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Tricky

Tricky

60 articles

Audio interviews

Tricky (1996)

Interview by Steven Daly, Rock's Backpages audio, October 1996

The Bristol maverick discusses his treatment by the music press and talks about being pigeonholed; about not repeating Maxinquaye; about recording in Jamaica and what went wrong with Massive Attack; about Trip Hop and his relationship with Martina Topley-Bird; about his criminal past and his gangster uncles; about his memories of Bristol, the Wild Bunch and Smith & Mighty; and about his role in Luc Besson's The Fifth Element...

File format: mp3; file size: 74.3mb, interview length: 1h 17' 26" sound quality: ***

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Various: The Hard Sell (Earth Recordings/All formats)

Review by Dele Fadele, New Musical Express, 27 July 1991

NO CELL OUT ...

Tricky: Dodgy Geezer

Interview by Jim Arundel, Melody Maker, 29 January 1994

At last count Tricky owes me two stereos and an eardrum. Yup, when the bassline to 'Aftermath' thunders into your life your woofers are history, ...

Tricky & Martina: Slack Magic

Interview by David Stubbs, Melody Maker, 14 May 1994

Remember Massive Attack's languid, smoky, shuffling, bluesy 'Unfinished Sympathy'? Former MA maverick TRICKY has done it again, with the languid, smoky, etc, etc 'Ponderosa'. DAVID ...

Tricky: The Wide Bunch

Interview by Sean O'Hagan, The Face, February 1995

Tense, nervous and paranoid, Tricky has emerged from the dark heart of the Bristol beat with an extraordinary album that is almost as strange and ...

Tricky: Maxinquaye (4th & Broadway)

Review by Dele Fadele, New Musical Express, 18 February 1995

THE SEVERN ALLIANCE ...

[the Phantoms of] TRICKNOLOGY [versus a Politics of Authenticity]

Essay by Ian Penman, The Wire, March 1995

"Machine technology is a type of transformation." Martin Heidegger ...

Tricky: Maxinquaye

Review by Jon Savage, MOJO, March 1995

THIS IS A brilliant record: densely layered, full of barely controlled nervous energy, paranoid under surveillance, at times more intimate than you’d wish – like ...

Red-blooded Chameleon — PJ Harvey, Tricky: Town & Country Club, London

Live Review by Dave Simpson, The Guardian, 8 March 1995

Enigmatic as ever, PJ Harvey returns in red satin and fine form, with Tricky in support ...

PJ Harvey, Tricky: Town & Country Club, Leeds

Live Review by Paul Moody, New Musical Express, 18 March 1995

THE REBIRTH OF GHOUL ...

PJ Harvey/Tricky: Barrowlands, Glasgow

Live Review by Everett True, Melody Maker, 18 March 1995

IT'S ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE to get a fix on these two artists. That this is one of THE tours of the year is indisputable. But the ...

Tricky, Renegade Soundwave: The Grand, Clapham, London

Live Review by Caroline Sullivan, The Guardian, 15 May 1995

Cool, calm and very, very strange: Caroline Sullivan is haunted by Bristol rapper Tricky ...

Tricky: Clapham Grand, London

Live Review by Ted Kessler, New Musical Express, 27 May 1995

SUPER GRASS! ...

Trip Hop: Another City, Another New Sound

Report by Simon Reynolds, The New York Times, 28 May 1995

POP GROUPS hate being identified as part of a scene centred on a city. But if there's one thing bands resent even more, it is ...

Tricky: Just Like That!

Interview by Martin Aston, Q, June 1995

Avonian ingénu Tricky has pulled quite a rabbit from the top hat they're calling "Bristol trip-hop". Martin Aston meets the Number 1 rapper with plenty ...

Tricky: Maxinquaye (Island)

Review by James Hunter, Rolling Stone, 15 June 1995

TWENTY-SEVEN-year-old English rapper, writer and producer Adrian Thaws has been known as Tricky since he roughed up bits of Massive Attack's milestone 1991 LP Blue ...

Tricky

Interview by Simon Reynolds, Melody Maker, 24 June 1995

"I had this psychic drawing done," says Tricky, sucking greedily on the first of the four joints he's to consume in the next hour. Behind ...

Trip Hop: Where The Beats Have No Name

Report and Interview by Stephen Dalton, Vox, July 1995

Trip-hop is now part of pop's international language — but the pioneers of Britain's most successful musical export in years refuse to admit it exists... ...

"Rock died out and then came pop now you're living in the world of... Trip Hop" — U.N.K.L.E.: 'If You Find Earth Boring'

Report by Bethan Cole, Mixmag, August 1995

One year ago we coined the term 'trip hop' for a new, instrumental school of stoned hip hop rhythms and psychedelic wizardry. Since then, the ...

New Faces: Tricky

Profile and Interview by David Sinclair, Rolling Stone, 10 August 1995

"YOU 'AVEN'T got any rizlas, 'ave you?" Tricky says, asking for rolling papers by way of an introduction. The 27-year-old rapper and songwriter — "I ...

The glory days of 1995 — Teenage Fanclub, Björk et al: Glastonbury Festival, Worthy Farm, Pilton, Somerset

Live Review by Caitlin Moran, The Times, 1 September 1995

Britpop may be bland, but the Reading Festival shows we are over the dark days of last year ...

You are invited to the Mercury Music Prize. Dress: tux. Behaviour: rock and roll. Nick Coleman is thrilled to bits

Report by Nick Coleman, The Independent, 14 September 1995

THIS YEAR'S identity branding of choice is the luminescent hospital wrist-tag you can't get off. It has supplanted the dangly laminate as the ligger/consumer's badge ...

Tricky: Uneasy Listening

Interview by Sean O'Hagan, The Observer, 22 October 1995

Hip, maverick rapper Tricky talks exclusively about the dark reality that inspires his music ...

Tricky: Vampire of the Sensi

Report and Interview by Gavin Martin, New Musical Express, 28 October 1995

Forget all you may have read about TRICKY. Forget that he once admitted being the father of MARTINA's child. Forget that he and Björk, at ...

Massive Attack: Unique 3

Report and Interview by Craig McLean, The Face, December 1995

With sales of Protection approaching a million. Massive Attack are going seriously global. They have recorded a love song with Madonna, Tina Turner wants to ...

Tricky: Pre-Millennium Tension (Fourth & Broadway BR 623 CD/MC/LP)

Review by David Toop, The Wire, October 1996

ANY MUSICIAN who debuts at creative boiling point is going to slap into problems before too long. A couple of years of press saturation, blind ...

Tricky: Pre-Millennium Tension (Island, 10 tks/42 mins)

Review by Simon Price, Melody Maker, 9 November 1996

2000 A SPACED ODYSSEY ...

Tricky: Things That Go Bumpkin The Night

Interview by Johnny Cigarettes, New Musical Express, 9 November 1996

After his darker than dark period, West Country imp Tricky comes back from the other side with a new LP, Pre-Millennium Tension, proclaiming New York ...

Tricky: On the Edge

Interview by Steven Daly, Rolling Stone, 14 November 1996

Each year, Rolling Stone looks to the far edges of rock & roll in search of new artists who march to the beat of a ...

Chuck D and Tricky: Conversation Terrorists

Interview by Dele Fadele, Vox, December 1996

It was a most unlikely summit meeting when Chuck D, Public Enemy's motormouth mainspring and founding father of political rap, met Bristol maverick Tricky, hip-hop's ...

Tricky: Pre-Millennium Tension (Island BRCD 623)

Review by Mark Cooper, Q, December 1996

Tricky: no way is everything getting to him. ...

Who Put The Bleep In The Boom-Chi Bleep?

Overview by Pat Blashill, Details, December 1996

PAT BLASHILL TRACES THE HISTORY OF ELECTRO, THE UNSUNG SOURCE OF RAP, TECHNO, AND TRIP-HOP ...

Tricky: Hanger 11, Tel Aviv

Live Review by David Bennun, Melody Maker, 18 January 1997

FRONTIER BASHING ...

Pre Millennium Tension

Report by Bethan Cole, i-D, March 1997

Adolescent angst and twentysomething trauma used to be something of a cliché. But no longer. With admissions of young people to hospital at an all-time ...

Tricky: Hackney Empire/Shepherd's Bush Empire, London

Live Review by Nick Hasted, The Independent, 25 April 1997

TRICKY'S MIND can't freeze long enough to be recorded. Since Maxinquaye's trip-hop trigger, he's been too edgy, too impatient, to stay in the studio honing ...

Tricky: Rock City, Nottingham

Live Review by Tom Cox, Uncut, June 1997

THE END of the millennium is nigh! Most men will perish and the rest will get extremely stressed out and have to take lots of ...

Lollapalooza: Coral Sky Amphitheater, West Palm Beach, Florida

Live Review by Will Hermes, Spin, September 1997

"DO YOU WANNA see the first band, or do you wanna see me jump to my death?" a paunchy MC bellowed from a perch atop ...

The Tricky Kid

Book Excerpt by Ben Thompson, 'Ways of Hearing' (Gollancz), 1998

HOTEL ROOMS ARE notoriously impervious to the characters of the people who stay in them: close proximity to a wicker basketful of complimentary toiletries has ...

Tricky: The Mad Father

Interview by Craig McLean, The Face, May 1998

They used to call him Tricky Kid, now they call him The Boss... He is the overworked businessman with his own label who is to ...

Tricky: The Forum, London

Live Review by Caroline Sullivan, The Guardian, 22 May 1998

Choking on his own venom ...

Tricky: Angels With Dirty Faces (Island)

Review by Neil Kulkarni, Melody Maker, 23 May 1998

Cherub Thumping! ...

Tricky: The Forum, London

Live Review by Ben Myers, Melody Maker, 30 May 1998

PRE-MILLENNIUM TEDIUM ...

Tricky

Interview by Tom Doyle, Q, June 1998

Demonised by the media, deified by the art set, the real Tricky still struggles to be heard above the hubbub. Q parts a curtain of ...

Tricky: Angels With Dirty Faces

Review by Simon Price, Select, June 1998

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE. Exposing music biz hypocrisy or biting the hand that feeds him? Tricky turns virus in the industry apparatus. ...

Tricky: Angels With Dirty Faces (Island)

Review by Nick Coleman, MOJO, June 1998

A fourth album for the Bristolian angst-meister, now removed to the US and working with real instruments played by real musicians. ...

Tricky: Angels With Dirty Faces

Review by Ian MacDonald, Uncut, June 1998

HEROES DON'T last long these days. Partly because the scene is shallow and restless; partly because cynicism is always muttering, "Why do we need heroes ...

This Must Be The Place: Newport, Bristol, Walthamstow, Colchester: Everybody's Talking About... The True Significance Of Location

Book Excerpt by Ben Thompson, 'Seven Years of Plenty' (Gollancz), October 1998

"A recent article in the New York Times proclaimed Newport as The New Seattle..." Caroline Sullivan, The Guardian, 13 December, 1996 ...

Tricky: Juxtapose (Island)

Review by Eric Weisbard, Spin, September 1999

IT ONLY SEEMS like Tricky is making the same album every time out. 1996's Nearly God stripped out whatever commercial possibilities Maxinquaye's paradigmatic trip-hop held; ...

The Drama You’ve Been Craving

Essay by Michael Goldberg, Neumu, 30 June 2001

Michael Goldberg blows back with Tricky... and discovers the new Sly. ...

Tricky: Blowback (Anti)**

Review by David Stubbs, Uncut, August 2001

Trip hop supremo Adrian Thawes returns, restored to health, and helped by guests Cyndi Lauper and Red Hot Chili Peppers ...

Tricky, Lee 'Scratch' Perry, The Mad Professor: Meltdown Festival, Royal Festival Hall, London

Live Review by David Stubbs, The Wire, August 2003

ON PAPER, what a line-up, what a dub melding of nonconformist minds: The Mad Professor (aka Neil Fraser), who through his remixes of Primal Scream ...

Tricky: Return Of The Bristol Rover

Interview by Ben Thompson, Daily Telegraph, 21 June 2008

After exploding on to the trip-hop scene with Massive Attack and as a solo artist, Tricky decamped to America to go through what some see ...

Tricky

Interview by Stephen Dalton, Venue , July 2008

HOME, THE saying goes, is a place you grow up wanting to leave and grow old wanting to return to. The most restless, prolific, exotic, ...

Latitude Festival Review: The Quietus Gets Saucy In Southwold

Live Review by Luke Turner, The Quietus, 24 July 2009

The Quietus bored by Yorke but tentage to Grace Jones, Pet Shop Boys and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds at the driest wet festival ...

Tricky

Profile and Interview by Stephen Dalton, The National, October 2010

THE GREAT LOST BOY of British music, Adrian "Tricky" Thaws has been on an exotic, erratic musical odyssey since he first added whispered raps and ...

Tricky: Koko, London ***

Live Review by Nick Hasted, The Independent, 26 October 2010

Still tripping on the ghosts of the past ...

Tricky

Interview by Dorian Lynskey, The Guardian, 18 April 2012

Seventeen years ago, Maxinquaye made Tricky an unlikely pop star, and made him angry and unhappy. Now, though, he and Martina Topley-Bird are ready to ...

Blunted On Reality: A Journalist Recalls Smoking With Snoop Dogg, Biggie, Cypress Hill & More

Memoir by Michael A. Gonzales, Complex, 20 April 2012

"Most marijuana smokers are Negroes, Hispanics, jazz musicians, and entertainers, Their satanic music is driven by marijuana."— Harry J. Anslinger, America's First Drug Czar ...

It's Like That: The Makings of a Hip-Hop Writer

Memoir by Michael A. Gonzales, Longreads, June 2019

Hip-hop was a different kind of music that needed a different kind of writer to cover it. This is how Michael A. Gonzales came of ...

Tricky: Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

Live Review by Ian Gittins, The Guardian, 27 October 2019

After a year of tragedy, the spotlight-shy producer stays in the shadows during this erratic yet utterly mesmerising set. ...

see also Massive Attack

see also Martina Topley-Bird

see also Wild Bunch, The

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