fanatic with mixed Dominican-British
ancestry, and Grant “Daddy G” Marshall,
whose love of music began with the
reggae parties his parents used to throw
when he was a kid. They recruited the
local rapper Adrian “Tricky” Thaws and
founded Massive Attack.
When recording with the Wild Bunch
they’d been inspired by their studio
encounters with cheap, simple samplers
like the Akai S9000, which was mounted
in an effects rack in studios, and the
Akai MPC60, a compact and intuitive
device that could sample and playback
using a series of buttons arranged in a
telephone-style keypad. The MPC60
allowed kids from Bristol to create tracks
on a single machine without knowing
how to play an instrument.
“Sampling made absolute sense to
us,” Del Naja explains. “It was collage,
segments joined together. You could
tap out beats on the MPC, then design
crazy pitch and duration. You’d use and
abuse that technology, but what makes
the album interesting is that the music
written on top of those samples also
had merit as really nice songs.”
The band recorded their debut album
in 1991 using just the Akai S9000 and
the MPC60. Called Blue Lines, its fusionof electronica, dub reggae, soul and hip
hop spawned a new genre – trip hop.
The band used guest singers including
Shara Nelson, reggae legend Horace
Andy, French funk performer Wally
Badarou and pop star Neneh Cherry.
The album’s lush, melancholy single
“Unfinished Sympathy” was described
in 2012 by The Guardian as “the greatest
British soul record ever made”.
The group used the same technology
for its 1994 follow-up, Protection- although the sprawling mass of
collaborators was in constant flux.
Nelson left, to be replaced by Everything
But the Girl’s Tracey Thorn; Hooper
returned to produce the record; and
the Scottish classical pianist Craig
Armstrong played keyboards.
For 1998’s Mezzanine, things became
complicated. Del Naja – who hated
critics calling Protection “dinner party
music” – wanted a harder sound and
started using live guitars and drums,
sampling post-punk and new wave
tracks. Hip-hop loving Vowles was
pushing in the opposite direction - bringing in clattering drums and
deep bass loops. At one point Vowles
thought of offering “Teardrop”, the
strongest single on the album, to
Madonna, while Del Naja pushed for
Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser. The
tensions sometimes spilled out in
public. During one press interview,
Vowles and Del Naja had a stand-up
row about the merits of Puff Daddy in
front of a stunned journalist.
From then on, the two were never
in the studio at the same time, with
Del Naja spending hours alone with
producer Neil Davidge, who would find
himself working on four different tracks
in a single day, swapping between
samples from Isaac Hayes, The Cure
and Manfred Mann’s Earth Band: a
process he describes as “messy”.
This adversarial environment proved
astonishingly fruitful musically –
Mezzanine sold four million copies and
remains the band’s most successful
album – but it was disastrous for the
band. Shortly after its release the group
split. Del Naja and Davidge produced a
fourth, less successful album called
100th Window in 2003, the year coalition
forces invaded Iraq – a war to which Del
Naja was passionately opposed.
As Massive Attack were preparing
to tour, he started collaborating on
visuals with United Visual Artists, a
London-based collective comprising
artist Matt Clark, director Chris Bird and
developer Ash Nehru. Nehru created
software that could sample data and
headlines lifted from local and interna-
tional media, then play them in the local
language across a giant video screen- from the Iraq war, through socio-po-
litical crises, and on to trashy headlines
from celebrity gossip magazines. The
visuals impressed Alex Poots, head of
the Manchester International Festival,
who invited the band to create a show.
Del Naja asked for a collaborator – and
chose Adam Curtis.
“The contradictions and manipulation
of information leading up to the war
was the first moment in my life I felt
convinced that power and news sources
had to be questioned,” he recalls. “I
wanted our stage show to harvest infor-
mation from the web, chop it up and
translate it into local language, mixing
political and tabloid news from interna-
tional and local sources.” His problem
was that he had always drawn energy
from creative tension, and at that point
he had no musical collaborators.
Shortly after their trip to Silicon
Valley in 2013, Del Naja appointed
Andrew Melchior as the band’s chief
technical officer. Melchior’s job would be
to discover, and introduce Del Naja to,
new forms of technology, in the process
turning Massive Attack into the first
band to collaborate with AI.
Del Naja wanted to create and play
music that changed as the listener
moved through space – the way that
he had heard it while moving through
Magic Leap’s augmented rooms, and the
sharing and machine remixing he’d seen
in Will Wright’s work. “If artists didn’tSpray and play: the can containing the
“DNA” of album Mezzanine – spray
on a wall and the music goes on too
Right: Del Naja and ABB IRB1200, a robot arm. It has used convolutional
neural networks to draw its own interpretation of the Blue Lines album art