I got my hands on a Massive Attack interview and of course I can’t wait to share it. Well, I hope you haven’t seen it before. It is on the album Heligoland and everything else you’d ever want to know about Massive Attack. Enjoy!

Massive Attack Interview Transcription

Interview with Robert Del Naja and Grant Marshall

December 2009

When was the new album Heligoland made?

Robert:            We’ve been making our fifth studio album since we started our first album, it feels like.  It has been an inevitable sort of course and trajectory. But when it was going to be finished was probably the question that no one could answer.  We’ve probably had various versions of this album almost finished in the last sort of 4 years, and amidst other projects, distractions, its kind of nearly materialised, and it hasn’t, you know.  I think we knew it was reaching a point where it was feeling like an album maybe this April or May, or maybe March.  The collection of tracks started to feel like a good album, or something you’d want to deliver, you know.

I think the internet offers you a cheeky interface with people as well, where you can make announcements that possibly you might be a little bit more tight lipped about if you were speaking to someone in the pub or someone from the press where you might say ‘yeah, we’re feeling it, we’re on a roll, lets put a new album out, we reckon the new album might be out the end of this year’.  And it might be a bold statement you make in all seriousness, but the reality of it is it is likely not to happen.  But we will constantly announce things that are not going to happen, and our career has been littered with strange strategies and bad timing.

It’s strange, we’ve had various versions of what might be described as this album, and even tracks which share the same folders as their previous incarnations solely because we’ve kept the name, even though the track has probably changed beyond recognition musically, vocally, whatever.  But it has a common legacy.

I think it gets to a point on every album where you feel that there is an energy that is brewing, and you start to go with the momentum of that energy.  When we went to Damon Albarn’s studio in November, and then went to see Tim Goldsworthy in New York, and the work we’d done in those two periods, combined with getting our shit together in Bristol, it started to feel like ‘this is an album’.  When Martina came down to Bristol, which was something we’d been planning for a long time, all those combinations of people and energy started to create something which felt like it was real.

What’s it been like working together on this new album?

Grant:              It has been a case of maybe initiating tracks, and taking a track through to fruition , and if and when we need each others input we’ll ask; whether it be through a vocal or even just for an opinion.  So the way that we made the album was the fact that we started it in November and we’ve worked together, but it was a case that we were actually in the same studio working. So there was a spiritual awareness of what was going on, but not necessarily a physical awareness because tracks were started and initiated and maybe finished by each one of us.  But the actual atmosphere is great, we’ve had our ups and downs, but it was an amicable procedure.

Robert:            We work in different ways don’t we?  Historically, going back to Blue Lines – being a different thing all together because it was our first record – and that was probably the record where we were all in each other’s faces in the studio in Cameron McVey’s house, and on top of each other with Johnny Dollar, who sadly passed away this year. It helped us to co-exist and coordinate with each other in a very new manner, because it was really a speculative demo, that album.  But from that period onwards, I think we found our own paths.  Historically, G has more of a DJ orientated attitude to things, and is sometimes quite aloof in that sense because he is not going to be in the studio hour by hour, minute by minute in the same way I might be or Mush (Mushroom ex band member) was, or Neil (Davidge, co-producer) has been.  Where we would sit there for weeks on end, but G would sort of come in with ideas and leave again, he’ll offer an opinion and visa versa.  And in a sense, we’ll offer the same for the tracks he has brought to us, and help those tracks to evolve.  But I think the interesting thing about this record, as opposed to the last two in particular; there has not been a central conflict which has maybe defined the relationships in the studio, or the nature of the album and it’s mood.

What is the mood of this album like?

Robert:            It’s more upbeat.  It is…I’m loathed to say the word because we’ve been using it a lot in the past few weeks, but it is more communal.  There is more people involved, more personalities.  That brings a different energy to the studio, or to the various studios we have worked in on this record.  I think the change of location from Bristol, New York, London has given it a different feel as well.  100^th Window was very much a Bristol album, and it was in one studio, and people came to it – Sinead, Horace – it’s a different experience.

Each track has historically been a moment.  You don’t sort of sit down with a set of backing tracks and strategise an album and work out how you’re going to finish it.  It is one track at a time, and how you work on that track is dependant on who you are collaborating with or what your feeling for it is.  It might be shelved for a year, picked back up again.  It might be deconstructed and rebuilt.  There is never really a central strategy, and I think that comes into play in the production side of it – when you are about to finish it, when you feel there is a record, what approach you take.  In the sense that 10^th Window was a strong reaction to anti-Mezzanine, because to me that record was still about loops and big bass lines and heavy beats.  100^th Window was about intricacies and layers, and very much was probably the most Pro Tools record we made, which was governed by the machinery and the computers in terms of everything being crafted in that world.  This record, in terms of its production, the sound was more of getting away from that, simplifying everything and stripping it back – making the instruments very evident.  So when we were doing drums, if they were drums recorded in New York they were very dry, very small drum booth, very simple.  If they are electronic, they are very electronic.  The contrast between the tracks and the moments within the tracks being made to be very evident.  100^th Window was about a lot of crafting, and lots of layers which were possibly interlacing, and you weren’t sure what was what.  The idea of this record was to make it very apparent and very immediate what was what.  So whether it was an analogue or an electric keyboard, you would recognise those sounds and the differences between them.

How do you avoid repeating yourselves when making an album?

Robert:            When the track sounds to us a little bit like something we have done before, you will fight against it, and try to drag it somewhere else.  A lot of tracks, because they won’t survive that process, will disappear or be left behind.  But I think in the basic curiosity of making a record, you don’t want to do what you’ve done before, you want to take it somewhere different because that’s the only way you feel confident about what you are doing.  For us we have always been a clash of ideas and as well as that created conflict within the band, historically it has been what makes it interesting.  The difference between Blue Lines and Mezzanine are quite extreme, but they make it interesting.  The whole point in getting to those places is part of the whole process, and if it does mean fighting because different personalities have different musical preferences historically or personally, then you are going to have fights.  But that’s part of what the band has always been about really.

I think because a lot of the work on this record was, when we got to November and went to Damon’s studio, we had a very joint opinion about what we wanted to do and how we wanted to finish it – not necessarily how it was going to sound in all the moments in all the tracks – but that we wanted to get this record finished and we wanted to enjoy the process.  Going into Damon’s studio was about as much a change of scene and energy, as it was about trying to make some good music.  And again, going to see Tim Goldsworthy in New York was a different energy, a different way of looking at the drums we were working with.  Martina brought a new energy to the studio too, which was really nice.  I guess especially after knowing her for so long, in a different way, working with her which could have been…sometimes working with friends or colleagues can be a disaster…and this luckily was really good fun.

Why the title Heligoland?

Robert:            The record was about a lot of different personalities and it seems nice to represent the title of the album as a place, as opposed to just a thing or a phrase or a word.  It felt more accurate to describe a place where everyone might co-exist, or not.  That was more interesting than just a very cool phrase you could dig out, you know.

To be honest, the history of the island was something that came more apparent later, after really getting into the idea, or falling in love with the word.  Which in itself sounds like an anagram of lots of other words, which is why it is such a nice word.  But the history of the place is absolutely intriguing, and also the fact that one of the earliest spellings ‘Helgoland’ also means Holy Land, which is obviously very poetic.  I think the history, the quantum physics thing, the British Military, the occupation of the island, the detonating of that bomb The Big Bang, the biggest sub-nuclear explosion…all those different parts of it’s history… its sixties utopian paradise concept.  It has got too much history really!

Were there any difficult tracks to finish on the album?

Robert:            There is always difficult tracks, I think Atlas Air was one of those epically difficult tracks that had 5 different versions of it historically in its shadow. For some reason could never get finished and ended up being a completely different musical track, different rhythm track, different chord structure, different lyrics, different vocal performance.  It was just, every time I mentioned it, it was called Marrakesh to the guys, I’d just get this collective groan from G or anyone, you know ‘it’s never going to get finished’ type of attitude.  Finally it got nailed on the deadline.  But on the whole, I think a lot of the tracks were about exploring opportunities and possibilities within them.  The Tunde track was a completely different song originally when we took it to New York and then it stayed on the shelf for like two years before we went back to New York and Tunde re-did a vocal which was completely different from the original vocal, which then informed how we finished the track, arranged it, re-arranged it, cut it up, changed the middle section.  That track, I suppose that and Paradise Circus, Saturday Come Slow, are tracks which are possibly from the last couple of years as opposed to new instant tracks which I guess you could add to things like Splitting the Atom,  Psyche and Babel which happened a lot quicker.  I think with Flat of The Blade for instance, taking that to Damon’s studio and messing around with the bass line completely changed the way we thought of the track initially.  And in fact when Guy (Garvey) came to the studio, him heading towards this track which was really just a ricochet of drums, and no music whatsoever, and starting this kind of vocal mantra almost white blues gospel thing, which was really bizarre. With Guy, maybe from outside perspective, he might be expected to work on something very beautiful and soulful – more what you’d expect from Elbow – but it was a completely different approach he took which made it really intriguing.  I think everyone who came in seemed to point to a different track than you would expect them to, and often we’d try and orienteer people towards different things so we’re not doing the obvious thing you might expect from that person.  Whether it has been Tracey Thorn in the past or Elizabeth (Fraser), you try something that hasn’t been done before by either them or us.  In this record people did that automatically, they were heading towards these tracks almost magnetically which was quite strange

Working with Damon Albarn…

Robert:            Going to Damon’s studio was a decision which helped persuade the people who we had just informed that we were going to inform that we were basically going to shelve the album we had at the end of last year.  That idea was met with, as you can imagine, a deafening silence which went on for a couple of weeks, and then it was followed by a big round of applause when we said ‘yeah but we’re going to Damon’s studio’.

Grant:              We’re talking about the record company yeah?

Robert:            Haha, and the management yeah, and everyone around us who couldn’t understand why we were shelving and album which they had heard live which they seemed to be enjoying all the summer previously, from Meltdown onwards.  Damon agreed to work with us after saying that he wouldn’t get sucked into a two year Bristolian vortex, and would only do it over a period of two weeks in the hours of 10am-6pm and everything would be in a major key, no minor keys whatsoever!  Of course all that changed when we got there – apart from the vortex bit.

Grant:              It was a great impetus actually, because like D was saying, we came back and we had what we though was an album, and we shelved it and were at a bit of a loss as to where to begin…where the starting point was going to be, the start of Heligoland.  We asked Damon if we could come to his studio, and he agreed, and it was a great starting point, a great springboard to work from.  Working with Damon, he is a complete genius and once we’d started those sessions with Damon there was no looking back really.  It became so fruitful that it seemed if we slowed down the process of work or the work rate it would be a fruitless exercise.  Also we had Damon in the background saying ‘when are my tracks going to be finished then?’ so that was a bit of Carry On really.  We went to New York and to Williamsburg to work with Tunde and Tim Goldsworthy, and also did some recording here in Bristol.

Working with Tunde Adebimpe…

Robert:            I think with Tunde he sort of knows when he’s doing his vocal, how many different takes he wants to attempt and knows how many different types of vocal he wants to attempt.  When he starts he starts to build up layers and layers and knows he wants to do another layer, and he’ll move away from the mic and do something a little bit more course, then back to the mic for something a bit more soft.  You can tell in his head he is creating a collage himself.  You add that to the fact that we are looking at an arrangement and thinking ‘right, this is going to work by moving this around’ and you’re trying to build it in your mind as he is putting a vocal in.  It is really great to be around him doing that because he is someone who…some vocalists need a lot of instruction you know, they need to be guided, Tunde gets in there and has a million ideas, and it’s really great to sit back and listen to it unfold.

Working with Martina Topley-Bird…

Robert:            From the moment Tricky played me the first demo he’d done with Martina when me and Tricky were living together, I still remember him putting the cassette into the machine and me being totally overwhelmed with jealousy and not being able to accept the fact he’d found her in Bristol just round the corner.  She ended up making a great album with him and then going on to making more amazing music herself, and collaborating with some different people.  We’ve been in similar orbits for a long time at gigs, festivals and she’s done shows with us, and it was inevitable that we would eventually get her in to the studio.  But there is always kind of that fear in the background that you want something so much that it might go wrong…that maybe the chemistry wouldn’t be right…but it was lovely.

Working with Hope Sandoval…

Grant:              Unfortunately that is the only track that was done by the powers of electronics.  Initially had a couple of tracks for Hope that we wanted her to do – sent them to her and she sent them back, that’s how it was done really, back and fourth.  Unfortunately we haven’t met her but we’re hoping to have her come on tour with us for a couple of gigs in the States.  I was made aware of her by the guys that I was working with at the time, guys called The Robots.  I’ve probably been asleep for all these years because I hadn’t been aware of Hope to be honest until then which was a couple of years ago.  She has the most amazing angst, and emotional voice…what more could you say about her but she is just amazing.

What was the process of working remotely with Hope?

Grant:              So simple, it was unbelievable.  Thinking that you’d have this really complicated back and fourth, it was really literally absolutely amazing.  When we got it back it was like hit it on the nail straight away.

Working with Horace Andy…

Grant:              We’re all surprised with Horace in the fact that he is from a traditional Reggae background and the fact that he is really open-minded.  It’s funny really because we work with him, and when he goes back to Jamaica and he must really have the piss taken out of him for working with us because I don’t think anyone in Jamaica understands our music at all, and they can’t understand what Horace is doing with us!

Album artwork…

Robert:            The artwork is something that has been around us from the beginning, when we were The Wild Bunch taking a space, getting into a warehouse and painting graffiti and drawing the flyers on that very old school level, was the fun of what we were doing.  It has been with us all the way and I think after Protection I got a bit bored with doing paintings and wanted to work more photographically, and had the chance to work with Tom Hingston and Nick Knight.  We threw ourselves right into a strange world of combinations of images on Mezzanine, collages of images.  And then 100^th Window took it to a more extreme level with blowing up the glass figures and then rebuilding them as composites.  And again on Collected it was again a very photographic graphic image.  James Lavelle got me back into painting on War Stories and I painted the sleeve for him – I haven’t painted a sleeve in that intense way for quite a while so it was a little bit of a shock to the system, and I had a deadline to work to which was good.  I gave myself a little bit of a deadline on this record to try and do some paintings which would give a sense of space and belonging for the record.  You know, something that you understood in us historically and something that made sense now of what the record is about, what it sounds like, who’s involved in it.  I don’t know if it is always successful, my favourite format is the one with the book where he put a book full of images which is really exciting because you get a chance to work like you would…if it is the difference between a film and a box set of The Wire or Sopranos where you can work over a long form period as opposed to trying to tell a story in 90mins, with the book you get lots of pages of things which give you an image of the band in a much more full way.  As opposed to the old CD jewel case which is cut and run.  And digitally, I think with the website it offers the opportunity to present the artwork in so many different ways over a long period of time.  With the website now the ability to put on downloads and tracks and stream things, put up photos from the tour, it is much more of an evolving space, as opposed to a finite point of sale or some really dull space where you find out the tour dates.  It is kind of an evolutionary thing which I think for the first time we have almost got right, I can only hope that other people agree with that.

Connections with other countries?

Robert:            We are lucky to have travelled, we are lucky to have had the ability and the chance to communicate and transmit what we do, and share that experience with various towns and countries around the world.  We have got a very inexplicable but great relationship with certain cities; Lisbon, Paris, Glasgow, Dublin for instance, are just great places where we feel a real connection.  But that isn’t to belittle or minimise the relationship we have with any other great places we’ve had a chance to tour in.  I think we have toured maybe 6 of the last 10 years, so its been an energy field for us which we draw on a lot.  That form of communication is so different to in the studio, where you are aware that you’re creating something for the future.  When you are on stage, it is happening now.  In fact, one of the things about the album, in terms of it’s sound and production, was to try and get a sensation that the music was being made as you listen to it, as opposed to something that was prepared earlier.  I think in the production we almost managed to capture some of that, in some of the tracks it feels almost like you are listening in on the session because it is so raw.

Grant:              I think it is more of a case of starvation of different cultures, whereas in England we have been bombarded with different genres of music so we are quite spoilt in a way.  Usually it is a case of ‘impress us’, whereas you go abroad and that whole thing translates internationally.  We’re quite shocked sometimes going to France and Germany and other European countries, and realising that we’re actually a lot bigger there, and the response we get is a lot greater there than in England.  It is more of a case…especially if you come to Bristol sometimes you get nil point.  So it is kind of harder to actually impress the indigenous crowd than it is to the foreign crowd.  I find that quite weird, and it is the same with the media in a way.  The English media love to bring their own down, and that is the same sort of attitude – they get complacent about the way they feel about you.  You go to Europe and they are more warming, more inviting.

Roots….

Robert:            Of course, the thing is about our history and our band is the multiculturalism of Britain in the era that we grew up in, is what defined us.  My Italian roots, G’s Barbadian roots, the Afro-Carribean roots of Bristol, the Reggae history of Bristol, what made Massive Attack, what made The Wild Bunch, that was really ultra important – the whole Punk, Ska, Reggae scene, then the Hip Hop scene and how that was the way people interfaced with the past and the future.  That was really what we were about.  It’s great going back, when we have been to Jamaica and Barbados to see where this comes from, as much as G enjoys coming to Italy and Naples in particular, seeing the history of my ancestry.  It is really intriguing and amazing to see how it manifests now, and the city for me has an amazing allure.  It is my fathers town, and I’ve got a lot of family history there, and as a place I find it absolutely fascinating being in the shadow of Vesuvius, and the attitude there, the passion there, the chaos there.  When Gomorrah (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gomorrah_(film)) was offered as a project of course I was super keen to take it, it was through a mutual friend, and it was a great project to be working with.

Grant:              The fact that we do share in, and celebrate each other’s backgrounds, and I love going to Italy and any chance that I get I’ll go there, and it almost feels like a second home to me, from the fact that D has initiated me into the family

Robert:            The food!

Grant:              And the food! Likewise, D’s saying that he loves coming to the West Indies and celebrating that, so it has always been a great cross pollination of cultures.

Robert:            Some cultures luckily in this day and age remain quite in tact; Italy is very Italian, Jamaica is very Jamaican and living with Horace Andy on the tour we are surrounded by the Jamaican thing constantly because….

Grant:              He is on the phone to Jamaica every 3 minutes!

Robert:            And he was always bringing his salt fish onto the bus, and you can imagine as it goes through the air conditioning, you all get a taste of it in your bunk.  But Horace is an amazing character, he really is for us I guess always a total dream to work with, and we’ve been in his company for such a long time now…you know 20 years I guess almost, its mad.  It is amazing being around him, you get to understand

Grant:              What he is saying!

Robert:            Yeah you finally understand what he is saying!

Did your work on film scores influence the making of this record?

Robert:            If it did, it was probably interesting because it was that I didn’t want to use any of the same processes involved in film score work on this record.  I think I was getting slightly despondent with the work on film in the last year because I find it slightly unrewarding because it tends to end up becoming generic, no matter how you start.  I think there is a fear of silence in movies which directors, producers, distributors cannot take, and every film has to have the same device to help the plot evolve or to help the audience interface with the characters and give them permission to laugh, cry etc.  After a while it really does become a bore and working in Pro Tools a lot of the time on film stuff, you tend to be doing lots of tones and layering, and again on this record it was about stripping away all that and keeping it very sharp, very Spartan almost in places.  Lots of space, which was really one of the intentions of the sound of this record, and ironically Gomorrah was one of my happiest most favourite moment in recent years on film scoring and that’s a film with no music in it at all – which goes to say a lot about the process.  When Matteo Garrone came to Bristol and I saw the film I was like ‘you don’t need music in this’ because it is so intense and beautiful that you are thrown straight into it, that it would destroy that moment if you were to put music between you and the film.  We tried a few things, and it didn’t work, and eventually we agreed on the naturalistic way that film is and sound design and did something for the end.

Making films not videos…

Robert:            The industry has changed, and to give you a long form answer, we are in a space that we feel comfortable with in terms of how the industry is now from where we were coming from, the DJ perspective of taking music and sampling it, and play listing it…this is the way people accept music now and share it, and we totally get that.  That whole peer to peer is something we have been around from our very beginning and we really dig that.  In the sense that everything is presented in a totally different way, it doesn’t have to go through reformed channels you had to go through – had to make a video for £100,000, it had to get onto MTV, it had to have a marquee presentation night.  Now you can put films together and you can transmit them in so many different ways.  For us, even going on tour last year, YouTube meant that all our songs that were possibly going to be on the album that we shelved were all out there anyway…with videos!  In a way you think what is the point in making a pop video now because people make their own videos.  If I want to get the football highlights, someone has already edited it together and added music and put their own title sequence up nowadays.  We want to give the directors we work with a different space for it, so if we give you a small budget as opposed to a big budget and you make the film you want to the track you choose, and you can pull the track apart, we’ll give you the stems, you can do what you want…it’s just more interesting now.  We’ve done the other thing, and this is the way it was always heading and I think it has got there at last to a certain degree.  So the films we got are the directors personal visions, done on a very tight budget in a very lo-fi and intriguing way – possibly never to be seen outside of the internet.

Tell us about the bullfight film for the track Splitting the Atom….

Robert:            It is interesting, because I think when we both watched it, we found it very difficult to watch.  When Bailey Walsh suggested the idea of filming a bull fight, it was obviously an issue that was difficult and troubling because we don’t really agree with that torture or cruelty.  So watching it was hard work, and it was a very far from enjoyable experience, but we were suddenly in the same place as everyone else that would watch it, and removed from the song, and were getting the same impression and emotional response from it that everyone else would.  It was quite strange that, because obviously working with Baillie Walsh in the past, and being in the edit suite at the end of the day doing Unfinished Sympathy which obviously didn’t have any edits…but that thing where it is your track and you’re going to present it together, suddenly it was Baillie’s film with our music in the background and it was very disturbing but something very beautiful about the filmmaking.  So it was a very complicated bit of work which we really appreciated.  Of course if someone was offended by the bull fighting video we say ‘we’re offended by it too’ which is the whole point of the video – it is hard to watch, it is difficult to stomach.  It is very uncomfortable, but it is something that is happening in a very real way, and we are not glamorising it, but drawing attention to it.

Tell us about the film for the track Paradise Circus…

Robert:            Yes, the study on erotography for instance.  Again the director’s idea, which was massively intriguing, and I think it is a brilliant piece of filmmaking, a brilliant piece of work.  What is surprising about it is what it leaves you with, and I think that statement that the actress makes about the fact that she’d do anything to be on camera, that was over 3 decades ago, framed in this environment culturally is amazing – the fact that that is what we are surrounded by.  People will do anything to be on camera, anything to be on TV, and that was what was shaping her decisions back then and no matter how degrading or stimulating it was, that was the reason for being there and that was the most poignant part of it for me.

Historically, we’ve been lucky to work with the people we have.  From Baillie Walsh onwards, who we shared a…our initial conversations about film and our cinematic references were what shaped the way we worked with him.  This time round, it is very different with all directors because we are giving over the music entirely and saying ‘you do what you want’.  And we’re prepared to relinquish all creative control and let them have the stems, pull it apart and re edit it – treat it as if we are the soundtrack to your film, as opposed to you making us a promo.  We’ve done all that and I think it is more interesting this way around.  A lot of issues that are going to be dealt with on the films aren’t about the music necessarily, or about us, they are issues to be discussed in a greater arena, which I think is what it is about with us – putting things out there which present discussion.  In the same way which we talked about the screen and the visuals are about creating discussion when people come to us after the gigs.  They get different things out of the show and they want to talk about different areas of the content on the screen, whether it is the economic issues, the political issues, the geographic issues.  We get lots of different discussion generated by that and I think that is great, rather than ‘we love your gig, we love your album’ which is a little bit banal.  We’re in a space where we are communicating on a different level which I think is more what we’re about, you know.

Playing live…

Grant:              Yeah, there is still a great excitement, and you know, the fact that we’re in a position where it feels good to be doing this.  It’s great to have an interface with the crowd after being in the studio for such a long time, and it was quite an intense period being in the studio and sometimes getting out, myself and D, it’s good that we can hang out for a little bit.

Robert:            With the visual, without using clichés like ‘cinematic’ or ‘journey’ we try and make it a little difficult at the beginning to challenge everyone’s notions of what we’re about or just to draw people in in a different way.  As opposed to going in with what you know, and then working backwards.  Sometimes we have done what a few other bands have done, where you put a couple of big hits right at the front to get them out of the way because you are slightly annoyed about that, and then you make it difficult.  But on the whole we try and make it a bit more intriguing and draw people in.

Tell us about the screen in the live show and the Stefano Cucchi incident?

Robert:            That was the first time that the screen had a direct…it is hard to describe…it is the first time the whole thing went full circle.  It was a complete information loop, which normally we’d go to a place and take random information, some political and some trivia, and make a sort of collage of it to transmit on the screen.  Just to kind of illustrate the contradictions in everyday news, media, life, information.  The whole show is a lot about visual stimulation, and chucking in words with the music which gives everything a different meaning.  In this particular case, that information about a guy called Stefano Cucchi who died in prison, and one of many Italian men in the last 10 years – I think there is something like 1,500 young men a year commit suicide or die in police custody in prison, which is a crazy and terrible statistic in a civilised country.

This was the latest in quite a long story.  We put it up on the screen because we often get students in the gig to translate, and the headlines or the local and international [news], and chose the things that are kind of the most intriguing, or the most trivial.  This information went up, it was from La Republica paper saying there needs to be justice for Stefano Cucchi And we need to know the truth.  Someone had filmed it in the crowd and put it onto YouTube, La Republica picked it back up off YouTube and transmitted it on La Republica online, and it got picked up by the national news agencies.  At the end of the 2 or 3 days of activity, the Justice Minister had commented to the press and said they would look into his case.  Whether that was a direct result, who knows? But it was amazing to see this loop of information, how it travelled…where we had taken it from and where it had ended up.  I think it makes us…it doesn’t validate what we do on the screen, but it shows how important it is to communicate with the audience in that way.  So it’s not just turning up: ‘here we are to do a gig, this is our latest album we are promoting’, it is much more of a sharing of information, a sharing of a space you are all in on that day.

You have got so much interesting information available to everybody, yet you have got a situation happening which is barbaric and unjust, and nothing is being done about it.  You would assume that because the information was so accessible that this couldn’t happen anymore.  In the past where you could cover up anything, anywhere, no one would know about it, but now in this digital age with CCTV cameras everywhere and the internet, you would imagine that nothing could happen without everyone knowing.  But there is almost so much information now that people just don’t see beyond it because it is so transparent that you see right through it altogether.  You don’t even stop in the middle and check it, you go right through to the other side.
Charitable causes and politics…

Robert:            Historically, maybe also because of our travel, we’ve been confronted with situations and groups of people that have engaged with us in their issues.  I think particularly after the amount of effort and headspace that went into the immobilisation of a protest against the Iraq invasion and realising really how little effect it would have on a greater scale, but the end result being that you didn’t really connect with anything or anyone.  When you work with small organisations like the Hoping Foundation (http://www.hopingfoundation.org/), or last year with Reprieve (http://www.reprieve.org.uk/) and someone like Clive Stafford-Smith who deals with those without representation at Guantanamo and on death row, you know you can connect on a real level and they are a real organisation that goes straight to the heart of the matter.  And if you can contribute something then it is real.  The Hoping Foundation is a very similar thing, we have been to Israel and the Palestinian Territories in Israel and seen first hand what a crazy place it is, and when we had a chance to help engage with the Palestinian cause it was very important because it is very misrepresented, or unrepresented, outside it’s own region.  For us, we almost tried to put gigs on in Palestine, it has been impossible to try and arrange that.  But in the end of it you think, well…Massive Attack music doesn’t mean anything to Palestinian kids…they’ve got so much going on in their lives, or so much stuff that’s not going on in their lives because they have been isolated economically, politically, that it would be better to try and do something to help them make music, to put money back into the refugee camps on a community level.  We’re going to try and help build some studios in the various refugee camps over the next couple of years, and raise more money for the organisation itself so the Palestinian kids can make their own music.  And then basically explain and communicate their situation as opposed to us trying to impose our musical artistic ideas on them.  So I think it is a much more real way of doing it.

We’ve done some great things in the past, as far as we were concerned; the gig with Portishead for Tsunami Aid, we worked with Gorillaz for the Red Cross in Afghanistan in the past.  But you do get the sense that you don’t know what’s happening, it sort of tends to disappear.  I’ve been lucky enough to work with the Gorilla Organisation in Uganda and the Congo and Rwanda, and it is amazing that you can put some money to build a ranger station and something real happens there – it is actually a real connection to what is happening on the ground.  But sometimes we have done things in the past where you wonder really where it will go…you come out of it feeling strangely unsatisfied.

We’re doing 4 shows in February for The Hoping Foundation in Newport, Brighton, London and Paris, and in the Paris one we are hoping to collaborate with JR as well.  I hope we can try and raise some money and engage with the issues of the Palestinian youth and shine a bit of light there.  Since the war in Gaza, or the bombardment of Gaza last year, there has been very little media attention on the region, it has just sort of coagulated again, and congealed, and we still don’t know what is happening.  There has been a kind of slightly flaccid push from the Obama administration to engage in the process, but so far not a lot – as far as I can see – has been achieved.  So even tiny little moments like this can effect someone’s life.
What is like working with the artist JR (http://jr-art.net/)

Robert:            JR is a person we have just become aware of through our natural interest in graffiti art evolution. Being a graffiti artist on …… Massive Attack, and the Wild Bunch before it, being about that world. We have always been fascinated in that side of the art scene.  JR is a brilliant more recent artist, probably the first artist I’ve known who doesn’t go out and paint his own name on the wall primarily, including me.  And actually paints some images of other people, so it’s more about people in the space, or people in another space translated onto a different space, as opposed to him saying ‘I was here’.  I think that is really amazing really, especially in this world where it is very the selfish gene orientated, and he is very different than that.  It was great to work with him in Paris, luckily for us we have got a really good connection with the French and the Parisian audience so he was aware of us and what we were about, and our history.  It was a very organic collaboration if you will.