Angel is the opening track of Massive Attack’s third album Mezzanine. It samples “Lost Bongo in Belgium” by The Incredible Bongo Band.

Originally, Angel was intended to be a very different sounding song, as it was to be a cover of “Straight To Hell” by The Clash that would have also have included a sample from an old Sex Gang Children record.

For this cover version, 3D had earmarked Horace Andy as being the ideal vocalist but by the time it came to record his vocals in London’s Olympic Studios they hit a snag. Horace Andy, a religious man, was unwilling to sing the word “hell” in The Clash song so at the last minute, unexpectedly.

Group were forced to improvise a new song on the spot to accommodate Horace Andy’s refusal. In the space of merely four hours, they stripped away much of the originally prepared track, wrote a new melody around it, halved the tempo and removed the Sex Gang Children sample entirely. Finally to use as lyrics for this new untitled song, they took the lyrics almost directly from Horace Andy’s own song You Are My Angel.