(#587: 2 May 1998, 2 weeks)
Track listing: Angel/Risingson/Teardrop/Inertia Creeps/Exchange/Dissolved Girl/Man Next Door/Black Milk/Mezzanine/Group Four/(Exchange)
Another Major Statement. Another sixty-nine minutes of my life – or more precisely, what remains of my life - that I won’t get back, and I think this tale has reached its natural ending. Another Damoclean sword suspended over my partially willing 1998 head, indicating, just as surely and sinisterly as Ultrasound’s “Best Wishes” or Geoff Ryman’s 253 that an end was approaching and encroaching.
So imagine this as the last Then Play Long article if the internet had existed twenty years earlier and I’d begun the blog when I still had sufficient energy to maintain it. This is how far I would have got in real time, in actual 1998. The third Massive Attack album, or a petrified Goth meditation that imagined it was the third Massive Attack album.
There is a lot to be said about the background to and making of Mezzanine but that has been more than adequately documented elsewhere and it didn’t help David Cavanagh either, did it? I could trawl sample sources exhaustively but that would, er, exhaust me and it’s already been done anyway. I don’t think any reader wants to be bogged down by the same facts mechanically reiterated and I certainly don’t have the heart or inclination to reiterate.
In précis: 3D was tired of the band’s music having been traduced to “coffee table soul” (a.k.a. “trip hop”) and wanted to inject elements of what he (and very likely not just he) regarded as the “soul” music of his own youth. Daddy G agreed that they had to do something different, but Mushroom was pretty happy with how things had been going and didn’t want to trip up their cart. There were arguments (“ARE WE A FUCKING PUNK BAND NOW?” But hadn’t they always been?). Each member recorded their own contributions separately. Elements of members’ songs got reworked by other members.
As with The Beatles, the resulting music probably benefited from the tension. Well, most of it did. When Mezzanine works it is a powerful beast indeed. When it doesn’t, it is slightly less powerful. But as a record it isn’t going to argue with you. It exists, it looms like the oppressive high-rises of Victoria Street, bearing down on me as I headed towards the Oxford Tube coach stop. Living a “life” that was only ever going to kill me. Turn around and it’s still there. Lamenting, consoling, suffocating.
At its best, Mezzanine is awesome, overwhelming. Take its first three tracks. “Angel” has a ghost of Horace Andy solemnly intoning a prayer as the track builds up and up with guitars, beats and purpose. It transforms into a monument as you listen. In his “love ya, love ya, love ya”s Andy appears to be summoning up what was not yet the ghost of Barry Ryan (other Discman long-distance commuting obsessions; stumbling off the Oxford Tube coach into early morning Park Lane with “Kitsch” climaxing in boogie woogie piano and prawn cocktail screams, off a budget-priced Dutch compilation which was the only way you could get Barry Ryan on CD in those days).
The video, if you haven’t seen it, is nearly as fantastic; Daddy G pursued from the car park by what turn out to be editions of him and turning on them (i.e. his worse self). It would have been even more convincing if they hadn’t killed any tension by having Andy intone “You are my angel” as a plot spoiler, because Circa Records A&R thought you were stupid. But “Angel” consumes like a raven before settling down and creeping away like the Natural History Museum beetle specimen on the cover (the BEETLES! How could I have not seen, etc…). Astonishing.
I had known “Risingson” already because it had been a single the previous year. I’m not even going to pretend to guess what the song’s about because nobody gives a fuck about lyrics – it’s the overall SOUND that impels you to remain in its orbit – but can confidently attest that it summed up EXACTLY what I felt about myself, Laura and the world at the time. “Toylike people make me boylike” – wasn’t that ALWAYS the truth? And there’s what wasn’t yet the ghost of Lou Reed in the background! The great turnaround in the song’s middle – oh, they know their Labi Siffre! – when it stops, not quite sure where or how to turn, before this enormous, swallowing escalator of a bassline, like a crocodile supping on Jacob’s Cream Crackers, ascends your spine. Hospital nightmares of voices, honing in on you from all directions, telling you that yes, there’s a THREAT, but you don’t know what it looks like yet, do you? And, at its root, the Fun Boy Three – “dream ON.”
Did you know Madonna almost sang “Teardrop,” or at least Mushroom Vowles’ original harpsichord demo of it? Somehow that demo found its way to Madonna’s people and to everyone’s surprise the answer was yes; she’d loved working with them on “I Want You” and was eager to repeat the experience. Record company problems notwithstanding, 3D and Daddy G were distraught, as they had already earmarked Elizabeth Fraser to sing over the (reworked, without Vowles’ knowledge) backing track.
Listening to the song, now as then, you really couldn’t imagine Fraser not singing it. I don’t know what Madonna could have brought to it other than Kabbalah reflected brightness or a Streisand variant on melancholia. Whereas Fraser recorded the song on the day she learned about the death of Jeff Buckley, with whom she had had a brief relationship – her words were inspired by Bachelard, but in performance they drip with very profound lamentation. The song, in her hands, turned into a requiem for Buckley, and she sounded more committed, emotional and open than she had done for some time (the Cocteau Twins, following a disastrous and ill-advised spell on a major record label that neither knew nor cared about them, had slid into disuse).
I take “Teardrop” as a requiem for more than simply Jeff Buckley. Its contours clearly cry out to – or, possibly, for - the days of Treasure and Tiny Dynamine, music I thought so transcendent and filled with personal emotional import, music that meant more to me in 1984-5 than you could possibly imagine. It serves, this song, as an elegy for a world expired, as though to remind its listener “remember how it was, how I once made you feel?” – see also the late Angelo Bruschini (formerly of the Blue Aeroplanes – the Bristol thing never dips out of view or conscience)’s modest guitar recollection of the Cocteau age.
Perhaps the song was telling me – a lesson that I should long since have learned – you can never get away from yourself.
So much closing, of doors. Everything, closing down.
* * * * * *
Mezzanine doesn’t really escape the shadow imposed on it by its first three songs, songs so powerful that they made much other music of the time sound inconsequential. As an E.P., nobody could have argued that it wasn’t a classic, just as the twenty-nine or so minutes of Lido Pimienta’s La Belleza or the twenty-and-a-half minutes or so of PinkPantheress’ Fancy That (can) stand to be heard.
(you see, I don’t have enough time or patience left in my life to devote to, or waste on, listening to and writing about chart-topping albums by dull boy bands, landfill indie rockers, sentimental tosh, unsentimental corporates…I need to keep discovering and travelling down unexpected new avenues because there’s only so much walking I’m able to accomplish these days…)
But there are still eight very long tracks to go on Mezzanine. “Inertia Creeps” is cumulatively quite tense and compelling in its quietly relentless build-up (although it lacks real release, presumably on purpose) and its sampled duality of John Foxx’ Ultravox! (the nervy synth lines of “Rockwrok”) and the half-speed fragment from “İstanbul” by Balik Ayhan (Interesting fellow, Ayhan, who passed away two-and-a-half weeks ago; he went into Turkish politics and became a prominent yes man to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, even composing and performing a sycophantic tribute whose title translates into English as “You are the king of men, you are from Kasımpaşa”) but it lacks the blatant humanity that Horace Andy lends to “Angel”; 3D just sounds cumulatively cheesed off.
Whereas “Dissolved Girl” – a song Madonna could have sung, but was in the end given to Skegness session singer Sarah-Jay Hawley (who was brought in by the band’s manager) to co-author and sing – simply sounds like a suboptimal pastiche of Massive Attack. I don’t intend to impugn the integrity of Ms Jay-Hawley, but this is akin to getting your free ticket to Top Of The Pops and you are faced with a studio much smaller and stuffier than it looks on television, while the superstars on tiny stages include David Dundas, Berni Flint and Lynsey de Paul featuring Mike Moran. And to think they could have had Madonna (although Lena thinks Sarah Cracknell could have taken a decent, er, crack at it). Though excellent musically - particularly the midsong switch from moody middleground shimmer to harsh guitar thrashing - “Dissolved Girl” stylistically rifles through every dreary cliché you’d associate with the B-roads of trip hop – Sneaker Pimps, Morcheeba, Lamb, Mono and other such Music and Video Exchange regulars. It perhaps isn’t surprising that some people wanted out.
Things improve dramatically with “Man Next Door,” possibly pop’s most ominous ode to noisy neighbours – in great part because we never see or connect with that man, merely hear him – which I suspect 3D knew from the Slits’ 1980 version rather than the Paragons’ original (or indeed “A Quiet Place” by Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters, which inspired John Holt to write the song in the first place) – which Horace Andy sings quite brilliantly, supported and echoed by Bruschini’s imposing guitar (and even a tick-tick Cure sample, from “10:15 Saturday Night”). It is almost a sequel, or even precursor, to “Throw Down A Line” – and I wonder what Cliff and Hank themselves might have brought to the track. This is tremendous paranoid pop.
Elizabeth Fraser returns for “Black Milk.” There is a sadness so ineffable – yet tactile – about her contributions to Mezzanine, and this song is, lyrically, her ode to a world that in 1998 was already vanishing and dying (hence it sounds uncomfortably up-to-date in 2025). She wanders through a twinkling cave of lullaby refrains – or are they really concealed stalactites – as though giving the world a final dusting before closing it down. Those twinkles stem from “Tribute,” an instrumental that closes side one of the eponymously-titled first album by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band (although somebody neglected to send Manfred the letter requesting permission to sample, meaning that the great man sued Massive Attack for copyright infringement. There were no hard feelings, however; the two parties settled amicably out of court). A dazzle and a shimmer in the impending winter sun (but it’s only springtime!).
The title song, featuring Daddy G and 3D lobbing verbal grenades at each other with vague innuendo ("Tastes better on the way back down"), doesn’t particularly go anywhere - much like the protagonist of the Nicholson Baker novel, I'd say; speaking of idle, semi-random thoughts that arise over the course of a lunch hour (see also "Mezzanine" the song and novel's eventual obverse, Geordie Greep's "Walk Up" - the carnal desire rendered explicit) other than a slightly surprising magnification (rather than a turnaround as such) two-thirds of the way through which suggests that they might actually be marooned on one of the outer moons of Saturn, or possibly stuck in the same police car as Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton in "The Stakeout" from Inside No 9 - this is certainly a nocturnal record, offering serenades to trainee vampires, and it still radiates "terminal."
Speaking of the music of the night: “Group Four” sounds, in the context of Then Play Long, like accumulating and cumulative music. Its title stems from the fact that the song is being rapped (by 3D, a.k.a. Robert Del Naja, whose album Mezzanine basically is) from the perspective of a security guard. The banal minutiae of overnight semi-alert existence – flasks of “sober tea,” “relay cameras,” “dummy screens and magazines”; this too is like living on another planet, or in a separate, enclosed parallel world (think airports, or long-term inpatients on hospital wards – if you’re inside either, you’re never really sure if it’s day or night. You could be anything, anywhere).
Elizabeth Fraser, making her third appearance on Mezzanine, counteracts this crushing mundanity with what I can only describe as distended electro-Tropicalia, singing sweetly over funereal sunsets of synthesisers about what the security guard imagines is the outside world, or his residual memories of it – escape in the starry sky, a need to flee from this “life” into the airy eternal. It is perhaps the saddest moment on what really is a deeply sad record – as though saying goodbye to humanity. The guard thinks of all the things he saw and was promised in childhood; a future of travelling with jet-packs that would never be permitted to happen, replaced by fitting more bolts to locks, or even cleaning toilets – the great lie of capitalism; this is what had been expected of you all along.
But, pace Manfred Mann's Earth Band, "Group Four" proves to be a definitive summation of and tribute to everything that has preceded it in this long-running tale. Drums - or the sample of Nick Mason's energetic pattern on Pink Floyd's "Up The Khyber," a brief, semi-improvised percussion and keyboard workout used in the band's soundtrack to Barbet Schroeder's very much of its time 1969 ironic ode to drugs, sex and alleged freedom More - enter the landscape, pursued by loud, droning guitars, over which Fraser's vocal resumes.
The structuring and evolution of this song appear to represent reality swallowing "the dream" - any dream - forever; abstract idolatry reduced to rough and tedious sex (“unlimited girl, unlimited sky”; exactly what sort of magazine is this fellow reading?).
But the manner in which "Group Four" patiently and relentlessly works its way up and forward into a climax is significant in the Then Play Long setting as it appears to represent the entire history of popular music, and rock music in particular, coming to a boil. Why is Mezzanine such a fitting record to conclude this tale, and "Group Four" perhaps its aptest closing song?
For one thing, as Lena pointed out, Mezzanine affords so many people into this story who had hitherto found their way barred - not only the Cocteau Twins and the Blue Aeroplanes (and, given that the latter's frontman Gerard Langley was his key mentor, its existence even paves the road leading to George Ezra) but also, by virtue of being sampled, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, Manfred Mann, Isaac Hayes, Ultravox, Iron Butterfly, Quincy Jones as an artist...
...and (for another thing) the man whose ghost was as ubiquitous as Ian Curtis' had been in the preceding decade. For "Group Four" is nothing less than an excoriating and exquisitely painful and poignant requiem for Jeff Buckley. I did write about Grace but few of you noticed it because you thought I was writing about something else. Stylistically and emotionally, however, Buckley's spirit flows through "Group Four"'s spine like lettering through a stick of rock, and if you can detect certain architectural similarities, I suspect Fraser is mourning another needless 1997 death - that of Billy MacKenzie (see also the latter's final recording, done with Apollo 440 about a year before commencement of the Mezzanine sessions).
Yet there are airs of unreality and urgency permeating "Group Four" that combine as though to prevent a particularly lucid dream from crawling out of control. Listening to the piece is akin to having the whole of Then Play Long flash between one's ears...it has all been building up to this. Even the name of the piece - "Group Four." Doesn't that make you think of...the Beatles? Led Zeppelin? The Four Tops? The Four Seasons? The Sex Pistols? The Clash? Pink Floyd? Blur? Overwhelmingly, the Gang Of Four (this album could have fittingly been titled Damaged Goods)? And, of course, Jeff Buckley (and the three other musicians in his working band), to whom "Group Four" ends up as an ultimately exhilirating tribute. As though revealing an escape route, towards the sky, the sun, and the light. And look how long a journey it took to arrive here.
Which leaves only “(Exchange).” That has already appeared, as an instrumental backing track and sans parenthesis, midway through the album, and that appearance was somewhat odd, since it sounded like the closing credits to a film. Yes, there’s the Isaac Hayes sample – whatever Tricky or Portishead do, so can we (one very strong motivating force behind this album was to come up with songs that would work on stage) – but where’s the purpose (other than its paradoxical sense of unsettlingly reassuring spaciousness, which directly inspired Groove Armada, Bonobo et al)? That makes itself apparent in Mezzanine’s closing moments, as Horace Andy returns for a final bow. His verdict? “You see a man’s face? You will never see his heart…But you will never know his thoughts.” Mezzanine as an extended internal monologue. Much as most of Then Play Long has been. The elastic bass, springing up like a safety net. The warm pacific (state?) chords of Fairlight, re-emerging behind the clouds, reluctant to leave. Daring you to get up before it's finished. A crackle of needle against polyvinyl chloride. Those days of records before any record of them was needed.
* * * * * *
I told you everything in this tale, or made an art of telling you practically nothing because it looked like the same thing. I feel that the story has run its course and that the bye-bye/be-seeing-you end titles of “(Exchange)” allow a nice, nifty exit back out into the world.
There are, as things stand at the time of writing, still over eight hundred number one albums to write about (not including the two we wrote about in advance). You see, all this time and we aren’t even halfway through yet. And if the miracle of immortality occurs and I get up to date, there are in all probability going to be at least a few hundred more albums that will have accumulated by that point – and I very much doubt that I’ll live to write about them.
Nor do I believe there is any real purpose in writing about them – not even the good ones. What could I tell you that you didn’t already know or couldn’t guess? How much energy and focus do I still have in reserve to spend time reassessing what I know are deeply average or mediocre records, purely because of the fleeting whims of certain sections of the record-buying public or astute record company marketing strategies? Either way, impulsive novelties always win out over lasting art – because the latter is rarely immediate, and immediacy is what any market, by definition, craves.
Or crass sensation; do I really wish to waste my declining years examining a ninety-minute album recorded by a MAGA cheerleader which, at the time of writing, has already been criminally misread and purposely whitewashed by people who are supposed to make their living as music critics? I agree with the commentator on I Love Music who noted that we seem to have lost the ability to differentiate between right and wrong. Always making pallid, wishy-washy excuses for performers (Kanye West, Arcade Fire) who are really beyond the pale, have transgressed the basics of human behaviour. Pretending that we can be “objective” about rats whose disease flows right (you can capitalise that “r” if you like) through the arteries of their work. Acting like Joel Grey in the Kit Kat Club – life in here is beautiful, etc., as if music were an abstract entity divorced from anything else in the world. In 1982 I was infuriated at what I regarded as sourpusses having a go at New Pop, but now I see how it helped lay the foundations of today’s hellhole. The gleeful embrace of capitalism for the presumed benefit of consumers who took not a jot of notice about what these songs were saying BECAUSE NOBODY LISTENS TO LYRICS except anxious English Literature graduates at a loss about what to do with their lives so turn to music criticism.
Hence I have decided that I would infinitely prefer to spend whatever amount of life I still possess in reserve – simply listening to, and enjoying, music that I actually like, or know I would like, or (a greater aesthetic miracle than either) didn’t know I might like? I have no urge to hunker back down to things I already know. We almost never listen to anything in our CD library these days; it is so much easier for us, at our age and stage in life, simply to listen to something on the computer than to spend half a back-breaking hour climbing stepladders and digging through CDs in an attempt to find that piece of music. That in turn escorts us back to the golden days where Steve McQueen, Julie Christie and John Lennon would just scatter records randomly across the floor and listen to them. Before the fences were erected, before there were “canons.” Random ecstasy. Nothing in music ever came along to replace that feeling. Making up your own pop story was always going to be far more fun than adhering to somebody else’s.
And there is also the overpowering feeling that with the long-term Then Play Long regulars in later years – the likes of Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar and even Eminem – it’s going to need to be someone else’s job to write about them. In other words, if you want this tale to continue, I’m afraid you’ll need to start relaying it yourself.
Then Play Long, however. Imagine that I’d started writing it twenty years before I did. As I’ve already said, I had more time, energy and enthusiasm to do this sort of thing back then and had the appropriate technology existed at the time I would have used it (I didn’t have the wherewithal to put a fanzine together – and who would have read it if I had?). That’ll teach me to be born twenty years too early.
Equally imagine, however, Mezzanine as Then Play Long’s natural endpoint. That it was the last piece of writing I managed to complete before I boarded the train to Paddington on the morning of Saturday 24 October 1998. That the writing stands as proof that, once upon a time, I was here.
* * * * * *
(In memory of Frank Sinatra, who died on 14 May 1998)
Posts
