Massive Attack goes on the defensive

Robert Del Naja was the only one of the group's 3 producers to contribute to 100th Window.

British dance group Massive Attack head to New Zealand with a new album which is being greeted with mixed reviews. That's just too bad, the group's Robert Del Naja tells STEPHEN JEWELL.

After the hostile reception that has greeted Massive Attack's fourth album 100th Window in some quarters, Robert Del Naja - aka 3D, the sole surviving member of the originally five-strong Bristol collective, which has also included rapper Tricky and vocalist Shara Nelson - could sympathise with beleaguered England football manager Sven-Goran Eriksson.

"Being British, we love to hate the people we love," says Del Naja, speaking the day after the English soccer team's humiliating 3-1 loss to Australia.

"We enjoy it. It's exactly the way the press enjoys slagging off Massive Attack. But it's all relative.

"What I don't like is when people have an agenda. The problem with the press in general is that they're driven by marketing and PR people.

"They're selling something to you, what you should be buying or wearing, what you should be doing."

The knives were out for Massive Attack after it emerged that Del Naja was the only one of the group's three core producers to contribute to 100th Window.

Grant "Daddy G" Marshall took extended paternity leave after becoming a real daddy while former member Andrew Vowles, aka Mushroom, departed acrimoniously after falling out with Del Naja over the musical direction of Massive Attack's last album, 1998's Mezzanine.

However, Del Naja refutes any suggestion that 100th Window is an erstwhile solo album, pointing out that he co-wrote and produced the LP with long-time production partner Neil Davidge.

"The band was meant to be experimental from the beginning, so it's not a solo project," says Del Naja.

"Because of the circumstances surrounding the album (Vowles and Marshall's absence), I knew that I was going to have a certain amount of criticism levelled at me, that it was megalomania and self-indulgence.

"But that's what being in a band is all about. It's about self-indulgence and dealing with your personality.

"Massive Attack has not changed because it's never been about collaboration. In fact, in the old days, G, Mushroom and I relished any time spent in the studio together.

"Usually I'd work from home with Tricky and G would be doing their thing. So when we got together, we had a lot of good ideas waiting for each other."

If 100th Window leaves any long-time listener feeling nostalgic for Del Naja, Vowles and Marshall's seminal 1991 debut Blues Lines, then they should check out Story of a Soundsystem, Strut Records' recently released retrospective of the trio's early 1980s, pre-Massive Attack days as The Wild Bunch, an even looser DJ collective which also included Bjork producer Nelle Hooper, Tricky and the CD's compiler Miles Johnson aka DJ Milo.

"It would have been hard to encapsulate that time, but they did a good job of it," says Del Naja.

"I wasn't sure if people would be interested in that time because it was such a personal thing.

"Nowadays, you can go on a television show if you want to become a musician and get a record deal.

"But in those days, it was all about who was going to carry the record boxes, who's going to do the flyers, who's going to get the beer, whose car are we going to sell the beer out of.

"That was what being in a band was all about. There was no money in it."

Massive Attack will return to New Zealand in a fortnight for their third visit to this country.

Joining Del Naja will be a 10-piece band including Daddy G, regular vocal collaborator Horace Andy and former One Dove singer Dot Allison, who will stand in for 100th Window's guest vocalist, Sinead O'Connor, who is indisposed.

"I've got fuzzy memories of the first time we played in Auckland," says Del Naja. "I can't quite remember what happened, it was such a mad night and everyone was so up for it.

"It was really interesting because we got into a little bit of history and politics.

"It was back when the French were busy testing their weapons in the South Pacific and we talked about where the Rainbow Warrior was sunk by the French secret service.

"We went to France straight after New Zealand, so I got Greenpeace involved and was shouting out about how disgusting what the French were doing was, so I got booed on stage every night."

Del Naja is still very active politically and bitterly regrets bowing to pressure to abbreviate the group's name to Massive during the Gulf War.

He therefore does not intend to be as accommodating if indeed war once again breaks out in the Middle East in the coming months.

However, he admits that the cataclysmic events of the past 15 months since September 11 have inevitably influenced 100th Window.

"The album's about the bombing in Afghanistan, the stand-off in Kashmir, the wars in Africa," says Del Naja, who recently spearheaded a musician-led anti-war campaign with Blur's Damon Albarn.

"So many terrible things have been happening continually that you absorb it psychologically and that comes out in the music.

"That's one of the reasons why we used a lot of Eastern string ideas on the album.

"We wanted to bring some sympathy and affection to a culture that I knew nothing about because I was reading about it in the media and getting a taste of it in paranoid terms.

"I don't know if the album is timely, but it's been an ironic thing with Massive Attack.

"We've released four albums and at the exact same time there's been war in the Middle East and the Gulf region.

"It's hard to still believe that this is still going on."

* Massive Attack play Wellington's Queen Wharf Events Centre on Friday, March 7, and Auckland's St James Theatre, Saturday, March 8.