Bristol
Bristol appears in 4 Songsheets issues: 90s UK Jungle and Drum & Bass, Post-Rock, Bristol Trip Hop and Dubstep. 8 artists in the archive came from here, including Roni Size, Massive Attack and Portishead.
Bristol's post-rock scene was inseparable from the city's trip-hop and electronic music infrastructure, with Flying Saucer Attack (formed 1992) creating a lo-fi, drone-based approach on their own FSA label that merged post-rock's guitar textures with ambient and experimental electronics. The city's Flying Saucer Attack and later bands like Movietone emerged from a DIY scene connected to venues like the Anson Rooms and the broader Bristol underground that included Portishead and Massive Attack, creating sonic crossover between genres. Bristol's particular contribution was a more bedroom-recorded, deliberately degraded aesthetic that stood apart from the studio precision of Chicago or the orchestral sweep of Montreal.
Scenes
Artists from Bristol
- Roni Size
Born Ryan Williams to Jamaican immigrants in Bristol's St.
- Massive Attack
Massive Attack came directly out of the Wild Bunch soundsystem, and its founders, Robert '3D' Del Naja, Grant 'Daddy G' Marshall, Andrew 'Mushroom' Vowles and Adrian 'Tricky' Thaws, carried that crew's magpie instinct for hip-hop, reggae and dub into a working band rather than a DJ collective.
- Portishead
Geoff Barrow had already put in studio time as a tape operator on Massive Attack's Blue Lines before meeting Beth Gibbons on a Bristol job-training course, a genuinely unglamorous origin for a band that would go on to define a genre's mood.
- Tricky
Adrian Thaws grew up in Bristol's Knowle West and came up as an MC with the Wild Bunch before that crew folded into Massive Attack, staying on to add his husky, half-spoken verses to Blue Lines.
- The Wild Bunch
The Wild Bunch began in 1983 when Milo Johnson and Nellee Hooper met at a gig pairing Magazine with Bauhaus, an unlikely meeting point between two post-punk acts for a crew that would go on to define itself through hip-hop, reggae and dub.
- Martina Topley-Bird
Tricky discovered Topley-Bird when she was fifteen, and her voice, untrained and strange in the best sense, became the emotional center of Maxinquaye and of Tricky's music through the rest of the 1990s.
- Nellee Hooper
Hooper co-founded The Wild Bunch with Milo Johnson in 1983 after the two met at a Magazine and Bauhaus show, then left Bristol behind for Soul II Soul and, eventually, a major production career.
- Pinch
Rob Ellis was born in Scotland, grew up in Newport, Wales, and settled in Bristol, where he founded the Tectonic label and co-founded the club night Subloaded.
