-imposed silence in the media.
Opportunity
Granted a rare audience with him, CityLife takes the opportunity to find out why he and Grant shun the limelight.
"I feel so uncomfortable with talking about myself it makes me cringe," winces Robert. "It's just such a waste of space. That's what makes people happy, reading about other people's lives, no matter how pointless and cruel. I just feel totally conflicted about that.
"When it comes to saying something useful or being able to get involved in mobilising a momentum to get behind a cause, I'm all for putting my voice behind it, because at least I know I'm doing something useful."
Fame to Robert is like a hangover - the price you pay for enjoying yourself. But he and Grant have certainly put their profile to good use, throwing their weight behind a number of political and social causes, including the plight of Palestinian refugees, tsunami victims, environmental issues and representation for political prisoners, including those detained at Guantanamo Bay.
The latter of these is close to his heart. In 2002, Robert and Damon Albarn (of Blur/Gorillaz/Monkey fame) took full-page adverts in the NME denouncing the decision to go to war with Iraq and calling for other bands to get behind the cause.
"I not saying when I was a lot younger I was an activist, but you get to a certain age and you start to become aware of what's going on around you, you see repetition in history and you think, 'This can't be'.
"David Miliband is talking about Russia and their recognition of South Ossetia and our willingness to recognise Kosovo and pull all these countries into NATO, and then America build missile bases in Poland. You see all that happening and think, 'God this is crazy, why can't we get past this point in our history and move forward in a much more sensible manner?'.
"I think all of us are responsible for the planet. You're constantly confronted with issues and I find it amazing that a lot of bands manage to avoid them."
Massive Attack headline Beck's Fusions on Saturday. Free.
Published: Thu, 04 September, 2008
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