Is Tricky getting too big for his roots?
4 June 2001

Or is it that the maverick artist just doesn't want to be pigeon-holed

Hunched over a microphone in the charcoal darkness of a crowded San Francisco club one night in April, Tricky is apparently oblivious to the 1,200 people who have come to watch him perform. With his bird-like frame turned away from the audience, the compulsive shaking, and a voice that bores into your soul like a pneumatic drill, the Bristol-born musical maverick is no Britney Spears. "I've forgotten the rest of the words," he mumbles at one point, breaking off a song midway. Not that it matters: in a city that was moved to proclaim 2 December as "Tricky Day" in his honour, all he has to do is cough and the crowds scream.

"I'm not a performer," he says, "and I'm not going to perform for people" (although he has agreed to take part in Robert Wyatt's Meltdown Festival this month). Yet his unabashed flirtations with different musical styles and subtly evolving personae put him up there with Madonna in the "whatever next?" stakes. His music has borrowed elements of everything from trip-hop and rap to rock and reggae, to the point where it defies description. "I'm a wannabe," says 34-year-old Tricky, splayed in the lounge of a San Francisco hotel, scruffy and alert as an alley-cat. "I'm not a rock artist or a hip-hop artist, but one minute I'll want to be a rock guy and the next I'll want to do hip-hop."

His image, which veers from the white-frocked lady on Maxinquaye's album jacket to the tattooed hard-man of Juxtapose, is similarly fickle. "Right now I'm just me Æ no make-up, no anything," says the former Adrian Thaws, cheerfully ordering a breakfast of steak, boiled vegetables and grilled tomatoes and wishing his six-year-old daughter didn't have to go to school so she could tour with him. "Next year I might want to look like a girl, and the year after that an alien," he adds.

No matter what form the man or his music might take, darkness has remained a constant of the Tricky soundscape. From the purring riffs of Maxinquaye to the percussive outbursts of Pre-Millennium Tension, music critics have scoured Tricky's musical canvas for daubs of light and found barely a brushstroke.

In this respect his new album, Blowback, comes as rather a surprise. It's not that Blowback isn't glum: cloudy melodies and asymmetric rhythms abound. Yet the album is splashed with uncharacteristic sunshine, from the punchy pastiche on the Wonder Woman theme to "Your Name", Tricky's cutesy take on the Jamaican ditty "Under the Mango Tree". On this album the sweet and savage collide, sometimes within the same song: in "Evolution Revolution Love", the badass rhymes of reggae vocalist Hawkman Æ "Walking down the street with my little rude gun" Æ are mirrored by "Walking down the street with my little rude girl" from Tricky, the doting father.

Tricky's attitude to music is perhaps best defined by the conflict between manic hyper-activity and unmitigated slothfulness. Working with a syn- thesizer, an engineer, a couple of session musicians and assorted vocalists including soul singer Ambersunshower, Eighties doyenne Cyndi Lauper and Alanis Morissette, Blowback took just two weeks to record. "I'm impatient," Tricky says. "As soon as I've got the music there, which takes two hours, I want to hear a vocal, and as soon as the vocal's there, I want to do something new."

Producing music for artists such as Bjùrk, Elvis Costello and Portishead takes even less time. "It's easy producing other people's music because you don't care about it so much," he says, claiming to have mixed his former vocalist Martina's new solo album in one day.

Unsurprisingly, music-making Tricky-style brings with it a certain haphazardness, a mixture of executing fixed ideas and last-minute improvising. "I don't actually have any idea of what I'm doing when I go into the studio," he says. Pressured by impatience and a quaint desire not to waste collaborators' time Æ "I feel bad if they're sitting around waiting for me to finish a piece of music" Æ Tricky does what he calls "cheating", changing a single word in a pre-existing lyric to create a new line. "I'm not thinking about narrative; it's the sounds that are important. Luckily it usually ends up meaning something," he says (though lyrics such as "Top of my chest/ Tip of my guess" require the listener to take "meaning" in the broadest sense.)

The current pop arena holds little interest for a man who still cherishes the albums he bought growing up in Bristol (the first single he owned was the Specials' "Gangsters"). He's impressed that audiences come out to see him Æ "I wouldn't get off my arse to see anybody unless I'm picked up and taken there" Æ yet has no time for the Top 20. "I hear all this hype and I think something strong is coming, something special. Then I listen to it and it sounds like nothing."

His particular contempt for the "art" of the DJ has been demonstrated on the handful of unfortunate occasions he has been asked to spin. In a Miami venue he managed to clear the dancefloor in an hour, while in Seattle, when clubbers complained that they couldn't dance to his tunes, he responded by, "playing a Specials' album all the way through three times," only interrupting his serial spliff-smoking to move the needle back to track one.

Whether this attitude stems from arrogance, laziness, a misapprehension of the DJ's job or all three, his sense of artistic security arises from a belief that music is at an all-time low, a smudge on the timeline of former and future excellence. "If I were around back in Janis Joplin's day, I'd be like the McDonald's of music. It's just that now music's so weak, I stick out like a sore thumb." He is optimistic that music will change, and when it does, so will he: "When music improves, I'll be forced to get patience and work harder."

The question is not whether music will catch up with Tricky, but whether Tricky will stick around to see it happen. His attitude towards collaboration is already shifting, with vocalists Hawkman and Ambersunshower contributing to the artistic vision in a way Martina never did. "Hawkman's the first person to write his own lyrics on one of my albums and Amber is the first person to write her own melodies," he says.

Both singers are signed to his record label, Durban Poison, and Tricky, anticipating his own boredom with the rock-star lifestyle, sees himself eventually turning impresario full-time. If he carries on signing talent such as Ambersunshower and Hawkman, he'll make a great A&R man. Somehow, though, it's impossible to picture him in a suit.

Tricky will be performing in Robert Wyatt's Meltdown 2001 at the Royal Festival Hall, SE1 (020 7960 4242), on 23 June

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