Set of the day

'You're only paranoid if they're not out to get you,' is an adage that's self-evidently true. With that as a given, Massive Attack mainstay 3D (a.k.a. Robert Del Naja) has every right to feel more than a little suspicious and mistrustful, especially when it comes to matters of... more

'You're only paranoid if they're not out to get you,' is an adage that's self-evidently true. With that as a given, Massive Attack mainstay 3D (a.k.a. Robert Del Naja) has every right to feel more than a little suspicious and mistrustful, especially when it comes to matters of internet privacy, security and surveillance.

After the FBI passed on a list of 7,300 UK credit card numbers associated with various porn sites (some legal and some of an illicit nature) to UK authorities, 3D was swept up in the excessively wide net of an indiscriminate police sting in 2003. Though allegations of any wrongdoing were unfounded, the repercussions were severe for the outspoken graffiti artist, vocalist and music producer. His home was raided, and all his computers and hard drives were confiscated for several months. To compound the situation, despite the fact that no charges directly relating to the police operation were ever filed, the furor that surrounded the investigation and baseless accusations (which were leaked and sensationally reported by a tabloid newspaper) meant that touring plans to promote Massive Attack's fourth studio album 100th Window had to be put on hold. The situation was all the more ironic considering the title of that album referred to a book that exposed the flaws in computer security and the rampant misuse of information in the internet age.

That unfortunate episode however was not the only incident that might have put 3D on the various "person of interest" lists around the world. He has been extremely open and vocal about his disapproval of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, going as far as designing and funding a series of anti-war ads which were published in the NME (with cohort Damon Albarn). Furthermore, having made several forays to the Middle East with the band, 3D has frequently voiced his concern for the plight of the Palestinian people, and in 2007 put the issue at the top of Massive Attack's political agenda with a series of sold out benefit concerts for the Hoping Foundation (an organization which aids children of the troubled state).

These distractions coupled with increasing demand from filmmakers for scores and soundtracks, meant that a new full-length Massive Attack release took a little longer than expected to manifest. However the wait - and the adversity - has paid off. Original band member Daddy G (a.k.a. Grant Marshall), who'd been absent from the project for several years, came back into the fold, and the resulting fifth studio album, Heligoland (released last month), debuted at #46 on the Billboard Top 200, giving Massive Attack their highest US chart position to date.

SuicideGirls caught up with 3D while he was in LA on a brief promotional trip ahead of Massive Attack's first North American tour in 4 years. During our phone conversation, he spoke about the new CD (which features contributions from Damon Albarn, Hope Sandoval, Martina Topley-Bird, and longtime Massive Attack collaborator Horace Andy, among others), and shared his thoughts on the increasingly pointless posturing of British and American party politics, the inherent dangers of our heavily surveilled states, and the futility of exporting such a culture to the Middle East.

Nicole Powers: Where are you calling in from?

3D: I'm at KCRW actually. I'm literally around the corridors making a nuisance of myself.

NP: Did you record an in-studio session there?

3D: No, we didn't actually play. We just put some tunes on and talked a lot of rubbish, you know, very, very British.

NP: Ah, talking bollocks, us Brits are very good at that.

3D: Exactly. I pride myself in my ability to talk absolute rubbish - especially live on radio.

NP: It's a gift. It's like we're all born with a PhD in bollocks in Britain aren't we?

3D: [laughs] Yeah. I've still got some education to go in the area in the field but I'm definitely applying myself to it.

NP: So I guess we should talk some bollocks about your new album shouldn't we? Especially since it was several years in the making.

3D: Yes. Absolutely. Well to be honest, it's one of those things where it's been a long time between the two albums but in fact the actual process of putting this album together probably only [took] about 7 or 8 months. There was lots of discarded material and lots of distractions, soundtrack work, Best Ofs, Meltdown [Festival], and a lot of gigs in between.

NP: There were all sorts of rumors going around as this album was being recorded, lots of reports of collaborations that people heard about but that didn't ultimately make the cut. When you finally came to figure out exactly what you were going to put on the album, in your mind was there a common thread with the tracks you chose?

3D: There wasn't a common thread really. Each track was a captured moment depending on who we were working with. I think it started to feel like it was a collection of tracks that had a relationship with each other, because of maybe the sentimentality or the sonic feel, then it started to become an album I guess. Before that point everything was just an individual moment, and there was no collective [theme or thread].

NP: Because it does have a very different feel. It's more gentle and earthier than some of your previous work.

3D: I don't know about gentle, I don't think it's got a gentleness to it. I think it's got definitely a more organic feel. It depends how you listen to it. If you play it on a certain system you'll get more aggression out of it, and if you play it in a more subdued way you'll definitely get more of the softer atmospherics. But in terms of production it's very stripped back. I was very keen on not doing what we did with 100th Window, and making the contrast between the electronic and the acoustic very obvious.

NP: When you were writing the tracks though, were you still constructing them electronically? Or were you doing things like picking up guitars to write?

3D: A bit or both, it's always a bit of both. But I think in the end in terms of the final mixes and the way we shaped it, it was about highlighting the contrast between the elements. 100th Window was very much about this amalgamation of everything joining, and eventually the process was so extreme that you couldn't tell if there was a string part if it was electronic or natural. [There were] lots of organic parts that ended up sounding very electronic. It became a whole world of different processes, and we wanted to do something a bit different because we've had that experience so we wanted to do something else.

NP: Talk about a couple of your favorite tracks from the album, and the lyrics and the meaning behind them.

3D: I think a couple of my favorite tracks are maybe "Psyche" and "Atlas Air." "Atlas Air" was very difficult. It was a track called "Marrakesh" and it had about ten different identities. We finally discarded all of them and started a new one. It was only connected to its original self by the name on the file on the computer where the files were located but it became a completely new piece of work. In the end, after lots of fucking around with tracks that weren't working, it came together quite instantly and quick.

Lyrically, because of its transformations it got quite mixed up. At one point it was a song about falling in love with an internet porn star and having this complete relationship with someone online only, nothing physical, purely electronic. Then it became a song about rendition. The two demos I did initially for it I discarded. When we constructed a new piece of music I came away from the studio and completely adlibbed the vocal but I still used the lyrics from both the demos on the same bit of paper and threw it all down in one hour. It kind of really worked even though essentially it was quite distorted.

NP: Right, they're two very disparate subjects.

3D: Yeah. Even though I was starting at the porn angle and going for the more political angle in the end, there's still a few lines that hang in there from it that totally had a different meaning. It's an interesting broken collage, which was finally finished I guess, if you ever finish anything.

And "Psyche," a track which Martina [Topley-Bird] wrote the words for, I love because it's like that flittering of the sun on your eyelids when you're driving in a car, going through light through trees. That kind of strange memory of all the summers you've ever had. It can often make you feel sort of sad and quite lost and lonely at times when it comes. But there are times when you get that flickering light, and you actually feel alright with that. The fact that everything's going by and these moments will never be repeated, but that's OK because you're enjoying it for what it is. You actually get to experience it in the present, and don't worry about the past. That song has that feel to me. It's a song about life and growing up, but it makes it feel alright, you know? It's one of those things that makes you feel alright about it all.

NP: So do you feel grown up now?

3D: [laughs] No. I've never felt grown up really to be honest. No, definitely not.

NP: One of the things I love about you guys is that you're not scared of wearing your politics on your sleeve and standing up for the stuff that you believe in. And I think that, especially in America, so many bands are scared to do that now because they're worried about the repercussions, of sacrificing radio play or TV appearances. But without that element it does mean much of the music we're fed is trivial and meaningless.

3D: We came into KCRW with that very thought in mind. The track I played at the start of the session was "Molotov Cocktail Party" by Vivi Bach, who's a Danish actress from the '60s and '70s. It's this track she did with Dietmar [Schönherr] and it was a '60s ironic song about activism...I wanted to use it as a slight statement about the fact that that whole aspect has been lost and has withered really. It's very hard to form groups or take a action because as soon as you communicate electronically they're shut down.

It's very difficult in this day and age. In Britain surveillance culture is insane - cameras everywhere, emails spied on. Since you've had a Labour left wing government in power it's actually got more and more totalitarian than it ever has been under the Tories. But I don't know if a change of government in the UK would actually change that now. I think it's endemic in the political governing system now to basically spy on the population, and to monitor and track the population, whether it's through their credit cards, their SIM cards in their phones, their GPS positions, their activities, their profiles, it's just really, really strange. It's colonizing everything I would expect to happen in the future but it probably isn't as exciting and science fiction as we thought it was going to be, just a little bit more mundane and depressing.

NP: Labour has been a bit like a wolf in sheep's clothing with regards to the Big Brother stuff. They've implemented policies that the Conservatives, had they tried to introduce them, would have never been able to have got through. With the Conservatives, people would have had their guard up for this kind of thing, but because it was warm and fuzzy Labour that introduced these measures people had their guard down. So they've actually been able to go further than the Conservatives would have been able to with regards to increasing surveillance and decreasing an individual's right to privacy. If the Conservatives had done some of the stuff Labour has got away with, the British population would have been up in arms about it.

3D: I think so, I'd agree. And I don't know without Blair if we'd have been involved with the invasion of Iraq at all. If it had of been a Tory leader, whether they'd have supported it, if that person would have had the power or the personality, or whether it was an inevitability forged in the corridors of power around the world anyway. Whether it was just going to happen, there was going to be a regime change because this was the start of a new century of change and this was just one of the areas they wanted to change. Whether, no matter which party was in power, it would have made any difference. But you're definitely right about the way Labour has been able to smuggle lots of policies and laws under the radar.

Ironically it shows how pointless electioneering party politics really is. Because if Labour had been fighting for power they would have opposed all the laws they've just implemented strictly as a matter of rote. So you think what kind of system are we in where the actual point of politics is lost. All politicians now are just electioneering, and no one actually believes in their own policies.

It's quite difficult. And I look at kids, they're so reluctant to engage in politics, students in the UK don't really have any activism left in them. They're just quite happy with convenience food and everything served up to them in a way that's as simple as possible because there's so much distraction and crap around to fill your mind with.

NP: Well it is easy to be apathetic when you don't see the fruits of change. I mean people had such great expectations for Obama but he's not really gone about trying to create change with the fervor that he campaigned for it.

3D: I was a big supporter of his from when I first saw him interviewed as a senator. I thought, wow, that guy, he looks like the next president of the United States - especially considering the two terms of office of George Bush. I thought this is definitely going to be what would be seen as an antidote. But with my limited education in American politics through West Wing and what I read, I do understand that it's almost impossible to implement a lot of the changes he [promised]. Then again, with the healthcare bill, which is being put to the vote, as was pointed out in the West Wing, that's one of the hottest potatoes in all American politics. He's gone with that, and I guess I can't argue with that. He's delivered on the promise even though he's not really helped deliver any promises in terms of legislating peace in the Middle East or shutting down Guantanamo and stopping drones from killing civilians on the Pakistani border. I think in all those cases it just initiates more people into militancy because of their own tragic loss.

The problem with that sort of thing in the UK and America is that we just don't really seriously consider the lives of other humans with an important regard. When you see [an incident] like the missile strike in Afghanistan which killed 30 civilians, if that had been in the UK, the country would go to war. That sort of action would be an act of war. For us, as far as we're concerned, it's just a sad loss of life and we shrug it off. It's the nature of the world we live in I think unfortunately.

This death by remote control thing, which is the way war is being fought...I thought when I saw with the Israeli Cast Lead Operation in Gaza last year how sterile and cynical that was in the sense that the amount of Palestinian deaths versus Israeli deaths was so grossly disproportionate that it couldn't be considered a war of any sort. And the weapons used were very modern, very automatic, very remote control, and a lot of weapons that apparently were not even meant to be in use like the phosphorus [munitions]. They call it a theater of war, it's almost used as some kind of training ground for even greater wars around the world, and those in the Gaza Strip are just stuck and endure it.

It's a shame because we've been to Israel twice and they asked us to come back this year. We said, "No," we're definitely not going to play in Israel. We've played in Beirut before, we've played in Tel Aviv before, but not while people are being strangled economically, socially, culturally, we're not going to come and play Israel. You can't PR the recent actions of your politicians out of the red by putting on cultural events. It isn't going to work. It's similar to engaging the South Africans in sport during the apartheid years. It's a crazy situation.

NP: So where are you touring to support this album?

3D: We've been everywhere. We've been all over Europe last year, Australia, New Zealand, we're coming back to the States in May, festivals, Japan.

NP: You say you're not able to tour the Middle East this time around, but are there any places you want to put on your tour itinerary because of your political agenda?

3D: When we went to the Middle East before it was between the two intifadas and it was an interesting time to engage in the process. You know, you go there, meet the people, get their side of the story. Now that would be impossible to do. We also went to Beirut and played in an amazing set of Roman ancient monuments in a place called Baalbek on the Syrian border, which was a great experience. It's just wonderful. They're very, very interesting places to be. It's very difficult though to take what we do out there. There's limitations with security. I want to go to Beirut this year but there's no way it's going to happen you know.

NP: It's interesting, I'm friends with a band from Iran, and in Iran you can't even make rock music without the threat of arrest. As adults in the West we have the luxury of either being political or not, but in the Middle East the kids that are growing up there don't have the luxury of not being political. They don't have the luxury of enjoying music for music's sake, or the simple pleasure of enjoying it in public with their fellow countrymen. In that region, if you're listening to or playing Western-style music, you're making a political statement whether you want to or not.

3D: Absolutely. It's that whole thing of why did our forefathers fight in the wars? To give us this freedom, which is now being totally eroded by their descendants. It's really a crying shame. Like I said, we have the luxury of choosing, whereas most people don't have the luxury of choice at all.

It's funny, I mean you look at the Iranian situation, and the recent upheaval after the elections. The way that [news] was shared was amazing. The fact that the rest of the world could see first hand, minute by minute what was really happening was an amazing thing. But ironically that's exactly the sort of thing that our government is trying to crack down on - on letting us have that freedom. Yet that freedom, the liberation of the internet, is expounded on as being one of the positives, helping share news and share injustice with the world. Yet if you actually look at the laws that are being passed and the attitudes of those in power, they're trying to completely control that freedom themselves in their own country. So what's the point of going to the Middle East to export our culture and agenda in the first place?

Heligoland is available online and in stores now. Massive Attack's US Tour kicks off at Terminal 5 in NYC on May 11. For full details go to: MassiveAttack.com.