by Bob Stanley
5 The name was apt as many of the clubbers took their own dogs, on home-made leads; ‘dog on a string’ soon became shorthand for the whole movement.
6 It’s such a guileless performance you’d hope Llorenna either became a superstar or never made another record – sadly she fell into a hole, cut a series of dispiriting pop-dance covers (‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’, ‘Dress You Up’) and was last heard of hanging out with exiled New Order bassist Peter Hook. The career of ‘Set You Free’ has been more thrilling – it has resurfaced as a hit a few times since, and echoes of its enormity and ebullience could still be heard in 2011 ‘stadium dubstep’ hits like Nero’s ‘Guilt’ and Chase and Status’s ‘Blind Faith’.
7 The term was first coined in Mixmag, in March ’95.
62
THIS IS HOW YOU DISAPPEAR: BRISTOL, SHOEGAZING AND A NEW PSYCHEDELIA
While jungle and rave were the definitive East London/Essex pop sounds, there was a railway line that ran from Paddington station in West London – Notting Hill, Portobello, Ladbroke Grove – to the ancient port of Bristol, and this axis threw up something quite different, a mixture of narcotically influenced escape and a quest for a modern, multiracial British sound. Compared to the intensity of Hackney and Dalston, the pace of the west was sloth-like.
In the late sixties and early seventies Notting Hill’s cheap housing had not only provided sanctuary for Jamaican immigrants but a haven for freaks, hippies, stoners and political agitators. There were Legalise Cannabis benefits at the All Saints Hall; Richard Branson had set up his Virgin Records label on Portobello Road in ’73; Chris Blackwell had founded Island Records on Basing Street just off Ladbroke Grove in the mid-sixties to promote the sounds of Jamaica, recording Bob Marley there but also signing white British counterculture acts like Traffic and Ladbroke Grove spiritual seekers Quintessence. Other Grove residents the Pink Fairies, Hawkwind and the Deviants – psychotropic adventurers all – were free-festival regulars, venturing west from Paddington to Shepton Mallet, Trentishoe in Devon and the first Glastonbury Fayre in ’71. Most successful, musically and commercially, were space rockers Hawkwind,1 who played a free festival on Wormwood Scrubs the weekend before the 1970 Notting Hill Carnival. By the late seventies the Clash were making a blunter attempt at uniting the white squat scene and the embattled black community with their debut ‘White Riot’ (UK no. 38 ’77) and a cover of Junior Murvin and Lee Perry’s Jamaican hit ‘Police and Thieves’ – noble and excitable, but less than essential once you’d heard the gossamer aggression of the original.
Bristol, once a slave port, was one of England’s first multicultural cities. In the early nineties Massive Attack made the transcontinental blend of dub reggae, sampled ephemera, politics, dope philosophy, rap and post-punk seem incredibly simple. They took everything at the slowest pace imaginable and, by stealth and with deceptive ease, they became one of the most influential British groups of the nineties.
Prior to the arrival of hip hop, progress in the search for a black British pop had been rather random: the Equals – from Tufnell Park via Guyana – and Notting Hill’s Foundations had been mixed-race goodtime acts in the late sixties.2 Hot Chocolate had created a kind of British soul in the seventies, mixing the dark Fender Rhodes of Isaac Hayes with high, eerie strings and Denmark Street funk to create some extraordinarily gloomy and effective hits: ‘Rumours’, ‘Cheri Babe’ and the space-age ‘Put Your Love in Me’ (UK no. 10 ’77) being leavened by party pieces like ‘Every 1’s a Winner’ and ‘You Sexy Thing’.3 In the eighties came Jazzie B’s Soul II Soul sound system in North London, mixing smooth soul, jazz funk and a little lovers’ rock; South and East London were more ragga-leaning. Quietly, Bristol produced an unforced synthesis of all these elements.
Massive Attack’s roots were in the contemporaneous Wild Bunch, an almost mythical Bristol group who included Nellee Hooper – producer of Soul II Soul’s hits, Sinead O’Connor’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ and Björk’s Debut – and Tricky. They put out a single of Burt Bacharach’s ‘The Look of Love’ in 1986, basically no more than a 98 bpm drum-machine track with a soulful-femme vocal, and were instantly seers: two years later Bomb the Bass’s ‘I Say a Little Prayer’ (UK no. 10) nabbed the idea; a year later Soul II Soul had their breakthrough with the sublime ‘Keep On Movin’’ and ‘Back to Life’. By 1990 you couldn’t move for 98 bpm remakes of oldies, and Beats International took their SOS Band remake ‘Dub Be Good to Me’ all the way to number one. ‘Three days’ work in seven years’ was how Massive Attack described the Wild Bunch; they weren’t proud of their church-of-the-tortoise work ethic, but they must have known that if they went any faster the spell might be broken.
Their unhurried, non-purist attitude allowed everything to stew nicely. John McCready of The Face met Massive Attack in early ’91, just before their first album, Blue Lines: ‘One minute they’ll be worrying about the environment or slagging off Thatcher, the next they’ll be talking about Studio One, Subbuteo, old Paper Lace records and the Beatles. 3D has no explanations ready when I make it clear that all this amuses and impresses me. “In a way I was just fired by the originality of the old school rappers. The accent comes easy. I have to check myself sometimes before it gets too Bristolian and we end up sounding like the Wurzels. It’s really just a bit of everything and a bit of nothing. I hope nobody’s looking for guidance in there because there isn’t any. They’re just thoughts about good things, about nature and stuff.”’
Nature and stuff was configured with help from guests, like reggae singer Horace Andy (backed by a didgeridoo on ‘Hymn of the Big Wheel’) and Irish cellist Caroline Lavelle, who sang the folk melody of ‘Home of the Whale’; they may have moved slowly, slowly, ever more slowly, but they were bloody hard to pin down. Shara Nelson was the singer on two Massive Attack songs that defined 1991: she was the tough, sexy mama on ‘Safe from Harm’ (UK no. 25 ’91) – ‘but if you hurt what’s mine, I’ll sure as hell retaliate’ – and then there was ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ (UK no. 13 ’91). The strings (by Wil Malone, late of pop-psych group Orange Bicycle) recalled the warm, wooded sound of Robert Kirby’s seventies arrangements. The cowbell pushed it along but the strings dragged it back, and you were caught in the slipstream. Shara Nelson was permanently on the edge of dissolving into tears; you can picture her setting the table for two, sitting down, realising that the front door will not open at six, never again, and sobbing. The sound was a dark Utopia, newness and freedom coursed through it. But it was hardly music for candlelit dinners.
* * *
Were there precedents for this stark, slo-mo sound that opted out of modern pop’s natural speed? There were some, and not often in the most obvious places.
Back in 1983 New York graffiti artist Rammellzee had created ‘Beat Bop’, a freaky, ten-minute, dub-handed hip-hop track that reached a wide audience in the UK on Street Sounds’ Electro 2 compilation. The early seventies had seen British folk rock disappear into guitar-pedal ambience that mixed bliss and stoner paranoia (Roy Harper, John Martyn), while others opted out of time, making music that could have either been recorded centuries ago or last week (‘Horn’ by Nick Drake, almost anything on the Wicker Man soundtrack). The sense of wandering into the ether had also been strong on records by the Cocteau Twins, a Scottish three-piece who had first appeared as a Siouxsie and the Banshees soundalike in 1981, but became more and more focused on their numerous effects pedals and echo boxes, as well as singer Elizabeth Fraser’s tremulous voice, something like a narcotic yodel, as the eighties progressed. Fraser’s lyrics and titles – ‘Pearly Dewdrops’ Drops’ (UK no. 29 ’84), ‘Persephone’, ‘Sugar Hiccup’, ‘How to Bring a Blush to the Snow’ – freed themselves from language; they melded, waxed, waned, with a backdrop of filmic chords and Roland Chorus Echo. The result was like a post-Impressionist Martin Hannett producing Kate Bush.
New York’s no-wave scene hadn’t been filmic or pretty in the slightest but was still about opting out, a screeching reaction to th
e commercial outreach of new wave after punk burnt up. The phrase was concocted by one of its main players, Lydia Lunch, and its participants were captured by producer Brian Eno on a compilation called No New York in ’79. Creem described it as ‘a solid statement of no-ness which shakes the listener’s complacency and (this is important) gives you something new to think about. Still … what do they do for an encore?’ One answer was Sonic Youth, who used peculiar tunings to make their cheap pawn-shop guitars sound like bells. ‘When you’re playing in standard tuning all the time,’ explained guitarist Thurston Moore, ‘things sound pretty standard.’ When their career took off in the late eighties, they could afford to get custom-made guitars, amps and effects boxes, including one which they called the Sound Destruction Device. Another suggestion on how to move on from no wave came from a group called Swans, who wanted to finish music completely. Their records were a slow, mean, physically overwhelming grind, with titles like ‘Time Is Money (Bastard)’. Of course, they didn’t succeed. They’d end up getting back together for a thirtieth anniversary of the end of music.
British ambitions were a little more restrained, as ever, but rather more fully realised. There was an urgent desire, as with no wave, to escape from the horrors of the present. As the eighties became progressively more conservative and unwelcoming to outsiders, some looked to escape in time – the C86 crowd’s Byrds jangle and ’76 manifestos; the Smiths, immersed in their late-fifties Manchester reverie – while others looked to escape in time and space. The Jesus and Mary Chain were Creation Records boss Alan McGee’s first commercial discovery. They wore their hair like the Cure’s Robert Smith, looked surly, and incited riots at their early shows, but their songs revealed a keen love of sixties pop. You can imagine Beach Boys harmonies on ‘Never Understand’ (UK no. 47 ’85), and Mary Weiss would have been the perfect singer for ‘Just Like Honey’ (no. 45 ’85). The reason they didn’t sound like sixties revivalists is because they covered their songs with deafening layers of squalling feedback – not just from one guitar, but a whole orchestra of them. It was unsettling and uplifting. It wasn’t quite like anything else pop had experienced. Afraid of being tagged as one-trick ponies, they ditched the feedback on their second album, Darklands. Now you could hear the tunes and the lyrics, clear as a bell, on ‘Some Candy Talking’ (no. 13 ’86) and ‘April Skies’ (no. 8 ’87), and they weren’t bad – they even got played on Radio 1. But the point of the group was entirely lost.
It was hard to imagine Rugby group Spacemen 3 getting it together to go to the post office, let alone getting played on the Radio 1 breakfast show. If the Jesus and Mary Chain used sheer noise to lift you physically out of the eighties, then Pete ‘Sonic Boom’ Kember and Jason ‘Spaceman’ Pierce’s group plumped for the chemical as well as the spiritual escape route on songs like ‘Walking with Jesus’. Recording an album in ’87, the smoke from their roll-ups and spliffs got so thick that, prior to each session, the engineer decided to disconnect the studio’s smoke alarm. They weren’t shy in admitting their influences with titles like ‘Ode to Street Hassle’ and ‘Come Down Easy’. 1989’s ‘How Does It Feel’ was seven minutes of minimal electro blips, lightly phased, over a three-note guitar dronescape, with Kember asking repeatedly, ‘So tell me, how does it feel?’ For unbelievers, they seemed staggeringly obvious, but if you wanted a soundtrack to narcotic oblivion – one which had been created in a state of narcotic oblivion – they were the perfect prescription.
‘We felt there would be other people who felt like us out there,’ Kember said in 1989, ‘people who lived their lives like us. The antithesis of the yuppie. Certainly we hoped the renaissance that was washing in on a wave of ecstasy would be fertile ground for us.’
Conceivably, there was no one else in Britain who consumed as many drugs as Pete Kember in the eighties, but there were musical kindred spirits. My Bloody Valentine took the C86 indie template, first adding the Jesus and Mary Chain’s fiercely overloaded guitar sound (‘Sunny Sundae Smile’, ’86), then minor chords and a woozy elixir of vocal harmonies (‘Strawberry Wine’, ’87), before ditching the original brief and just keeping the disorientating noise and the washed-out, loved-up vocals. The results – on 1988 album Isn’t Anything – were incredibly sensual. ‘You Made Me Realise’ and ‘Feed Me with Your Kiss’, singles in ’88, gave the impression of seeking escape through intense sex and intense volume, with Kevin Shields’s treated guitars sounding alternately like harpsichords, elephants, Chinese orchestras and fire alarms. On stage, they married their romantic sense of linguistic abandon to ear-splitting feedback and guitars louder than anything even Motörhead could muster. My hearing, I’ll vouch, never recovered. ‘I think there are a lot of out-of-focus qualities in our songs,’ drummer Colm Ó’Cíosóig told the NME. ‘A lot of sounds swirl about in them and it’s easy to imagine things in them that aren’t actually there.’ Did he think My Bloody Valentine had a problem with reality, then? ‘Probably.’
Sexy and dangerous, it wasn’t surprising that My Bloody Valentine’s sweet narcosis quickly drew escapist followers and imitators. By 1989 a slew of acts from the Thames Valley – notably Ride, Chapterhouse and Slowdive – were following a similar route, lost in music. They were tagged ‘shoegazing’ by Melody Maker but, as a whole generation jumped headfirst into the emergent dance-music scenes, fashion swiftly brushed them aside. Ride were pretty enough to become Smash Hits material, scoring hits with ‘Today Forever’ (UK no. 14 ’91) and ‘Leave Them All Behind’ (UK no. 9 ’93), though Slowdive became something of a punchline, which seemed very unfair. Their sales trailed off into the blue distance, as did their music: third album Pygmalion (1992) sat sonically between the KLF’s Chill Out and Portishead’s Dummy, an album of somnambulant escape. Slowdive didn’t fit in 1992, though, and they would have to wait more than a decade to get their due from the critics. The Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser, there at the beginning of this effects-pedalled escapism, had in the meantime moved to Bristol and ended up guesting on Massive Attack’s deeply atmospheric ‘Teardrop’, a UK number ten in 1998.
As G-funk bossed America in 1994, Massive Attack – like hip-hop snails leaving silver traces – saw their sound adopted by sometime colleagues and lesser chancers. The only surprise was that it had taken so long. Their sidekick Tricky Kid, as Tricky, took things further into the mist on the entirely undanceable dreamscape ‘Aftermath’, with its dub bassline, woodwind and occasional atonal, echoed quacks. Then he really opened up a bag of nails with a cover of Public Enemy’s ‘Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos’; it sounded like the early Who playing ‘Public Image’ underneath his girlfriend Martina Topley-Bird’s soft, unbothered vocal. Tricky’s album Maxinquaye (named after his mum) was hit-and-miss, but nothing later in his career came close. By the twenty-first century Tricky was fronting a punishing grind-rock band and getting lairy at festivals in Suffolk, chatting up girls by saying he had ‘a semi hard-on’. He was a disappointment.
Then there were fellow Bristolians Portishead.
The main sound on Portishead’s Dummy, like an electric fan slowly turning in an airless, fuggy room, was a Wurlitzer electric piano. This threw up echoes of a bygone era as surely as the strings on ‘Unfinished Sympathy’; in this case it was 1971’s Get Carter, the bleakest of British crime movies. The cimbalom recalled John Barry’s silver-blue score for the equally dour 1965 spy film The Ipcress File. Vocals were recorded on a hand-held tape recorder, the most impressive use of deliberately lo-fitechniques since the Fall’s Dragnet. Someone opened a window – and suddenly there was snow falling outside, courtesy of a festive sample on ‘Strangers’. Just as quickly, the window shut. Throughout, Beth Gibbons’s voice was cracked and full of regret: ‘Dreams have passed me by – salvation and desire keep getting me down.’ Like Del Shannon, Portishead couldn’t help but keep dragging up their memories. Over and over, Dummy relived lost love, gradually blurring the reality and the memory in a half-speed wagonload of samples. Like Johnnie Ray – whose ‘I’ll Ne
ver Fall in Love Again’ they sampled on ‘Biscuit’ – this sad music could only end in tears.
My Bloody Valentine reached stasis after 1991’s Loveless album. Kevin Shields and Colm Ó’Cíosóig were tuning into South London pirate-radio stations in early 1993 and getting their minds blown. ‘When I first listened to jungle,’ said Ó’Cíosóig, ‘it seemed full of possibilities in a way I hadn’t encountered since hip hop. Jungle was like hearing that very early, very stark hip hop like LL Cool J – really raw and unpretentious, yet as out there as you can get.’ Their foray into jungle never happened, though lost recordings may be out there somewhere, amongst the hours and hours of abandoned My Bloody Valentine tapes that furnish their mystique.
With jungle and ambient hip hop, Britain had developed new forms from rap, mutations barely recognisable as foreign relatives to an American hip-hop audience. Mo’ Wax added an aesthetic aloofness. This reflected owner James Lavelle’s love of weed, skateboard and graffiti culture, as well as his taste for mashing together all manner of eclectic found sounds, be they from hip hop, jazz or a 1968 easy-listening album on A&M. Its output was knowingly obscure, sometimes haunting, but often one step away from the purely academic; a Major Force twelve-inch on Mo’ Wax described itself as ‘a jigsaw puzzle for the intellect … a mental mystery movie’.
