Just as long as my baby's safe from harm

Massive Attack, motherhood and me

On 5 October 1998, Massive Attack played the Standard Bank Arena in Johannesburg.

At the time, I was writing regularly about music for a local newspaper and Billboard in the US and so was fortunate enough to be given tickets with access to a VIP area. If I hadn’t been, I would never have seen a group that I count among my most enduringly treasured.

The reason wasn’t because it was VIP or nothing for me - something, let’s be honest, not foreign to a few of my colleagues because it was the nineties, and radio, television and print journalists still provided a gateway to music for audiences and so frequently expected to be treated like, well, very important people. For me, it was much more personal because, on that Monday evening, I was pregnant and at full term, carrying the baby that is now my 26-year-old daughter, Hannah Rae.

As we drove downtown to where the arena was situated, I remember calculating in my head how far away we were from Garden City, the hospital in Brixton where my midwives Liz and Eleanor were going to deliver the baby (like with all my children, we had asked not to be told the baby’s sex and so didn’t yet know Hannah was going to be a girl). I remember, too, slowly, breathlessly, climbing the stairs up to the VIP area, exchanging a few niceties with the people gathering there, and then quickly finding myself a seat.

I wasn’t comfortable in the raked chair above the stage. But I wasn’t going to miss the show. I had loved Massive Attack ever since the release of Protection in 1994 which I had come to through my devotion to anything featuring Tracey Thorn (which you can read about here), who sang on two of the album’s tracks - the magnificent title track and “Better Things”. In the unendingly pleasurable way of music discovery this had, in turn, led me back to the group’s 1991 debut Blue Lines, now considered a - perhaps the - foundational trip hop record, which opens with “Safe From Harm” featuring Robert "3D" Del Naja's chopped up voice skirting around Shara Nelson’s power vocals. More than three decades on, the song is still an intoxicating, unnerving listen.

I can’t find the set list from that Johannesburg show but I recall “Safe From Harm” being on it, and its lyrics - “You can free the world, you can free my mind/Just as long as my baby's safe from harm tonight” - feeling especially meaningful as I rested my hands protectively on my fully raised belly.

Massive Attack were on the road in support of their January 1998 album, Mezzanine, and so that night’s set was generous with songs off what is a landmark record, a music masterpiece. In my memory, among the songs emanating from the inky, multi-blue-hued stage, was the title track (with Del Naja and Grant “Daddy G” Marshall - Massive Attack’s two members - trading verses), “Risingson" (which features a line from Pete Seeger's "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?", slowed to a woozy, melancholic pace), and the textured, hypnotic “Inertia Creeps”.

By the time I got to see Massive Attack play, my favourite song on Mezzanine was “Teardrop” featuring the softly brushed and tangled vocals of Scottish singer Elizabeth Fraser, of Cocteau Twins, who shared songwriting duties with Marshall, Del Naja and Andrew Vowles (along with Tricky, Vowles was a founding member of the Bristol collective but left after the release of Mezzanine). At the time, the third in what remains one of the strongest opening trio of tracks on any album was showing all the signs of becoming the classic juggernaut that it is today.

If you haven’t yet listened to Massive Attack but have watched House you will know the song from the television show’s opening credits. Like the casting of Hugh Laurie, the choice of “Teardrop” to introduce viewers to the complex, dark-edged but brilliant world of Dr. Gregory House was inspired (“We cut ourselves out of a fuckload of money with that song,” Del Naja told the Guardian in 2010. “We got an email from Bryan Singer saying the entire concept of House was based on Teardrop. We were flattered. We let him have it.” )

1998 was still the time of the dial-up internet and YouTube was still many years in the distance and so it was some time before I caught the full Walter Stern-directed video for “Teardrop” on a music television show. The video - a 90s standout - consisted entirely of an unborn fetus (a latex, life-size animatronic puppet) mouthing Fraser’s vocals (“Love, love is a verb/Love is a doing word/Fearless on my breath”) while floating peacefully in amniotic fluid. When I eventually did see the 4:54 minute video, it was an extraordinary experience for someone who had sat, for an entire Massive Attack show, marveling at the unceasing movement of the baby in my womb, at times visible enough to have me worrying that she might just spontaneously burst forth.

Hannah was born less than three full days after the show, on 8 October, emerging in the early hours of the morning after a long labour, and I never cease to think of that time when listening to Massive Attack all these years on. Although I had guessed wrong (I always did when it came to our babies), I was especially happy she was a girl as part of me had fallen in love with Massive Attack because of what felt like a considered desire by the group to foreground female collaborators like Nelson, Thorn, and Fraser, but also, later, Sinead O’Connor (who appeared on three tracks on 2003’s 100th Window including the protest song, “A Prayer For England”) as well as Tricky collaborator, Martina Topley Bird and Mazzy Starr’s Hope Sandoval (both on 2010’s Heligoland) - through not just vocal features, but songwriting too.

Hannah’s birth will also be intimately intertwined with another group of female artists, vastly different to those surfacing on Massive Attack’s recordings. My oldest child, Jami Ella, was seven in 1998 and was mad about the Spice Girls after more than a year of listening to the UK group’s debut, Spice, on repeat on her CD player. On a trip to London, my partner Jeremy bought some highly sought after merchandise for her, and, along with books, drawing paper and crayons, Jami had her prized t-shirt and watch in the bag that she packed to bring to the hospital when my labour began. As a consequence, the very first photos of the new sisters also include the Spice Girls - the role of music in our family life sweetly captured within the first hours of Hannah’s life.

Jami Ella, Hannah and the Spice Girls 8 October 1998

One more thing: at the time that Massive Attack played there, the 5000-capacity indoor arena in Johannesburg’s Ellis Park district was sponsored by Standard Bank (it’s now known as the Ellis Park Arena) which also put its sponsorship behind the annual Standard Bank Young Artists Awards. In 2014, the award for Jazz was given to Kyle Shepherd who last year released an album with his trio titled A Dance More Sweetly Played. The 12-track recording features two covers amidst the repertoire composed by Shepherd - Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” and Massive Attack’s “Teardrop”. The former retains its anthemic quality in the hands of the three players but it’s the latter that is the standout, sitting comfortably alongside The Brad Mehldau Trio’s recordings of Oasis, Radiohead and David Bowie songs. Across more than six minutes, the South African trio shows us how jazz can be deployed to deconstruct and reassemble a song in a way that beautifully expands the original.

I leave you with this, dear reader.

I might have been able to see Massive Attack on the cusp of becoming a mother for the second time but I missed The Smashing Pumpkins and James because of my third pregnancy. They were playing at local radio station 5FM’s 25th birthday concert on 11 November 2000 and I was already overdue with my son, Zachary (who entered the world six days later, our millennium baby). The venue for the mini-festival was Centurion, near Pretoria, this time a fair distance from my midwives and the hospital and so I stayed at home with Hannah while Jeremy took (by then) nine-year-old Jami to the show. Truthfully, I was ok to miss out because, although I really liked Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, they were never embedded in me in the way Massive Attack was - and still is. The restless “1979” off that album remains a lovely listen, embodying the best of alternative rock (that is, if you discount anything by the Pixies because, in the end, there’s little comparison). But Billy Corgan turned out to be conventional, conservative even, in the kind of ways that someone who likes their music a little overblown and isn’t averse to giving songs titles that make a meal out of juxtaposition (“Bullet With Butterfly Wings”) might be expected to be. This is quite the opposite, I gratefully note, of Massive Attack who are outspoken and committed to all the issues that mean something to me (including their first Bristol homecoming show in five years last August breaking the world record for producing the lowest carbon emissions ever, according to a new study by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research”).

From the perspective of many decades on, I would love to have seen James, the support act at the birthday concert, because my appreciation for this underrated English band has only grown since 2000. Lead singer Tim Booth’s performance at last year’s Glastonbury - with the band that he co-founded, left in 2001 and rejoined in 2007 - was a joy to watch, a communal, ecstasy-stoking turn that stretched way beyond nostalgia into something fresh and real. Plus, the title track off the band’s 1993 record Laid might just be a feminist anthem with its central lyric …

“This bed is on fire with passionate love

The neighbours complain about the noises above

But she only comes when she's on top”

… and its video that features the dress-wearing singer, a handcuff loose on his arm, sitting uncomfortably on a chair in front of an ironing board, that age-old signifier of female domesticity.

And I also leave you with this.

Like many of you, I am sure, I have watched - and been haunted by - the new mini-series, Adolescence, over the past week.

In the final episode, at the start of the scene on the drive to the DIY shop when Jamie’s mom, dad and sister are trying (so heartbreakingly) to “get back the day”, Eddie makes a stab at a return to normalcy by asking his daughter to play some music.

“Make sure you pick a good tune with a bassline,” he instructs.

“What are you on about?” she asks.

“All good music has to have a proper bassline, you know what I mean? You need a good bass guitar. None of this plinky plonk shite, all this drum ‘n bass bollocks. A proper bassline I can sink me teeth into.”

In the end, it’s a-ha’s “Take On Me” that is selected because of the happy nostalgia it holds for a younger, more innocent time in the lives of two people who will now never not be known as the makers of a murderer.

I thought of this scene as I revisited Massive Attack’s catalogue while writing this Substack this past weekend. That’s because, in the end, it is the thick, heavy, moody bass that anchors so many of the band’s songs that I remember most from that gig 26 years ago because I feel sure that was the sound that Hannah heard loudest and clearest in the last days before she was born.