Massive Attack
Selected by Helen Walsh
In the summer of 1991, I stumbled upon a dingy, box shaped club called Legends. This was the epicentre of Warrington’s fleeting Acid House scene and, to a small but dedicated band of revellers, the epicentre of our universe.
I grew up in a musical household. My father was a drummer and a bandleader, my brother a gifted jazz musician who, in his late teens, would go on to win Radio 2’s Big Band Drummer of the Year. Our family’s livelihood was dependent on a live music scene and Electronic Music was anathema to our household. But from the moment I stepped across the threshold of that sweaty, little dance club and heard the propulsive, four-on-the-floor kick drum pulse of Acid House, any sense of familial loyalty bit the dust. In a heartbeat, my world was blown wide open.
The UK Acid House scene was both a product of Thatcher’s project of individualism and a rampant rejection of it. Many club owners and DJs capitalised on the spirit of entrepreneurialism she espoused but the youth movement itself was built on the communal values of unity, fraternity and solidarity. When the scene eventually shut up shop and moved out of town, it was almost too much to bear. I went into a period of mourning – I simply couldn’t accept that something as magical and profound as this was over.
A few months later, my mum was driving me back from school and Unfinished Sympathy came on the radio, the brainchild of Bristol trip-hop outfit, Massive Attack. Unbeknown to me the track was already 12 months old. Locked up in my Acid House haze, it had simply passed me by. Musically, it bore no resemblance to anything I’d heard before but it captured perfectly the teenage heartache I experienced at the loss of my little club scene. Shara Nelson’s aching, splintered vocals, Will Malone’s swelling orchestral string arrangement and the ‘hey hey hey’ vocal refrain which is taken from John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s Planetary Citizen all combine to create a seminal piece of music.
For many, the soulful plaintive lyrics ‘you really hurt me baby, how can you have a day without a night’ were a bittersweet love letter to an ex but to me, they will forever remain an elegy to my first true love, Acid House – the biggest youth movement to sweep the planet.
