Massive Attack: A retrospective on Mezzanine

Massive Attack are shortly to arrive in Dublin to perform, in its entirety, their 1998 masterwork Mezzanine, one of the greatest and most influential albums of the ’90s. Created in the midst of artistic differences, personality clashes and inter-band turmoil – eventually leading to the departure of founding member Adrian ‘Mushroom’ Vowles during the subsequent tour – Mezzanine is a testament to the fact that incredible art can sometimes arise from the most trying of circumstances.

And like all great art, the record continues to reveal new layers. Ahead of the group’s upcoming 3Arena date, I began listening to Massive Attack’s albums in order; I got stuck on Mezzanine – their third LP following the back to back classics of Blue Lines (1991) and Protection (’94) – for quite some time. Though already a fan of the album, it sounded even better than I remembered it.
Eschewing the soulful grooves of their previous two albums in favour of the claustrophobic darkness that had often threatened to emerge in their music, Massive Attack produced a visionary effort. Mezzanine’s nocturnal atmosphere and sense of urban desolation can be heard in some of the most thrilling and groundbreaking music being made today, especially dubstep. Fittingly, one of that genre’s leading lights, Burial, would remix Massive Attack to spine-tingling effect on 2011’s ‘Four Walls’ single (further plans for Burial to do a full remix of the band’s 2010 album Heligoland would sadly come to nought).

Revisiting the album, I developed a virtual obsession with the title track, a dark electro tour de force that plays like the soundtrack to some futuristic noir thriller. In keeping with Mezzanine’s infamously fraught creation – it has developed a reputation over the years something akin to the trip-hop Exile On Main Street – it was a song that went through five separate versions before Massive Attack declared themselves satisfied with it.

“Sometimes you wonder whether what you put in is actually worth it,” brooded Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja upon the album’s release, as the music press honed in on the group’s creative tensions and painstaking working methods. Certainly, in the case of Mezzanine, nobody could accuse them of not suffering for their art.

THE LONGEST DAY

One of the first times the world got a sense of what Massive Attack had in store for Mezzanine arrived on June 21, 1997 when – in a concert billed as The Longest Day – they supported Radiohead in a downpour at the RDS in Dublin. Less than a week earlier, Thom Yorke and co. had issued OK Computer, an LP that attracted such extravagant levels of critical acclaim, it swiftly started making all-time greatest album lists.

It was also a record that was a spiritual relative to Massive Attack’s then still-in-progress third LP. Musically, both OK Computer and Mezzanine were built around ingenious interplay between live instrumentation and programmed electronics. Furthermore, the two records also shared a similar psychic space – the 3AM feeling when the comedown starts to hit hard – as well dystopian undertones and a pervasive sense of urban alienation.

“It was a big record for us,” acknowledged Del Naja of OK Computer, though plans for Massive Attack to remix it in its entirety – a collaboration for the ages – were ultimately shelved. Thom Yorke, for his part, seemed to glean more satisfaction from the Bristol trip-hop scene’s embrace of OK Computer than virtually any other accolade afforded it.

Sessions for Mezzanine had commenced around a year previous to the Dublin show in Massive Attack’s hometown of Bristol. Notably, during their stint at Christchurch Studios – located in a building owned by the Church – a box of bibles turned up addressed to the band, with a note saying, “Read these and you shall be enlightened.” Whether or not the group took up the offer, the turn-the-other-cheek philosophy was in short supply in the studio.

After searching around for a unifying idea for the next Massive Attack album, Del Naja eventually hit on a brilliant concept: a record that drew on the murky post-punk he loved growing up in Bristol as a teenager. He duly set about assembling basic tracks based on samples of bands like Wire and The Cure (Mezzanine’s working title was at one point Damaged Goods, also the name of Gang Of Four’s debut single).

Like many great concepts though, Del Naja’s grand design proved hard to execute in practice. He was immediately at loggerheads with Vowles, whose distaste for punk was informed by the racism he encountered during his Bristol upbringing, when the Oi! sub-genre was partially co-opted by white nationalists.

With Del Naja and Vowles clashing and Grant ‘Daddy G’ Marshall unhappily bringing up the rear, it was left to the band’s long-time producer, Neil Davidge, to umpire the studio ructions. At times, he found himself working on up to four separate tracks in one day, as the different group members arrived in turn, each with a different set of priorities.

Adding to the malaise, new equipment the band had installed in their studio routinely malfunctioned. Eventually, the band relocated to Cornwall for a badly needed change of scenery.

“I SEEN YOU GO DOWN TO A COLD MIRROR…”

Whilst the move wasn’t without its difficulties – at one point, Del Naja and the band’s guitarist, Angelo Bruschini, nearly drowned after getting trapped in a local cave – Massive Attack started to get some real results in their new base. A chance encounter with the Cocteau Twins’ brilliant and unique vocalist, Elizabeth Fraser, led to her finally collaborating with the band, their initial approach to her six years previously having been declined.

Though the circumstances may not have been the stuff of rock legend – the group running into her in the Bristol branch of Sainsburys – the meeting yielded spectacular results. Requesting that the group leave the studio while she worked, Fraser added her trademark ethereal vocals to a delicate tune built around a simple harpsichord riff.

Inspired by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, and recorded as the news of the death of her friend Jeff Buckley came through, the lyrics were the icing on the cake of the majestic ‘Teardrop’. Inevitably, the song had already been the source of some contention within Massive Attack.

Vowles had sent the demo version to Madonna, with whom the group had previously collaborated, and wanted the pop superstar to record it. He was voted down – much to Madonna’s disappointment – by Del Naja and Marshall, who felt Fraser’s vocal style was better suited to the tune’s plaintive mood.

During the Cornwall sessions, the band also assembled another collaboration with Fraser, the phantasmagoric ‘Black Milk’. Arguably even better than ‘Teardrop’, and certainly more representative of the album’s overall mood, the track eventually resulted in a successful lawsuit by – of all people – Manfred Mann, whose song ‘Tribute’ it sampled.

The first fruits of Massive Attack’s labours surfaced a few weeks after their Dublin show with Radiohead, in July 1997, when the band unleashed the single ‘Risingson’. In a further parallel with Thom Yorke’s crew during this time, the more audacious, extreme and wilfully uncommercial Massive Attack got, the more wildly popular they became.

An utterly sublime slice of dark electro-dub, the lyrics further signalled that the group were taking a walk on the wild side. Brilliantly intoned in a dub style by Del Naja, the song featured lines like, “I seen you go down to a cold mirror… It’s the way you go down to the men’s room sink.” Throw in Marshall’s menacing contributions (“Every time we grind/ You know we severed lines”), and there was no mistaking the subject matter: this was an exploration of absolute coke psychosis.

‘Risingson’ also marked the first in a series of memorable videos from Mezzanine. Directed by Walter Stern, it found the band performing the song in a dank, nightmarish living room, as an abseiling unit arrived outside the gothic windows armed with sledgehammers. Further confirming that viewers hadn’t accidentally flicked on the latest episode of Coronation Street, the denouement found a chainsaw-wielding gimp hacking down the kitchen door and chasing Vowles through the house.

“ALL THESE HALF-FLOORS…”

Originally due to appear in December 1997, Mezzanine was delayed for another four months as Massive Attack continued to rework tracks. Eventually, it surfaced in April 1998, the ominous beetle on the cover indicating the band had dramatically moved away from the jazzy soundscapes of yore.

The album was promoted by another classic Stern video for ‘Teardrop’ – this time of a foetus singing the track. There was an irresistible post-script to the clip’s success: accepting an MTV Award for the video later in the year, Del Naja – ever the anti-establishment agitator – refused to shake the hand of Duchess Of York Sarah Ferguson, before announcing, “Is this a fucking joke?”

That the finished version of Mezzanine was as cohesive and powerful as it became speaks primarily to Massive Attack’s remarkable gifts as a group, as well as Davidge’s world-class diplomatic skills. At some level, it was also undoubtedly true that the creative tensions contributed to the record’s brilliance: the band’s perfectionist streak stood them in good stead.

Though now somewhat over-exposed thanks to its use in countless film trailers and TV promos, the opening ‘Angel’ – built around possibly the most sinister bassline of all time – perfectly sets up the record’s atmosphere of dread and drug-soaked paranoia, a mood further increased by ‘Risingson’.

Like Maxinquaye, the stunning debut of their erstwhile collaborator Tricky, Mezzanine explores themes of drug culture burnout, urban decay and dysfunctional relationships, topics that reach their apogee on ‘Inertia Creeps’. Taking unlikely musical inspiration from belly-dancing music the group encountered in a Turkish bar, the song always put me in mind of Martin Amis’s ’70s novel Dead Babies – a darkly comedic shocker about a group of youthful hedonists, who hole up in a country retreat for a weekend of drug-fuelled debauchery.

In particular, Amis’s description of the gang’s painful comedowns could serve as Mezzanine’s liner notes: “Then came the lagging time… with its numbness and disjunction, its inertia and automatism, its lost past and dead future.” The album briefly comes up for air with the blissed out instrumental ‘Exchange’, before the trio of ‘Dissolved Girl’, ‘Man Next Door’ and ‘Black Milk’ continue the journey into the heart of darkness.

The record reaches a peak on the unforgettable title track, on which the overall concept is finally realised, Del Naja assuring the object of his desire, “All these half-floors will lead to mine”. It’s followed by ‘Group Four’, on which the narrator seems to be experiencing some personal epiphany as he roams the dawn streets: “A world in myself/ Ready to sing”.

The relentlessly intense coda sees a rumbling bassline duelling with Fraser’s operatic vocals. Mezzanine ends with a reprise of the gentle ‘Exchange’, the band’s long-time collaborator Horace Andy crooning, “You see a man’s face/ But you don’t see his heart”. In effect, we’re blinking into the sunlight after a long dark night of the soul.

NIGHTMARE HEAD-TRIP

Ultimately shifting four million copies, Mezzanine was the biggest seller of Massive Attack’s career and confirmed them as one of the greatest acts ever to emerge from the UK. They haven’t equalled it since, but few have. Anticipation is at fever pitch for the 3Arena show, which will feature special visuals, as well as appearances from Fraser – performing live again after a seven-year hiatus – and sundry guest vocalists. Whetting the appetite still further, Del Naja describes the production as the group’s “own personalised nostalgia nightmare head-trip”.

Twenty-one years later, all these half-floors have led them back here.

Massive Attack perform Mezzanine XXI at 3Arena, Dublin on Sunday, February 24. Mezzanine is reissued on April 19 on Universal.