I do love it when you can hear and feel the character of a city in a band or artist’s music. How you can hear New York in the music of Lou Reid and Velvet Underground and how Joy Division just sounds like a tense grey nineteen seventies Manchester.

In turn, this music becomes part of the fabric and image of the city so in the end they are inseparable. A band that had a huge impact were Massive Attack and the could only have come from one city – Bristol.

 

This was a city that was used to cultural clashes and blends. The city was built upon the blood, sweat and tears of the slave trade and many immigrants entering the UK in the 1950s would have arrived in Bristol.  A new book Massive Attack: A Bristol Story by Melissa Chemam charts the story of how such a rich and influential band could only have come from that time and that city.

It is built around a long series if Robert Del Naja (known as 3D), other Massive Attack members as well as many other musicians and artists, who worked with Massive Attack or see them arise. These include Mark Stewart, Tricky, street artist Inkie, Neil Davidge, Sean Cook, and members of the bands Alpha and Portishead, among others. The authors also did research in the city, interviewed historians and quoted the artists from press interviews from the 1990s and 2000s.

It looks at the huge impact the band had in turn on the city but also wider culture. It spawned its own musical form and went on to influence other artists in the city.

Because of 3D’s deep involvement into a political look at our world, and after our hours of discussion, this book ended up displaying another history of British culture, from an underground and unorthodox point of view. After three decades of increasing creativity, Bristol now epitomises another side of England, deeply artistic, less conformist and much more rebellious… And Massive Attack thus embody a different, more diverse, progressive, radical and uncompromised story of their own British culture.

The book will be out on 9 April 2018. Publisher: Tangent Books

For more details visit the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/frombristoltomassiveattack/  Tangent Books: https://www.tangentbooks.co.uk

Massive Attack youtube –  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLqMjQtlnOkknN-FvrtQ0WQ