“I’ve locked myself away for days to stay in the same emotional place, capture something, and see a piece of music through to the end. You’re always chasing what you imagine in your head, so you just keep going. I prefer working at night. Everything is a bit too stark during the day and reality is too prevalent. You need to be in a state where you believe things you dream can actually happen.” Neil Davidge, February 2009
For over a decade now, Neil Davidge has excelled at helping people dream harder. As co-writer and key sonic facilitator on the lauded Massive Attack albums Mezzanine and 100th Window, the Bristol, England-born composer and producer has helped birth some of the most arresting and innovative sounds of the Nineties and Noughties.
Scan Neil’s CV to date, though, and you soon suss that his ongoing work with Massive Attack is but the tip of the iceberg. Since co-founding the Bristol-based production company One Point Six Studios in 2004, the former painter and graphic designer has scored music for many prestigious film, TV and advertising ventures. In truth it’s a ‘duck to water’ thing, for in Neil’s world the visual, the musical and the emotional have always overlapped.
Recent feathers in One Point Six’s cap include scoring the music for Trouble The Water, a moving study of those displaced by Hurricane Katrina which won ‘Best Documentary’ at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and an Oscar nomination. Working with Snoop Dogg, no less, Neil also scored the music for In Prison My Whole Life, a documentary about US death-row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Naturally, these projects required plenty of emotional investment from Neil, but fortunately One Point Six also enjoys lighter commissions that allow him to de-stress. “Yeah, doing the music for the David Beckham Instinct advert was great fun”, he says, quizzed about one such venture. Levity aside, though, the Instinct gig was another scoop, for the execs who had invested in the A-Lister that is Becks weren’t going to hire just anyone to pen the ad’s music.
Neil Davidge was born in Southmead Hospital, Bristol in 1962. As a teenager he loved to paint, creating both fine art works and more abstract pieces. Prior to studying graphic design at Brunel Technical College, he became enamoured with the late 1970s UK punk scene, attending local gigs and reading of iconoclastic movers and shakers in the New Musical Express. Neil also began to play guitar. “Punk taught me that you didn’t have to understand the academic side of music to make a great noise’, he says.
He played in bands. He wrote songs. He sang. There were gigs, of course, and long hours of alchemical, suck-it-and-see experimentation as Neil learned the complex, but hugely rewarding art of sound recording.
Jump cut to the early-to-mid 1990s. Neil had met Massive Attack’s Mushroom AKA Andrew Vowles as early as 1991, and was in and around Bristol’s Coach House Studios when Portishead recorded parts of their debut album Dummy there between 1991–1994.
The owner of Coach House, Andy Allen, introduced Neil to the rest of Massive Attack in 1996, and hitting it off, they collaborated on The Hunter, a song for the Batman Forever soundtrack that featured Everything But The Girl vocalist Tracey Thorn. That same year, Massive Attack won a Brit Award for ‘Best Dance Act.’
Working in close collaboration with Massive’s Robert Del Naja, AKA 3D, Neil then had a key hand in shaping the darker, forward-looking sound of the band’s third album, 1998’s Mezzanine. One of its most memorable sessions found him working with former Cocteau Twins vocalist Liz Fraser on the song Teardrop, now known to millions more as the theme tune for House, the hit US medical drama that stars British actor Hugh Laurie.
“Liz was pregnant at he time” recalls Neil. “She’s a shy performer who finds it hard to sit in with just anyone when she’s singing, but the two of us built an unspoken relationship of trust. Some producers could be described as bullies. I’m not a bully – I’m someone that people can let their guard down with. They know that I want the best for them, and that frees-up their creativity.
“With Liz, I’d loop sections of the song’s verse, and she would sing 13 or 14 takes. Her attention to detail was amazing. I could hear her working out the tempo of her vibrato, and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. It was an amazing experience.”
As with Mezzanine, Massive Attack’s fourth album 100th Window was largely piloted by Neil Davidge and Robert Del Naja. Sessions for the 2003 chart-topper were protracted and pressurised though, the group jettisoning huge swathes of material to re-write the whole record in the last six months of a three-year odyssey. “Some great things had been said about Mezzanine and we didn’t want to repeat ourselves”, says Neil, ever the sonic Columbus. “It was a strange period of isolation and the weirdness of 9/11, but we got there in the end.”
As Neil’s career progressed and his CV became more and more impressive, various doors opened. Massive Attack’s stately, cinematic sound had previously been utilised by various film directors, and this, together with Neil’s longstanding affinity with visual mediums, gave his route into scoring for film and TV and air of inevitability.
It was onwards and upwards, then, when French auteur Luc Besson came knocking on the doors of Neil and Robert Del Naja’s then nascent production company One Point Six Studios circa 2004. Neil picks up the story:
“He was making Danny The Dog, or Unleashed as it was later renamed. It was just Robert and I working on that score, but Luc wanted the name Massive Attack for the soundtrack credits. He was prepared to pay quite of money to get it, so we thought, ‘Okay – this will help us set up One Point Six Studios!’ But to all intents and purposes that was the first One Point Six project.”
What has One Point Six scored since then? Well, aside from the ventures mentioned at the start of this missive, Neil and Robert are behind scores for Bullet Boy (2005) and Battle In Seattle (2007), and have written music for advertising campaigns by Jaguar, Adidas and Levis, among many others. Away from his collaborations with Robert Neil also scored the music to the Paul McGuigan directed Push (2009).
You sense, though, that documentaries such as the aforementioned Trouble The Water lie particularly close to Neil’s heart.
“When you’re pouring emotion into a film or a drama it can sometimes feel that you’re hyping up the emotion”, he says, “but in serious documentaries it can be important to do that. These are real people who are suffering, and at a time when constant news coverage can make us immune to images of disaster, music can play an important role in reconnecting people to footage of great human tragedy.”
On a lighter note, we should mention that Louis Leterrier, Director of Unleashed offered Neil the chance to co-score (along with Craig Armstrong) his sequel to The Hulk. Alas, ongoing work on the new Massive Attack album meant Neil had to decline. He says the new album will be “simpler and more graphic” than 100th Window, and that he alone wrote over 150 pieces of music while working on it. To sum up, that’s Neil Davidge in a nutshell: a restless creative who will always go the extra mile.
Design: Paul Mills / Robson Dowry.