Bristol, UK · trip-hop

Tricky

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Trip-hop's shadow king — the whispered menace of 'Maxinquaye' live, Bristol paranoia thickened by three decades.

Tricky was born Adrian Nicholas Matthews Thaws in Knowle West, Bristol, to a Jamaican father and a Ghanaian-English mother, Maxine Quaye, whose name he later used for Maxinquaye. His mother died when he was four, and he was largely raised by his grandmother while his father ran the Studio 17 sound system. His youth in Knowle West was marked by petty crime and a spell in prison at seventeen.

He fell in with the Wild Bunch sound system in the mid-1980s, the group that evolved into Massive Attack, and picked up the nickname Tricky Kid. He rapped on Massive Attack's debut album, Blue Lines, in 1991, the same year he met vocalist Martina Topley-Bird, who would become his key collaborator.

His solo debut, Maxinquaye, released in 1995, paired his hoarse, half-spoken murmur with Topley-Bird's clearer vocals and became one of the defining records of what was labelled trip-hop, a term Tricky has generally rejected. He followed it quickly with Pre-Millennium Tension and the pseudonymous Nearly God, both released in 1996.

His music runs on slow, heavy drum programming, smeared samples and dub-derived space, with lyrics delivered close to the microphone and often doubled by a female voice. Over the years he has worked with a wide range of artists, including Björk, Terry Hall, Grace Jones and PJ Harvey.

He has released nine studio albums since 2000, most recently Different When It's Silent, moving between electronic, rock and dub-influenced material with a rotating cast of singers. In 2016 he joined Massive Attack onstage for the first time in two decades. Live, his sound tends to be darker and louder than on record, and he often performs at the edge of the stage in low light.

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trip-hop