FEATURE:
Aftermath
Tricky’s Maxinquaye at Thirty
_________
ON 20th February…
one of the most important and acclaimed albums of the 1990s turns thirty. Tricky’s debut studio album, Maxinquaye, turns thirty. Angered and stifled by the lack of exposure and opportunity he found working with Massive Attack, he soon met Martina Topley-Bird. They hit it off quickly and had a common goal. She was signed with 4th & B'way. Tricky recorded Maxinquaye the following year, with Topley-Bird acting as the album’s primary vocalist. There are guest spots from artists such as Alison Goldfrapp. Reaching three in the U.K., Tricky’s debut album was a massive success. In years since it is seen as one of the most groundbreaking Trip-Hop albums ever. Even if Tricky does not like that term, alongside Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, Maxinquaye is seen as one of the pivotal and defining albums of the year. Ahead of its thirtieth anniversary, I will bring in some feature and reviews. Before getting to reviews of the original, it is worth noting the fact Maxinquaye has been reissued, where some of the tracks were reworked by Tricky. Speaking with NME, Tricky revealed why he wanted to reapproach the album:
“The Bristol-born artist (real name Adrian Thaws) is known for co-founding Massive Attack, who spear-headed the ‘trip-hop’ scene along with Portishead and Tricky himself. He released his debut solo album ‘Maxinquaye’ in 1995, which featured Tricky on production and singing with his then-partner, Martina Topley Bird. NME declared ‘Maxinquaye’ as Album of the Year over Oasis’ ‘What’s The Story (Morning Glory)’ and Radiohead’s ‘The Bends’. It was also nominated for the Mercury Prize, but lost out to Portishead’s ‘Dummy.
Reflecting on the legacy of ‘Maxinquaye’, Tricky said: “I do appreciate it, but I can also see the damage done to my mind as well.”
The musician reportedly struggled with the fame that came with ‘Maxinquaye’; with Thaws moving to New York to protect his anonymity. After living in LA, Paris, and Berlin, he is now residing in Toulouse.
The reissue, which Tricky called a “reincarnation”, features five tracks rewritten entirely by Tricky (‘Aftermath’, ‘Strugglin’, ‘Pumpkin’, ‘Hell Is Round The Corner’ and ‘Ponderosa’). ‘Maxinquaye (Reincarnated)’ also features eight previously unreleased remixes, including one by Leftfield.
Tricky said he wanted to rewrite the songs, as he believed the original sounded “dated”, and was inspired to update the album with his musical evolution and current feelings on certain tracks.
“I wanted to take them somewhere else,” he explained. “I’ve had so much love over the years that I have to put some effort into it, the people deserve that. I’m very grateful for the support I’ve had all these years.”
The album is named after Tricky’s mother, Maxine Quaye. She suffered from epilepsy and was placed in a psych ward when Tricky was just 12 months old; her grandmother took Tricky into her care.
Shortly after Tricky decided to call the reissue a reincarnation, he reportedly received a call from a cousin in Tipperary, saying he knew of a box containing the only known photograph of him and his mother together. That box was found with their great-grandmother, who lived with family in Colorado. That photo is now the cover of ‘Maxinquaye (Reincarnated)’. “The timing was just ridiculous,” said Thaws. “It was meant to be.”
The box also contained a letter written by Quaye in the psych ward, which Tricky had never seen before.
“It’s very depressing,” he said. “My mum was saying: ‘Thank you for looking after Adrian, Gran. I know it must be difficult for you because he’s young’. I’ve never heard what my mum was going through, so that really fucked me up.”
Maxine Quaye killed herself when Tricky was just four. His album is a significant reflection on the impact of her loss.
He also spoke about the recent death of his daughter, Mazy of 404, which the reissue addresses. Tricky and Topley-Bird had Mazy (also Mina), who was born a month after the release of ‘Maxinquaye’. In 2019, she took her own life in a psychiatric hospital.
“Since Mazy died, my mind is fucked and I’ve had to stop smoking weed for a bit, I started getting paranoid,” he said. “I was speaking to Martina; she said, ‘When ‘Maxinquaye’ came out, that’s when you started getting paranoid’.”
The updated lyrics on ‘Aftermath’ reference the months after Mazy died: “I see it through the town/There was a friend of mine/Feel it all the time/I might lose my mind.”
Tricky also recently lost his childhood hero, Terry Hall of The Specials (they previously collaborated on 1996 album ‘Nearly God’). “Terry dying, I felt like I had a part of my youth torn away from me,” said Tricky. A month before his death, Hall had emailed Tricky a picture of the pair from 1995, New Year’s Day.
The Specials, he recalled, were “the first band I heard who were like me.”
“They gave me hope,” he continued. “If these guys can do it, I can. The Specials were talking about council flats, going out on a Saturday night, doing the same stuff me and my mates were doing, singing about society. Without The Specials, I wouldn’t be doing music.”
Tricky, who does not normally attend funerals (“I’m not brave enough to deal with them”), attended Hall’s last year: “I felt I had to go, I don’t know what it was.”
“I cried at a baby at his funeral,” he confessed. “I was alright until they showed all his pictures from life, and then I was just blubbering. I can’t listen to The Specials anymore. But it’s the same thing with Mazy, I still can’t look at her picture. When I’m going through my phone and Mazy comes up, I’m like… whoa. I can’t deal with it. Hopefully that’ll change.”
During the recording of ‘Maxinquaye’, Tricky suffered a severe asthma attack, and Hall drove him to the hospital: “He shit himself. His face turned grey, he thought I was gonna die. Luckily, we got to the hospital.”
The artist also opened up about the legacy of trip-hop, which he labelled “fucking stupid” and “lame”.
“It became really hipster and corny, all this trip-hop stuff,” said Tricky, who has historically rejected the term. While noting the recent 90s revivalism in music, he did not believe trip-hop could make a similar resurgence as genres of the time like jungle. “I don’t think it can have a resurgence because there weren’t enough artists claiming it,” he said. “But there’s a resurgence in different ways – Billie Eilish, some of her stuff sounds like me. So that’s a resurgence, because she’s had huge, huge success”.
‘Maxinquaye’ and its biggest hit, ‘Hell Is Around The Corner’, is known for sharing the same sample with Portishead’s ‘Glory Box’ – Isaac Hayes’ ‘Ike’s Rap II’. Looking back on it today, Tricky told NME that this was purely coincidence.
“We’re in the car with two women, one is driving me back to my apartment,” he said. “I’m playing [‘Hell Is Around The Corner’] and she told me, ‘Geoff [Barrow] sampled that!’ Which is crazy: it’s the same sample, same speed, but they’re two different songs, so it didn’t bother me.”
Tricky’s former engineer Mark Saunders (who worked on ‘Maxinquaye’) alleged that Tricky and Barrow had a fight about the alleged sample at the 1995 Mercury Awards. However, Tricky has denied the fight ever happened. “Geoff’s a lovely guy! He’s a real positive guy, even though he’s been thinking the world’s gonna end for the last 20 years,” he joked.
“He ain’t the sort of guy to say, ‘Fuck you, you used the same sample.’ There’s no up and down with Geoff, he’s the same guy as years ago; he’s humble.”
Tricky also claimed that Saunders, who published a blog in 2021 detailing the process of ‘Maxinquaye’, did not accurately portray how the album was made.
“On my baby’s grave, that guy exaggerates what happened,” he said. “He said once that he would play stuff when I was outside the studio, like the guitar, and I would come back and not notice it. Come on, that’s ridiculous.”
Tricky added that Saunders was a “good dude, but a strange guy”.
Prior to coming to a couple of reviews, I want to highlight two anniversary features. Both published to mark Maxinquaye’s twenty-fifth anniversary. These 2020 features are illuminating. I want to start by quoting from Albumism and their recollections and writing about a classic. Even if Tricky has reapproached it, one cannot deny the power and influence of the 1995 release:
“In the mid 1980s, aspiring emcee Adrian “Tricky” Thaws joined the now-legendary Bristol sound system collective The Wild Bunch, who would later morph into Massive Attack. Tricky’s association with the group would serve as his career launching pad, as they featured his signature raspy vocals and haunting lyrics on the title track of their landmark 1991 debut album Blue Lines, as well as two songs—“Karmacoma” and “Eurochild”—from their acclaimed 1994 follow-up LP Protection. No longer content with his relegated role as a secondary contributor residing on the periphery of his peers’ spotlight, Tricky ultimately abandoned his collaborative work with Massive Attack to devote his creative restlessness and passions toward crafting his debut solo album.
Titled as an homage to Tricky’s late mother Maxine Quaye, Tricky’s inaugural long player Maxinquaye more than delivered upon the promise that had been manifest in his previous supporting roles, and heralded the proper arrival of a wickedly talented voice and musical visionary. A gritty, intoxicating, and inventive head-rush of an album, the Mercury Prize-nominated Maxinquaye confirmed that Tricky’s musical imagination was more vivid than the vast majority of artists working at the time.
While the album is primarily indebted to hip-hop, it succeeds in merging multiple styles including ambient, dub, reggae, and rock, making it damn near impossible to pigeonhole, and thankfully so. The twelve songs are dominated by atmospheric, chilled-out fare that sounds like the most beautifully dark and twisted lullabies you’ll ever dream of hearing. And a few propulsive, beat-driven compositions are incorporated throughout to ensure a more balanced, monotony-free listening experience, overall.
What ultimately makes Maxinquaye so unforgettable is that it is an album of marked contrasts that play off of each other to extraordinary effect. The most striking example of this is the intriguing juxtaposition of featured vocalist Martina Topley-Bird’s freshly alluring voice with Tricky’s substantially less polished, unabashedly raw wordplay. In theory, the combination of such antithetical vocal styles shouldn’t engender such an enchanting sound. But it most certainly does here.
Presumably well aware of the vocal gold he had to work with in recording the album, Tricky actually defers much of the spotlight to Topley-Bird, whose not-so-secret weapon of a voice features on the majority of the songs and very nearly steals the show, single-handedly. And though she contributes to just one song (“Pumpkin,”), Alison Goldfrapp also thoroughly dominates the proceeding with her vocal charms, which would figure prominently in helping to secure worldwide plaudits for her five-and-a-half years later with the release of Goldfrapp’s debut LP Felt Mountain (2000).
In addition to its seemingly incongruous vocal pairings, Maxinquaye’s duality is further manifested in its sonic inspirations. It sounds very much like a futuristic record, and remarkably so, considering that it borrows so heavily from the classic soul and hip-hop that predates it. Samples abound throughout the album, most notably on “Brand New You’re Retro” (Michael Jackson’s “Bad”), “Aftermath” (Marvin Gaye’s “That’s the Way Love Is”), “Feed Me” (KRS-One’s “Sound of Da Police”), and “Hell is Around the Corner” (Isaac Hayes’ “Ike’s Rap II,” which was also lifted by Portishead on their “Glory Box” single released just weeks prior to Maxinquaye’s arrival).
The key to making this dichotomy between old and new work so effectively is Tricky’s commitment to constructing these songs as distinctively original compositions, as opposed to the lazily recycled rehashes of already-proven songs that producers of lesser ambition often lean on. “Black Steel,” a cover of Public Enemy’s classic prison-break anthem “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” is the prime example of Tricky’s originality. Aside from staying true to Chuck D’s lyrics (sung by Topley-Bird here), the song’s mix of propulsive drums and guitars sounds nothing like PE’s version, further affirming the album’s pure ingenuity.
Tricky has recorded a dozen albums since Maxinquaye, and with each subsequent recording, he has gradually abandoned the more subdued approach of his debut, in favor of more rugged, harder-hitting sounds. So Maxinquaye represents a bit of an anomaly—and a brilliant one—when considering his catalog as a whole. It’s a fantastic record that requires repeated, focused listens (headphones highly recommended) to fully understand and appreciate its genius”.
I hope there is new light shone on Maxinquaye on 20th February when it turns thirty. It is a phenomenal album that influenced so many other artists. The Quietus published a feature in 2020. David Bennun interviewed Tricky through the years and wrote about how his experiences with the album have changed since it was released:
“Maxinquaye is around an hour long and the first three-quarters of that is left-field bubblegum gold. It opens with a cover version, of sorts: ‘Overcome’, in which Tricky remakes his own Massive Attack number, ‘Karmacoma’, as a thick, unquiet fever dream – and an almost cubist vision of a moment in time that encompasses within the same frame a couple walking through quiet suburbs as the Gulf War rages three thousand miles away. It’s one of two numbers not first heard on Maxinquaye, the other being ‘Black Steel’, the ingenious rock version of Public Enemy’s ‘Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos’. I’ve met a fair few people who know the song only from here, and for whom the original, when they seek it out, is as startling as the Maxinquaye take was then. Between them comes ‘Ponderosa’, dragging its clanking chains like Marley’s ghost. (Jacob, not Bob. There was an awful lot of Bobness bobbing about just then, but Tricky had stranger fish to fry; retrieved via submersible from the depths where weird things swim.)
I notice only now how much ‘Ponderosa’ echoes Tom Waits. Returning to Maxinquaye with ears tempered by time, and with the shock of its newness having long since receded, its sources are easier to spot. Which makes it no less remarkable. Twenty-five years ago, it was possible to believe you’d never heard anything like it before; when of course, what you’d never heard before was this particular adaptation. Which is the beauty and joy of the new – not that it’s without precedent, but that it feels that way.
‘Hell Is Round The Corner’, for instance, didn’t just revolve upon an Isaac Hayes loop, but upon the same loop (from ‘Ike’s Rap II’) Portishead had already used on the exquisite ‘Glory Box’. It’s a measure of each act’s invention that each track seemed fresh and entire of itself. Everybody concerned may have tried to distance themselves from the notion of a Bristol scene – "I was supposed to have invented trip hop, and I will fucking deny having anything to do with it," said Tricky, with understandable venom – but there was certainly a Bristol sound, and we know now it constituted British indie-pop’s last grand sub-cultural flourish before Britpop’s dead hand fell upon it.
"If I was in a band," one usually electronics-averse colleague said of Maxinquaye, "and I heard this, I’d probably think, why am I even bothering?" ‘Pumpkin’ was likely the point at which all those soon-to-be trip-hoppers, who must have thus far listened with a combination of awe and despair, thought to themselves, "Hang on, we could have a go at this." Five tracks in, it’s the first thing on there that sounds straightforward enough to be attainable. A steady beat, a climbing tune, a torchy vocal… and Tricky growling allusive filth beneath it, but that’s the bit they usually decided they could do without. Inevitably, if you had to choose between it and the entire catalogue of things that resemble it, you wouldn’t need to blink, let alone think about it.
It probably didn’t happen that way, though, because the soon-to-be trip-hoppers had a head start with ‘Aftermath’, which thirteen months previously had been Tricky’s first release, causing a multitude of ears to prick up and jaws to drop. That shuffling beat, that slumberous, claustrophobic atmosphere, Martina’s voice flitting through it, deadpan and spectral. Only a year after Jacques Derrida proposed the idea of hauntology, Tricky and Martina created an exemplary musical manifestation of it. As debut singles go, it’s up there with the greatest of them – ‘Virginia Plain’, ‘Anarchy In The U.K.’, name your own favourite – as both a statement of intent and a gobsmacking thing. Something that one moment wasn’t there and the next moment was, and made life feel different because of it. "Just when I thought I could not be stopped," murmurs Tricky at the end of the longer album version, revealing another apt and, in hindsight, unsurprising source – ‘Ghosts’, by Japan.
‘Abbaon Fat Tracks is pure sleaze’; the sly, whirring ‘Brand New You’re Retro’, a semi-parodic and wholly brilliant rap throwdown. ‘Suffocated Love’, which lives up to its title, is yet another blueprint much consulted and never bettered. Because, how could it be? The only way you’d have the imagination to improve on it was to be the person who thought of it, and that person never tried. Then there’s ‘You Don’t’, which stands alongside ‘The Rhythm Divine’ and ‘History Repeating’ as a magnificent, melodramatic Shirley Bassey electro track, despite Shirley Bassey not appearing on it; Icelandic singer Ragga fills in neatly.
Again, I’m struck by how songs which then seemed to spill their contents over their brims now seem so spare and tidy. I’d say there’s not an ounce of fat on Maxinquaye, and it would be true but for the final two tracks, ‘Strugglin” and ‘Feed Me’, which aren’t bad by any measure. They’re the most avant-garde and overtly "difficult" things on the album, and in being so they emphasise just what corking pop tunes are the ten tracks which precede them.
Maxinquaye was an album of its time largely because it made its time what it was. For better or for worse. Out of its time, it belongs to a category beyond that of mere genre. It’s one of those albums whose radicalism is matched by its brilliant immediacy, an inescapable barrage of pleasure bombs whose revolutionary impact is succeeded by an undimmed afterlife. Revolver, Highway 61 Revisited, Supa Dupa Fly, Technique, Maxinquaye. Argue the toss about their relative greatness if you care to; still, you understand the type. You don’t get a lot of those lately, not because nobody is capable of producing them, but because our pop culture is seldom cohesive enough to recognise them. Sic transit gloria Tricky, and all his kind”.
Before wrapping up, there are a couple of reviews I want to bring in. AllMusic had their say about a classic album. One that is not only seen as one of the best albums of 1995 but one of the greatest of all time. An album we will be speaking about for decades:
“Tricky's debut, Maxinquaye, is an album of stunning sustained vision and imagination, a record that sounds like it has no precedent as it boldly predicts a new future. Of course, neither sentiment is true. Much of the music on Maxinquaye has its roots in the trip-hop pioneered by Massive Attack, which once featured Tricky, and after the success of this record, trip-hop became fashionable, turning into safe, comfortable music to be played at upscale dinner parties thrown by hip twenty and thirtysomethings. Both of these sentiments are true, yet Maxinquaye still manages to retain its power; years later, it can still sound haunting, disturbing, and surprising after countless spins. It's an album that exists outside of time and outside of trends, a record whose clanking rhythms, tape haze, murmured vocals, shards of noise, reversed gender roles, alt-rock asides, and soul samplings create a ghostly netherworld fused with seductive menace and paranoia. It also shimmers with mystery, coming not just from Tricky -- whose voice isn't even heard until the second song on the record -- but with vocalist, Martina Topley-Bird, whose smoky singing lures listeners into the unrelenting darkness of the record. Once they're there, Maxinquaye offers untold treasures. There is the sheer pleasure of coasting by on the sound of the record, how it makes greater use of noise and experimental music than anything since the Bomb Squad and Public Enemy. Then, there's the tip of the hat to PE with a surreal cover of "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos," sung by Topley-Bird and never sounding like a postmodernist in-joke. Other references and samples register subconsciously -- while Isaac Hayes' "Ike's Rap II" flows through "Hell Is Around the Corner" and the Smashing Pumpkins are even referenced in the title of "Pumpkin," Shakespear's Sister and the Chantels slip by, while Michael Jackson's "Bad" thrillingly bleeds into "Expressway to Your Heart" on "Brand New You're Retro." Lyrics flow in and out of consciousness, with lingering, whispered promises suddenly undercut by veiled threats and bursts of violence. Then, there's how music that initially may seem like mood pieces slowly reveal their ingenious structure and arrangement and register as full-blown songs, or how the alternately languid and chaotic rhythms finally compliment each other, turning this into a bracing sonic adventure that gains richness and resonance with each listen. After all, there's so much going on here -- within the production, the songs, the words -- it remains fascinating even after all of its many paths have been explored (which certainly can't be said of the trip-hop that followed, including records by Tricky). And that air of mystery that can be impenetrable upon the first listen certainly is something that keeps Maxinquaye tantalizing after it's become familiar, particularly because, like all good mysteries, there's no getting to the bottom of it, no matter how hard you try”.
Let’s finish up with a review from Pitchfork. They made some interesting observations about Tricky’s amazing and seismic debut. I think I first heard the album in the 2000s but it has stayed with me ever since. It is one of the most affecting albums I have ever heard:
“Topley-Bird also brought the lion’s share of vocal melody to Maxinquaye, spinning off improvised tunes like velveteen rabbits from a hat. Rather than suggesting that Topley-Bird listen to his tracks in advance and reflect on what she would sing, Tricky would apparently hand his teenage foil a set of lyrics and send her off to the kitchen to improvise a take. It was, Topley-Bird said, “totally instinctive.” “There was no time to drum up an alter ego,” she told The Guardian. Yet the melodies she came up with are otherworldly and sublime, from the hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck revolt of “Strugglin’” to the disinterested disgust she lays on “Abbaon Fat Tracks.”
These various themes—happy accidents and wide tastes, casual melodic power and genre ambivalence—collided on “Black Steel,” a strutting, guitared-up half-cover of Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” that dented the UK charts. The track started with a scratchily recorded drum loop from “Rukkumani Rukkumani,” taken from Indian film composer A. R. Rahman’s Roja soundtrack, which Tricky had received from the mother of his former girlfriend and to which someone—possibly Saunders—added a backward guitar riff. When it came time for Topley-Bird to record her vocals, Tricky couldn’t be bothered to write them out in full, so Topley-Bird ended up using just the song’s first verse, to which she improvised one of her most powerful melodies, twisting and swooping like a bird escaping from its cage. Techno-rock act FTV, who Tricky had met at a gig, added snarling guitar and Sex Pistols-style drums to create a supremely unlikely—and yet entirely fitting—Bollywood/rock/techno/hip-hop take on the Public Enemy classic.
Maxinquaye was an immediate sensation in the UK, selling 100,000 copies in its first months of release. It even made an impact in the U.S.—something almost unknown for a hip-hop-leaning act from the UK at the time—and Tricky teamed up with Gravediggaz for The Hell EP, cementing a stylistic union with RZA. For an album so rooted in Bristol, Maxinquaye’s reach remains surprisingly universal: Tricky might have claimed that Beyoncé had never heard of him when she invited him to guest at her 2011 Glastonbury headline slot, but without the critical and commercial success of his debut, that bizarre cameo surely would never have happened. Such public recognition came at a price. Alongside the output of Portishead and Massive Attack, Maxinquaye would come to be seen as a leading work of the trip-hop movement, a stylistic tag that Tricky hated. “I don’t really know what trip-hop is, I think it’s bollocks to be honest,” Tricky told Dummy in 2013. “People call Morcheeba trip-hop don’t they? Well I’ve never listened to them.”
You can understand his distrust of the label. Tricky’s music is far darker and more abstruse than the soft-soap hip-hop beats of Morcheeba or Sneaker Pimps; it is far more claustrophobic than Massive Attack’s celebrated trio of ’90s albums; and there is little to no connection between the scorched velvet of Tricky and Topley-Bird’s vocal pairing and the operatic intensity of Portishead’s Beth Gibbons. Tricky had poured his whole life into Maxinquaye and had no desire to see his music watered down by weakling imitators armed with a sampler and a couple of library-music albums.
Even if his debut were trip-hop, Tricky would spend the next few years recording an increasingly bleak collection of records intended to “kill all that Maxinquaye bullshit,” resulting in the noxious paranoia of Nearly God and the vibe-suffocating desolation of Pre-Millenium Tension. With the ratcheting nerves of Tricky’s subsequent albums—2020’s Fall to Pieces was his 14th—Tricky’s star has faded somewhat, and he has bounced label to label and collaborator to collaborator. For almost 30 years, listeners have been waiting for Tricky to return to the monumentally anomalous charms of Maxinquaye, a record regularly cited among the best albums of the ’90s.
They will wait in vain. To revisit such singular territory is unthinkable, like wishing lightning would strike twice with a slightly updated color scheme. Even if Tricky wanted to return to the sound of Maxinquaye, he almost certainly couldn’t. Maxinquaye was based on musical instinct—on not knowing what was right, and caring even less. But chance encounters happen only once, and innocence lasts only so long. In recording Maxinquaye, Tricky inevitably started to absorb the conventions of musical production, slowly strangling the goose even as it laid the golden egg. Fall to Pieces is a great album, agonizing in its wounded depths; but, the odd anarchistic touch aside, it is a fairly orthodox record, one that appears to know all about eight-bar sections, consonant harmonies, and the other musical conventions to which Tricky was once so gloriously indifferent.
Like fashioning a house of cards in a strong wind, Maxinquaye held its destruction in its own creation and its failure in its success: a borderline unclassifiable work that was Tricky in both name and nature. If we can no more remake Maxinquaye than land another first man on the Moon, it remains a magnificent singularity, a full-on solar eclipse of an album that blotted out all precedent to seek refuge in the shadows”.
On 20th February, it will be thirty years since Tricky released his masterpiece debut, Maxinquaye. I wonder if he will share his thoughts on the album. As he has re-released it and reworked some songs, maybe he feels a bit of distance with his 1995 original. However, he cannot deny the album has impacted so many people. A defining Trip-Hop work, thirty years on, we are still talking about…
A work of genius.