It was clear by the end of the 1980s that dance music was here to stay. Following the “rave” explosion of 1987, clubs all over the UK were pumping out various strains of house, hip-hop and techno to an audience that was quite prepared to dance until dawn and beyond. A lot less clear was how this passion for beat-driven tracks could be adapted for a more cerebral crowd and those who preferred to listen sitting down.

The arrival of Unfinished Sympathy, a single by the Bristol-based collective Massive Attack, in February 1991 silenced the dance doubters in tremendous style. Opening with a delicate, tinkling hip-hop percussion groove, underpinned by some stately cello, the song laid out its impeccably modern rhythmic credentials before unleashing a female vocal, by the then unknown Shara Nelson, that possessed all the emotive clout of vintage soul. Then, just at the point at which it seemed to be promising a conventional chorus, Unfinished Sympathy slipped effortlessly back into the present tense, abruptly reprising the nervy rhythmic shuffle of the intro. The group’s leader, Robert “3D” del Naja, later described this stop-start effect as “all that warmth being spun into a tiny little thread”.

The song’s mood of dark, lovelorn complaint — piercingly highlighted in the line “really hurt me baby, really cut me baby” — seemed to inhabit a very different world from the hedonistic free-for-all that was celebrated in the all-nighters. That in itself was serendipitous. Although the group could hardly have known that the first Gulf war was brewing while they toiled in the studio, when it finally appeared, just after the commencement of hostilities, Unfinished Sympathy struck a suitably sombre chord. As did the name of its creators — so much so that they were briefly obliged to shorten it to Massive, to assuage the concerns of Radio 1.

Like many landmark records, the song proved initially to be more of a critical than a commercial success.

But its afterlife, as the forerunner of trip-hop and many other attempts to take dance beyond the dancefloor, has confirmed Unfinished Sympathy as the timeless pop moment of 1991.

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