Unfinished: The Making of Massive Attack


Unfinished: The Making of Massive Attack

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Transcript


LineFromTo

-Thanks, mate.

-You going down to Bristol again, are you?

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-That's right.

-What's it like?

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Bristol, what's it like?

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MUSIC: Unfinished Sympathy by Massive Attack

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This programme contains some strong language.

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I think Blue Lines is one of the great albums of all time.

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As a young black man, it was the first record I could identify

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as something that came out of Bristol.

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# I know that I've been mad in love before

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# And how it could be with you... #

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I remember hearing Unfinished Sympathy and I just went,

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"Fuck, that is amazing."

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You know that's exactly what I've been trying to do all of this time.

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25 years ago, the music scene in Bristol exploded with the release

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of Blue Lines, the pioneering debut album from Massive Attack.

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A little kid can hear it in an estate, in France,

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or in Germany or in Portugal or whatever.

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They think if Grant can get up there and do something,

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if Tricks can get up there and do something,

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3D can get up there and do it, we can fucking have a go.

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In February 1991,

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the second single from the album, Unfinished Sympathy,

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and the cutting-edge video that accompanied it,

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thrust Bristol's music scene into the global spotlight.

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But its genesis was in the decades that led up to the 1990s,

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and the fusion of musical styles that emerged from the diverse

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suburbs of this historic city.

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Modern Bristol is a cultural melting pot.

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Home to a large Caribbean community after post-war immigration,

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it's stereotyped by outsiders as laid-back, even sleepy,

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in comparison to the Northern powerhouses

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of Liverpool and Manchester.

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They have a saying in Jamaica...

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"Soon come. Soon come."

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"What time are you going to be here?" "Soon come. Soon come."

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And in Bristol, we've kind of got that mentality.

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The Jamaican community settled largely in the inner-city suburb

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of St Pauls during the post-war years of relative prosperity.

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But in 1980, less than a year into Margaret Thatcher's premiership,

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rising youth unemployment and disaffection resulted in a backlash.

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SHOUTING AND SCREAMING

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On April 2nd, the Black And White Cafe was raided by police,

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sparking a full-scale riot in which 130 people were arrested.

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The reason why it went wrong yesterday, right, is because the

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policeman came down in too much of a force to raid one small cafe, right?

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We know how it is round here, right?

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It's been like this for years, right? And the tension is so tight,

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you can cut it with a scissor.

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From what I remember,

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the police were trying to arrest somebody in the Black And White.

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It just escalated from there, I think.

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You know, I think a lot of what was happening politically in the country

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kind of exacerbated the situation to what it became, you know.

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Just kind of like a world event.

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It's cooled for a while, towards the late afternoon,

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but then the police processed up the road with dogs and 50 police behind

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them and I think the police, if they thought through that,

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maybe they would've handled it differently.

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That was a major reaction against something that young people

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felt very strongly about and I don't believe it was a racial divide,

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I think it was a youth and authority divide.

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It was the first of its type in the country.

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In the aftermath of the riots, the police gave St Pauls

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a wider berth which gave the creative people who lived there

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greater freedom to express themselves.

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Late-night parties and unlicensed venues,

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more freedom with drugs

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and the liberated approach to the famous St Pauls Carnival.

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Used to set-up our rig at 11am and we used to close, probably

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around 6am, the next morning.

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Cops used to come along and see 500 to 700 people in the streets

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dancing and try to shut us down and nobody was having it, really.

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They just shook their heads and left.

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I think the riots kind of like gave us that freedom.

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I think the police were wary about causing further problems.

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Anything too clumsy would've caused big problems.

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Jamaican immigrants had brought with them their sound-system culture.

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Loud impromptu street parties with huge, often custom-built,

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speaker stacks where communities would come together

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to listen to music.

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Sound-system culture was all about DIY.

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It was about learning how to string up amps, how to cut the wood,

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how to load speakers onto the van properly,

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even how to learn to drive a big HGV lorry

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down the thinnest roads in St Pauls.

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Sound systems provided the musical backdrop to inner-city Bristol

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and unified young people, regardless of their skin colour.

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There was never an issue with the colour.

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I don't think, you know, it really matters to the extent,

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as long as what you do, you do it from the heart.

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And the Wild Bunch sound system exemplified this racial unity.

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Miles "DJ Milo" Johnson, Grant "Daddy G" Marshall,

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Paul Nellee Hooper,

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Claude "Willie Wee" Williams and Robert "3D" Del Naja all came from

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different backgrounds but shared a love of music.

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They were a multiracial group themselves influenced by the

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coming together of those cultures.

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And if you think, The Clash always had that combination of white rock

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and reggae and so there was plenty of tradition to make that work.

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Nellee was regarded like anybody else in the crew, really.

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I think they saw him as somebody who respected the culture

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and the music and that was all that mattered.

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MUSIC PLAYS

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Milo and Nellee had met in 1979 and formed a new wave band.

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They'd regular regularly hang out at Paradise Garage near the bus

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station in Bristol, the hippest clothes shop in the West Country.

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It was here they met Grant Marshall.

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There were three of us for a long while

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which was G, Nellee and myself.

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We used to go to G's house and listen to records that we bought

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in say Virgin, some punk records, some new wave, some disco,

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some reggae, some early hip-hop maybe

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and it was like sitting down as friends

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just listening to this new music that we were getting introduced to.

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These informal gatherings soon attracted more people and

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a bigger space was required for the fledgling unit to share their music.

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We played in one of these places

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after we ran out of space at G's place.

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It wasn't really planned to be anything to do with dance

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or anything like that.

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It was just to give us a bit more space and a bit more volume.

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We just put our records together and just played what we bought

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that weekend.

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It was our first gig outside of the crib.

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MUSIC PLAYS

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Unlike the industrial cities of the North, Bristol had never had

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a musical identity it could claim as its own,

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but as the '80s became the '90s,

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things were changing and the creative city we know today

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was emerging, albeit with typical West Country languor.

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MUSIC PLAYS

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It was a very laid-back scene.

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There was a lot of smoking of dope, I believe,

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and that shows in the music.

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You know, very contemplative, very sort of inward-looking,

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I guess, but in a really lovely way.

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When you go to London, everything is a million miles an hour but when

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you come back to Bristol, it's like everything just slows right down.

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I grew up in Birmingham and, you know, as a teenager,

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the only place to go then if you wanted to drink

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after 10.30 at night, was at Sound System.

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So, you know, it was kind of part of my partying growing up

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so Dub and MC Culture and all that was very familiar to me

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and also very familiar to any white teenager who's going

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out around that time.

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Birmingham was very like Bristol in that it was a small scene,

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so you all knew each other very well.

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It was the same faces every night, different place.

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Anywhere that we were having a party, everybody would come.

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If Grant was DJing, we'd all go to his party.

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We'd all meet in the Red Lion on a Friday night

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and just chat to each other.

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Oh, there's something going on there, there's a gig down there,

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there's something going on... Just rush across town or whatever.

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One of the party venues was Nellee's flat in Clifton Village.

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Nellee lived in one of these apartments here so, yeah,

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we used to practise here and did a few really good house parties

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here and guys used to come up from St Pauls and it was basically

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them who gave us the name, The Wild Bunch.

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MUSIC PLAYS

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And the event where The Wild Bunch name really drew crowds was

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the St Pauls Carnival.

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I'd never heard bass like you hear through a sound system cabinet

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and you can immediately understand the attraction,

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because it was a much more sort of visceral experience

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than a band could create in even the smallest pub.

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Ronnie Size, at the time a young teenager called Ryan Williams,

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had grown up with sound systems.

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You'd be able to hear the music travel all the way up the hill.

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As soon as you heard the sound systems

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being set up in St Pauls, like the Pied Piper, me and my friends,

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we'd all go down to St Pauls and join in all the celebrations.

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MUSIC PLAYS

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The DIY ethos of sound systems was something shared with the

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punk culture that already existed in Bristol and the political

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ideology of the city's youth found common ground in both genres.

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Punk kind of blew the doors open,

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it was a completely enabling political act.

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Seeing Paul from The Clash with little stickers on his bass showing

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him where to put his fingers,

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suddenly we thought we can have a go at doing that,

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otherwise we would've ended up working in a factory.

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I mean he wasn't that far away from that front cover of the fanzine.

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Here are three chords, now go and form a band.

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Coming back from a gig at The Roxy with the Cortinas,

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we decided to make a punk band.

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We said we'd called it The Pop Group to be anti-punk,

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anti-star.

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So we started putting on concerts at Barton Hill Youth Centre.

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Grant was down the front, Miles was down the front, Delta was there.

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In the late '70s and early '80s,

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The Pop Group pioneered the post-punk scene

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which embraced elements of jazz, funk and dub,

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familiar sounds on the streets of Bristol.

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MUSIC PLAYS

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We wanted to be mixing the stuff we were hearing in the clubs and

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streets and the sound systems and the blues dances of Bristol,

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which was baseline.

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We were crashing and smashing and careering all the influences

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we heard on the streets of St Pauls and Bristol in

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a punk manner into what we were doing.

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Because we thought it wouldn't be punk to do something

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that was already happening.

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Mark was also instrumental in introducing hip-hop to Britain.

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And when The Wild Bunch added it to their repertoire,

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the embryonic Bristol sound began to take shape.

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He really did put us onto a lot of good music.

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Punk had the attitude of you don't have to learn your instruments,

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but hip-hop gave the means of putting music together

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without needing to be particularly great musicians.

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You know, it was all about the ideas.

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You could sample the stuff, you could play with the stuff

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without a huge amount of sort of musical talent.

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# Party people, party people

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# Can y'all get funky? #

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We were virtually living in New York. Suddenly, somebody says,

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"There's a really cool radio show on this thing called Kiss-FM and WBLS."

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We used to have big ghetto blasters, double cassette machines,

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back in the day. We copied these tapes, brought them back to Bristol.

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Copied, copied, copied.

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3D would draw on them. Suddenly,

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everybody was getting into hip-hop in Bristol.

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Coming up to London, London was not even aware of it.

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# It's time to chase your dreams

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# Up out your seats Make your body sway

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# Socialise, get down let your soul lead the way

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# Shake it now, go, ladies,

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# It's a livin' dream

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# Love, life, live Come play the game... #

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They were getting all these exclusive tracks that no-one

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could get a hold of unless you heard them on maybe WBLS

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and that is when Wild Bunch really started to come into their own.

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We were offering a different genre of music to a community that

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probably had never heard that stuff before, you know?

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And for us, that was just like...just the best.

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Being able to play things like,

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some really underground Chicago house music in like 1985

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or whatever to a bunch of, like, West Indian people who had never

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heard that and then staying for the duration of a record

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that they had never heard like that. It's... I mean, that's job done.

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One of the clubs where these new sounds were shaking the foundations

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was The Dug Out on Park Row.

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The Wild Bunch DJ crew was given a residency,

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which gave them further exposure to the public eye.

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I was made an honorary member of The Dug Out club, which I considered

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to be one of the highest accolades I've ever received.

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Oh, man, The Dug Out...

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Sticky carpets.

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Pretty grim.

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Even its best friends, even its mother would say it was

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a horrible little place, actually, in many ways.

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But the vibe was really good.

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I just remember it feeling quite claustrophobic as a club.

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It was just like one of those ones where it almost felt like it

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was a glorified someone's house.

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Lots of little rooms, you know.

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And the DJ is over there, but you've kind of got to squeeze past them.

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It had a rather wonderful atmosphere of decadence, I suppose.

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It was quite an eclectic mix.

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It felt extraordinarily Bristol.

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Unfortunately, I was too young to get into The Dug Out,

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but the amount of times I tried to sneak in

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and got caught was a crazy amount.

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Miles would find the tunes, Nellee would be the selector.

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It goes back to old Jamaican sound systems.

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Somebody was selecting the songs, then there was the MC,

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or the toaster like U-Roy back in Jamaica.

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Grant would toast a bit.

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Round that time, I think we kind of, like,

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established ourselves as a DJ unit.

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Later on, we would get a couple of guys to do some emceeing,

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which would be Willy and 3D.

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Some occasions, Tricky.

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I was working at The Face at the time and so we got sent,

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kind of white labels of the early sort of Smith & Mighty

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stuff and The Wild Bunch stuff and really, really liked it.

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I guess it was like a natural progression

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that we would want to record our own tunes at some point.

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So, yeah, I think that timing of The Dug Out enabled us to do that.

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# Scooby-Doo, get down with the crew

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# On the mic singing one, two

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# Where to drink your Tennent's where to drink your brew

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# Get down with The Wild Bunch crew. #

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In 1985, the graffiti art exhibition at the Arnolfini

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gave young creatives the opportunity to legitimately flex their muscles.

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3D and his fellow artists painted the walls of the gallery.

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And The Wild Bunch perform to an audience that included

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a 13-year-old boy named Geoff Barrow

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who would go on to engineer Blue Lines

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and later still, form the band Portishead.

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This previously unbroadcast footage illustrates the emergence of a scene

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which drew heavily on the New York culture,

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which the likes of The Wild Bunch found so fascinating.

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HIP-HOP MUSIC PLAYS

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The whole hip-hop attitude in Bristol,

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you could express yourself all kinds of ways.

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You know, you could be a DJ, you could be a rapper,

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you could make music, you could make art,

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you could make record sleeves, you could make little films

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and all of those things intertwined and mixed with each other.

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And it was very acceptable to be a videomaker one day,

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a rapper another, a DJ the next.

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And as a result, you got that fluidity.

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# No moneyman can win my love... #

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The next step on The Wild Bunch journey was a trip to Japan in 1987.

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Milo had been there the previous year deejaying during fashion shows,

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arranged by The Face magazine and Neneh Cherry, a singer who had

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previously been in the Bristol post-punk group Rip Rig + Panic.

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# Looking good hanging with The Wild Bunch

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# Looking good in the Buffalo Stance... #

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But now the group were to tour Japan,

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another step on the ladder to wider success.

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Me and Nellee went out there the following year and hooked up

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the tour and brought the rest of the guys out there.

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But when the rest of the crew arrived,

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things quickly deteriorated.

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I don't want to put anybody on the spot here or anything like that,

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but it's just like...

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a member of the crew had an issue,

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problems he had back home at the time

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and he needed to get back.

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And we were like,

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"Dude, we just got this tour together and you want to bail

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"on us right when we're going to start this tour?"

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And that kind of like...really pissed us off.

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And with tensions running high, the tour that should have been

0:18:480:18:51

the making of the group put an extra strain on their relationships.

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When we came back from the tour and we came back to the UK,

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it was hard work trying to work with that dude again.

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In spite of the disagreements within the group,

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on returning to UK, The Wild Bunch secured a record deal.

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Got signed to...

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Island - 4th and Broadway,

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and recorded a couple of...

0:19:190:19:22

..things for them.

0:19:230:19:24

# Born and raised in the ghetto

0:19:240:19:26

# An age-old story

0:19:260:19:27

# And this is how we go

0:19:270:19:29

# They call me black my skin is brown... #

0:19:290:19:31

The deal with Island led Nellee to believe that the logical

0:19:310:19:34

next step was for the group to relocate to London.

0:19:340:19:37

Nellee was the one who was basically the ambitious one,

0:19:370:19:40

so I was just tagging along.

0:19:400:19:42

He just said, "Do you fancy moving to London?"

0:19:420:19:45

I thought, you know, "Sure."

0:19:450:19:47

Nellee had previously tasted the limelight,

0:19:490:19:51

appearing on Top Of The Pops with Cheltenham band Pigbag.

0:19:510:19:55

He was like the leader,

0:19:590:20:01

in that sense, in terms of pushing us forward,

0:20:010:20:03

not so much creative steps forward, but steps forward as a crew.

0:20:030:20:09

But Daddy G and 3D were reluctant to swap the laid-back lifestyle

0:20:140:20:17

of the west for the fast pace of the capital.

0:20:170:20:20

We had asked them, but they just weren't comfortable with it.

0:20:200:20:23

They did come up to do some recording.

0:20:230:20:27

And whatever press things that we needed to do.

0:20:270:20:31

The geographical spread of the crew wasn't the only issue.

0:20:320:20:36

As pioneers of a new sound to British audiences,

0:20:360:20:39

their record label struggled to know what to do with them.

0:20:390:20:42

We were like their first, basically,

0:20:420:20:43

hip-hop, say, group to sign to a major.

0:20:430:20:46

How are they going to promote us and stuff?

0:20:460:20:48

It's much easier to sell a female singer than

0:20:480:20:52

a hip-hop band or the genre

0:20:520:20:55

that people just were not familiar with yet.

0:20:550:20:57

And that really was...the trouble that we had.

0:20:570:21:01

Their relationship with Island was short-lived and the crew fragmented.

0:21:010:21:05

Milo set up home in New York

0:21:050:21:06

while Nellee joined Jazzie B and Soul II Soul,

0:21:060:21:10

co-producing their multimillion selling debut album

0:21:100:21:13

Club Classics, Volume One.

0:21:130:21:15

Back in Bristol,

0:21:150:21:16

the collective that would become Massive Attack was taking shape -

0:21:160:21:20

3D, Daddy G and Andrew "Mushroom" Vowles.

0:21:200:21:23

There wasn't one Bristol sound and that gave Massive Attack the

0:21:250:21:29

opportunity of saying, "Well, look, there is room for something big."

0:21:290:21:34

# Massive. #

0:21:340:21:35

One of the things that made Massive Attack into the phenomenon

0:21:370:21:40

they were was meeting and knowing Neneh Cherry

0:21:400:21:43

and Cameron McVey, you know,

0:21:430:21:45

who supported them financially and gave them lots of resources

0:21:450:21:48

and really encouraged and nurtured their talent.

0:21:480:21:52

# In my space... #

0:21:520:21:54

I think it was Daydreaming that I first heard.

0:21:550:21:58

I loved the juxtaposition in that piece,

0:21:580:22:02

the fact that it was a really strong but simple driving groove

0:22:020:22:05

and this really ethereal, softly, sort of rapped vocal.

0:22:050:22:10

-# Daydreaming

-Way that we say 'em in style

0:22:120:22:15

# That we write 'em in Massive Attack,

0:22:150:22:17

# We keep it strong just like a vitamin

0:22:170:22:19

# Going for the positive wiping out the negative songs

0:22:190:22:22

# Cos, brother, it's relative

0:22:220:22:23

# The pass is picking up all the lyrics on the dance floor

0:22:230:22:26

# That raise your spirit level cos it demands for

0:22:260:22:28

# Attitude is cool degrees below zero

0:22:280:22:30

# Up against the wall behaving like De Niro

0:22:300:22:33

# Tricky's performing taking his phono

0:22:330:22:35

# Making a stand with a tan touch it like cocoa... #

0:22:350:22:38

If you hear Blue Lines, it's like walking around City Road,

0:22:380:22:41

a little bit out of it after Carnival or something

0:22:410:22:43

and just hearing all these things,

0:22:430:22:45

just like washing over you and they didn't polish it, they didn't...

0:22:450:22:48

It's real, it's fucking real.

0:22:480:22:51

Bang, there you go. You've got these huge, huge hits.

0:22:510:22:55

Massive records played on daytime radio.

0:22:560:22:59

And in a pre-Internet age,

0:23:000:23:02

Milo Johnson, who Mark Stewart referred to as the king in exile,

0:23:020:23:06

stumbled upon the band's phenomenal success in a New York bookstore.

0:23:060:23:11

I saw them on a quite big magazine cover in New York.

0:23:110:23:15

And I was like, "Wow, shit! Guys, fucking brilliant!"

0:23:150:23:18

Do you know what I mean? It put a smile on my face.

0:23:180:23:21

Blue Lines kind of had this impact

0:23:210:23:24

where they recognise Bristol having a sound.

0:23:240:23:28

It was that underlining sub-bass from the dub,

0:23:280:23:31

it was the breaks from hip-hop

0:23:310:23:33

and the two gelled together and it just summed up the culture.

0:23:330:23:39

And I think Massive Attack really tapped into that.

0:23:390:23:42

Outside of the core members,

0:23:420:23:44

Tricky was also bringing his unique talent to the group.

0:23:440:23:48

# Weebles, wobble, occasional squabble

0:23:480:23:50

# But what happen when the bomb drops down... #

0:23:500:23:53

I met Tricky before everybody, basically.

0:23:530:23:56

He was like around about seven years old.

0:23:560:23:59

He looked at music differently from most kids at that age.

0:23:590:24:02

I mean, he was, like, really focused on everything,

0:24:020:24:07

every detail of what we were playing him.

0:24:070:24:10

I had this, like, big house down...by the Feeder Road and

0:24:100:24:14

Tricky used to... On his way home from school,

0:24:140:24:16

he used to just pop into the house, right?

0:24:160:24:18

The guy was an obvious...nutter.

0:24:190:24:23

He brought his, you know, original style of laid-back, smoked-up,

0:24:230:24:28

doped-up lyrical flair to the table.

0:24:280:24:32

After Blue Lines, Tricky went on to have

0:24:320:24:34

solo success with his debut Maxinquaye.

0:24:340:24:37

Tricky's first album is a seminal album.

0:24:370:24:40

You know, it was the darker side of the whole trip-hop thing,

0:24:400:24:43

I think. I hate that word trip-hop, actually,

0:24:430:24:45

but of the music that was coming out of Bristol, you know,

0:24:450:24:48

his was the more kind of paranoid,

0:24:480:24:51

"been smoking dope for a week and

0:24:510:24:53

"I'm not quite sure where I am any more" kind of side of it.

0:24:530:24:56

But it also had a kind of really beautiful intimacy that drew

0:24:560:24:59

you in and a great warmth about it.

0:24:590:25:01

MUSIC: Safe From Harm by Massive Attack

0:25:010:25:05

Massive Attack's willingness to collaborate was

0:25:050:25:07

a key element of the success of Blue Lines.

0:25:070:25:09

This is something they carried forward throughout their

0:25:090:25:12

musical career.

0:25:120:25:13

They are great collaborators with each other,

0:25:180:25:20

but also with other people and they brought the best out of

0:25:200:25:22

everyone they worked with, I think, including each other.

0:25:220:25:26

# But if you hurt what's mine

0:25:260:25:31

# I'll sure as hell retaliate

0:25:310:25:32

# Infectious and danger...

0:25:320:25:35

# Infectious and dangerous. #

0:25:350:25:39

A quarter of a century has passed since Blue Lines was released

0:25:390:25:43

and Massive Attack have gone on to have huge success with their

0:25:430:25:46

subsequent work.

0:25:460:25:48

After Mushroom's departure in 1998,

0:25:480:25:51

the duo of Daddy G and 3D

0:25:510:25:53

remain as creative and relevant today as ever.

0:25:530:25:56

Their legacy to the musicians who came out of the city in their

0:25:560:25:59

wake is immeasurable.

0:25:590:26:01

We took the hip-hop breaks, sped them up,

0:26:020:26:06

we took the sub-basses from sound system, tuned them up.

0:26:060:26:10

You know, our whole thing was about energy.

0:26:100:26:13

It was about creating some atmosphere vibes in your head

0:26:130:26:17

and then we were trying to get that from here out to those people.

0:26:170:26:20

I think most people who came out of the Bristol scene,

0:26:200:26:22

none of them wanted to be celebrities,

0:26:220:26:24

and that enabled them to be more creative rather than less.

0:26:240:26:27

I think the ambition was to do something really exciting musically.

0:26:270:26:32

But the ambition was never to be world-famous

0:26:320:26:35

and chased down the street by paparazzi.

0:26:350:26:37

They are punk. Nobody tells them what to fucking do.

0:26:370:26:40

They won't talk on camera.

0:26:400:26:41

I end up talking about them or for them all the fucking time,

0:26:410:26:44

which I don't want to. I'm trying to have my tea.

0:26:440:26:46

Do you know what I mean? But they are proper punk.

0:26:460:26:50

But Bristol punk.

0:26:500:26:51

I think the whole crew owes a lot to Mark.

0:26:510:26:54

I don't think without him,

0:26:540:26:56

they would be where they are, pretty much.

0:26:560:26:59

And without me, I don't think they would be where they are.

0:26:590:27:04

That's kind of like...

0:27:040:27:05

..that's pretty much a fact that I can feel comfortable saying.

0:27:090:27:14

When you saw these guys on Top Of The Pops, it was fantastic.

0:27:170:27:21

You looked up and said, "You know what?

0:27:210:27:23

"If they can do it, I can do it."

0:27:230:27:25

There is something in the water down there.

0:27:250:27:27

Where the hell does all this amazing music come from?

0:27:270:27:31

# Big wheel keeps on turning

0:27:310:27:36

# On a simple line day by day

0:27:360:27:41

# The earth spins on its axis... #

0:27:410:27:46

I think it just made a lot of the people who were already making music

0:27:460:27:51

in Bristol kind of go, "Yeah, of course."

0:27:510:27:55

# Seems like the world is out together just by gravity... #

0:27:550:28:00

The impact that Massive had on the city is just undeniable.

0:28:000:28:05

# Look, my son, the weather is changing... #

0:28:050:28:09

Your shoulders got slightly wider, you know,

0:28:090:28:11

you just stood a little taller.

0:28:110:28:15

# And so the green come tumbling down... #

0:28:150:28:19

The sense of pride to be written across your face,

0:28:190:28:23

"I'm from Bristol."

0:28:230:28:25

# And I'll show you sunset

0:28:250:28:29

# Sometime again

0:28:290:28:31

# The big wheel keeps on turning

0:28:310:28:35

# On a simple line day by day

0:28:360:28:40

# The earth spins on its axis

0:28:410:28:45

# One man struggle while another relaxes. #

0:28:460:28:50

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