Trip-hop group Massive Attack laid the foundation for the genre with their first album, Blue Lines. In subsequent years, they forwarded their sound with darker, heavier beats. However, they’ve been absent from the charts since 2003, when they released 100th Window.
They are back this year, though, with the EP ‘Splitting The Atom’, which precedes their fifth studio album LP5, scheduled for a release early next year. In this interview, Grant ‘Daddy G’ Marshall reveals why this album took so long and talks about working with Guy Garvey.
Daddy G has been working with group member 3D since they were with the underground group, The Wild Bunch, in the eighties. He says the name of the EP came from a conversation about where the world has taken them in the past decades. “It’s just a reference that 3D made to splitting us,” he says, “The way that we’ve moved and taken our ideas since our incarnation as The Wild Bunch, then Massive Attack and how things have split away from the main source. People have fallen away, we’ve split off into different factions – it’s just a metaphor for how we work.”
While primarily a two-man group, they have recorded with a number of artists throughout their career. G says that it has had a major impact on their work. He says, “Well the initial idea we had as a DJ combo, the Wild Bunch thing, was that we were a five man army and unfortunately now it’s down to two. Some of the factions have blown off; like Tricky, some have come into play to focus on the one central vision that Massive Attack have had. We’ve had people come and go, we’ve gained energy and lost energy.”
G says that people keep asking him why it has taken him so long to write an album. He says that it isn’t like he was sitting around all those years. “People say to us – ‘What is it with you Bristol people? You work in these five or six year cycles’. But with us it’s not been a case of sitting down and doing nothing but since 100th Window, we’ve had a massive tour.”
“We had the Collected / Best Of album come out, then another tour. Then last year we had Meltdown festival in London, and that took quite a bit of time to curate. We had the Phantom tour last year, and we had quite a lot of the songs ready for the album. When we came back off tour last year and reconvened, then chucked all the tracks that we had toured with. We started again and over the past six to nine months have been working on new material. That’s what we’re trying to get ready for the next album which is coming out in February. It hasn’t been ‘lazy days of summer’ sort of thing with us,” he says.
Splitting The Atom is a tiny collection of songs which G says serves as a preview to the album. He says the main reason for releasing it was to keep the fans occupied until the album is released.
“Well to be honest, the whole album concept is dead in a way really. It’s just a collection of songs that has a name. In terms of giving people an album’s worth – initially you would get 72 minutes on a CD, which amounts to a fair body of work. But we’ve got 20-odd songs and you can’t release those songs physically as an album. So what we’ve released as a record will come further down the line. This acts as an introduction to the album. Initially, when the album comes out we’ll just release the album further down the line…which is just an excuse to say the album’s not ready yet!”
Elbow mainman Guy Garvey has sung and composed many songs on the EP. However, G says, the songs were jammed on by the whole group. He says, “What had happened originally is that after coming off tour last year we had a collection of tracks, then we re-convened and prepped them up for the tour. The idea was to finish them and move on to the next songs. But what happened is that D and Guy moved into the studio and I go and work on other tracks. We’ve also been working on tracks with Tim Goldsworthy from DFA as well. He’s been coming down programming some beats with us as well. But in terms of the songs they are all initially jammed between us.”
G says that bands always profit from collaborations. He says, “It always helps the creative process. It’s good to hear these things from other sides. With quite a lot of these singers we’ve been fortunate enough to work with some people from band’s we’ve loved – Sinead O’Connor, Liz Fraser, Lucy Thorn, Horace Andy. Likewise, those collaborations are still going on with Martina, Guy Garvey, Tunde from TV On The Radio, Hope Sandoval. These people make music that we love and we’ve always hoped to work with them. They bring their own thing to the studio. Guy Garvey’s a great example of this as Guy’s a great songwriter.”
