Saturday Come Slow

Album: Heligoland (2009)
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Songfacts®:

  • This lament features the vocals of Blur frontman Damon Albarn. Massive Attack band leader Robert "3D" Del Naja explained to the NME that he drafted in Albarn at the beginning of 2009 to work on two songs, but the Blur singer was initially wary of the band's famously drawn-out methods. "He [Albarn] was like, 'I want to work with you, but I'm not getting sucked into some nine-year-long Bristol dope-haze'," he said. 3D added: "[Albarn] said] 'We'll work 10 to six, at my studio, for five days and that'll be it'. The irony was that it was him who ended up instigating all the bad behaviour!"
  • 3D told The Daily Telegraph how Albarn's contributions energized the duo: "It changed everything up," he said. "It was a different energy and a different environment. We started to strip everything back and build it back up again. That feels like the start of what the album is now."
  • Portishead's Adrian Utley plays guitar on this track.
  • 3D told The Independent February 12, 2010: "Damon wrote this about Bristol and the sort of limestone caves of the south-west land. 'One sound that the believers understand': you know, it's definitely about Bristol and Damon interpreting our relationship with our own land. It's almost, like, you know, frontiers and medieval times, when the land was divided into counties, this being the county of Bristol and his view of it. And also I think his experience of passing through it and of places like Glastonbury or Devon."

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