Massive Attack Blue Lines album cover Photo: supplied
For a record seen as so cutting edge Massive Attack's Blue Lines has not dated at all, says Alexis Petridis.
It’s an important record in British musical history. It’s an incredibly influential record and still an incredibly enjoyable record. Remarkably for a record that at the time seemed cutting edge at the time it was released it hasn’t dated at all.
Alexis Petridis, Guardian Music and Culture writer reflects on the album that made such an impact on him.
"I’ve just bought the coolest record I’ve heard. It became a constant in my life, I’ve lost count of the number of times in the 1990s that I passed out to the strains of Blue Lines after a long night of clubbing. It was the quintessential record that got played at 7am when you got back home from clubbing."
"If you look at the sleeve notes of Blue Lines they’re shouting out old reggae and Public Image Limited. So there’s influences coming from all directions on Blue Lines. Obviously, there’s soul music, hip hop and reggae. 3D from Massive Attack is a huge post-punk fan so there’s Bauhaus and The Cure.”
To Petridis, the writer behind Elton John's autobiography, Massive Attack's record "sounded like all those things and none of those things at the same time. It sounded so different and I think that this down to originality and the people that made it."
He cites "the slight sense of isolation that Bristol has as a city" and its notable distance from London as key influences on Massive Attack's sound.
"It’s a city with a large Afro-Caribbean population which is really important when you think of Massive Attack’s sound. Music in Bristol grew up differently, it grew up in isolation and developed its own distinctive kind of sound."
Massive Attack grew out of a creative collective called the Wild Bunch who were, in Alexis’ words “were Massive Attack before Massive Attack were Massive Attack”
One of the wild Bristolians who made it "mainstream" was Neneh Cherry. Incidentally, she was the first person to make a chart-topping reference to what was going on in Bristol in her song 'Buffalo Stance'.
Not only were the core members of Massive Attack part of Wild Bunch, producer/DJ Nellee Hooper, who went on to produce MA’s follow up, Protection were key personnel. Hooper went on to produce Soul II Soul’s Club Classics Vol. 1, Sinead O’Connor’s I Don’t Want What I Haven’t Got with the hit 'Nothing Compares To You', and Bjork, Gwen Stefani, Smashing Pumpkins, Madonna and was the soundtrack for Baz Lurhmann’s film Romeo and Juliet.
Concurrently in Britain house music and techno were really taking off in youth culture. Across the Atlantic, the rise of Nirvana was also symbolic. Petridis sees parallels with the "flux and change" the acid house scene was creating in his milieu.
Massive Attack was making hip hop in their own image. Petridis cites the Bristolian accent as a groundbreaking and bold move
“The snobbish London implication of the Bristol accent is that it makes you sound like a farmer and to come out and rap in that voice is an incredibly bold thing to do”
It’s got a very British sense of melancholy about the lyrics.
"It’s got this reputation in inverted commas of being a chillout record, but if you actually listen to the lyrics on Safe From Harm, it’s got this weird sense of weed addled paranoia about it. There’s an oddly edgy nervousness," Petridis adds, "There wasn’t that showboating or braggadocio that you associate with hip hop."
The big link between Blue Lines and subsequent British hip hop is that they found an authentically British voice to do hip hop in.
"Music that is made at the cutting edge and seem to the latest thing and the hippest thing going at the time they’re released, tend to date quite badly. T[They] tend to be frozen in the time that they came out. And that hasn’t happened with Blue Lines."
Alexis Petridis concludes," If the song 'Unfinished Sympathy' came out tomorrow by a new band everyone would flip out. It’s that kind of a record."
