A certified pop classic, ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ by Massive Attack was released this week in 1991, the second single from the band’s debut album, Blue Lines. Shara Nelson had met the members of Massive Attack when they were part of the Bristol sound system collective the Wild Bunch.Massive Attack, Nelson and Dollar worked on the song during a jam session, and using a drum machine, keyboards and Nelson’s swirling vocals it became a rolling piece of revelry. The title ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ – was a pun on Franz Schubert‘s 1822 ‘Unfinished Symphony’ – and during this session, Robert Del Naja said: “I hate putting a title to anything without a theme, but with ‘Unfinished Sympathy’, we’d started with a jam… The title came up as a joke at first, but it fitted the song and the arrangements so perfectly, we just had to use it.”‘Unfinished Sympathy’ is a hymn to heartbreak featuring the soul tones of Horace Andy as well as Shara Nelson. It’s all filtered through the trip hop prism of trippy beats, samples and unobtrusive string arrangements – this was a watershed moment for both.The orchestral section was originally played on synthesiser, but, according to the Massive Attack member Andrew Vowles, “The synth sounded too tacky, so we thought we may as well use real strings. The orchestra definitely changed the feeling of the song, making it heavier and deeper with more feeling.” Dollar contacted the music producer Wil Malone to arrange and conduct the strings, which were recorded in Abbey Road Studios, London. According to Vowles, the orchestra “were really good [but] it took them about five takes to do it because they were slightly behind the beat”. “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’,” remembers Wil Malone for the Abbey road website. “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.”The strings particularly have a billowy grandeur on the final record. “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.”According to reports, Massive Attack had not taken the cost of the orchestra into account when planning the budget for Blue Lines, and had to sell their car to pay for it.This piece originally appeared here: https://www.godisinthetvzine.co.uk/2024/04/18/strings-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-orchestral-pop-sound-of-the-1990s-part-one/
