The song began as a hum.
According to accounts from the Blue Lines sessions, repeated across the band's interviews and the secondary literature that followed, Shara Nelson was humming a melody during a break in the studio when someone — the precise attribution varies — suggested she develop it. The crew around her was unusual. Massive Attack had emerged from Bristol's Wild Bunch sound-system collective in the late 1980s: Robert "3D" Del Naja, Grant "Daddy G" Marshall, and Andrew "Mushroom" Vowles, working with producer Jonny Dollar, arranger Wil Malone, and Nellee Hooper orbiting the sessions. Nelson was not a permanent member of the group. She was the voice of the album's title track and of this one, not an architect of the record.
The hum became "Unfinished Sympathy." Malone wrote the string arrangement, and contemporary accounts describe it as recorded with a live ensemble rather than built primarily from samples — a distinction that mattered in 1991, when the aesthetic later called trip-hop (a term that would not enter the music press until the mid-1990s) was still being invented in real time. The working title, according to several later accounts in the fan and music press, was "Kiss and Tell." The final title is a pun on Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony." Exactly when and by whom the wordplay was coined has not been satisfactorily documented.
The single was released on February 11, 1991, as the second from Blue Lines. By that point, the Gulf War had begun. On the original UK pressing, the artist was not Massive Attack. It was, simply, Massive.
The sources on who decided this are thinner than the event itself suggests. Most retrospectives point to record-company pressure and the risk of a BBC radio ban; the primary exchanges between label, band, and broadcaster have not been published in any form readily available today. The name change lasted, by various accounts, several months, and was not extended to later re-pressings. The single peaked at number thirteen on the UK Singles Chart.
The video was directed by Baillie Walsh, who had already made the video for "Daydreaming," the album's first single. He chose, for the second, to shoot Nelson walking along a street. He chose Los Angeles.
The choice of city has since been explained by the band, in interviews cited second-hand, in practical rather than artistic terms: they wanted a steadicam operator of sufficient caliber, and they wanted the light. Dan Kneece — who had shot David Lynch's Blue Velvet in 1986 and had been working in American independent film through the late 1980s — carried the camera. The location was West Pico Boulevard. More precisely, the route began near 1311 South New Hampshire Avenue and ended near 2632 West Pico, a walk of several blocks shot, for all practical appearances, in a single unbroken take. Nelson, in a black outfit, sings to the camera while the city flows past her: cyclists, a disabled man in a wheelchair, children, a woman carrying groceries. She does not interact. They do.
The often-repeated figure of fourteen takes appears to be a forum myth. One of the more detailed technical accounts, attributed to fan-research built on interview citations, places the number at six rather than the oft-repeated "fourteen" — Kneece carried the rig until his stamina gave out, and one of those six takes was used. Whether the final take contains any concealed cuts of the kind later directors would use to manufacture the illusion of single-shot cinema is not possible to verify from the sources in circulation. Walsh and Kneece have not, to public knowledge, addressed the question directly. The claim that this was the first single-take music video, which recurs in fan-writing and some press pieces, does not survive scrutiny. It was unusually committed, unusually long, and unusually well-executed; the historical superlative is more enthusiasm than fact.
The people on the street raise a more interesting question. The suggestion that real local gang members were cast as themselves has become part of the video's lore, but there is no traceable interview in which Walsh, Kneece, or a member of the band confirms it. What is likely is that the production blended a small number of extras into the regular pedestrian life of that stretch of West Pico — a result that reads, thirty years later, as closer to documentary than it probably was.
Massive Attack would not record another song quite like "Unfinished Sympathy." Shara Nelson left after Blue Lines and released her solo debut, including the single "Down That Road," in 1993. Baillie Walsh kept directing videos — Kylie Minogue's "Slow" among them — before moving to features with Flashbacks of a Fool in 2008. The category "trip-hop" crystallized in the music press over the following four or five years, and Blue Lines began to be treated as the urtext it had not been designed as.
The video is routinely ranked among the greatest music videos ever made. Nelson walks. The camera follows. The song does what its title says it will not.
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