Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja: Massive Blast from the Past.
Revisiting an exclusive 2003 interview with Massive Attack’s Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja — discussing technology, obscenity, war and electronic artistry.
Exactly 20 years ago, I was offered an interview with Massive Attack’s Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja, prior to the release of the band’s latest album, 100th Window. I said yes, of course — Massive Attack were and remain, to this day, one of my favourite groups. Speaking with 3D was bucket-list stuff for this fresh-faced reporter, then employed as deputy editor of club culture publication, Ministry magazine Australia.
For those of you too young to remember, or who’ve simply forgotten, the dawn of the 21st Century was a very different time. Social media didn’t really exist, though some tech-forward brands and bands used forums and message boards (kinda like Reddit) to communicate with their fans. There was no streaming — a new company called Netflix sent DVDs out in the post, but usually you watched TV or rented movies from a video store. You got your music on vinyl or CDs, or illegally via sketchy file-sharing services like Napster; with a typical 56kbps dial-up internet connection, it took all night to download an album.
Bigger picture, in 2003, the September 11 attacks loomed painfully close in the rear-view mirror. People were frightened, angry, anxious. There was a global recession, a deadly coronavirus outbreak. The War on Terror was in full swing. Saddam Hussein’s alleged support for Al-Qaida and supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction were being used as justification for an invasion of Iraq by the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ — already busy fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The new Massive Attack LP was due to drop in February ’03, just weeks, as it would turn out, before the war in Iraq commenced. Del Naja had been active in protests against the impending conflict, so I began our conversation by asking about his involvement in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s ‘Stop The War’ initiative and how fans had reacted to his activism.
Del Naja at an anti-war protest in 2003 (from his Instagram), with placards in the style of anonymous graffiti artist Banksy, believed by some to be 3D’s alter ego.
“For the ‘Stop The War’ campaign, we [Del Naja and co-campaigner Damon Albarn of Blur and Gorillaz] put double-page adverts in the NME, which had an effect, CND reckoned, of directing at least 20,000 people to their petitions, and to participate in their marches, which is positive,” Del Naja said. “We got Tony Benn — a staunch peace campaigner, and a veteran of peace and socialist politics — to comment. And we got Ramsey Clark, a former US Attorney-General who’s been a pro-Iraqi campaigner in terms of trying to halt sanctions and fight the idea of war, so we had a trans-Atlantic view on it.”
He told me, “We tried to present a balanced view and not bring our egos into it, just raise the question of what is happening; point people in the direction of information, informative sites and places.”
Nevertheless, Del Naja said, “The response on our message board was quite frightening. A lot of Americans were totally slating me, saying that was the last time they were gonna buy one of our records, asking why we hate Americans. Some of it was so strange, they were going as far as to say, ‘We bailed you out in the Second World War and we’re gonna have to defend the world again, if it wasn’t for America, the world would be… blah blah blah.’
Recently, Del Naja has been selling art prints online to raise funds for relief efforts in Ukraine. He visited the war-torn country in February this year.
“I just thought, ‘Christ, these people are into the music we’ve been making, and we’ve got nothing in common whatsoever when it comes down to the real world,’” Del Naja said. “It’s quite terrifying that they took it that way, and the way they felt about the band was completely out of context with the way the music’s made. It makes you wonder — are you really communicating, are you really getting through to anyone in the first place?”
Our interview took place only a few months after the October 2002 Bali terrorist bombings that claimed 202 lives, almost half of them Australian. From my vantage point in Sydney, I remarked that while there was an outpouring of grief following this tragedy, the reaction in Australia had been quite calm and measured, compared to the fury (righteous, as it was) in the US after September 11th — and the shock-and-awe action in the Middle East that followed.
“America will seek revenge first and ask questions later. It’s unfortunately very typical,” Del Naja said. “That’s unfortunately the American way, isn’t it? It always has been. America is probably the most extreme country on the planet, a magnifying glass for the rest of the world in a sense, with all its negatives and positives. And it’s a shame to see it reacting in such an extreme way, every time, without really questioning its position in the rest of the world.”
“They deem things to be offensive — songs, movies, words, phrases — when what’s really offensive is bombs and bullets.”
Massive Attack’s debut album Blue Lines came out in 1991, around the same time the Gulf War began. Because the BBC and other radio stations felt it would be insensitive to play music by a band with such an awkwardly pertinent name, temporarily, Massive Attack were forced to go simply by Massive. Del Naja told me he’d considered reverting to this diminished moniker.
“I thought of dropping the ‘Attack’ recently as an anti-war statement, but I think that kind of encourages the stupidity and hysteria in the media,” he said. “It only encourages them to focus on the wrong things. They deem things to be offensive — songs, movies, words, phrases — when what’s really offensive is bombs and bullets.”
We switched gears to talk about the band’s music, which I felt had become progressively moodier. A reaction to an increasingly dark outlook, globally? “I dunno, it’s weird. People often associate us with ‘dark’. I think when people hear our music they go ‘dark’ straight away,” he said. “I don’t see [100th Window] as being that dark. It has its dark edges, but it has a greater warmth than anything we’ve done before. It’s more complex — it’s got a lot of depth, a lot of levels. And that’s definitely affected by what’s been happening around us. Inevitably.”
Del Naja said advances in production technology were giving musicians the opportunity to express themselves in ways they could hardly have imagined just a few years earlier. “I find bands that aren’t interested in exploring the world of electronic music quite strange. You have so much creative freedom in that space,” he said. Rather than turn music into something cold and robotic, technology had the potential to make compositions so much warmer and multi-dimensional, “more human,” he said.
“I love technology when it’s used positively, and I can’t imagine going backwards. Even life without the internet — that was only a few years ago,” he said. True enough, most of us had begun using the net in earnest in the very late ’90s, Del Naja included. As late as 1998, he said, “I wasn’t online, wasn’t into email, wasn’t using the net a lot. But now it’s part of my everyday life. I shop on it, research on it, read on it. When there’s an issue in the news, I spend so much time looking at different sites, different countries, different nationalities, different news agencies, to try to get as many views as possible on the topic. Online you can see so many more angles.”
A 2003 promo shot of Del Naja for the release of 100th Window.
On the other hand, Del Naja recognised that tech had its pitfalls. For example, the digital piracy that was rife at the time, with people burning copies of their CDs for friends or using file-sharing platforms to download tracks gratis, presented an existential threat to musicians, he reckoned. (I’d had to sign a pretty serious piece of paperwork, when I received my advance copy of 100th Window, stating that I wouldn’t share it and should expect to be prosecuted if I did. Not that I could’ve ripped MP3s if I’d wanted to: the promo CD itself was embedded with anti-copy technology that stopped it even playing on my candy-coloured iMac’s disc drive.)
“There’s this lovely mythology of file sharing,” Del Naja said. “But the perfect socialist utopia doesn’t really exist — most people who’d download and copy the album would do so for their own capitalist means. The piracy issue’s becoming quite a big deal. In one respect I don’t give a fuck. But in another respect, if we can’t make any money off it then we can’t make any more music. And that’s the issue.”
With great prescience, Dela Naja noted, “Music is becoming cheapened by the way the industry concentrates on commerce rather than quality. I think the music industry’s paranoid because it knows it hasn’t got a lot of life left in it, maybe 20 years before it operates in a completely different way and doesn’t sell CDs via retail outlets on the high streets. And that’s affecting how they sign bands, how they promote records and what records they market. That, alongside piracy, makes music a lot cheaper these days. When it comes to the decision of copying something or buying it, most people will say, ‘The music industry’s shit anyway, let’s copy it.’ I feel sympathy for that.”
Del Naja felt the entertainment industry’s money-hungry cruddiness was highlighted (and music consumers’ screw-the-system attitude justified) by the spate of reality-TV karaoke acts that had begun to dominate the charts twenty years ago. “The whole manufactured Pop Idol thing is bigger than ever,” he said, with disdain. “That’s a stark contrast to the fragile place the world’s in at the moment. You can’t apportion blame for it, but you feel it’s this whole idea of the American Dream — that you can have it all as an individual, instant fame and fortune.” Or as we might put it nowadays: influence.
“I wonder whether, if you were in a different part of the world looking in on our culture via TV, you’d be saddened and shocked by what you saw,” Del Naja pondered, two decades ago. “It’s gonna breed more resentment of our culture if we don’t start to balance our view a bit and start thinking of more important things.”