It's a geo-cultural thing: cities and the music they produce is a minor fascination, and we're not talking Nashville here, mister. Starting in New York round about the mid-1970s with CBGBs and the whole Richard Hell/Television/Ramones/ Blondie/Talking Head vibe, over to London during the glory days of the revolution - 1977 is our year zero, and Joe Strummer is our Elvis Presley - and we're looking at The Pistols/The Clash et al, then it's up to Manchester (or Madchester as the T-shirt had it) and it's all gone baggy with The Stone Roses, The Mondays and maybe a bit of The Charlatans and then over to Seattle for the short, sharp shock of Nirvana, Pearl Jam and other assorted Nationwide League grunge bands.
The one city lying in wait, though, and determined to wreak revenge on the legacy of The Wurzels and their combine-harvester pop, was the sleepy, don't-mind-us place of Bristol - which, in the 1990s, produced three of the best acts in music's living memory. It was sweet revenge, too: for many years the south-west city and its Worzil Gummidge accent had been the butt of many a jibe. But when the now legendary Wild Bunch crowd decided to kick out the jams, they unleashed the odd Mercury Music Prize winner and a few multi-million selling, Zeitgeist-defining, scene-stealing acts.
Take the simple matter of producing the album of the decade: when Massive Attack released the phenomenon known as Blue Lines in 1991, they rewrote the script and added new characters. It wasn't just that Portishead's Geoff Barlow worked as tape-op on the album, or that Tricky was a featured vocalist; it was more that the Dali-esque mix of punk, soul, hiphop and reggae gave way to music that would stop you in your tracks and a song like Unfinished Sympathy, which would facilitate adjectives like "miraculous". (Incidentally, Unfinished Sympathy was once voted the best "bonk" song of all time).
Like all great things, Massive Attack can be traced back to The Clash. The latter's unique mix of white boy guitar rock leavened with black dub and reggae sensibilities resulted in songs like Armagedion Time and Bankrobber - the likes of which hadn't been heard before and became a prime influence on Blue Lines. It's oft been said of The Massive, that's it's dance music for grown-ups (meaning people who are more at home with fondue sets than a tab of E and bottle of mineral water) but that ain't the full story.
The three-piece of Daddy G, Mushroom and 3D are de facto the most important and influential band of our time - at least on this side of the Atlantic - and they effortlessly dismiss the full gamut of musical shortcomings displayed by nominal rivals like Oasis. Maybe it's Strummer's white/black thing, maybe it's not, but certainly the city that produced The Massive, Tricky and Portishead is one of the most racially integrated ones in Britain, and one where no one notices if The Pistols are followed by Sly and The Family Stone on the jukebox. Just take a look around: the white rock of Kula Shaker (and their right-wing rantings), Cast, Ocean Colour Scene and The Seahorses is in the ha'penny place compared to this year's Mercury Prize winner, Roni Size, who - coincidentally or not - is also from Bristol.
Julie Burchill, herself a Bristol girl and "pretty bloody proud of it", tells us that the reason why Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky all contribute so well to popular music's canon is precisely because they draw from their immediate culture and overtly manifest their city's social leanings - whether that be trippy West Country ethereal madness or spliffed-up all-nighter ska nights. "Listening to Massive Attack is like listening to music under water," says La Burchill, "and living in Bristol for so long was like living under water for many of us. It's slo-mo, like the city itself, and is also indefinably sexy, like Portishead. There is a sense of manana in Bristol that is not the conventional kind, born of laziness or good humour, but one that is almost spiteful and vengeful, as in: you ignored me too long, so why should I bother now? "And this, our very special anomie, by now a positively sensual pleasure, can be heard at its hardest and most heartless in the miraculous sound of Massive Attack. All that detachment, all that darkness, all that useless beauty. . ."
From the elder statesman Horace Andy to newer recruits like Tracy Thorn and ex-Cocteau Twins singer Elizabeth Frazer, the musical co-operative that goes under the name Massive Attack is back with its third album, Mezzanine, three weeks from today (the release date was put back due to legal problems relating to sampling on the new album). Who would ever have thought that the best band in the world would still struggle to be the best band in Bristol? This is the band. This is the music.
The column's e-mail address is Sleevenotes@irish-times.ie
