The problem with basing your career on a manifesto is that
you then have to build a career. You have to follow up your lifetime’s thoughts
with rapidly-assembled sequels. If you are unlucky enough to be without your
best-known singer, that intensifies the pressure to prove cynics wrong.
Usually, when faced with this situation, the artist expands,
adding guest singers and instrumentalists, or children’s choirs, to the basic
picture. The artist has to be careful that the basic picture does not become
obscured as a result. All of this is evident on the second Soul II Soul album,
which, though receiving good, if not spectacular, reviews at the time, has
since tended to lurk beneath the overweening shadow of its predecessor.
At the time it was easy for cynics to say, ah, they’re just
replacing Caron Wheeler with gimmicks, it’s a bit all over the place. On recent
repeated listening, however, I reckon that Vol.
II might actually be the better record. Certainly something like “Get A
Life” was easily taken for granted back then; now, however, one realises what a
bizarre and out-of-kilter record this is for something that was, as a single,
almost the Christmas number one of 1989. “WHAT’S THE MEA-NING? WHAT’S THE
MEANING OF LIFE?” bellows the children’s choir – a full decade after “WE DON’T
NEED NO EDUCATION!” – while the beats are crisp and Marcia Lewis’ vocal
threateningly reassuring enough to balance out Jazzie B’s booming ringmaster
announcements and obviate the need to think too much about concepts as abstract
as “positivity” and “objective” (on at least two of the album’s songs we are
instructed to “analyse” – pop as a PowerPoint presentation?). A flute carefully
walks the music’s beneficent tightrope.
After this, Jazzie B effectively bows out and leaves the
stage to everyone else; apart from a couple of cameos on side two, he only
reappears at the very end to wrap the record up in the illustrious and opulent
company of Fab Five Freddy. The solution to the Caron Wheeler problem – she had
left to pursue a solo career – was to spotlight a whole host of other singers
and personalities. If that means Vol. II
plays like a superior hits compilation, it is no bad thing.
Lamya – full name, Lamya Hafidh Sultan Al-Mugheiry – does
very well on “Love Come Through” and especially on “In The Heat Of The Night”
where her astoundingly rising voice reminds me of no one less than Billy
Mackenzie; perhaps not coincidentally, the music has grown darker by that
stage.
Marcia Lewis returns to sing “People,” Nellee Hooper’s beats
both crunching and floating, like the worn boots of angels kicking away paving
tombstones, and then you realise that worlds are beginning to merge:
Walking down the
street, watching people go by
I was looking back to
see if you were looking back at me to see me looking back at you
However, this song, “People,” as with the rest of the
record, bears what Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards termed “deep hidden
meanings (DHMs)” to do with things other, and perhaps greater, than what is
expressed in Chic’s songs themselves. Phrases go off like landmines to the
unwary throughout “People,” particularly “This time we make a stand/To be happy
to live on this land.” It is a pledge made by, for and to the hitherto
oppressed.*
*(And hence it is at best jejune for people like Ben Ratliff
to presume that such things do not matter. Amid the multiple mishearings,
misreadings and misunderstandings demonstrated in his “acclaimed” new book, Every Song Ever, Ratliff asserts that
the above explanation is insufficient: “Those are good answers for interviews”
he chortles, patronisingly, at Chic, “but I am convinced that they understood
the creation and dismantling of the repetitive art as its own DHM.” In other
chapters he goes on to demonstrate how much more he understands about the music
Shostakovich and Robert Johnson than the artists themselves – his brief
commentary on the former’s almost unbearably moving String Quartet No 15, from
1974, the year before the composer’s death, is an impertinence, and shrivels to
nothing when set next to definitive writing on the same piece by Ian Macdonald,
Judith Kuhn and others, whereas he demonstrates his understanding of Johnson by
digitally slowing the speed of his recordings, a habit out of which most of us
have grown by the time we have reached the age of five – so his blatant
misunderstanding of Chic may not have a racist undertow in itself, although the
chapter in question carries too many assumptions – “I know of six excellent
songs called ‘Don’t Stop The Music.’ Rihanna’s, of course [sic; why “of course”? What will this mean to people reading the
book half a century hence?)].”
Elsewhere Ratliff demonstrates philistinism – bracketing
Sunn O))) with Paul Bley, Cecil Taylor and Keith Jarrett [“powerful,
mind-over-matter stuff”; I cannot disagree with a phrase I cannot understand,
though suspect it of being profoundly wrong-headed] – and misinterprets Andrew
Hill’s comment that “I look at melody as rhythm” [“If you accept melody is
rhythm,” Ratliff goes on, which is not what Hill said or meant; rhythm and
melody are two entirely different, though possibly interdependent, things, as a
cursory listen to Point Of Departure
or Black Fire would have confirmed] -
but things become extremely problematic when he addresses the issue of bebop,
specifically Bud Powell’s 1953 Birdland recording of “Salt Peanuts.” The
chapter in question begins with the sentence “If you are thinking of Bud
Powell, you may be thinking of someone playing the piano fast [sic; unfortunately for Ratliff, we
fuddy-duddy, stuffed-shirt conservatives in Britain expect salaried writers to
be able to differentiate between nouns and verbs, between adverbs and
adjectives, and between verbs transitive and intransitive]” and does not
improve from there.
The point of Chic’s subtext was the black struggle. So it is
inadequate and indeed insulting to refer to Powell’s “Salt Peanuts” as “the
symbol of straight stunting, aggressive showboating,” and it is hardly an
improvement to refer to the drummer Roy Haynes, who celebrated his ninety-first
birthday two-and-a-half months ago and continues to work as a musician,
composer and bandleader, in the past tense [“found self-possession,” “made
velocity irrelevant” – whatever those
phrases are supposed to mean].
“The experience of hearing music like this,” says Ratliff,
“involves questioning whether it’s worth it, or whether you’re up to the
task…Why are you here? Do you actually hear
music that goes by this quickly? Really, how many people do?” What, apart from
the thousands of musicians who heard this, learned from it and used it as a
building block for their own music? Is Ratliff entirely ignorant of the racial
struggle, the confrontation that gave rise to bebop – the declaration that this
music would be too fast and complicated for white people to copy and steal?
“At a certain point, as a listener, you just don’t know. You
give up,” complains Ratliff, confusing the second person singular with the
first person singular. “And what have you gained? A statistic…And then an
evaluation, which is probably of no consequence…” Actually if Ratliff had shown
evidence of any knowledge of basic musical theory and the art of developing
variations, improvisatory or otherwise, he wouldn’t have been so baffled.
Powell’s “Salt Peanuts,” a recording with which I have been familiar since
childhood, is an exhilarating rush of
paradoxically patient invention, Mingus and Haynes with him, answering back and
interacting all the way. It is a defiant declaration of power, of ecstasy, of
independence.
“Speed has no practical purpose in music…Speed is to be
considered separately from music…Speed on music is like a sweater on a dog:
mostly for show.” Soon after such a display of arrogant ignorance – since
Ratliff is obviously aiming to comfort affluent, white, Google-avid listeners
rather than tell the truth – the author begins to contradict his own “theory”
by slavering over the deployment of speed by Houston punk band D.R.I. [at a
1984 gig where the teenage Ratliff just happened to be present] and Jerry Lee
Lewis live at the Star Club in 1962. The inescapable subtext is: how dare those
black fellows come in here with their superior ways, and perhaps all of the
speed is merely a priapic metaphor because “we” know what "they"’re like?
I think that’s perhaps enough of Ratliff’s “writing” to do
us for the time being, and indeed for any time)
Side one eases to a satisfactory end with one of Kym
Mazelle’s most intense (in terms of brightness) vocal performances, while
Courtney Pine has fun with his soprano over some elementary beats in a John Surman-jamming-with
Spyro Gyra sort of way. The second side concentrates on assimilating the
collective’s** aesthetic with the then relatively new template of Deep House,
be it by ritual chanting (the more-or-less title track), the use of angular
classical tropes (“A Dream’s A Dream,” here improved from its rather ponderous single
mix by the introduction of accented beats to a Pet Shop Boys-lost-in-a-Kentish
Town-riot scenario; the surface-light menace of the “I can see, I can see, I
can see, I can see, I can see RIGHT THROUGH YOU” refrain comes over more
markedly) or, in the case of “Time (Untitled),” the absence of words. Overall, Vol. II is a largely optimistic and determined portrait of mid-1990 London culture, if a little more wary than before, peering over its shoulder, sensing the incipient cool of an approaching autumn (with particular thought being paid to Lamya and Marcia Lewis, both of whom died at absurdly young ages earlier this millennium).
(**Do collectives, as such, exist outside black or
predominantly black music genres? Broken Social Scene, Fife’s
Fence Collective and maybe Belle and Sebastian aside, I can’t think of any)
Those paving-stones-as-crisp-tombstone beats from Nellee Hooper, looking back and forward, marching forward but then sideways rather than back - looking to the North once more, then eastwards where it all began, and celebrating what was great about new black culture...before it all went West.
“The way to test a modern painting is this: If
it is not destroyed by the action of
shadows it is genuine oil painting.
A cough or a baby crying will not
ruin a good piece of modern music.”
(John Cage, Silences.
London: Calder
and Bryars, 1968, “45’ For A Speaker”)
The first I heard of Massive Attack was in the autumn of
1990, a few months after Vol. II came
out, when the evenings were dark again and Twin Peaks was on
television. Listening to a radio show whose provenance I have long since
forgotten – even whether or not the station broadcasting it was legal – I heard
this tune drift into my presence and sensed that it wasn’t like other music.
“I quietly observe standing in my space,” sang one Shara
Nelson, as though she were John Berger’s daughter, or Bartleby’s
great-great-granddaughter. Above and around her, pin pricks of what once might
have been music darted, momentarily lit before retreating back into universal
ash, like a long-disused jukebox or pinball machine.
I recognised the sample as coming from “Mambo” by Wally
Badarou, a sometime unofficial fifth member of Level 42. 1984 and parallel
thoughts of Nik Kershaw’s song “Human Racing” where he looks back to see if he
was looking back to see if he was looking back at him. Echoing statues of beats
arose in the middleground like a rediscovered cooling tower in Pimlico. There
were other whispers, mutters; three quiet male voices playing aesthetic table
tennis, always more (gently) warming than comforting.
“The cool breeze that
you welcome in the heat,
You don't see it but
you feel it when it's blowing on the street.”
This isn’t Soul II Soul’s primary-coloured welcome-all open
day; indeed, the discourse makes it resemble more of a closed day. Perhaps a Generation X
* * THOSE WORDS!!!! * *
declaration of no principles, or anti-principles.
Words which saunter out of the picture like a friendly
rocket:
“But I just take it easy, it’s a Sunday morn!”
That one called himself Tricky Kid. One already gets the
feeling that he won’t quite settle for what the other two want (“I’m very down
to earth but brain sits on top floor”). But what do the other two want?
The three voices remember those old songs, scanty memories –
“Light My Fire,” the Budokan (such a cheap trick), Mrs Thatcher (by now, nearly
gone), Fiddler On The Roof, Abbey Road (though they sound
as if they have the Richie Havens version of “Here Comes The Sun” burning
quietly in their minds; this is NOT coffee in St John’s Wood). Meanwhile,
Nelson is the impartial observer.
“I love my neighbour,
I don’t wait for the Olympics”
The music is so damned patient,
twinkling in a quiet μ-zik sky (not that anybody in 1990 knew who Mike
Paradinas was yet), doing anything BUT selling itself. And if you couldn’t sell
yourself in 1990, what good were you? As far as some people were concerned, you
might as well be selling your soul.
* * * *
Late winter/early spring 1991; the summer’s warming up early
again, Twin Peaks has curdled into
indifference and “Unfinished Sympathy” is like NOTHING I have ever heard
before, with the partial exception of the 1975 tune “Unfinished Sympathy” which
Mike Gibbs used to close his album …Directs
The Only Chrome-Waterfall Orchestra, a feature for the Belgian guitarist
Philip Catherine which arises out of a sombre line for Pat Halling’s low
strings and decisive rhythm (Steve Swallow, Bob Moses – both sounding more
confident than they had done on A Genuine
Tong Funeral eight years earlier - and Jumma Santos; the band was
international) which in turn demands
that you hear it as a prototype for what would eventually become the first
thing the rest of the world heard from a collective who, because of the Gulf
War and nervy British media, could only be referred to at the time as “Massive.”
Back then, I do not think anybody had really heard anything
like this “Unfinished Sympathy” and
nobody was really ready for it; perhaps the diluted band name, a misguided
dance remix and a strangely lacklustre TOTP
performance combined to make the single stall at #13. But among the dozen
records above it which the British public appeared to prefer were four reissues
(The Clash, Madonna, Xpansions and Free), two novelties (Hale and Pace, the
Simpsons), a mash-up (“You Got The Love”) and a cover version (“It’s Too Late”
by Quartz “introducing” Dina Carroll). Nonetheless, enough people decided “fuck
the charts” and stood awed at the spectacle of this record.
It begins with a reticent count-in, reminiscent of workmen
trying to install triple-glazing, a rash scratch, a deep heartbeat from
somewhere (inside us). Then a line of ‘celli play a drone; it is the root note
of D minor.
Then the sun rises, possibly the last sun of all, and like
stout Cortez we are compelled to witness in wonder the rest of the string
section playing the song’s slow and patient chords, starting at D minor, and carefully climbing
via E flat minor, F and G to G minor before going back down to where the
sequence began, like an ant being knocked back down the anthill by a careless
or sadistic finger. Like Prince, no bass is
used; there are no guitars either, and only occasional piano at key points. A
familiar “hey, hey” vocal sample hovers into distant view like a forgotten 1976
helicopter…
…familiar because the sample – along with the “are you ready”
sample we hear later in the song – is also from 1976. It comes from the song “Planetary
Visitor” by the Mahavishnu Orchestra, from their album Inner Worlds. The album is not very good. Only John McLaughlin
remained from the original line-up, and the music appeared to have degenerated
into routine MoR jazz-funk, worlds away from Escalator Over The Hill or even Extrapolation.
This was indicative of a general surrender that some leading sixties jazz
players had made to “the market” – from someone who was there, I can testify
that in the late seventies jazz was by some distance the least fashionable
music going, at least in late seventies Glasgow, where I was told more than
once that there was “absolutely no market” for this music; indeed I was “the market” (one record shop owner
confessed that they ordered in stuff in the expectation that I would go in and
buy it; their jazz section was stuck far at the back of the shop, next to the
bargain cutouts – nobody else went near it, or cared a fig about it).
So a lot of musicians examined their flag, decided that it
was white and promptly waved it. “Planetary Visitor,” however, has a crisp
backbeat to go with its vocals, both probably due to the band’s then
drummer/singer Narada Michael Walden (although bassist Ralphe Armstrong
composed the song, and both McLaughlin and keyboardist Stu Goldberg are also
credited with vocals on the album) and thus became popular with club DJs and
nascent hip hop DJs, always looking for the perfect beat; it is inconceivable
that the Wild Bunch would not have spun this at club night time.
Shara Nelson is the lead singer again, and once more she
sounds like a planetary visitor herself.
As the music slips unexpectedly back onto a B flat cushion,
she resembles the spectator at the end of Bowie’s
“Subterraneans,” except here she might be trying to reproduce the sound of
Aretha rather than Sinatra. As the harmony floats around C, A minor, D minor, B
flat and C again before rejoining the main sequential trail, we hear her cry
for understanding: “You’re the book that I have opened/And now I’ve got to know
much more.”
Perhaps the song’s theme – she’s already been hurt and would
like to get involved again but is understandably wary to the point of denial –
is not so far from that of “I’ve Been Wrong Before.” After a brief, piano-led
instrumental break the Sisyphean circuitous climb begins again, with the singer
a more brisk and intense Wizard of Oz
participant: “Like a soul without a mind/In a body without a heart/I’m missing
every part.” Behind her the scratching, which sounds a thousand miles away and
a million years old, echoes into its own sarcophagus, while Wil Malone’s
strings steadily ascend in conflicting runs of whole tones, bending down and
back to the beginning before total discordancy is reached.***
***Wil Malone, who while still a teenager was in the sixties
baroque/psychedelia group Orange Bicycle, also did the orchestral arrangements for
Rick Wakeman’s Journey To The Centre Of The
Earth and the score for the horror movie Death Line. On UNKLE’s Psyence
Fiction he gave Richard Ashcroft his finest moment in “Lonely Soul.” He was
also responsible for the raised-eyebrow string arrangements on the strange 1976
Beatles covers/war footage mash-up All
This And World War II. His orchestrations, in the right context, are as indipensable as the whiter skies of Turner.
Then the song turns in on itself, retreats into its
quietened shell, the opening harmonic sequence repeating over and over as yet
more layers reveal themselves; piano arpeggios, scratching beamed down from
another planet, samples, cut-up voices…the visitor struggling to make sense of
this planet and the people living on it. The strings crawl back down to a low
drone, which they hold for a few seconds, before the song cuts out, distant
echoes, stilled lives and a brief, unanswerable cry – we are in the world of
Joy Division’s “The Eternal.”****
****Possible Bristol
forebears: Rip Rig & Panic, who in 1981 burst out of the (then) ashes of
the Pop Group with a determined and youthfully arrogant mission to get free
jazz back in the centre of the picture. I’m not sure many people knew what to
make of them then, other than giving Neneh Cherry her first big chance, but it
is significant that pianist Mark Springer was a protégé of Keith Tippett and
the right age to remember Centipede, the spirit of which I think the group
wanted to recreate and renew (to the point where they kept adding in extra
musicians as each song or gig required – they were also a true collective).
Their discography is, to put it plainly, a glorious mess.
But listen to something like November 1981’s single “Bob Hope Takes Risks” – a time
when, let it not be forgotten, such records stood a serious chance of becoming
pop hits – and it’s all there; the queasily querulous string arrangements
(occasionally colliding with discordant, droney brass fanfares out of Michael Mantler), Cherry’s proto-
Sushi sassiness, the happy feeling that
anything goes and “everything” must go; there is even some scratching in the
distance of the mix, Sean Oliver and Bruce Smith’s infallible rhythm, holding
everything together like Miller and Moholo did in another time. They are,
perhaps only semi-knowingly (since they frequented the same clubs in St Paul’s and elsewhere),
preparing our ears for a decade hence.
One clue might be found in the piece “The Blue, Blue Third,”
which appears on the group’s 1981 modestly-titled debut album God. Ostensibly a slow, contemplative
piano piece by Springer – perhaps in an attempt to prove to cloth-eared cynics
that he could actually play the damned instrument – there are strange, whirling
sounds in the background. These were provided by guitarist/multi-reedman Gareth
Sager, running his finger around some giant Chinese glass bowl-type instrument;
on first hearing one is put in mind of a late-night club closing down, the bar
staff polishing their glasses and clearing the place up, but in reality it was
Sager trying to make the piece into more than a moody Evans/Jarrett meditation
(although on those terms, Springer succeeds magnificently). The whirling sounds
and murmurs we hear circling around the end of “Unfinished Sympathy” really do
not sound all that dissimilar.
“Why is it necessary to give the sounds of knives and forks
consideration? Satie says so. He is right. Otherwise the music will have to
have walls to defend itself, walls which will not only constantly be in need of
repair, but which, even to get a drink of water, one will have to pass beyond,
inviting disaster. It is evidently a question of bringing one’s intended
actions into relation with the ambient unintended ones. The common denominator
is zero, where the heart beats (no one means
to circulate his blood).”
(Cage, op. cit.: “Erik Satie”)
Despite spending 130 weeks in the album chart (to date; it
still resurfaces occasionally), Blue
Lines never peaked higher than its original debut position of #13, in
mid-April 1991. The British album-buying public appeared to prefer items such
as Rod Stewart’s Vagabond Heart or Flashpoint, a live album by the Stones
(if one is wondering aloud who on earth would have bought a Stones live album
in 1991, it should be recalled that when the Purple Rain soundtrack reached its British chart peak of number
seven, it was outsold by Mick Jagger’s She’s
The Boss. Sometimes the album chart is the least reliable of cultural
barometers). In third place was Joyride
by Roxette, while at number two was that week’s “big” release, Real Life by Simple Minds, though even
they could not overtake the monolithic popularity of the hits compilation that
was sitting, long-term, at number one (#427).
But many albums, as this tale is subtly attempting to
demonstrate, exceed the charts, the
momentary and well-marketed favourites of a few thousand consumers, and at its
darkest Blue Lines almost exceeds
music. It was Neneh Cherry who noisily encouraged the Wild Bunch (as were) to
make and record music (demos were largely put down in Cherry’s nursery,
competing with the smell of nappies drying on the radiator; in a 2004 Observer piece, Daddy G admitted: “We
were lazy Bristol twats”). Certainly the overriding, or underriding, sound of Blue Lines is patient, unhurried, at
times playful and at other times menacing (sometimes both at the same time), as
if pointing a rueful finger at the go-ahead nineties and asking: to where do
you think you are running?
The record begins with a quiet wind, perhaps the same wind that
wound us out of the Specials’ “Ghost Town.” Then an endless but determined
bassline begins – most of the track is constructed on a loop of Billy Cobham’s “Stratus”
with other samples making their way through the fog, depending on what the
musicians picked up in the second-hand record shop that morning (in that sense,
Blue Lines is the darker cousin of Foxbase Alpha); Funkadelic, Herbie
Hancock, Johnny “Guitar” Watson. The choice of connoisseurs.
And the Browns. “Looking Back To See” was written and
jointly sung by Jim Ed Brown and Maxine Brown – the group would go on to top
the American charts with their Anglicisation of the French song “The Three
Bells” – and first recorded in March 1954, with a jaunty but resilient backing
band including Jim Reeves on rhythm guitar. It is an upbeat, light-hearted
C&W love song and would later go on to be recorded by the likes of Buck
Owens and George Jones. Its cheery chorus began:
“I was looking back to see if you were looking back to see
If I was looking back to see if you were looking back at me”
However, I suspect that Massive Attack probably had David
Essex more in mind; the far more aggressive “Streetfight,” from his 1973 album Rock On, includes, at their 1991 tempo:
“I was lookin' back to see
If you were lookin' back at me
To see me lookin' back at you”
In the song Essex (with Jeff Wayne) paints a picture of a Saturday
night out that is the mirror of a nightmare (“Somebody got it tonight”); you
might summarise its content as: “Another Saturday night/And I ain’t got no body.” Shara Nelson extends this
setting to the prosperous, chic London
of her time and sees only hissing, laughing threats: “But if you hurt what’s
mine,” she warns, “I’ll sure as hell retaliate.” In the chorus she goes on to
warn all these people to keep away; she’s amazed and a little fazed by those
lucky dippers and crazy chancers (“What happened to the niceties of my
childhood days?” she asks; “niceties” being, like “clutching,” one of those
words you just do not find in lyrics these days) and views them as smiling
sources of violence. This is the down side of the primary-coloured boom:
“You can free the world you can free my mind
Just as long as my baby's safe from harm tonight”
(“baby” as either “lover” or “the next generation, DON’T YOU
DARE HURT THE NEXT GENERATION)
In the early nineties you had this choice:
“One love, we don’t need another love…”
versus
“But I believe in one love…”
Which were you more prepared to believe? It is true that
Horace Andy’s declaration of true (and monogamous love) has a rather more
direct emotional impact than a glorified football chant which avoids any notion
of the specific. But this “One Love”
is slower, more cunning – in another time, Bing Crosby could have sung the song
– and, when it needs to be, far more threatening (the scratched brass lines of “Ike’s
Mood I” creating a surreal effect when set against the smooth promenade of the “You
Know, You Know” basic groove - Mahavishnu again). Just turned forty-one at the
time of the record’s release, Andy sings like an authoritative but soothing adult
when set against Ian Brown’s Curly-Wurly “easy-peasy”s. You are inclined to believe him much, much more.
The underlying sample for the title track is distorted but
familiar (“Sneakin’ In The Back” by Tom Scott and the L.A. Express; another
untouched title known to me from my 23rd Precinct days); the three
rappers pass the pipe and muse about Stephen Stills, Dion, Paul Simon, more
looking back, Paper Lace, the Brotherhood of Man (the Brotherhood of Breath
would be a far more fitting comparison point here; compare Feza’s “You Ain’t
Gonna Know Me ‘Cos You Think You Know Me” with Tricky’s “Even if I told you,
you still would not know me”)…but the stakes are higher than they were with
Soul II Soul. In the middle of this comforting miasma, Daddy G inserts the
line: “Are you predator or do you fear me?” – a line which could have come
straight from Archie Shepp on Impulse circa
1966. “Skip hip data to get the anti-matter” (best internet advice ever, long
before such a thing as the internet was known to exist), “It’s a beautiful day –
well, it seems as such”; the syllables sink and refloat like a hopped-up Housman.
Their concerns are not that different from Soul II Soul’s; out there working,
or in here thinking, and both are hard in different, non-“hardworking” ways.
Like a grinning cat in the midst of the maze, the record’s best and most
resonant lyric comes through: “To wander lonely as a puzzled anagram.”
“Be Thankful For What You’ve Got,” then a song nearly
seventeen years old, and a memory of a not yet unclutched past, is sung very
well by one Tony Bryan as though the song had just been written. On “Five Man
Army” Daddy G, 3D and Tricky again swap
mauvais
mots, this time bringing Nina Simone, Paddington station (for easy escape back
to Temple Meads if needed), the ease or otherwise of getting a visa card, Subbuteo and Wilkinson razor blades into their
deliberations (as do the Kinks with the best Ray Davies paraphrase in all of pop - no argument with Davies himself, one of the most articulate, imaginative and affecting of pop operatives, but some of his disciples and ardent yeasayers do him no favours), all of which are violently brought to an end by a resurgent Horace
Andy, who barks “Get away with you gangsters! We don’t want it” before bringing
the piece to an end by musing at steadily diminishing volume, merging with the
undertow (or underpass) about money being the root of all evil.
Summer in the city, or is it winter upside down? “Summertime
always gives me the blues,” sings Nelson over an aviary of distressed string
vibrati and (with the occasional joyful
hint of Isaac Hayes) the essence of Lowrell Simon’s 1979 hit “Mellow Mellow
Right On,” much played on the radio at the time by Tony Blackburn and more or
less the foundation of the career of Imagination (“Body Talk,” “In And Out Of
Love,” “All I Want To Know,” etc., are natural European extensions, a link
between Lowrell’s Chicago and Art of Noise’s Basing Street). The big seasonal
hit of that liquid summer of 1991 was “Summertime” by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the
Fresh Prince, sampling Kool and the Gang’s “Summer Madness” but bearing a certain
cognisance of Soul II Soul’s work with the clouds of autumn already palpable in
the middle distance of the record’s fibres. “Lately” proceeds even more slowly,
the park cited sounding like the loneliest and bleakest park on the planet.
Permanent sunshine, or any sunshine at all, is not guaranteed.
Nor, for that matter, might the future be guaranteed.
There is whale song and a booming magnifying glass of an
electronic melody line. In what will become a common occurrence with Massive
Attack albums, the ending will suddenly enlarge and you find that the corner of
your eye has now become a globe, seen from space.
It is left to Horace Andy to deliver the final word, a word
so apocalyptic that it’s easy to miss in the song’s amiable E flat major
shuffle (nearly heaven, not quite heaven, but humanity will have to do with the
nearest they can get to perfection; see also the opening, perfect chord of
Vaughan Williams’ Tallis Fantasia,
which is never repeated). Once upon a time, Marvin Gaye or even Errol Brown (“As
a child's silent prayer, my hope hides in disguise”) might have sung this
spiritual. From where he stands, Andy can watch, feel, the world ending, and there is a sudden shock when the
(heart)beat stops, as the acid rain washes away the watcher’s shadow and burns
a hole in him, “and all the King’s men cannot put it back again.”
But the watcher concludes on a bleakly optimistic note, and
its message is really not that far removed from that of Soul II Soul: “But the
ghetto sun will nurture life.” In the honest town of the south, not the opulent
plunder of robber barons one finds in the glorified, or degraded, Disneyland
north of the river; that is where
love, and life, reside (as the song’s co-author, Neneh Cherry, unmissable in
the background, tells us by virtue of her own presence). If Soul II Soul’s
record tells us that the future is sunshine, but that we have to work and
perhaps overcome ourselves in order to make that happen, Blue Lines reminds us just what a difficult task the art of
overcoming can be. The sun has set but can rise again.
The credits are straightforward; Daddy G for the records, 3D
the words, Mushroom the sound. Tricky is Tricky. Shara Nelson’s subsequent
lonely road was rocky. Neneh Cherry and Cameron McVey were around, at least
some of the time, in that order. The late Jonny Dollar co-produced. Nellee
Hooper will reappear on the next Massive Attack record. A happy face, a
thumping bass for a loving – and, crucially, loved – race.
“Listen, my friends, when I leave you like this and must go
home on foot, it is towards dawn I come near Arcueil. When I pass through the
woods, the birds beginning to sing, I see an old tree, its leaves rustling, I
go near, I put my arms around it and think, What a good character, never to
have harmed anyone.”
(Cage, op. cit., “Erik
Satie”)
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