The Blacksheep Online | The Black Sheep Interviews: Daddy G of Massive Attack

The Black Sheep Interviews: Daddy G of Massive Attack

March 2, 2010 - 5:00 pm | Posted by: Staff

Black Sheep writer Brian Garcia got a chance to interview Grant "Daddy G" Marshall of Massive Attack, discussing their most recent LP for Virgin Records Heligoland, the struggling music industry's effect on the band, and just why it takes them so damn long to come out with a new album.

The Black Sheep: What was different this time around that brought you back to the band? I know you were out of the band when 100^th Window came out in 2003.

Daddy G: Yeah, it's been well documented that Massive Attack seems to shed a member whenever we make a new album. We're so passionate about what we do, we seem to implode on ourselves. And just during that period I just wasn't seeing eye to eye with my partner D [Robert Del Naja] and also the circumstances were that my girlfriend had a baby. I decided to skip out for a while, become a real human being.

TBS: I am sure I could read this on some Wikipedia page, but I wanted to hear it from the horse's mouth, why does it take you guys so long to make a new record?

DG: We're perfectionists, we do a lot of procrastination. We like to chill in Bristol for a bit, there's no time frame that we really work by. We can get to other things we've been doing over the years as well. We've done a 'Best Of' [called Collected released in 2006], a few tours, some soundtrack work for some films. So it's certainly when it's right it's right. In fact this album should have been out two years ago. We'd had it all prepared and went on tour with it, and we weren't all that happy with it, so we started again. This album has actually had three different lives.

TBS: How long did the recording process actually take?

DG: Well, Heligoland took us 10 months. We went into Damon Albom's studio in November and did a few recordings there, did a few recording in Bristol, and some in New York.

TBS: Seeing as you guys have been around since the early 1990s, were you guys at all influenced by any bands that you in fact influenced? I'm trying to get at the collaboration you guys did with Tunde Adiempbe from TV on the Radio, as it could have certainly been the case.

DG: Well we're not necessarily influenced by TV on the Radio, but we obviously love their music along with Elbow, we love what Damon [Albom of the Gorrilaz and Blur] does, Martina Topy Bird. Before we even got in making music we were a DJ collective called The Wild Bunch - that was back in the '80s. We were music lovers before we started making music, we've got a big buried history and that's what we draw on really - the music we were into when we were DJs.

TBS: So is a tour imminent to support Heligoland. What can we expect? Any US shows, festivals?

DG: We've got a whole month in the U.S. in April. We've been working with a company called UVA for the last four tours, and D, my partner who does a lot of the visual stuff for Massive Attack. We've got these 25-foot high screens that take the whole of the back of the stage with LED lights. It's quite an amazing design, we have a lot information we like to put on the screens.

TBS: What do you mean by information?

DG: Some of it's political awareness to get you thinking. Some of it's triviality to get you thinking about things you wouldn't have thought about, some funny. It's just the prick of the consciousness that hits you everyday. We just bombard you with a lot of information but it's also an amazing lecture. That's one thing Massive Attack has always had a quite heavy visual aspect to what we do.

TBS: Speaking of visual lectures, what is the music video making process like? Do you guys just commission a director, or?

DG: Pretty funny actually, because over the last period when we were making videos with Baillie Walsh, Jon Glazer, people like that. We usually would spend quite a bit of money on videos, we were known to spend up to $250,000, those days are gone now. The record companies don't have the money, we can't afford to do that stuff anymore. We've had to downsize really, in a way, Heligoland's videos were commissioned to some great producers on a tenth of that budget. So we've got a whole body of videos we've made for this album [four videos so far]. But that doesn't mean the creativity that goes into them has been diminished.

TBS: So what does the future of Massive have in store? Can we expect a new Massive Attack album in less than six years?

DG: Well, let's just hope so, mysterious things happen - but hopefully. We've got a body of tracks, in fact for this album we have 20 plus tracks and we only had time a certain amount of time on a record. So, we'll be putting some EPs out in the future, and hopefully we'll have another album before six years is up.