“I’d rather shoot myself in the foot, to be honest with you,” Tricky grins. I’ve just asked the trip-hop trailblazer how he strikes a balance between staying true to himself and not shooting himself in the foot. I don’t know what other answer I expected to receive.
For those who weren’t around to observe Tricky’s ascent in the mid-1990s, his 2019 autobiography Hell Is Round the Corner offers a comprehensive, no-holds-barred account of an artist who has been both incredibly successful and staunchly principled in his own way. This is a guy who, for instance, did two months in prison at 17 (after being caught with forged £50 notes) rather than watch his nan beg the judge for leniency, and who knew he’d end up leaving Massive Attack when they wouldn’t lend him £2.50 for food at a service station. “Where I grew up, they would steal that money so I could eat,” he writes.
“£2.50 for sausage and chips…” he scoffs now, his Bristolian accent still as thick as if he’d lived there his whole life, rather than bouncing around London, North America, Berlin and his current residence in the south of France. “To me that’s just like, ‘you ain’t my mate then, are you?’ I’m not money oriented at all, but little things like that it’s like, ‘what are we doing here?’” He fell in with Robert Del Naja and Grant Marshall when he was 19 years old, having come from nothing, financially speaking. “And then the judge watching my nan beg, I thought, ‘Nah, fuck this, I can‘t be bothered.’ Because it‘s a game, innit? So I just can‘t be bothered with it.”
Tricky, real name Adrian Thaws, is right up there with Banksy, Black Roots and cider as one of Bristol’s most significant cultural exports. Raised in a mixed race family in the tight-knit, rough neck neighbourhood of Knowle West, he cut his teeth as an MC for The Wild Bunch sound system, which later evolved into Massive Attack, helping to pioneer what is now referred to as “the Bristol sound.” Though he rejected the “trip-hop” label at the time – and still does – Tricky is nevertheless revered as one of its primary architects. His debut album Maxinquaye stands as one of if not the defining album of the genre; a strange, nocturnal collage of hip-hop, dub, downtempo soul, ambient and post-punk held together by whispered tales of interior nightmares and societal deterioration.
“I don’t believe there‘s such a thing as a Bristol sound,” Tricky shrugs now, hand-rolling a cigarette and blowing smoke out the window at the Creation Records office in Soho on a blistering afternoon in mid-July. “If I were to say that Bristol had a sound it would be reggae, because it’s an old sound system place, but the stuff that happens now? I’d say that’s just music.”
Named after his mother, who died by suicide when he was four years old, Maxinquaye put Tricky and his now-lifelong collaborator Martina Topley-Bird on the map, earning a gold certification, a Mercury Prize nomination, and the adoration of music critics on both sides of the Atlantic. They responded by never making another album like it ever again, opting for experimentation over tried and tested acclaim, and a version of success defined by artistic freedom over major label metrics.
Spiritually, Tricky has always fallen more in line with punk than anything else. That non-conformist streak is partly why he’s been able to tour with everyone from Gravediggaz to Tool; collaborate with a broad church of artists including Bjork, Terry Hall, Grace Jones, David Essex, PJ Harvey and Cyndi Lauper; and land a major supporting role in Luc Besson’s psychedelic sci-fi The Fifth Element. Even at 58, his sinewy 5ft 6in frame vibrates with the kind of raw, unpredictable energy that might burst out at any moment, like too many clothes stuffed into a suitcase. He cuts an incongruous figure in the Creation Records office in a yellow net polo shirt and cream cords, flanked by a tower of unworn Carhartt hats and a fancy candle, sitting in a desk chair the way those who are deeply unsuited to 9-5 desk work do: awkwardly. The glint in his eye when he talks about scribbling what could be described as early poems with crayon on his great grandmother’s concrete floor as a kid, or his disdain for musicians who “intellectualise everything,” gives off the same aura of mischief.
“That’s my definition of success. Being able to do whatever I want to do musically, on my own terms, and people support me”
The rejection of the spotlight brought by Maxinquaye is one of many moments in a decades-long career in which Tricky has been presented with a clear run to fame, and bolted in the opposite direction. Live, he has always performed antisocially, with his back to the audience and minimal stage lighting – a choice which divides fans to this day. He quit Massive Attack in 1995, just as they were blowing up, over creative differences (in addition to the chips thing). When devoted fan David Bowie wrote a short, delirious piece of fiction about meeting Tricky for Q Magazine and then reached out directly, Tricky never pursued the potentially fruitful connection. “It was all too fast…” he reflected, with some regret, in 2023. Still, you might argue that, for Bowie at least, the lived experience rang true to the fantasy, and was therefore the ideal outcome. “The phantom was known to move as a group of one,” Bowie wrote in Q. “Never took prisoners. You‘d never catch him snorting vodka at the bar. You‘d never catch him period, I‘d been told. A shaman who‘d never slept with the Others, he was still pure, his spells unblemished.”
“[Creation Records co-founder] Alan McGee said to me once, ‘You know what I like about you? You’re not a celebrity,’” Tricky ponders now. “So I think that’s [my definition of] success. Being able to do whatever I want to do musically, on my own terms, and people support me.”
Case in point: his most recent single, “Out of Place,” made its way onto BBC radio A-Lists despite being a wandering melancholic orchestral arrangement that makes a sharp u-turn into grinding post-punk without a chorus, or any vocals for the first 35 seconds. “It’s not a radio song at all,” he marvels. “I think sometimes as artists we want to be the biggest, to sell the most tickets, the most records… But that to me is success.”
“Out of Place” is the last track on Tricky’s latest album, Different When It’s Silent. Released independently through his own False Idols label, it’s Thaws’ first album as Tricky since 2020’s Fall To Pieces, which was made in the wake of his daughter’s sudden death in 2019. (Mina Topley-Bird took her own life on the ward of an NHS adult psychiatric hospital in Darlington; an inquest into her death ruled that there had been a failure in care. She was just 24.)
It’s not that Thaws hasn’t kept himself busy in the last six years; he worked on a collaborative album with producer Mike Theis under the name Theis Thaws, a joint album with collaborator Marta Złakowska, and put together an all-star 2021 project under the name Lonely Guest, which included contributions from Idles’ Joe Talbot, Murkage Dave, Maxïmo Park’s Paul Smith, and, Lee “Scratch” Perry. But, crucially, side projects can come without the strings of press, music videos or touring attached to a Tricky release. “I wouldn‘t say I was reluctant to release music under my own name. But I wasn‘t that interested, to be honest. I didn‘t have the motivation,” he explains.
Different When It’s Silent was also conceived as a side project. It was McGee, now his manager, who convinced him to put it out as Tricky upon hearing the material, deeming it the artist’s best work since Maxinquaye. So here we are, and here is the album – a brooding, uranium-heavy meditation on grief slash celebration of life that marks his “first indie rock / grunge album” and holds Mina’s presence throughout. On “Out of Place” – which originally appeared on Marta Złakowska’s album When It’s Going Wrong (2023) under a different title, sung by the Polish vocalist – Tricky reclaims lyrics as a powerful declaration of fatherly love: “I’m singing, I sing for my daughter.”
Incidentally, Different When It’s Silent is the first Tricky album to feature mostly male vocals. Whether it’s Martina, Marta, or any of his other collaborators, the texture of Tricky’s discography has been largely mapped by women, regardless of the fact that it’s the low, slow murmur of Thaws’ voice that people most associate with it. On this album, though, he takes a backseat. The most definitive voice on the record belongs to the young, fellow Bristolian singer-songwriter Mitch Sanders (even if he does sing in a somewhat androgynous register, with reviewers comparing it to Portishead’s Beth Gibbons). On earlier versions of the album, Thaws’ voice was completely absent.
“I didn’t realise it at the time, but a lot of the lyrics are about my daughter,” Tricky says of the decision. “The lyrics [to ‘Out of Place’] are the same ones I wrote for Marta on ‘Moving Through Water’, but when they’re sung by a man it has a totally different perspective. So I think it was subconsciously knowing that this is about my daughter, and thinking, like, ‘Marta can’t sing for me on this one.”
Photography Steve Gullick
Different When It’s Silent has been released into a zeitgeist in the throes of rediscovering trip-hop and downtempo, with the biggest acts of the 90s circulating on TikTok, and a new generation of songwriters and producers retooling its paranoid signifiers for the present-day digital dystopia. In spirit, it’s perhaps Tricky who most faithfully meets youth culture where it’s currently at – with his historic lack of adherence to genre, and the gender fluidity that has been an organic presence in both his music and presentation since the start, when he and Martina Topley-Bird appeared on the cover of “Overcome” dressed like a bride and groom; Martina in a top hat clutching flowers, Tricky in a wedding dress and smudged red lipstick wielding two pistols. (He describes in his memoir how, as a kid, he’d pick out dresses in charity shops and wear them out raving in Bristol.) It was never an attempt to be deliberately subversive though, he says. Rather, if he likes an item of clothing it simply doesn’t occur to him to care about what section of the shop it comes from. He still does that now. The cords he has on today are women‘s, he notes. “From the 60s.”
Rather than being re-upped by the algorithm, Tricky reckons most of the younger fans he’s met on tour have come through word of mouth. “I’ve got a lot of young people in my shows – but they’re not finding me through revivalism, it’s through their family,” he explains. “I met a girl in Russia whose granddad played her my music, because her dad had played it to her grandad who then passed it back down to her. So I get a lot of that, people playing it to their kids or parents.”
That might be because, despite supposedly “inventing” it, the trip-hop label is one Tricky has largely succeeded in shrugging off. “The Bristol sound, the Manchester sound, the Liverpool sound… It‘s just a marketing tool. And one of the problems Bristol has is that we’re so obsessed with the past,” he says. “I love what Bristol‘s done and I love being Bristolian, but people tend to live off of what happened 30 years ago. You get people who weren‘t even around then obsessed with it. But there’s a younger generation of talented people there too, and I think working with new artists is more interesting than talking about war stories.
“It’s great to love the past,” he concludes. “But if you’re too invested in it, then there ain’t no future.”
That said, not even Tricky is totally immune to the nostalgia industry. Last year a re-recorded version of Maxinquaye was released to mark its 30th anniversary, followed by the Maxinquaye Reincarnated tour that reworked what is still considered to be his greatest work. Though in reality, if you ask around, everyone has their own darling. Angels and Pre-Millennium Tension were panned by critics at the time of release, but they’ve gone on to become cult classics. Someone told him the other day that their favourite album is 2001’s Blowback, once regarded by critic Jeffrey Thiessen as “a great pop album nobody liked.” Is there an album he’s most proud of, though, I ask? He furrows his brow and curtly replies, “No.”
That’s not the point, you see. For Tricky, every release has to be better than the last. It’s all about forward momentum. Different When It’s Silent just came out, and he’s already over it. He’s thinking about working on Marta’s next album in October, and with Mitch Sanders on his album at the end of the year.
“I’m not proud [of my music], but I’m happy that it’s there for people,” he reflects. He recalls a moment of ennui once, years ago, while touring North America at the height of his commercial success. “One day I was on the tour bus by myself, smoking a spliff and thinking, ‘Alright, so, I’m wealthy, I travel the world, I can go in the studio anytime I want… but what’s this all about? Is this it?’” But then later that day, his drummer asked him to sign a CD for a nurse who worked on a children’s burn unit. Shortly after, in Texas, he visited a man in a coma whose parents had reached out to say was a fan, and they played his music to him in the hospital. When he was on tour with Tool, a pregnant lady approached him and thanked him for his music. More recently, a girl came up to him after a show in Berlin and said his music helped her through a crisis.
“That stuff is why I’m here, I think. That’s what it’s about,” he says. “All the travelling et cetera is a bonus.” Maxinquaye, then, matters insofar as it matters to other people, but it doesn’t really matter to him. “Being stuck on one album? It’s not about that.”
The glint in his eye flashes again, like sunlight passing over a blade, when he recalls one of his previous managers advising him to put money away for when he retires. “I said ‘Mate, retire from what? You don’t retire from music. What are you talking about?’” he says, still incredulous. He points to Lee “Scratch” Perry, who did a six week coast-to-coast tour of America at the age of 82 – a damn sight older than Tricky is now. “I can understand someone not wanting to tour anymore, or doing press, but retire? That’s impossible.”
You do it because you have to, I offer.
“Well, yeah,” he says, like I just told him water is wet. Like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “There’s nothing else to do.”
Different When It’s Silent is out now.