Massive Attack and the Wild Bunch: How Bristol Invented Trip Hop

Blue Lines was released in April 1991. The album – Massive Attack’s debut, recorded in a studio in Clifton over the previous year – combined hip-hop rhythms with soul samples, live instrumentation, three different vocal styles and a tempo that moved considerably slower than anything in the contemporary dance music landscape. Tricky, Shara Nelson and Horace Andy all appeared on it. The Unfinished Sympathy single preceded it and was not what anybody had expected from a group that had emerged from a sound system collective in Bristol’s St Pauls district.

Tricky later described the album’s atmosphere as something specific to a time and place: Bristol in the late 1980s, a city that was economically depressed, musically omnivorous, and physically compact enough that the right people were always running into each other. He was not wrong about any of that.

The Wild Bunch

The Wild Bunch was a sound system that formed in Bristol in the early 1980s, bringing together Massive Attack’s founding members (3D, Mushroom and Daddy G) with Tricky, Neneh Cherry, Shara Nelson, and a network of DJs and producers including Portishead’s Geoff Barrow on the edges. They operated from the Malcolm X Community Centre in St Pauls and played parties across Bristol through the mid-1980s.

What distinguished the Wild Bunch from the sound system culture they emerged from was their catholicism. They played hip-hop, reggae, soul, punk and pop simultaneously; the curation made connections that genre-segregated listening never would. 3D, who had grown up in Oxford before moving to Bristol, brought a visual arts background. Mushroom and Daddy G brought the Caribbean musical traditions of the St Pauls community. The combination produced an aesthetic that was not reducible to any single influence.

Why Bristol

The argument that Bristol made trip hop rather than somewhere else is partly circumstantial and partly structural. St Pauls had a significant Caribbean community – predominantly Jamaican – that had settled in the area from the 1950s onwards, creating the reggae and sound system culture that formed the sonic base of what the Wild Bunch built on. The proximity of the art college and university brought people with different musical references into contact with that culture.

Bristol’s size was also a factor. It is large enough to support a music scene but compact enough that scenes overlap rather than stratify. The Wild Bunch could play a party in St Pauls and find that half their audience had come from Clifton. The mixing that produced the music reflected a city that was, despite its social divisions, physically dense enough to create collisions.

The Records

Portishead’s Dummy, released in 1994, and Tricky’s Maxinquaye, released in 1995, consolidated what Blue Lines had started. Three records in four years from three artists with overlapping roots in the same Bristol sound system scene produced the genre that journalists called trip hop – a label that all three acts consistently rejected and that has nonetheless stuck. The collective term misses the differences: Portishead’s noir cinema influences are distant from Tricky’s paranoid claustrophobia, which is distant from Massive Attack’s architectural grandeur.

Massive Attack’s subsequent albums – Protection in 1994, Mezzanine in 1998, 100th Window in 2003 – each moved further from anything easily categorised. Mezzanine in particular is considered one of the finest British albums of its decade: dark, dense, built on live bass and distorted guitar underneath a surface that retained the slow hip-hop pulse. 3D has described it as representing a creative conflict within the band that nearly ended it. The tension produced the best thing they ever made.