Electric Picnic: How Massive Attack fomented the Britpop Revolution

I received torrents of abuse the last time I proffered this opinion but, hey, as Adam Ant said back in the mists of time, ridicule is nothing to be scared of.

While Oasis and Blur were doing their respective Beatles and Kinks-with-a-soupçon-of-Bowie tribute acts, the real genre-straddling, multi-cultural Britpop revolution was being fomented in Bristol by Massive Attack and their Wild Bunch cohort.

“Daddy G saw The Clash on the White Riot tour but he’d never really heard The Pop Group or Wire or the Gang Of Four, so I lent him a load of my records,” Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja told me when we swapped punky tales one afternoon backstage at the RDS where they were supporting Radiohead. G and him were swearing allegiance to the guitar after a review that accused them of straying into Fleetwood Mac/Eagles dinner party music territory with their then new album, Protection.

“I have to say that the idea of it being brought out with the After Eights is a bit fucking disconcerting,” he winced. “I know I’m being guilty of reverse snobbery but I don’t want our records in the same collection as Rumours and Hotel California. Physical Graffiti and Animals, maybe, but not those two!”

As if to prove his point, Massive had been throwing caution to the wind with their choice of summer gigs.

“We played this mental fucking festival in Italy with Slayer and the Sex Pistols,” he chuckled. “The Pistols were on before us and spent an hour dodging rocks and bottles which were being thrown by their own fans. We were watching this from the side of the stage thinking, ‘Oh my God, we’re going to be killed!’ If it’d been up to me, we’d have slung our hooks there and then but we went on and these punks and metallers from hell loved us.”

“Actually, it was great because we got to spend most of the day hanging out with the Pistols drummer, Paul Cook. He’s a really nice bloke but incapable of going ten seconds without saying ‘fuck’, ‘wank’ or ‘cunt’. I don’t think I’ve met anyone who swears as much as he does.”

From rebooting Primal Scream and Jean-Michel Jarre to scoring a TV doc with Thom Yorke and running their own Melankolic label, Robert and his mates have always been fond of their extracurricular activities.

“What I love, outside of Massive itself, is the amount of shit that’s going on around our studio,” Robert noted. “It’s gotta be organic, though. A lot of times we get offered money to basically pass our credibility onto other people. We could make a fortune tarting up crap songs but we’re not fucking Stock, Aiken & Waterman.”

Which is why you never heard the ‘Ganja Headwreck’ remix of any Boyzone or Westlife song. Despite gracing such massive Hollywood soundtracks as Batman Returns, Mission: Impossible, The Matrix and The Insider, Massive Attack have constantly confounded our colonial cousins.

“The problem we’re always going to have in America is that we don’t fit into any of their neat little pigeonholes,” 3D reflected. “We’re too white for black radio and white stations aren’t comfortable with us because of the reggae vibe. Y know, they’re okay with a bit of Bob Marley but anything else and they’re frightened the ratings are going to plummet.”

Perhaps I was high on the Jamaican aroma that Massive referred to on ‘Karmacoma’, but I enquired as to whether 3D had ever shagged to his own music.

“Nah, simply because I know that at a crucial moment I’m going to stop and go, ‘that fucking snare! And the arrangement, it’s brutal,’” he said, resisting the temptation to give me a smack for being inappropriately nosey. “Actually, there was one girl who stopped me mid-shag and said, ‘It’s the music that’s turning you on, isn’t it, not me?’ I panicked and went, ‘No, no, no, it’s you, it’s you’, but she was right. You just get lost in what you’re listening to.”

Twenty years on, I sadly still can’t recount the full story of 3D, a former Hot Press staffer, Europe’s biggest pornographers and a hi-hat sound being ruined by squelchy cum noises. What I can tell you is that, 27 years after releasing their classic Blue Lines debut, Massive Attack remain one of the most viscerally thrilling live acts there is – which is terribly good news if you happen to be heading to Stradbally!