6 Music - Music News

As Bristol trip-hop duo Massive Attack gear up to the release of their fifth studio album Heligoland, next Monday (8 Feb), they have revealed to 6 Music fans can expect an EP of leftovers before the summer.

They hope to have it out in May and Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja admitted it could include a song they penned with Elbow frontman Guy Garvey.

He told Steve Lamacq: “It will probably be made up of tracks that we didn’t put on this record and maybe some new stuff as well. That’s obviously one of the tracks we’re looking at trying to finish.”

Unfinished difficulty

However, it seems the song has been giving them some trouble since its inception.

“We’ve got this one called Red Light, which we wrote with Guy [Garvey], which we’ve been playing live for two years and we still can’t finish it,” explained 3D. “I really don’t know if it will get finished.”

The musician spoke to Guy recently, but was unsuccessful in trying to explain what kind of limbo the song was living in: “To be honest, I still can’t make the promise it will be finished because it seems to be a really evasively hard thing to capture.

“Some songs are like that. Some happen instantly and some continually trouble you.”

Studio claustrophobia

Heligoland features a host of guest vocals including long-time collaborator Horace Andy, Damon Albarn, Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star, Guy Garvey, Martina Topley-Bird and TV On The Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe.

3D revealed: “We never actually spend a lot of time in the studio together because we both work in very different ways. G [Grant 'Daddy G' Marshall] actually hates being in the studio most of the time anyway.”

“Going to Damon’s studio was probably the first time we’d actually spent in the studio together in years,” he laughed.

Surprisingly, Daddy G admitted working with the Blur frontman at his studio was, for him, the “most enjoyable part of the process”, despite the fact he has little enthusiasm for that environment.

“I get kind of claustrophobic and I’m not the most productive of people really,” he said.

When Lamacq mentioned he thinks their latest batch of songs seem to bare down on you in quite a claustrophobic way, 3D said they didn’t deliberately set out to make a closed-in, difficult record.

“This record was about stripping it back and making it very much more graphic, very electronic or very acoustic or very analogue, but everything very exposed," he explained. "With the voices, keeping them quite real and keeping it very personal on that level was so you could imagine the person singing the song to you, as opposed to having it recorded in the past.

“It definitely has a strangely organic feel to it, even though it does retain a sense of strange distance as well.”

You can download a podcast of Massive Attack with Steve Lamacq.

Or you can listen again to that whole interview here.

It aired at 6pm GMT on Monday 1 February.