One version of the history of trip hop, told surprisingly often, is of laid-back Bristolians stumbling upon a downbeat form of dance music almost by accident. It’s a tale that has little to do with striving to create anything new, or of cultural collisions and backstories, but rests on local musicians being, to quote Massive Attack’s Grant ‘Daddy G’ Marshall on the band’s work ethic, “lazy Bristol twats” who just happened upon what came to be called the Bristol Sound.

To understand why this idea is so clearly nonsense, remember how radical Massive’s Blue Lines (1991) sounded in the context of the year grunge broke – and indeed still sounds. Or listen again to the sense of melancholy and creeping fear that underpins Tricky’s claustrophobic Maxinquaye (1995). As for Portishead, to complete trip hop’s holy triumvirate, Dummy (1994) is an album of extremes, ice cool and precise yet also bluesy, anguished.

How to explain these albums? First up, banish all thoughts of Bristol as the gentrified, weekend-break destination of today, which is anyway a misleading picture. The centre of Bristol in the 1980s during high Thatcherism was a place pox-marked by abandoned and decaying spaces, the city as broken machine. It was Bristol where a decade of unrest in the nation’s urban centres began, when an April 1980 police raid against the Black and White Café in St Pauls, an area with a large British Afro-Caribbean population, was a catalyst for rioting.

Bristol was also a city with a vibrant and constantly mutating underground with strong roots in punk. To quote one of the late Mark Stewart’s favourite aphorisms, “There is the arrogance of power and what we got from punk was the power of arrogance.” It was a multicultural city too, with its own distinct sound system culture linked to the local reggae scene and the annual St Pauls Carnival. To this heady mix, add radical politics and graffiti artists such as Inkie, Massive’s Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja and, following on, Banksy.

Directly or indirectly, it’s striking how many of Bristol’s deepest cultural currents seem to flow through Stewart’s The Pop Group. According to Stewart, when the band put on early shows at the Barton Hill Youth Centre, those in attendance included Marshall, Del Naja and Milo Johnson, aka DJ Milo, all of whom would go on to be integral to The Wild Bunch sound system. Later, it would be Stewart who often brought back early hip hop records to Bristol from the USA. Later still, he took The Wild Bunch to London, where he introduced them to Newtrament, a Ladbroke Grove resident and electro pioneer who, rumour had it, got the newest hip hop records direct from his American father, as related in the Stray (Tangent Books) by Laurie Owens and Milo Johnson.

One of the spiritual homes of The Wild Bunch was the Dug Out on Park Row, a sticky and sweaty space where the collective honed their skills. In 1985, underground went overground when Bristol’s Arnolfini held the first British gallery exhibition of street art. Del Naja’s work was on the walls and, when The Wild Bunch performed at the gallery, a teenage Geoff Barrow, who would be mentored by Blue Lines producer Jonny Dollar, was among those in attendance.

In short, while there may have been spliff breaks along the way, trip hop didn’t just happen, it’s rooted in Bristol’s radicalism, its DIY ethic and, as the six tracks below reveal in their different ways, the pervasive influence of the city’s 1980s music scene.

Talisman – ‘Dole Age’
(1981, Recreational Records)

Like London and the West Midlands, Bristol was a centre for homegrown roots reggae in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Locally, the two biggest bands were Black Roots and Talisman, whose indie single ‘Dole Age’ says much about the world into which it was released. This was a time when Thatcher’s monetarist government prioritised controlling inflation over employment rates and the jobless total headed towards three million, a rate of more than 10 per cent. Although John Peel played the single and gave the band a session, Talisman never achieved sustained success or landed a major record deal. More generally, reggae and a love of deep bass are recurring themes in Bristol music. It’s no coincidence Massive Attack have so often worked with Horace Andy. For more on Bristol reggae, and indeed different stripes of alternative Bristol music from the 1970s and 1980s, visit the Bristol Archive Records site.

Mark Stewart & The Maffia – ‘Jerusalem’
(1982, On-U Sound)

So tall he loomed over most people, intense and direct to the point of bluntness, the much-missed Mark Stewart was intimidating to meet. And yet, when you talked to him or watched him talk to others, he had the knack of appearing to be completely engaged. This may well go some way to explaining both why he was so often a catalyst, someone whose very presence encouraged others to act. It helped too that he was uncompromising and always followed his own muse. “[The Birthday Party] truly loved them,” said Nick Cave of The Pop Group, “were mystified by them, playing their strange, utterly unique music non-stop, barely able to comprehend what it was we were actually listening to.” When The Pop Group finally imploded in 1981, Stewart simply carried on. His first single with The Maffia, produced by Adrian Sherwood, is a dub-infused take on Hubert Parry’s setting of William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ that, while it can be heard as a critique of Thatcherism, sounds prescient in the way it wrestles with notions of Englishness.

Rip Rig + Panic – ‘You’re My Kind Of Climate’
(1982, Virgin)

While Mark Stewart struck out as a solo artist, Pop Group multi-instrumentalist Gareth Sager and drummer Bruce Smith formed Rip Rig + Panic, named after a 1965 album by Roland Kirk. As the name suggests, the band, fronted by Neneh Cherry, had a sound that incorporated elements of avant-garde jazz, all well as post-punk and funk. Listen to the skittering ‘You’re My Kind Of Climate’, one of the band’s more accessible offerings, and it may seem extraordinary the band were signed to Virgin, but such were the times. Besides, Cherry was a huge talent who would go on to have a worldwide hit with ‘Buffalo Stance’ (1988), famously performing the song on Top Of The Pops when seven months pregnant. She was also important in encouraging Massive Attack, having known them since their days in The Wild Bunch, and chivvying them along to complete Blue Lines. To quote Grant Marshall, “We recorded a lot at her house, in her baby’s room. It stank for months and, eventually, we found a dirty nappy behind a radiator.”

Maximum Joy – ‘Why Can’t We Live Together’
(1983, Garage Records)

Arguably, the high post-punk era ran for from 1979-80, the years that albums such as Metal Box, Entertainment! and Closer were released. Then came synthpop, which smoothed out the angular experimentation of what went before. Except of course that’s too simple a narrative. Looking back, the early 1980s were years when things were in flux, with musicians looking for a way forward often drawing on disparate influences. Case in point: Maximum Joy’s final single, a cover of a 1972 soul hit by Timmy Thomas, calls to mind the funky twitchiness of A Certain Ratio yet seems to be aiming for pop’s mainstream, if only with its Heaven 17-esque backing vocals. British reggae visionary Dennis Bovell is on production duties. Maximum Joy grew from the ashes of Bristol post-punk band Glaxo Babies and, via guitarist John Waddington, who sadly passed in 2023, The Pop Group. If the single’s beats seem to anticipate what will follow, that’s maybe in part because one Nellee Hooper joined Maximum Joy as a percussionist in 1982. A record that represents both an ending and a beginning.

The Wild Bunch – ‘Tearin Down The Avenue’
(1987, 4th & Broadway)

If talent is volatile and convinced of its own vision, it was probably inevitable The Wild Bunch would be more influential than stable. This was after all a soundsystem collective that, alongside founder DJ Milo and rapper Willy Wee, featured at different points Nellee Hooper, who would join Soul II Soul prior to becoming a hugely influential producer, Adrian ‘Tricky’ Thaws and the three core members of Massive Attack when the band was founded, Grant Marshall, Robert Del Naja and guitarist Andrew ‘Mushroom’ Vowles. ‘Tearin Down The Avenue’, recorded for Island’s hip hop imprint 4th & Broadway by Milo, Hooper and Del Naja, then still better known as a graffiti artist, suggests musicians finding their way, perhaps too in thrall to American beats to be distinctive. Probably you had to be at The Wild Bunch’s club nights or sound clashes to get the full flavour. The single was never afforded a widespread release, but nevertheless represents a moment when the different currents of Bristol music begin to coalesce into something new.

Smith & Mighty – ‘Walk On…’
(1988, Three Stripe Records)

On the b-side of ‘Tearin Down The Avenue’ was a cover of ‘The Look Of Love’ featuring Shara Nelson (‘Unfinished Sympathy’) on vocals. Stark and melancholy, it’s sometimes cited as the recording that invented trip hop. But there are other contenders if you want to play this game too, notably production duo Rob Smith & Ray Mighty’s languid breakbeat take on another Burt Bacharach and Hal David song, ’Walk On By’, featuring Jackie Jackson on vocals. Both records, it’s worth highlighting, prefigure Portishead’s fascination with sophisticated 1960s pop. Smith & Mighty are also important to the story of trip hop because of their production work on Massive Attack’s first single, ‘Any Love’, released via Massive Attack Records in 1988. Smith & Mighty would go on to mix tracks for, among others, Fine Young Cannibals and Neneh Cherry, although there’s a sense of what might have been in that ffrr/London Records refused to release a debut album in 1989. Bass Is Maternal didn’t appear until 1995 and momentum was lost. To go back to where we started, Rob Smith was a member of one of the key Bristol reggae bands, Restriction.