Massive Attack - The Belfast Telegraph Digital - 24/03/06
MASSIVE ATTACK - 'Collected'
Time's right for a Massive Collection
Eamon Sweeney talks to Massive Attack about why now is a good time for a retrospective
24 March 2006
Massive Attack have shunned the opportunity to do a regular 'best of' or greatest hits collection. Instead, they've chosen to do full justice to their audio and visual back catalogue with a double CD set that comes complete with a DVD and book, all under the title Collected.
Of course, their second single, Unfinished Sympathy, is still a perennial staple of those 'best songs of all time' polls that come in handy when some air time or column inches need filling. The phenomenal success of this timeless piece of music in 1991 not only launched their career, but gave birth to the 'trip-hop' genre in its own right. It pre-dated the more recent chill-out fad by years and paved the way for a new generation of Bristol acts such as Portishead and Tricky.
One of those endless BBC polls claimed that it "remains one of the most moving pieces of dance music ever, able to soften hearts and excite minds just as keenly as a ballad by Bacharach or a melody by McCartney".
Fast forward 15 years and millions of album sales later, and the Bristol collective's two founder members, Robert Del Naja ('3D') and Daddy Grant Marshall ('Daddy G'), are reminiscing over midday coffee in a suite in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, in Knightsbridge, revealing an ulterior motive behind their latest compilation strategy.
"For starters, this project (Collected) really came out of the blue," begins Del Naja (3D). "Our manager brought it up when we were in the middle of recording a new album. We're contractually obliged to do a 'best of' at some point, so we thought it would be good to do it at a time when we've a good relationship with our record company rather than letting them do it off their own bat when we mightn't be in such a good place. It also buys us time and freedom for the future. They want something, we give it to them, and we get credit back and loads of things we ask for next time round."
They also view Collected as a convenient means to release some new materials in advance of their fifth studio album proper. "We had a couple of songs sitting there doing nothing," 3D reveals. "One was False Flags, which is a social-political statement written at the time of the riots in France. We thought, 'It'll be irrelevant when the album comes out, so why not now?' The other one was Live With Me with Terry Callier, which Neil Davidge (long-term Massive collaborator) and I wrote for a film soundtrack for a British independent movie which never came out."
"The age of technology brings opportunities to re-master tracks and make things sharper sounding," chips in Daddy G. "We were quite surprised how well the old tracks sonically fit together."
One of the most impressive things about this enterprise is how well the vintage material has aged, despite being played well past the potential point of exhaustion in coffee shops and bars everywhere, a point further brought home to me later that afternoon when I hear Karmacoma wafting over the speakers of an East End cafe bar. Not to be too reductionist, but is there any individual track that they're particularly proud of?
"Obviously, fingers still point to Unfinished, don't they?" says Daddy G. "The experience of working with an orchestra is still such a great memory. In general, it's an enormous ongoing process of building the sound upwards, so it's so hard to narrow that down to one particular track."
"But Unfinished has got this massive mythological status though," adds 3D. "It wasn't really a labour of love or a painful struggle. It was a process of elimination as opposed to constructing this really intense masterpiece. Everyone assumes we were throwing ourselves on a sword all the time trying to get it right, but it wasn't like that at all." He laughs, as he makes producing classic music sound deceptively easy.
Collected is released today. Massive Attack are due to play the Electric Picnic in September.
