The story of Massive Attack

The Wild Bunch and a Bristol sound system

The story begins in Bristol in the early 1980s, in the St Pauls and Montpelier districts, with a sound system called the Wild Bunch. It started playing out around 1982, with Grant Marshall and Miles Johnson, known as DJ Milo, as its two main DJs. The crew took its name from Sam Peckinpah's violent 1969 western. Like the Bronx crews they idolised, they played hip hop, reggae, funk and soul at warehouse parties, clubs and all nighters. What made them different was a taste for slower rhythms and spacey, atmospheric sounds. Grant was born in Bristol in December 1959 to parents from Barbados, and people knew him as Daddy G.[1] [2] [3]

In 1984 the Wild Bunch invited a young graffiti artist to join them. His name was Robert Del Naja, known as 3D, born in Bristol in January 1965 to a father from Naples. He had been painting all over the city, was cautioned twice by police and given community service, and he appeared in the 1987 book Spraycan Art and the 1988 film Bombin', alongside a young Goldie. He soon started rapping with the crew. Another DJ in the circle was Andrew Vowles, nicknamed Mushroom after the arcade game Centipede, which sat in Special K's Cafe, the crew's favourite hangout. A future star producer, Nellee Hooper, also spun records with them.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A teenager from the Knowle West estate was drifting into the same circle. Adrian Thaws was born in January 1968. His mother, Maxine Quaye, died when he was four, and he was raised largely by his grandmother, who let him watch old horror films instead of going to school. He fell into petty crime, and at seventeen he spent time in prison after buying forged fifty pound notes from a friend who then informed on him. The Wild Bunch crowd called him Tricky Kid, and by 1987 he was rapping with them. It was a crew of what Daddy G later called immigrant kids, with roots in Italy, Barbados, Jamaica and beyond.[1] [2] [3]

The Wild Bunch did well. In 1986 they played the St Pauls Carnival, signed to Island Records' Fourth and Broadway label and toured Japan. Their stripped down cover of Bacharach and David's The Look of Love, sung by Shara Nelson, is often heard as the first sketch of what became the Bristol sound. On New Year's Eve 1987 they took on Soul II Soul in a sound clash in a Bristol church crypt. But the crew was splintering. DJ Milo stayed in Japan, Nellee Hooper headed for London and Soul II Soul, and petty feuds did the rest. By 1989 the Wild Bunch was finished, and three of its members already had a new name.[1] [2] [3]

Massive Attack is born and Blue Lines changes everything

Massive Attack began in 1988 as a spin off of the Wild Bunch, built around Daddy G, 3D, Mushroom and Tricky. Daddy G later said the plan was for Massive Attack to be an umbrella outfit that would look after several local acts, but the Bristol duo Smith and Mighty could not work out what was in it for them. Smith and Mighty did produce the group's first single, Any Love, sung by the falsetto singer Carlton McCarthy, in 1988. In 1990 Massive Attack signed to Circa Records, a label later folded into Virgin, promising six studio albums and a greatest hits collection. That contract would shape their story for the next sixteen years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The group moved slowly, and it took Neneh Cherry to push them. 3D had co written her hit Manchild with the producer Jonny Dollar, and a young Mushroom can be spotted as a DJ in the video for her song Buffalo Stance. Cherry and her partner, the producer Cameron McVey, funded the band's early work and recorded much of the debut in their own house. McVey became their first manager. Daddy G later joked that they were lazy Bristol boys until Neneh got them into the studio, and remembered recording in her baby's room, which smelled for months until someone found a dirty nappy behind a radiator.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Jonny Dollar became the album's co producer and co writer, and he shaped the band's loose ideas into finished songs. The singer Shara Nelson, an old Wild Bunch friend, co wrote and sang four tracks, and the veteran Jamaican reggae singer Horace Andy joined too, beginning a partnership that would run across every Massive Attack album. Blue Lines came out on the eighth of April 1991. It mixed hip hop beats, dub, soul and reggae at slow, smoky tempos, what the critic Simon Reynolds called spliff tempos. It reached number thirteen in Britain and was later hailed as the first trip hop album, a label the band always disliked.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The single that changed everything was Unfinished Sympathy, released on the eleventh of February 1991. Its sweeping strings began as a synthesiser part by Jonny Dollar, then were arranged by Wil Malone and recorded with an orchestra at Abbey Road. The band had not budgeted for an orchestra, and they sold their car to help pay for it. The song topped the Dutch chart and reached number thirteen in Britain. But the credit on the record read simply Massive. The first Gulf War was under way, and the word attack was thought too risky for radio. The band returned to their full name for the next single, Safe from Harm.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The video for Unfinished Sympathy became famous in its own right. Directed by Baillie Walsh, it follows Shara Nelson in one continuous shot down a street in Los Angeles, lost in thought, while the three band members drift along behind her. The Steadicam was carried by Dan Kneece, who had worked on Blue Velvet, and he managed six takes before he was too exhausted to go on. Some of the people on the street were real locals, not extras. Blue Lines was nominated for Best British Album at the Brit Awards, and a Guardian critic later called the video a benchmark, more short film than pop promo.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Protection, and the first departures

Success brought the first cracks. Shara Nelson left to go solo, and her 1993 album What Silence Knows was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize. Cameron McVey drifted away to work on Neneh Cherry's next record, leaving the band without a manager and producer. For their second album they turned to their old Wild Bunch friend Nellee Hooper, now a star producer. 3D later admitted Mushroom never trusted Hooper, and that the sessions were a battle of personalities. The new voices were Tracey Thorn of Everything but the Girl, who wrote the lyrics and melody of the title track, and the singer Nicolette. The Scottish pianist Craig Armstrong added orchestral colour.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Protection came out on the twenty sixth of September 1994. It was cooler and smoother than Blue Lines, moving between soul, hip hop and reggae flavoured tracks. Tricky rapped with 3D on Karmacoma, whose video was the first ever made by the director Jonathan Glazer. The video for Protection was shot by Michel Gondry in Paris, and 3D said holding himself against a slanted wall for around fifteen takes in freezing weather started his back problems for life. Protection won the Brit Award for Best British Dance Act. A year later the dub producer Mad Professor remixed almost the whole record as No Protection.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

By then Tricky was on his way out. He had given Massive Attack some lyrics he had written for himself, so Karmacoma on Protection and Overcome on his own debut share words. His solo album Maxinquaye came out in 1995, featuring the teenage singer Martina Topley-Bird, and it was a sensation. The same year Portishead, whose Geoff Barrow had worked as a tape operator on Blue Lines, won the Mercury Prize with Dummy. The press now had a name for this slow, dark Bristol music. A Mixmag writer had coined the term trip hop in 1994, and Massive Attack were crowned its founders whether they liked it or not.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Massive Attack kept building. In 1995 they started their own label, Melankolic, and signed Craig Armstrong and Horace Andy among others, promising to let artists make records their own way. That same year they were introduced to a little known producer called Neil Davidge. Their first job together was a cover of The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game, sung by Tracey Thorn for the Batman Forever soundtrack. Davidge was hired as an engineer, but he quickly became a producer and co writer. He would spend the next fifteen years as something close to a fourth member, and his partnership with 3D would define the band's next sound.[1] [2] [3]

Mezzanine, Teardrop and a band at war

Work on the third album began in 1997 and turned dark in every sense. 3D wanted to bring in the post punk and new wave he had loved as a teenager, bands like Wire and Gang of Four, and he made demos sampling them. Daddy G backed the change. Mushroom, a purist devoted to soul, funk and hip hop, did not. Neil Davidge said the three rarely worked in the room together. Mushroom would come in by day, Daddy G would drift in and out, and 3D would arrive in the late afternoon. Davidge called the atmosphere totally dysfunctional, and the album was delayed by four months while 3D kept tearing tracks apart.[1] [2] [3]

The first taste was Risingson in July 1997, built on a Velvet Underground sample. The same year the band recorded songs for the film The Jackal, and one of them, Dissolved Girl, sung by Sarah Jay, would later open The Matrix. The song Angel grew out of a failed attempt to rework The Clash's Straight to Hell. Horace Andy was not keen on singing the word hell, so he and 3D went next door and came back with a new vocal based on Andy's own old song You Are My Angel. The guitarist Angelo Bruschini, who became their permanent guitarist in this era, helped turn it into a storm of guitars and drums.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The album's most famous track began with a simple harpsichord riff that Neil Davidge played in April 1997, with Mushroom listening. Mushroom wanted Madonna to sing it, and she was eager. 3D and Daddy G wanted Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins, and they won the vote two to one. Fraser wrote the words herself. While she was recording, she learned that her former partner, the singer Jeff Buckley, had gone missing. He was later found drowned. Fraser said the song came to feel like it was about him. Teardrop reached number ten in Britain, the band's only top ten single, and years later became the theme of the television drama House.[1] [2] [3]

Mezzanine was released on the twentieth of April 1998 and went straight to number one in Britain, the band's first chart topping album. Its cover, a black beetle on white, was photographed by Nick Knight at the Natural History Museum, after 3D abandoned an obsession with spiders. The working title had been Damaged Goods, after a Gang of Four single. The album won the Q Award for Best Album and was nominated for the Mercury Prize. There was a sting in the tail. Manfred Mann sued over an uncredited bass line on the track Black Milk, and later versions added him to the credits. 3D said he had been told it was just a bit of atmosphere.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Behind the success, the band had stopped talking. For Mezzanine's press, the three founders were interviewed separately. Mushroom hated touring, and after the long tour ended in 1999 there was no schedule forcing them together. They drifted, and then Mushroom was gone. 3D said later that it was done on the phone, coldly, and compared it to warmth being spun into a thin thread that was then cut. Mezzanine went on to sell millions, and critics now rank it among the best albums of the 1990s. But Massive Attack were now a duo, and even that was about to change.[1] [2] [3] [4]

One man in the studio, and an arrest

After Mezzanine, 3D and Neil Davidge took the live band, including former members of Spiritualized in a group called Lupine Howl, to Ridge Farm studio and recorded endless jams. They ended up with about eighty hours of material. Almost none of it worked out of context, and after months they scrapped nearly everything and started again in Bristol. Meanwhile Daddy G stepped back in 2001. He said he and 3D were not getting on and he wanted to be at home with his first baby. The two barely spoke for about three years. Officially he never left, but for this record Massive Attack was essentially Robert Del Naja.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The fourth album, 100th Window, came out on the tenth of February 2003. It used no samples at all, a first for the band. Sinéad O'Connor sang on several tracks, including A Prayer for England, a plea about violence against children, and Special Cases, which reached number fifteen in Britain. The cover showed life sized human figures made of glass, built by a glassblower and then shattered and photographed. 3D said it was the most expensive sleeve the band, and possibly their label, had ever made. The album went to number one in Britain, but critics at home were cooler than before.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Then came the darkest chapter of 3D's life. On the twenty fifth of February 2003, two weeks after the album's release, he was arrested in Bristol as part of Operation Ore, a national police investigation into people whose credit card details appeared on a list linked to a child abuse image website. His home was searched and his computers taken. He said publicly that he had never looked at such material. A month later police released him without charge over those allegations for lack of evidence, and returned everything they had taken. At that point he remained on bail over a separate allegation of drug possession.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The damage was already done. The arrest was leaked to a tabloid, and 3D said visas for Australia and New Zealand were withdrawn and then restored, forcing the tour to be rescheduled. Each night on tour he told the crowd that if they were there, he guessed they did not believe the charges. In 2007 a Guardian investigation into Operation Ore described him as falsely accused, and reported that many cards on the list had been stolen and used by fraudsters. 3D said the ordeal had one good effect. He and Daddy G, he said, had talked more in a couple of months than in the previous three years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Soundtracks, Collected and Heligoland

Through the mid 2000s 3D and Neil Davidge became a film scoring team. They wrote the full score for the Jet Li action film Danny the Dog, known in America as Unleashed, and music for the British film Bullet Boy. Later came documentaries including Trouble the Water, about Hurricane Katrina, and In Prison My Whole Life, with Snoop Dogg on the end title song. In 2006 the band finally delivered the greatest hits album their old contract required. Collected included a new song, Live with Me, sung by the soul singer Terry Callier, with a video by Jonathan Glazer in which the lead actress was asked to get genuinely drunk.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Daddy G came back, but on his own terms. In 2006 he admitted he had not worked with 3D for six or seven years and that they did not like each other very much. He said DJ crowds kept asking him where the soul of Massive Attack had gone, and he wanted to put it back. The two began working in separate studios with their own collaborators, Daddy G often with a production duo called Robot Club. In 2008 Massive Attack became the first band to curate London's Meltdown festival, with a bill that included Grace Jones, George Clinton and Gang of Four. In 2009 they received an Ivor Novello award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The year 2009 also brought a loss. Jonny Dollar, the co producer who had turned Blue Lines into a finished record and written the melodies behind the Unfinished Sympathy strings, died of cancer on the twenty ninth of May, aged forty five. He left a wife and four children. Dollar had gone on to co write Kylie Minogue's Confide in Me and co produce Neneh Cherry's albums. His nickname came from the Blue Lines sessions, where he was reportedly the only person working on the album who was being paid regularly. The band's next album was dedicated to his memory.[1] [2] [3]

That album was Heligoland, released on the eighth of February 2010 and named after a German archipelago, after a working title of Weather Underground was dropped. It was the first Massive Attack album made by the two founders as a duo. The guests included Horace Andy, Damon Albarn, Martina Topley-Bird, Guy Garvey of Elbow, Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio and Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star. The song Paradise Circus, sung by Sandoval, became the theme of the BBC crime drama Luther. London Underground refused the poster artwork unless 3D removed the paint drips, so it would not look like street art. He called it absurd censorship.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Art, apps and an old friend returns

After Heligoland the band released music in fragments rather than albums. There was a 2011 single with the elusive producer Burial, and in 2013 3D confirmed a long rumoured reunion with Tricky, joking that they got on well because they did not spend time in the studio together. That summer 3D and the filmmaker Adam Curtis staged an immersive show in Manchester, with a film projected all around the audience. Music 3D wrote for it later became the score of Curtis's BBC documentary HyperNormalisation. 3D also had a major solo art show in London, and published a book, 3D and the Art of Massive Attack, with an introduction by Banksy.[1] [2] [3]

In January 2016 the band released the Ritual Spirit EP. Its four songs first appeared inside an iPhone app called Fantom, which remixed the music in real time using the listener's location, movement, the time of day and even their heartbeat. The EP featured Tricky on a Massive Attack record for the first time since 1994, along with Young Fathers and Roots Manuva. That summer Daddy G produced his own EP, The Spoils, without 3D. Its title song was sung by Hope Sandoval, and its video starred Cate Blanchett, her face slowly transforming. The two founders were now working almost as separate studios under one name.[1] [2] [3] [4]

For Mezzanine's twentieth anniversary in 2018, the band had the album encoded into synthetic DNA with scientists in Zurich. The music was stored in about nine hundred and twenty thousand short DNA strands inside five thousand tiny glass beads, and some of it was mixed into cans of black spray paint. 3D joked that street artists wanting anonymity were unlikely to use it. The Mezzanine XXI tour followed in 2019, with Elizabeth Fraser and Horace Andy and new visuals by Adam Curtis. The North American dates had to be postponed from March to the autumn because of illness in the band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The band's politics were now as loud as the music. 3D and Damon Albarn had paid for newspaper adverts against the Iraq war in 2003, and the band played benefits for Palestinian refugee children. They have refused to play Israel since 1999, describing it as pressure on the government rather than hostility to its people. In 2018 they left Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and they backed Extinction Rebellion. In 2019 they commissioned climate scientists at the Tyndall Centre in Manchester to measure the carbon footprint of touring, and they began travelling across Europe by train.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Loss, protest and new music

In 2020, during the pandemic lockdown, the band released Eutopia, three short audiovisual pieces made across five cities, featuring the climate diplomat Christiana Figueres, the economist Gabriel Zucman and vocals from Young Fathers, Algiers and Saul Williams. 3D also sold a screenprint called Protection that raised more than one hundred thousand pounds for Bristol food projects. In 2021 the Tyndall Centre report was published, a roadmap to cut the carbon of live music. In 2022 a serious illness in the band forced them to cancel a headline slot at Primavera Sound in Barcelona and the rest of a European tour.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the twenty third of October 2023 the band lost Angelo Bruschini, the Bristol guitarist whose playing runs through Mezzanine and 100th Window and who had toured with them for decades. He died of lung cancer at sixty two. Earlier that year he had written with grim humour that doctors had twice wished him good luck. The band called him a brilliant, eccentric talent whose contribution was impossible to measure. Massive Attack returned to the stage on the fifth of June 2024 in Gothenburg, their first show in five years, with Elizabeth Fraser, Horace Andy and Young Fathers alongside them.[1] [2] [3]

In late August 2024 they played Act 1.5 on Clifton Down in Bristol, a hometown show for around thirty thousand people designed as the lowest carbon concert of its size. Tickets went first to locals, food was plant based, and the site ran on renewable energy. Earlier that summer they cancelled a concert in Tbilisi in protest at the Georgian government's crackdown on demonstrators. In October 2024 they called off a short American tour days before it began, citing unforeseen circumstances. 3D told NME that they had new music ready for years, held up by label problems, and that they had turned down Coachella over its carbon footprint.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In September 2025 Massive Attack asked for their music to be pulled from Spotify worldwide, in protest at chief executive Daniel Ek's investment in the military technology company Helsing, and joined a campaign to block their music from streaming in Israel. In April 2026 they released Boots on the Ground, a protest song with Tom Waits recorded years earlier, with vinyl profits going to civil liberties and immigrant defence groups. That same month, on the eleventh of April, 3D was among hundreds of people arrested in Trafalgar Square at a protest supporting the banned group Palestine Action. He called his few hours in custody a small price to pay.[1] [2] [3] [4]

As of 2026, Massive Attack are Robert Del Naja and Grant Marshall, still making music in separate rooms, still arguing, and still one of the most influential British groups of their time. Blue Lines is widely treated as the first trip hop album, and both it and Mezzanine appear in Rolling Stone's list of the five hundred greatest albums. Their five studio albums have sold more than thirteen million copies. Their slow, heavy beats and cinematic strings can be heard in artists from Radiohead to Burial and The Weeknd. For a crew that never wanted a face on the cover, the sound itself became the signature.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Massive Attack

Robert Del Naja and Grant Marshall. 3D and Daddy G are the two founders still standing, and their partnership has been anything but smooth. Around 2001 they stopped speaking for roughly three years, and Daddy G said in 2006 that they did not like each other very much. Yet they rebuilt a working relationship by giving each other space, often working in separate studios with separate collaborators. 3D said his 2003 arrest brought them closer than they had been in years. By 2008 an interviewer found them joking together over frozen Jaffa Cakes.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Robert Del Naja and Andrew Vowles. 3D and Mushroom were the band's great creative mismatch. Producer Neil Davidge described Mushroom as methodical, someone who liked to plan before entering the studio, while 3D wanted to make noise and see what happened. The clash over Mezzanine's darker, guitar heavy direction and the Teardrop row ended with the two refusing to be in the studio at the same time. Mushroom left in 1999. In 2003 3D said he had heard Mushroom was softening towards him, and hoped they might make it up.[1] [2] [3]

Robert Del Naja and Tricky. 3D and Tricky shared a house in their early twenties, and 3D later called it an implosion waiting to happen, two stubborn Aquarians with strong opinions. Tricky left after Protection, and credit for Blue Lines remained a sore point for decades. In 2013 3D confirmed they had written together again in Paris, and in 2016 Tricky appeared on the Ritual Spirit EP, his first Massive Attack release since 1994. He also joined them on stage that year for the first time in two decades.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tricky and Martina Topley-Bird. Tricky met Martina Topley-Bird in Bristol when she was fifteen, and her voice defined his 1995 debut Maxinquaye. They had a daughter, Mina, born in 1995. Tragedy followed years later. Mina struggled with mental illness and took her own life in May 2019 after a psychotic episode. Tricky said nothing would ever be the same again. Topley-Bird herself went on to sing on Massive Attack's Heligoland and tour with the band.[1] [2]

Neneh Cherry and Cameron McVey. Neneh Cherry and her partner, later husband, Cameron McVey were the band's first great patrons. They funded early work, recorded much of Blue Lines in their home, and McVey became the band's first manager and executive producer. 3D co wrote Cherry's hit Manchild, and Mushroom worked on her debut Raw Like Sushi. McVey later stepped away to work on Cherry's next album, a loss 3D said left the band feeling they had to start over with every record.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Robert Del Naja and Neil Davidge. Neil Davidge arrived in 1995 as an engineer and became 3D's closest musical partner for fifteen years, co producing Mezzanine, 100th Window and Heligoland and scoring films with him. A former graphic designer, he said they talked about music in pictures, textures and contrasts. He called 3D a brother but also an argumentative bastard. Davidge went on to score the video game Halo 4, whose soundtrack became the highest charting game soundtrack on the Billboard 200.[1] [2] [3]

Massive Attack and Horace Andy. The Jamaican reggae singer Horace Andy, born in Kingston in 1951, is the band's most faithful voice, appearing on all five studio albums from Blue Lines to Heligoland. His song You Are My Angel became the basis of Angel on Mezzanine, and Massive Attack released his album Living in the Flood on their Melankolic label. He has also faced criticism over homophobic lyrics in some of his older reggae songs. He was back on stage with the band in 2024.[1] [2] [3]

Massive Attack and Shara Nelson. Shara Nelson was the band's first great voice, singing The Look of Love with the Wild Bunch and co writing four Blue Lines songs, including Unfinished Sympathy and Safe from Harm. She left to go solo and felt her role had been undervalued. Her later life was troubled. In 2011 she was convicted of harassing the DJ Pete Tong with nuisance calls, falsely claiming to be married to him, and received a community order. She returned to sing Unfinished Sympathy at a charity show in 2012.[1] [2]

Elizabeth Fraser and Damon Reece. Elizabeth Fraser, the voice of Teardrop, had been in a relationship with Jeff Buckley in the mid 1990s, and his drowning while she recorded the song shaped how she felt about it. She later settled in Bristol with Damon Reece, a drummer who became Massive Attack's regular session and touring drummer. Fraser has toured with the band several times, in 2006, in 2018 and 2019, and again from 2024.[1] [2] [3]

Massive Attack and Nellee Hooper. Nellee Hooper came up as a DJ in the Wild Bunch before finding fame with Soul II Soul, then producing Björk, Madonna and U2. He returned to co produce Protection, which helped win him the 1995 Brit Award for Best Producer. But his arrival divided the band. 3D said Mushroom did not trust Hooper, and the Protection sessions were reportedly uncomfortable. Hooper and the band parted ways before Mezzanine.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Robert Del Naja and Damon Albarn. 3D and Damon Albarn of Blur were allies in politics and music. In the run up to the 2003 Iraq war they paid for anti war adverts in the NME and lobbied Parliament, and 3D said they looked back and found no other musicians behind them. Albarn sang backing vocals as the Gorillaz character 2D on 100th Window, wrote with the band at his studio in 2008, and sings on Heligoland.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rare facts about Massive Attack

• 3D is colour blind, and in his graffiti days he labelled his spray cans so he knew which colour was which. Robert Del Naja has said painting is hard for him because he is colour blind. As a young graffiti artist he wrote the colour on each can. He joked that people praising his colours were like the emperor's new clothes.[1] [2]
• Mushroom's nickname came from the arcade game Centipede, whose mushrooms filled the screen at the crew's favourite Bristol cafe. Andrew Vowles got the name Mushroom from Centipede, a game installed at Special K's Cafe. In the mid 1980s it was the regular hangout for him and his Wild Bunch friends.[1]
• The Wild Bunch took their name from Sam Peckinpah's 1969 western The Wild Bunch. The Bristol sound system that gave birth to Massive Attack borrowed its name from Peckinpah's famously violent western. The crew played hip hop, reggae and funk at parties across St Pauls and Montpelier.[1]
• Jonny Dollar got his nickname because he was the only person on Blue Lines being paid regularly. The producer born Jonathan Sharp picked up the name Jonny Dollar during the Blue Lines sessions. He was reportedly the only one working on the album with a regular wage.[1]
• The band sold their car to help pay for the orchestra on Unfinished Sympathy. Massive Attack had not budgeted for real strings on Blue Lines. When the synth version sounded too tacky, they hired an orchestra anyway and sold their car to cover it.[1]
• The Unfinished Sympathy video was shot by the Steadicam operator from David Lynch's Blue Velvet. Dan Kneece carried the camera for the single unbroken shot through Los Angeles. He managed six takes before he was too exhausted to continue.[1] [2]
• The flamboyant performance artist Leigh Bowery was art director on the Unfinished Sympathy video. Leigh Bowery tried to dress down for the Bristol lads and turned up in LA in a huge parka, a pudding bowl wig and baggy jeans, dripping with sweat, according to 3D.[1] [2]
• A young Mushroom appears as a DJ in the video for Neneh Cherry's Buffalo Stance. Before Blue Lines, Andrew Vowles was already in Neneh Cherry's orbit. He can be seen DJing in her 1988 video, and he worked on her debut album Raw Like Sushi.[1] [2]
• Portishead's Geoff Barrow worked as a tape operator on Blue Lines before forming his own band. Geoff Barrow was mentored by Jonny Dollar and worked on Blue Lines as a teenager. A few years later Portishead's Dummy won the Mercury Prize.[1] [2]
• Karmacoma's video was the first music video ever directed by Jonathan Glazer. Glazer, who went on to make films like Under the Skin, made his video debut with Karmacoma. He later directed Massive Attack's video for Live with Me.[1] [2]
• Karmacoma and Tricky's song Overcome share lyrics, because Tricky gave the band words he had written for himself. Tricky failed to finish lyrics for Protection and handed over some he had written for Maxinquaye. That is why Karmacoma and Overcome, and Eurochild and Hell Is Round the Corner, overlap.[1] [2]
• The comic book artwork for the No Protection remix album was an early prototype of Grand Theft Auto's art style. Stephen Bliss drew the sleeve for No Protection before becoming a key artist for Grand Theft Auto. 3D described that art as an early prototype of his later game work.[1] [2]
• Mezzanine's working title was Damaged Goods, borrowed from Gang of Four's first single. 3D's love of British post punk ran through the album. Its original title came from Gang of Four's 1978 debut single.[1]
• The beetle on Mezzanine's cover was photographed at London's Natural History Museum. 3D first wanted spiders and even dreamed of clothes made of spider skin. Photographer Nick Knight then showed him beetle pictures taken at the museum, and that settled it.[1] [2]
• Inertia Creeps was built on tapes of Turkish music 3D brought back from nights out in Istanbul. The rhythm of the Mezzanine track comes from çiftetelli recordings 3D acquired in Istanbul. Those tapes became the rhythmic base of the song.[1] [2]
• Dissolved Girl, first recorded for the film The Jackal, plays at the start of The Matrix. The Sarah Jay sung track was reworked for Mezzanine. It was featured at the beginning of the 1999 film The Matrix but was not on the official soundtrack.[1]
• Horace Andy did not want to sing the word hell, which is how the song Angel was born. The band first tried a version of The Clash's Straight to Hell. Horace Andy was uneasy with the lyric, so he and 3D worked up a new vocal next door.[1]
• The Angel video was shelved for three years because the band felt it missed the song's mood. Walter Stern filmed Daddy G being chased through a car park. The band did not use it for the single, and it only surfaced on the Eleven Promos DVD in 2001.[1]
• Elizabeth Fraser's lyrics for Teardrop were inspired by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. Fraser wrote the words herself. She has said they drew on Bachelard's writing, and that the song later came to feel like it was about Jeff Buckley.[1] [2]
• 3D says the latex baby from the Teardrop video still exists, now a rotting animatronic in a puddle. The band kept the singing foetus from Walter Stern's video. 3D said the old latex had not lasted, leaving a scary half creature like a museum piece.[1]
• Mezzanine was the first album ever stored in synthetic DNA. For its twentieth anniversary it was encoded in about nine hundred and twenty thousand DNA strands held in five thousand glass beads, with some mixed into spray paint cans.[1] [2]
• 100th Window was the first Massive Attack album to use no samples at all. After years of sample based music and two lawsuits over samples, 3D and Neil Davidge made the fourth album entirely from new playing and programming.[1] [2]
• The 100th Window cover used life sized glass people that were blown apart and photographed. A Brixton glassblower made eight human sized figures. They were shattered on a controlled site and filmed with multiple cameras, the most expensive sleeve the band had made.[1] [2]
• Only one guitar riff survived from the eighty hours of jams recorded for 100th Window. After a month of recording every note at Ridge Farm, almost all of it was scrapped. Neil Davidge said an Angelo Bruschini riff on What Your Soul Sings was the one piece used.[1]
• The band tracked down Nina Simone in the south of France hoping to work with her. 3D said they wanted Nina Simone on 100th Window and found her in France, but it never happened. He also named Tom Waits as a hope, which came true more than twenty years later.[1] [2]
• 3D wrote the score for an adult film with The Prodigy's Liam Howlett. In 1999 he worked with Liam Howlett on music for The Uranus Experiment. He cited it during his 2003 police interviews to show he had nothing to hide about pornography.[1] [2]
• The Live with Me video actress was asked to get genuinely drunk for the shoot. Jonathan Glazer's video follows a young woman drinking alone in her flat. Actress Kirsty Shepherd was asked to become drunk for real to film it.[1]
• Transport for London made 3D remove paint drips from the Heligoland posters. Its policy was to avoid anything that looked like street art. 3D called it the most absurd censorship he had ever seen.[1] [2]
• Unfinished Sympathy was voted the tenth best song of the millennium in a huge 1999 British poll. More than six hundred thousand people voted in the poll for Channel 4, HMV and Classic FM. Unfinished Sympathy came tenth in the best song category, one place below Robbie Williams's Millennium.[1]
• 3D's instrumental Herculaneum won an Italian film award for the crime film Gomorrah. The piece, written with Euan Dickinson, won best song at the David di Donatello Awards. 3D supports Napoli, the city of his father's birth.[1]
• Banksy wrote the introduction to 3D's art book, recalling a kid called 3D painting the streets. In 3D and the Art of Massive Attack, Banksy remembered seeing 3D's work when he was about ten, and said his move into music was a big loss for Bristol.[1]
• An early Wild Bunch rapper, Claude Williams, was jailed in 2010 for a series of robberies. Known as Willy Wee, he rapped on Massive Attack's Five Man Army in 1991. In 2010 he received a three year sentence alongside five other men.[1]
• Tricky played a villain's sidekick in the Luc Besson film The Fifth Element. Tricky took a supporting role as Right Arm, the aide of the evil businessman Zorg, in the 1997 science fiction film.[1]
• Massive Attack were the first band to curate London's Meltdown festival. Previous curators were individuals like David Bowie, Morrissey and Jarvis Cocker. In 2008 Massive Attack booked Grace Jones, George Clinton and Gang of Four.[1] [2]
• Boots on the Ground was the first Massive Attack release withheld from Spotify. The 2026 Tom Waits collaboration came out through the label PIAS after the band's Spotify protest. Vinyl profits went to the ACLU and an immigrant defence group.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.