Angel

Album: Mezzanine (1998)
Charted: 30
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Songfacts®:

  • This song is very unusual in that it only uses two chords for the entire song. The bass line is highly prominent, with other elements wisping in and out. >>>
    Suggestion credit:
    Stephanie - Houston, TX
  • Massive Attack uses a variety of vocalists. This one is sung by the reggae singer Horace Andy. It's based on Andy's 1973 song "You Are My Angel."
  • Massive Attack's Robert "3D" Del Naja was a young graffiti artist before becoming a vocalist and he designed the Mezzanine cover art. He told The Guardian February 6, 2010 about it: "By this point I'd painted on wood, on metal, on canvas and with this album I wanted to go for something more photographic. I started off with images of spiders. I was really obsessed, having mad dreams about them; I wanted a spider's abdomen on the back of the album cover and I wanted to develop this idea of making clothes from spider skin. It was all very trippy s--t that proved quite difficult to make it into anything, but then Nick Knight showed me these shots of beetles that he'd taken in the Natural History Museum. They were really beautiful. That kind of settled it."
  • The original idea was to record a cover version of The Clash's "Straight To Hell," but Horace Andy wasn't happy singing the word "hell." Mezzanine co-producer Neil Davidge recalled to Q Magazine:

    "We were literally rewriting songs while we were mixing... Angel (was) plucked out of thin air at a mixing session at London Olympic Studios. 3D and Horace went next door, were kind of throwing vocal ideas around... And we were messing around with the track, dropping things together. Then Horace put a vocal down and it was like, wow, s--t, that is magic."
  • 3D explained the meaning of the album name to Q magazine: "The title Mezzanine (was) pretty much a metaphor... We don't feel like we're in the same time zone as other people. It's the feeling of not really fitting in. It's a bit paranoid and a bit isolated."

    He added: "We did toy with the idea of calling it Damaged Goods for a while. It seemed to sum up a lot of the ideas that were going on. But it felt too obvious in the end."

Comments: 3

  • Heidi from Palmdale CaliforniaI think this is such a beautiful art it speaks of them both as well as myself.
  • Gene Akimov from Vaughan, OnThis one inspired me to write a trip hop track Fix My Broken Wing.
  • Paul Marlo from Perth, Australia, -featured in the movie snatch. while the charctor played by brad pitt had his mother killed in a burning caravan
see more comments

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