Nellee Hooper

intimate musical relationships / Nellee Hooper
I’m very much a person who has intimate musical relationships with people and they are almost like love affairs, you see. But I’m very loyal. So me and Nellee got through half the album and then we just stopped turning each other on. We remained friends, but we would just kind of know each other’s taste too much for it to be a surprise.

Dazed&Confused, issue 16, january 1996

Nellee Hooper
A friend of mine suggested we work together and I was a bit suspicious to begin with.I had to ask what he had done. I like Soul II Soul, but mainly when they’re on the radio. Myself, I like to go out and dance to hardcore or industrial techno, hard beats with an experimental edge. I thought Nellee was too ’good taste’ for my liking. But then I met him, got to know him, got to hear about his fabulous ideas and it ended up with him producing the whole album.

Face, june 1993

Nellee Hooper
We met accidentally, through friends. But he turned out to be this really exciting, open-minded guy who was on exactly the same trip as I was : Fuck styles, fuck categories - take risks, try anything. We basically just didn’t want to make an album that had been made before, It was just by chance that he was the producer and I was the singer/songwriter, or whatever you’d call it. It was more about our musical relationship, which was a very, very magical one. I guess it was a bit of a musical love affair between Nellee and me.

Rolling Stone, september 1993

Nellee Hooper
(Producer of Soul II Soul’s first two LPs, Massive Attack’s ’Blue Lines’ and Sinead O’Connor’s ’Nothing Compares To You’. Producer and part co-writer of ’Debut’.) Her boyfriend Dom T was working as a DJ in LA. He said we should get together, so we hooked up in London. The initial plan was to do a couple of tracks ... but things went so well we ended up doing the whole album. She’d come up with an original idea, with an overall picture of the song. She liked the way I didn’t take her too literally. She’d say, I want this track to sound like Stockhausen, and I’d play a Quincy Jones loop from an old film score, and she’d say, That’s exactly what I meant. Björk’s never written a lyric that actually rhymes. Björk works in a language that isn’t Icelandic or English but more of a North...

Select, june 1994

Nellee Hooper
He’s a genius. He’s also a stylist who likes things to look immaculate. When you go to Nellee’s house he knows where to get the best brandy in Europe and he’s got the best cheese. He’ll have a record that could only be bought from some record store in Texas in 1953. Everything is the best. And so, in a way, when he is working with you you feel quite special. When I was working with Nellee I would write five times better lyrics and five times better melodies and five times better everything - because he was so hard to please, you see.

Raw, janvier 1996

Nellee Hooper
The musical relationship between me and Nellee was intense. It was close to marriage. My musical collaborations sometimes seem to be more intense than my love things, because it’s so deep in me. If I write a tune and somebody completes it, it’s almost more important to me than the romantic idea of who is the other half of my child or something. It came to an end because he and I stopped surprising each other. It was quite magical when we met, and it exploded with the same intensity, but we’re really good friends now. I like to think that I can survive on my own. I’ve got a stupid amount of that in me. But you can’t live without someone.

Q, november 1997

Nellee Hooper
I had never intended to get a producer, I didn’t even like the word producer - I thought that things would just be done by themselves, you know. But Nellee Hooper seemed to be very sensually into my ideas and it seemed he would arrange my songs with me from the point of view of my lyrics, not from some musical history vibe. I didn’t really like Soul II Soul, they were too tasteful for my liking. So I didn’t let him loose on the album, I would criticise every footstep he took but he seemed to have a very open mind like myself. I wasn’t worried about where I came from and he wasn’t worried where he came from at all ; we both wanted to start at point zero.

Wire 1993-08

Nellee Hooper
For me, Nellee Hooper is very much about me coming to London and he would be very sociable. He is like this big daddy - a host character who would introduce me to tons of people. He has a real talent to see what’s inside a person and he would set up things to surprise me. For example, when we were working on this island, in the evening, he would blindfold me and put me in the car and take me to this beach and he would have set up a little DAT recording system with a microphone with a very, very long lead and I would have some headphones, so I would record vocals whilst running along in the sand. So he would be very fearless in sussing out what was inside of me and dying to get out. He would set up these situations where I had to do things that were quite scary, but I had to do it. I...

David Toop Interview, 2002