30 Years of Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy’

30 Years of Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy’

11th February 2021

On 11 February 1991, 30 years ago today, Massive Attack released the record that would come to define them.


Unfinished Sympathy was written by Massive Attack’s Daddy G, 3D and Mushroom with vocalist Shara Nelson and producer Jonny Dollar, was recorded in the Coach House Studio, with the strings orchestrated by Wil Malone in Studio One and recorded by former Abbey Road chief engineer, Haydn Bendall. Massive Attack had not correctly budgeted for the cost of hiring a full orchestra, and ultimately Mushroom was forced to sell his car (a Mitsubishi Shogun) at the time in order to cover all the hiring costs for the orchestra.

 

How It Began?

Unfinished Sympathy began as a melody floating around in Shara Nelson’s head during the sessions for ‘Blue Lines’. She recalls to Uncut Magazine in 2010: “The song started while we were rehearsing at the Coach House in Bristol in mid 1990, we had already recorded a few tracks that went on Blue Lines, including Safe From Harm, and we had been struggling to record a track called It Will Rain. I couldn’t concentrate very well, so we were told to take a break, have a cup of tea. I didn’t drink tea at the time, so I just stood in the corner and started trying to put together this idea that had been going around my head for a while. I started mumbling to myself, half singing the lines, ‘I know that I’ve imagined love before’. The melody and the words started to come into shape.

“At the time Mushroom [Andrew Vowles], was in the room with [the producer] Jonny Dollar. Mushroom heard what I was doing and said: ‘What’s that? Sing up, girl!’ So I started to sing, and Mushroom put some beats towards it, and Jonny Dollar started playing synthetic strings, and that was it! It was a real rogue track.”

The surging string arrangement, which was the final part of the puzzle was the brainchild of Jonny Dollar, who first laid down synthesized strings, then brought in a 40-piece string section to deceive the part, which was conducted by string arranger Will Malone in Abbey Road’s Studio Two.
 
 

String Arranger Wil Malone Tells His Story

Wil Malone is a musician, producer and responsible for the string arrangements of Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy. He explains his story below of how the arrangement came to be:

“With Unfinished Sympathy it was the band and the producer who asked me to do the string arrangements for the song. I remember, the track was originally eight minutes long and they let me hear many demos of the song; all sorts of constructions and different ways of doing it. I asked them what they had in mind for the string arrangements of the track and it was Massive’s producer Jonny Dollar – he was highly responsible for putting together the track – who said: ‘do what you feel like’.

"The reason for inclusion of the string arrangements was to be supportive. In my view, in pop music, strings have to be supportive to the vocal, although they also have to give a boot and a sense of tension. If you have a rough track, it’s good to have the strings as a classical contrast sound so that you create a tension, a suspense going on all the time between the roughness of the track and the purity and classical feel. In pop music you’re usually working on a track with bass, drums, guitar, synthesizer, vocals and the strings have to blend with all that. My approach for Unfinished Sympathy was that it’s a really open track: basically it’s just a groove – keyboards, and a great vocal by Shara Nelson – so you just let it drift, just let it chill.

"With most string arrangements that I do, the strings are ‘put back’ in the mix. In other words they are so quiet you don’t really hear them, or they’re mixed up, so that you can just hear the top lines; but on Unfinished Sympathy, the strings are exposed. You can really hear them and I think that makes something different.

"The string arrangements were played by 42 session players in Abbey Road Studio One. I wanted to make the sound rich so that it vibrates in your chest and stomach, but to also keep it cool, so not so much vibrato – hit the bar lines very accurately. When you are writing, descriptively, in classical music there are emotions that you want the orchestra to have or play, but in pop music that isn’t true. There is no point in writing instructions like ‘dolce’ unless it really means something; basically it is a different way of writing for strings in pop music as you’re writing to a mix, you’re trying to blend your sound into the sound that is on the track."
 
Former Abbey Road chief engineer, Haydn Bendall, adds: "I think the song is wonderful and everything on that album so well defined. Including the cover! The session was just a normal string session in Studio Two, nothing terribly remarkable in that I think; but it seems there have been numerous attempts to re-create that “sound”! It’s just a string section playing with minimal vibrato!"

Listen back to Unfinished Sympathy on our Studio One playlist.
 
 

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