30 years since Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy’

A trio of workmen were stripping out a building in Clifton on Wednesday afternoon, with planks of wood piled high ready to be taken to Bristol Wood Recycling Project to be reused.

If only walls could talk, because a future bookshelf or coffee table will be made of wood that played a supporting role in the most significant recent moment of Bristol’s musical history.

7a Richmond Hill Avenue, opposite the students’ union, was where Massive Attack made much of their debut album, Blue Lines, including the second single taken from it, Unfinished Sympathy, which was released exactly 30 years ago.

The former Coach House Studio is being gutted before becoming a three-bedroom house – photo: Martin Booth

On February 11 1991, a bunch of “lazy Bristol twats” (in the words of Daddy G) released the record that would come to define them.

The track, written by Massive Attack’s Daddy G, 3D and Mushroom with vocalist Shara Nelson and producer Jonny Dollar, was recorded in the Coach House Studio, with the strings orchestrated by Wil Malone later added at a recording session in London’s famous Abbey Road Studios, and mixed at Matrix Studios in London.

The orchestra did not come cheap, however, and the band went so overbudget that they had to to sell their car in order to pay for those strings.

The Coach House Studio is now in the process of being turned into a three-bedroom house, with the equipment and acoustic treatment moved into new premises in Redcliffe.

Because of the start of the Gulf War, Massive Attack removed the word ‘Attack’ from their name when Unfinished Sympathy was released.

The track was accompanied by a video featuring Nelson walking from South New Hampshire Avenue to West Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles.

The video was almost as influential as the song itself, inspiring The Verve’s Bitter Sweet Symphony from 1997 which sees Richard Ashcroft walking down Hoxton Street in London; which in turn was parodied in Vindaloo by Fat Les the following year.

Released on Wild Bunch Records through Virgin, Unfinished Sympathy reached number 13 in the UK singles charts, but fared better across Europe including topping the Dutch charts; with Tina Turner releasing a cover in 1996 which made the top-ten in France.

The title is a pun on Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 in B minor, known as the ‘Unfinished Symphony’ because only two movements were completed by 1822.

The beat is sampled from Parade Strut by JJ Johnson, taken from the soundtrack to the 1973 film Willie Dynamite; while the vocal sample is taken from Planetary Citizen by the Mahavishnu Orchestra and John McLaughlin from the 1976 album Inner Worlds.

The track’s bell riff meanwhile is Massive Attack’s attempt at emulating Bob James’ Take Me to the Mardi Gras.

“The song started while we were rehearsing at the Coach House in Bristol in mid 1990,” Nelson told Uncut magazine in 2010.

“We had already recorded a few tracks that went on Blue Lines, including Safe From Harm, and we had been struggling to record a track called It Will Rain.

“I couldn’t concentrate very well, so we were told to take a break, have a cup of tea. I didn’t drink tea at the time, so I just stood in the corner and started trying to put together this idea that had been going around my head for a while.

“I started mumbling to myself, half singing the lines, ‘I know that I’ve imagined love before’. The melody and the words started to come into shape.

“At the time Mushroom [Andrew Vowles], was in the room with [the producer] Jonny Dollar. Mushroom heard what I was doing and said: ‘What’s that? Sing up, girl!’

“So I started to sing, and Mushroom put some beats towards it, and Jonny Dollar started playing synthetic strings, and that was it! It was a real rogue track.”

Robert Del Naja told Uncut that Unfinished Sympathy “started out as a jam in the studio in Bristol. It was just breakbeats and a percussive line.”

“Everyone’s lost the sense of how important silence is. That was the way we first made music – keeping a lot of space in it, using very sparse arrangements and production. A lot of the beauty of Unfinished Sympathy was in the editing of ideas.”

Wil Malone added: “For Unfinished Sympathy, the producer Jonny Dollar gave me a demo, which had synthesised strings, and he wanted it to be revoiced so that it would sound really big and symphonic.

“Most people will record with a small amount of strings-maybe a ten-piece or 15-piece section, and then put lots of heavy digital delay on them to make them sound bigger.

“Instead of doing that, we decided to use a lot of strings, so that it’s big to start with, and then we can keep them dry So we booked Abbey Road Studio Two, which is a pretty big place, with amazing acoustics, and got a 40- or 50-piece string section. So there’s more texture, more gut.”

A mix of Unfinished Sympathy by Paul Oakenfold appeared on the original 12″ single, and he admitted to Uncut that “it’s a difficult song to remix”.

He said: “The original is an absolute classic, probably my favourite pop song of all time, so why fuck around with it? As Mushroom said at the time, why do we need a club hit? He said a remix would be like smashing up a clay pot and trying to rebuild it! And, in a way, he’s right.

“In the end I did two things. I put in a bass line and I took out the original Bob James breakbeat: my breakbeat is much simpler. It’s a much sleeker, more dancefloor-friendly piece.

“As it happens, Massive Attack’s Daddy G [Grant Marshall] used my remix as the last track on his DJ-Kicks album, so he obviously doesn’t hate it that much!”

In her book, Massive Attack: Out of the Comfort Zone, Melissa Chemam writes that “Shara’s voice depicts a lost love, but soon the song, with its powerful melancholic feel, talks to listeners about the stressful era, of a dramatic urban anxiety, that music enthusiasts and critics found as surprisingly intensely emotional, classy and unheard”.

Main photo: Massive Attack / YouTube

Read more: Exploring Massive Attack’s Bristol roots as city gets ready for huge homecoming shows