I go back to work today, two weeks earlier than I've been used to now I'm working in a 6th form college. Returning to work in mid- August feels a bit odd- the rhythm of my year usually sees me return in early September, but change is good, change is what I moved jobs for so I'm just going to have to get used to it. It'll soon be the bank holiday weekend and then September and then the weeks when the leaves start to turn from green to orange, gold, yellow and then brown. It's already darker earlier, noticeably so this week.
Blue Lines is a fantastic album, one of those which crossed borders, knocked doors down and united different tribes. The flow of the album, from Safe From Harm to Hymn Of The Big Wheel via those chilled rap songs, the glorious majesty of Unfinished Sympathy and lush, organic proto- trip hop is perfect. Every beat, every note, every word, weighed and exactly correct. When side two plays out with Hymn Of The Big Wheel it feels like you've done the full trip, gone all the way round. It creates a stew from Bristol, late 80s/ early 90s club culture, rap and reggae, dub, breakbeats, sampling, graffiti, rare groove, weed, 90 bpm tempos, found sounds, Horace Andy, Nellee Hooper, Neneh Cherry, sound system and DJ culture and American hip hop styles into one hypnotic and seductive package.
Hymn Of The Big Wheel is a Neneh Cherry co- write and she sings the female harmony (uncredited on the sleeve). Daddy G has said that Neneh gave the members of Massive Attack a kick up the arse and a place to record (her baby's bedroom), booting them out of their natural laziness. Good job she did eh?
A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion.
Last week's Oblique Strategy suggestion was You can only make one dot at a time.
This made me start joining the dots between One Dove and Dot Allison, Arab Strap, Wire and Dot Dash, Ry Lichtenstein, The Jam and Pete Wylie and Ariadne's Labyrinth. From the wider Bagging Area community came these dots- C with Angines de Poitrine, Ernie with The Blue Aeroplanes ...And Stones, Al G and Jonathan Richman and Vincent van Gogh, Craig with Hot Chip's Over And Over, Noone and Les Rallizes Denudes, Rol and The Teardrop Explodes, the Swede with The Beat and Ranking Full Stop, Walter with !!! and Chris ZenArcade with some lysergic dots and E.D. 209's Metre and that Robocop sample...
This week's Oblique Strategy card is this- A very small object. It's centre.
My knowledge of physics is fairly limited. Last year a friend lent me Carlo Rovelli's Helgoland,a very readable account of the story of quantum physics. I still couldn't explain even in the simplest terms much about quantum physics but I enjoyed the ride.
I do know that atoms are extremely small and are the basic particles that make up everything. At the centre of an atom is the nucleus (which must therefore be smaller than an atom- right?). Atoms are so small we cannot see them, a million times smaller than the breadth of a hair. Coincidentally (and I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that nothing about this series is coincidental, it all seems to be connected), earlier this week I was wandering around the campus at Manchester University where I photographed the Humanities building, a rectangle of concrete opened in 1970. It is the picture at the top of this post. It is just round the corner from the Rutherford Building, which contains the room in which in 1917 Ernest Rutherford split the atom* and so created the modern field of nuclear physics (I once went on a course in the exact room where Rutherford made his discovery).
Sixty seven years later, also in Manchester, Factory Records released FAC 102, Atom Rock by Quando Quango.
Quando Quango were a dance act somewhat ahead of their time, Mike Pickering channeling electronic music from New York and Chicago into mid- 80s Manchester along with Gonnie and Reinier Rietveld. They formed in Rotterdam in 1980 and then relocated to Manchester in '82 when the Hacienda opened. Mike Pickering's role in modern Manchester and Factory cannot be overplayed.
Atom Rock is a light on its feet slice of 1984, pioneering dance music with jazz and Latin influences worn on its sleeves, produced by Be Music (Bernard Sumner and Donald Johnson of ACR). That jangly, funky guitar riff is a moonlighting Johnny Marr (the birth of Electronic, Marr and Sumner's late 80s band, is this record). It's one of those songs that made Factory such an interesting record label in the mid- 80s. 'Fela Kuti meets Kraftwerk somewhere between Rotterdam and Manchester', said Gonnie of the band's sound.
A year later there was a Mark Kamins remix, Kamins putting his Roland 808 through its paces (Kamins was the man who launched Madonna)...
Juan Moreno's Atomism Theory came out in 2024, an eight minute ambient piece that actually sounds like it could be the sound of atomic particles and nuclear fission.
And in a nice link to Carlo Rovelli's Helgoland, in 2009 Massive Attack released Heligoland (both named after the same piece of land, an archipelago in Germany). The first single from the album was Splitting The Atom, with Horace Andy on co- vocals and Damon Albarn on keys.
I have several other atom/ atomic songs but I'll stop there. Feel free to split your own atoms in the comments box or make any other responses to the Oblique Strategy card- A very small object. It's centre.
* Apparently 'splitting the atom' is a poor choice of words for what Rutherford actually did. The University of Manchester's website says that Rutherford was ''the first person to create an artificial nuclear reaction... now described as 'splitting the atom' in popular accounts''
The beach at St. Bees, Cumbria, has some interesting features as well as its own natural beauty. These two rings up the cliff face, presumably for mooring boats to, both well worn by the sea and time. The soft cliff face and rocks have been a haven for graffiti artists and people wanting to scratch their name, leave a reminder of who visited and when. There are lots of names from 1985 and 1986, the traditional so- and- so loves so- and- so (do they still? ) and some much older graffiti, some dating back to the holiday makers and day trippers from the 19th century (as seen below).
The cross in the photo above is my concession to Easter. Happy Easter. Sunday, whether Easter or not, is always a good day for some dub and dub doesn't get more serious or better than when King Tubby is at the controls. I put this mix together with hundreds of King Tubby tracks, dubs and songs in front of me, hours and hours worth and almost all of it as good as anything that came from Jamaica in the 70s.
Tommy McCook and The Aggrovators' Super Star- Disco Rockers came out in 1977, the year two sevens clash. Tubby engineered it. Tommy McCook and The Aggravators Dub Station album came out two years earlier, one of the best dub albums there is- lush, melodic, dramatic, Tubby manipulating volume, mix and FX at the desk. It bounces.
Yabby You and King Tubby's Conquering Lion dates from 1977. An expanded edition from 2021 on Pressure Sounds with all the dubs is serious summer music. Listen with a glass of rum and ginger on ice.
555 Dub Street and the title track that closes the mix above both come from Augustus Pablo's classic 1976 album, King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown, one of dub's definitive texts with a line up of the best dub musicians at their peak- Robbie Shakespeare and Aston Barrett on bass, Carlton Barrett on drums and Earl 'Chinna' Smith on guitar.
Dub Fi Gwan- clattering drums, endless rhythms, rimshots, echo and bassline- was the final track on Dub Gone Crazy, a 1994 Blood And Fire compilation of Tubby tracks from the 1975- 1979 era. It turned me on to King Tubby and dub in a big way.
A Better Version is from an expanded version of King Tubby Presents: The Roots Of Dub, a King Tubby album from 1975, Horace Andy's Skylarking twisted inside itself and dubbed out into space. Strangely I've missed including anything from the original version of that album in this mix- a Tubby Mix Two will have to follow at some point.
Dub From The Roots and Declaration Of Dub are both from 1975's Dub From The Roots, his first full length, self- titled album, dubwise versions of Bunny Lee songs.
This week's Sunday half hour mix comes from Bristol courtesy of Massive Attack. It's difficult now to remember exactly the impact Massive Attack had back in 1991 when Blue Lines was released, instantly switching on the heads of people to the reggae/ dub/ hip hop (soon to be trip hop) sound. Ravers, house heads, indie kids, almost everyone, was suddenly listening to something else. They went on to make some stunning songs and records after that but maybe with slightly less of 'the shock of the new' that they had in spring '91 (a time when they also dropped the word Attack from their name due to the bombing of Iraq by the US led coalition). Protection and Mezzanine both had outstanding songs and moments (plus the various remixes and versions, not least Mad Professor's dub of the whole Protection album). After that my interest came and went and I've dipped in and out (dipping back in for the remixes from Heligoland and 2016's Ritual Spirit EP.
The thirty seven minute mix below tries to avoid the obvious mixes even if it goes for some of the big hitter songs and has a dub vein running through it, ideal for making your Sunday breakfast too. I realised putting it together that it could be three times the length without any drop off in terms of quality. It takes in vocals from Horace Andy, Tracey Thorn, Liz Fraser and Hope Sandoval, remixes by Brian Eno, Mad Professor, Larry Heard and Gui Boratto and has the combined talents of Smith And Mighty, Johnny Dollar and Nellee Hooper at the producer's desk.
Since posting Massive Attack's 1991 single Unfinished Sympathy I've been listening to my fairly battered copy of Blue Lines and some of the 12" singles that surrounded it. There's no getting away from the brilliance of the album and especially it's final song, the whale sound, Buddhist, ecology trip hop/ ambient beauty of Hymn Of The Big Wheel. The heartbeat drum opens it, there's didgeridoo and then the sound envelopes the room before Horace Andy begins his wonderful, androgynous vocal. The lyric, a man talking to his child, about life and its cyclical nature, the weather, inequality, cities and factories, the sunset, the need to have one's soul mended. It's breathtaking stuff.
Nellee Hooper did a remix not too far removed from the album version but more breakbeat- led and with a heart stopping piano part. Co- written (and sung on uncredited) by Neneh Cherry, if you needed another reason to love it. They can play this at my funeral.
'The big wheel keeps on turning On a simple line day by day The earth spins on its axis One man struggle while another relaxes'
Traditionally a British camping trip should combine sunburn with hours of pouring rain and this one delivered on both. Friday evening was gorgeous, the tail end of a day where the temperature gauge in my car read 30 degrees when I left work. Saturday afternoon was spent around and in a tarn on top of a hill near Water Yeat before at 3.30 pm the heavens opened and it rained all night. Sunday gave us sunshine and sunburn around Coniston Water followed by more rain of biblical proportions yesterday. But its definitely worth getting away from the world, going offline and spending evenings sitting round a fire drinking booze and talking bollocks with friends, especially so after the events of the past week. A dripping wet tent that needs to be dried out is a small price to pay for living outdoors for a few days.
Back in the music world I've been spinning this a few times recently and prompted by my friend Meany offer it for your delectation today, Horace Andy's cover version of The Clash's Straight To Hell. I've written about Straight To Hell recently, a Strummer song of immigration, refugees, suffering and dislocation. Horace recorded it many years ago but was never happy with the rhythm. A conversation with Eric Blowtorch led to the pair digging the track back out and fixing it (out now, 10% of all proceeds going to Doctors Without Borders and a Big Youth dub on the B-side). This is reggae roots style, Horace's vocal floating over the organ, bass and drums. Campfire music.
Back in 1969, just before I was born and long before Massive Attack were even a twinkle in 3D, Mushroom and Daddy G's eyes, Horace Andy recorded this light-as-the-breeze reggae classic. Just rhythm, Horace's vocal and some little bursts of organ (Fender Rhodes perhaps?). A total joy.
The jumper modelled above is available from Old Town, for £98. If you happen to have £98 going begging. It is a Guernsey fisherman's jumper strictly speaking, different from a Gansey.
This time of year always brings me a strong sense of time whooshing by- we are a few days short of the GCSE and A level exam season starting, the end of the football season is imminent and another World Cup about to start, in two and a half weeks it'll be the May half term holiday, then the long downhill slope to July, the summer holidays. Another school year done, another year older, September and autumn... Then I have to slap myself and stop imagining the time away.
This song's combination of crickets, whale song, sonorous strings, the lazy breakbeat and Horace Andy's beautiful vocal was the perfect closer to Blue Lines and is a bit of a tearjerker.
It's a bit difficult to imagine now the impact Massive Attack had back at the turn of the 90s. Their debut lp, Blue Lines, had people who never normally bought that kind of thing listening to little else. On top of that, here was a British group, doing breakbeats, reggae, soul and rap properly. With Bristol accents. Almost all of that first lp is top stuff- Safe From Harm with it's massive sampled bassline (from Stratus by Billy Cobham) and paranoia, the gorgeous Hymn Of The Big Wheel, Horace Andy singing Be Thankful For What You've Got, the lighter than air Daydreaming (with Tricky).... and Unfinished Sympathy- contender for greatest British single of the decade ever, I'd have thought. This one ain't too shabby either-
I don't think they've ever pulled it off again in such style, although the songs Protection (especially) and Teardrop are as good as anything on Blue Lines. But as a whole the subsequent albums didn't repeat the trick for me. Protection has good songs but doesn't feel as whole. Fallings out and shedding members they then became darker and darker, not enough light to balance things up. Angel is superb, a trip-hop Joy Division, but Mezzanine was an oppressive listen. Whereas Blue Lines was a joy from start to finish.
