Neil Davidge
Neil Davidge was born in Southmead Hospital, Bristol in 1962. As a teenager he loved to paint, creating both fine art works and more abstract pieces. Prior to studying graphic design at Brunel Technical College, he became enamoured with the late 1970's UK punk scene, attending local gigs and reading of iconoclastic movers and shakers in the New Musical Express. Neil also began to play guitar. "Punk taught me that you didn't have to understand the academic side of music to make a great noise", he says.
Jump cut to the early-to-mid 1990's. Neil had met Massive Attack's Mushroom AKA Andrew Vowles as early as 1991, and was in and around Bristol's Coach House Studios when Portishead recorded parts of their debut album Dummy there between 1991-1994. The owner of Coach House, Andy Allen, introduced Neil to the rest of Massive Attack in 1996, and hitting it off, they collaborated on The Hunter, a song for the Batman Forever soundtrack that featured Everything But The Girl vocalist Tracey Thorn. That same year, Massive Attack won a Brit Award for 'Best Dance Act.'
Working in close collaboration with Massive's Robert Del Naja, AKA 3D, Neil then had a key hand in shaping the darker, forward-looking sound of the band's third album, 1998's Mezzanine. One of its most memorable sessions found him working with former Cocteau Twins vocalist Liz Fraser on the song Teardrop, now known to millions more as the theme tune for House, the hit US medical drama that stars British actor Hugh Laurie.
As Neil's career progressed and his CV became more and more impressive, various doors opened. Massive Attack's stately, cinematic sound had previously been utilised by various film directors, and this, together with Neil's longstanding affinity with visual mediums, gave his route into scoring for film and TV and an air of inevitability.
It was onwards and upwards, then, when French auteur Luc Besson came knocking on the doors of Neil and Robert Del Naja's then nascent production company One Point Six Studios circa 2004. Neil picks up the story: "He was making Danny The Dog, or Unleashed as it was later renamed. It was just Robert and I working on that score, but Luc wanted the name Massive Attack for the soundtrack credits. He was prepared to pay quite of money to get it, so we thought, 'Okay - this will help us set up One Point Six Studios!' But to all intents and purposes that was the first One Point Six project."
What has One Point Six scored since then? Well, aside from the ventures we mentioned at the start of this missive, Neil and Robert are behind scores for Bullet Boy (2005) and Battle In Seattle (2007), and have written music for advertising campaigns by Jaguar, Adidas and Levis, among many others. Away from his collaborations with Robert Neil also scored the music to the Paul McGuigan directed Push (2009). Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.
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