2 posts tagged “massive attack”
I started working 10 years ago today. Or, at least, this Monday of the month 10 years ago.
It all started with a football match and probably some beer and ended up with me and a friend named Gareth walking up Liverpool Road to an interview at something called a "new media" company. Which sounded terribly Wired.
This was back when Wired was still very, very cool. Especially if, like me, you were arse deep in a course at Imperial College - the UK equivalent of MIT but with, if it's possible, even fewer women. Staring down the barrel of a job in investment banking, IT consulting or something in the vague but yet horrific-on-a-Lovecraftian-scale world of Java B2B I was rapidly starting to fear that the jig was up and that I was sometime soon I was going to be exposed as a consumate slacker.
Walking in front of us was quite possibly the most beautiful woman I had ever seen - poised, ethereal and, I swear to god, glowing. I was completely smitten.
She turned out to be Fiona Brice and she was the office manager for the rather generically named New Media Com.
Remember that all interviews I had up until this point were in typical corporate offices - bad carpet, ceiling tiles, harsh overhead lights and cubicles as far as the eye could see - stuffed with stressed looking people in bad suits.
Therefore the New Media Com offices came as a bit of a shock.
The floor was polished hard wood and all the light came from a floor to ceiling patio windows with organicly shaped window panes. Since then it's been turned into a rather hip dance studio
And the detail I remember most was that it was the first time I heard "Teardrop"
Rather suprisingly they hired the both of us as employees number 9 and 10. It soon transpired that they were blagging it as much as we were. No-one new anything about new-media back in 1998 - you made it up as you went along and if it worked then you pretended that you'd known it would all along and if it failed you came up with an excuse on the fly and lied until you almost believed it yourself.
During the boom I hired everyone I knew and Profero, as it was soon renamed (the name being chosen, literally, by thumbing through my old Latin GCSE dictionary until we found a word we liked) started doing much actual, real, important campaigns such as Sky Digital and CNN. I tried my hand at everything - there's an old joke that goes "Can you play the piano?", "I don't know, I've never tried" and I was 20 years old and some combination of fear of being found out and youthful arrogance meant that I'd give anything a go - build a website for Miss World including a voting script in a weekend? No problem - the team came in on Monday morning to find me asleep on my keyboard. Client wants a promotional screen saver? Of course. I've never written one before but how hard can it be?
I worked there for over 2 years, juggling college work and usually 3 days in the office a week. Profero survived the bust that afflicted many of the bigger, trendier agencies out there and now has 12 offices from London to Madrid to Sydney, Singapore, Shanghai and, as of this year, New York. The last friend I hired (who came in to do 2 days of HTML work 9 years ago and forgot to leave) finally quit - albeit to work for one of the original 9 employees. Gareth's doing clever things with television in Australia and I'm here in San Francisco with a CV that once caused someone to remark that it reminded them that "... career was a verb as well as a noun".
I had a whole line up worked out - a veritable smorgasbord of British 90s Indie. A little gallivant round my musical teens, a soupçon of shoegazing. A brief frolic through the BritPop girl bands of '95. A smooth slide to the IDM oeuvre as seen through Warp Records. A bit of triphop, greebo, a dash of big beat.
Then I found out that Abe had never heard, let alone seen, "Unfinished Sympathy". I wasn't actually on my list - I figured everyone had seen it. It's a modern masterpiece, an achingly beautiful walk'n'talk down West Pico Boulevard. That xylophone(?) percussion sample from the Bob James' cover of Paul Simon's "Take me to the Mardi Gras". Those strings. Oh god those strings.
I think it's got to be a candidate for "Best. Track. EVAR" and I shall fight anyone who says otherwise. Marquis of Queensbury rules.
- The video was oviously an inspiration for The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony video and the video for the Chili Pepper's Under the Bridge, released the next year, also contains similar elements
- Wikipedia says that the video was directed by Baillie Walsh yet I'm pretty sure it was done by David "Dune / Lost Highway / Mullholland Drive" Lynch
- It's done as a continuous shot - presumably a steadicam on a cherry picker at the start and then go from there. As an aside I rewatched Serenity yesterday and realised how stunning the steadicam work is, especially in the first 4 minutes in the ship and during the fight scenes
- The uncredited male sample is from John McLaughlin's 1975 song "Planetary Citizen"
- The single was actually released under the name "Massive" due to sensitivities over the Gulf War
- It only got to 13 in the British chart. A fact that makes me want to start a program of mandatory post-natal abortion
- By doing these bits of trivia I only reconfirm my status as a huge nerd. Being a nerd about music videos is still being a nerd
