Massive Attack – Unfinished Sympathy
Going to do an easy one this week, since I got lost in a swamp of sample connections yesterday.
In 1991 Massive Attack was temporarily named just ‘Massive‘ due to the outbreak of the Gulf War. Under that name they released Unfinished Sympathy. While a lot of the budget of the album went into the string arrangements of that song, it still leans on two samples as well.
The hey-hey comes from the 1976 track Planetary Citizen by Mahavishnu Orchestra and John McLaughlin. It blends in quite nicely with the vocals by Shara Nelson in Unfinished Sympathy. The beats from the song are hidden between the drum rolls in the opening of the song Parade Strut (instrumental) by J.J. Johnson for the soundtrack of Willie Dynamite (1974).
Interestingly, I had to correct the Wikipedia page for Unfinished Sympathy, because it stated that the bells in the song are from the famous (and often used) Take Me to the Mardi Gras by Bob James. Not only is the ring of the bells different, Unfinished Sympathy has the bells in 4 keys and the original Bob James sample only 2. Seriously, play them next to each other and tell the difference.
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Hey cool, finally someone else who knows the bells are not from Bob James. I was a regular at a great soul/funk/latin/jazz club in Edinburgh around 1992 called Chocolate City (interestingly run by Jamie Byng who now runs Canongate Press) where they played the song that the bells are sampled from. It was a crazy latin number and the bells played in a sort of breakdown in the middle IIRC – it *could* have been Take Me To The Mardi Gras but definitely not the studio version on the Bob James “Two” album. I wondered if it was maybe from a live recording by him or someone else doing it in a similar style, but have searched in vain. I really wish I had asked the DJ at the time but was too busy enjoying myself! There was a real trainspotter-ness in those days to sample including/spotting with loads being from weird bootlegs etc, so my guess is it’s from an unusual/rare track, or someone would have identified it correctly by now. If you ever track it down I’d love to know! Great post!
@bulgy_eyes : The people at WhoSampled.com have been trying to track down the true origin of the bells for years, without success. If I’d ever find out, I wouldn’t only blog about it, but be damn sure it was on Who Sampled as well.