Massive Attack’s first three albums are game changers. They raised the bar for what it was possible for urban British music to achieve. Some people called it trip hop, although they hated the label.
“Blue Lines” was for me a very special album. I heard it less than a year after it came out, and I liked it, but when I went back to it a few years later (when Portishead and Tricky had made their debuts) it just sounded spectacular. It sounds low key, and people might mistake this as being somewhat inferior, but it shows you that you need to concentrate on the content and go for great grooves and great ideas. Trip hop can be endlessly parodied, and there are many copycats who went for the flourishes and ornaments without understanding what made a great groove great. “Blue Lines” was the most consistent Massive Attack album: 9 songs, 9 masterpieces. “Protection” would be a career highlight for anybody else, but it’s the runt of the three. But the Mad Professor released a dub version of it that’s possibly superior to the original.
Then there was “Mezzanine”. I first heard it near the end of my full time national service, and I was in “ORD mood”. That meant that your time in full time service was soon to run out and you didn’t give a shit anymore. Yes, I had a place in a good university, and I didn’t have to worry about finances, and probably that was the biggest lucky break in my life so far. But there was this fear and trepidation about where my life was going. Socially, my life was not great. National Service showed me that I had some way to go before I truly adapted to adult life. And working in a clerk’s office – rather, avoiding any work that was not necessary – was corrupting my sense of right and wrong. I won’t profess to have the strongest work ethic around, but I think those years have ingrained in my this sense that you can’t spend your days and hours whiling away and not doing anything. Right or wrong, there always had to be some kind of a direction, some project to do, something to accomplish.
“Mezzanine” has been considered one of the greatest electronic music albums ever made. It’s also a change of direction from their previous outings, where there was more of a tendency to sample tracks with an R&B flavour. Their most prominent member, 3D, was headed more in a post-punk direction, and incorporating more jagged, guitar-based sounds. This shift in direction caused a schism between him and one of the other three, Mushroom, who preferred to maintain the old direction. Eventually Mushroom left the group after this album, and for whatever reason, has never been heard from since, which is a shame because he had been an important musical contributor to the first 3 albums.
The opener, “Angel” was everywhere, because of its use in an Adidas commercial for the World Cup in 1998. Massive Attack’s music had always been cinematic and broody. But “Mezzanine” took it to a new level. A slow burner that started off ominously, and ended up in a crescendo of guitars and effects.
While the first albums alternated between the dark moods and more relaxed and laid back numbers, “Mezzanine” was unrelenting in its darkness. “Mezzanine” describes a “middle level” – maybe somewhere between wakefulness and sleep? Suffering and relief? Life and death? Purgatory is a very similar concept to Mezzanine.
It captured my state of mind at that time. There were a few late nights when I was out with friends that I did not really get re-acquainted with in the intervening years. We were out late at Chinatown, which was basically under construction around that time (they were building the MRT). I was on my way out of the SAF and going to college, and yet something stopped me from fully giving my all to getting myself ready for life in another country. I felt like the haze of the music was a great reflection of the state of my mind at that time.
The music was dense and nebulous. Ideas floated in and out of the music. It was strange, beautiful music, and also occasionally terrifying. The atmosphere would well up like a large cloud and then release itself in a downpour. It was menacing, and strangely stupefying at the same time, and you felt like a sleep deprived soldier who nevertheless thought he’d be killed at any minute. The last proper song was “Group Four”, with guest vocals by the great Cocteau Twins vocalist, Liz Fraser. I always wanted to write a song about a night watchmen, and I had also come off a few guard duties in my camp. The idea of walking around in the dark with danger all around you was an extremely good inspiration for a song. I always knew that. But Massive Attack executed this idea to perfection. The finale, where everything seemed to come crashing down in some apocalyptic flourish, is one of those pieces of music where you have to hear over and over again to believe that it’s true.
The jewel in the crown, though, was “Teardrop”, still one of Massive Attack’s greatest masterpieces. The most atypical song on the album (and not surprisingly one of Mushroom’s last contributions to the group.) It’s the only song where it doesn’t sound like it was meant for night. It’s very hopeful and calm mood piece. Very life affirming, and possibly a portent of better things. Your late teens are a very anxious time, because there’s this great angst about facing up to adulthood. “Teardrop” was the vantage point of a serene peak. A panoramic view. A time of contentment, contemplation. Intensely spiritual, the reward and payback of hard-won knowledge and wisdom. It was my portent of what adulthood might be like. It was a glimpse of something to work towards and aim for. One year later, I would be in college, standing atop a hill, surveying a panoramic scene of the farmland from whence it looked out from. I’d be living through the one part of my life where anything and everything seemed possible, before the world closed in on you.
Strangely, a few years later, after my graduation, my father said to me, “you are on the top of the hill, gazing around, surveying the landscape, looking around for miles and miles. Cherish this moment and make the best of it, because it will have an influence on what the rest of your life will be like.”
Funnily enough, “Mezzanine” is not even my favourite Massive Attack album. That would be “Blue Lines”, the one that I went back to over and over again. But “Mezzanine” was every bit as special, and totally reminiscent of those days when I was preparing to go to college. The fear, the excitement and the thrill of a life unfolding before your eyes.
I wrote the above on “Mezzanine”, barely aware that two years later, I’d be attending a concert in San Diego State University, where Massive Fucking Attack would be performing their album in entirety, interspersed with this huge strobe lights, and multimedia show.
It was a great flashback to 1998 for me. Me, at 21, fresh out of the army, having a few gap months that would result in a life changing experience for me. It was a tense, nervous, confusing time. Not looking forwards or backwards, just stewing in my juices. Not know what to pack. Not having much of a social life. With “friends” who may not really be friends, but there were hours playing bridge games that could have been soundtracked to some of the music on Mezzanine. There was this temp job that in retrospect was hardly worthy of my time – it was basically just a lot of sifting through credit card slips by hand. I met a few people from the working class, but we never talked again. I was basically a lost kid. That long trip through all the peninsular states of Malaysia. “Angel” soundtracking Adidas commercials where David Beckham was showing off, doing free kicks into a small hole in the wall.
I mentioned that “Teardrop” was a shard of light through all the darkness. Well, the university I went to had a panoramic view of farmlands from high ground. But a lot of it equally was dark dank basements that uniquely suited the claustrophobic and menacing aura of “Mezzanine”. But sometimes I wonder if that’s what the pursuit of knowledge is – plenty of dead ends, plenty of darkness, then suddenly a great flash of insight, then back to the coal face again.
This show was supposed to have taken place in April, I bought the tickets for April. IT was postponed all the way until September because “one of the band members had taken ill”. Funnily enough, between April and now one very interesting thing had taken place in my life. In 1998, I was in some purgatory, in between things, and for whatever reason, in 2019, coincidently, I’m also in a similar purgatory.
It’s pretty unedifying but lately when I go to concerts I notice that all the people are 30-40 somethings, who have lived through the 90s and are going back on nostalgic trips. It’s funny because we wouldn’t necessarily have associated 90s music with old geezers, or maybe there was a time when 60s music really did represent youth, instead of old farts refusing to acknowledge that they were no longer young. In any case, there’s much to be proud of “Mezzanine” as a work because it’s ageless. You can almost hear God in that music – or rather the death thereof. It was the most 90s thing ever, where you’d have picture montages of Saddam Hussein and Tony Blair and Oxycontin. They told you the unvarnished truth and political correctness be damned. It was such a big difference from the political correctness of today’s climate. There were references to current events like “who killed Jeffrey Epstein?” or images of Hong Kong riots. There was even a snippet where you had Donald Trump’s face superimposed on Princess Diana’s body and that prompted quite a bit of hooting.
This time, I was far up in the amphitheatre, so I couldn’t really see the faces of the performers. I only saw 3D, Daddy G, Liz Fraser and Horace Andy sharing the spotlight, and age has clearly taken a toll on them, you knew there was a time in the past where their voices were in better shape. But Horace Andy still got a few of his moves, a few years short of 70.
The show took more than 1 hour to begin, and I knew that I should have brought along a kindle to browse. During that 1 hour, they played music from 1998 over the PA. IT was nostalgic, and I hate to sound like one of those old geezers that I used to hate, but what happened? Why does even the most corny music from 1998 sound so much better than the shit that they put out today? I never liked “My Love Don’t Cost a Thing” but it sounds like a masterpiece compared to … well the music making machines ain’t working anymore, that’s for sure.
Ironically, the themes behind the dystopian multi-media show revolve around Big Data, where some machine learns what you want and morphs to fit the computer users, and at the same time moulds the system. It’s interesting to think – since Mezzanine was released at the dawn of the internet age – how the internet has evolved since then. Well, the problem is that that was the theme of OK Computer, not Mezzanine. Ironically, I almost forgot about this show, until youtube recommended me a Massive Attack video, and it was almost certainly that a lot of people in my city were suddenly listening to Massive Attack. If not for that video showing up on my youtube feed, I might have missed the show.
I heard somebody remark, “that was strange. It’s one of those shows where the singer doesn’t go hellloooo San Diego”. But I’ve seen that before in the Godspeed You Black Emperor show. It’s a multimedia show, they just show up on stage, play all the parts, and then fuck off even without taking a bow. But personally I think that both this and the GPYBE show were pretty damn great.
It’s interesting that for this show Massive Attack has decided to intersperse their own music with the original music that they sampled stuff from, as you can see from the setlist. There’s no danger that these guys will be accused of being copy cats, because if nothing else, the Mezzanine stuff is often more original than the sample sources. But it’s a nod to all their sources, although I don’t know why they didn’t cover the Isaac Hayes version of “Our Day Will Come”.
Setlist:
I Found a Reason (The Velvet Underground cover) (Live debut)
Risingson
10:15 Saturday Night (The Cure cover) (Live debut)
Man Next Door (with Horace Andy)
Black Milk (with Elizabeth Fraser) (First performance since 2007)
Mezzanine (First performance since 2010)
Exchange (First performance since 1998)
See a Man’s Face (Horace Andy cover) (with Horace Andy) (First performance since 1998)
Dissolved Girl (First performance since 1997)
Where Have All The Flowers Gone (Pete Seeger cover) (with Elizabeth Fraser)
Inertia Creeps
Rockwrok (Ultravox cover) (Live debut)
Angel (with Horace Andy)
Teardrop (with Elizabeth Fraser)
Group Four (with Elizabeth Fraser) (First performance since 2007)
Music Composition 