Massive Attack — The Dug Out Club, Bristol

The Dug Out club on Park Row in Bristol was the central venue of the Wild Bunch collective in the early 1980s — the loose group of DJs, MCs, graffiti artists, and musicians from which Massive Attack, Portishead, and Tricky all emerged. The Wild Bunch — 3D (Robert Del Naja), Mushroom, Daddy G, Tricky, Neneh Cherry, and others — mixed hip hop, dub, soul, and rock in sets that predated the genre categories that would later be applied to their music. The Dug Out's Sunday sessions were where Bristol's music scene of the next decade was being invented.

Massive Attack formed formally in 1988 and their debut album "Blue Lines" (1991) is the founding document of trip-hop — though the band always resisted the term. The combination of sampled breakbeats, bass frequencies borrowed from dub reggae, live instrumentation, and guest vocalists (Shara Nelson, Tricky, and Horace Andy on the debut) produced a music of extraordinary depth and emotional complexity. "Unfinished Sympathy" — built on a string arrangement recorded with a full orchestra in Los Angeles and featuring Shara Nelson's vocal — is one of the most fully realised recordings of the decade.

The Dug Out club no longer exists, but Bristol's music heritage — centred on the St Pauls and Stokes Croft areas as well as the city's universities and independent music infrastructure — is the subject of growing recognition. Massive Attack, Portishead, and Tricky are among the most internationally significant acts the UK has produced in the last thirty years, and their shared Bristol origins are one of music history's more remarkable geographical concentrations.