Tricky revolutionised UK hip-hop with his debut album, Maxinquaye. Seasoned music writer SHERYL GARRATT considers his breed of cross-over
TO punks, disco was the enemy. Veterans of the battle of the beat are now a bit sheepish about telling their war stories, but not so very long ago the British music press was split into two opposing camps. There were those who defended hip-hop as the ultimate post-modern music, and those who felt raps which rhymed “brag and boast” with “breakfast toast” could hardly compete with the profundity and angst of indie rock.
The struggle for the hearts and souls of the readers was bitterly fought in editorial meetings, but what never really occurred to any of us at the time was that dance and indie could learn from each other, that there were people out there who might be listening to both. Yet by the end of the Eighties, the warring factions had taken an “E” and made friends on the dancefloor. They had shared a spliff and listened to some dub reggae together. And then they all went out and bought the same pair of Adidas trainers.
Who’d have predicted that rap heroes Run DMC would have a hit with rock dinosaurs Aerosmith, that indie darling Nick Cave would record a duet with disco poppet Kylie Minogue, that there’d be new British musics like trip-hop and jungle and bands like Black Grape or The Prodigy? Most of all, who could have imagined Tricky?
A one-time collaborator with Massive Attack, Tricky emerged from the same doped-up, dubbed-out Bristol scene that spawned Portishead. His debut album, Maxinquaye, was a deserved, if surprising, success: Tricky’s territory is the dark side of the tune and there’s something deeply disturbing about being invited to thirtysomething dinner parties where the soundtrack in-cludes a sensual, drugged-sounding female voice singing “I’m gonna/fuck you in the ass/just for a laugh” or the sound of a gun being cocked repeatedly while a cracked male voice considers suicide or murder.
Lyrically, he explores the kind of territory that was once the exclusive realm of the indie kids, a dissection of his own paranoid psyche, a troubled soul laid bare with an honesty which is far more disturbing than the stylised violence and sexual put-downs of American gangsta rap. Visually, he steals smudged red lipstick from The Cure’s Robert Smith and has even worn a frock. Musically, everything from Public Enemy to PiL has gone into the mix.
The range of his influences is even more apparent on Nearly God, an album credited to a collective also called Nearly God, but actually a series of collaborations led by Tricky and released on his own label, Durban Poison. It opens with Tattoo, an abrasive, messy cover of a Siouxsie and The Banshees B-side from 1983, and a brief look at the past lives of the other collaborators shows just how far we’ve come since those New Musical Express faction fights.
In the Eighties, Terry Hall sang with ska polemicists The Specials; Neneh Cherry was in avant- garde jazz funksters Rip Rig and Panic; Alison Moyet was exploring synthesised pop in Yazoo; Bjork was fronting indie darlings The Sugarcubes; Cath Coffey and Dedi Madden were building up the influences and experiences that would eventually converge in the Stereo MCs; and Martina Topley Bird was still at public school, too young to even listen to the American grunge bands she later learned to love.
It’s a tribute to Tricky’s talent that such a diverse group can make an album that sounds consistent, while still letting the contributors keep their own identities. Alison Moyet’s powerful blues voice has never sounded better than over the hypnotic, stoned beats of Make a Change. Like much of Terry Hall’s work since The Specials, the current single, Poems, is about romantic idealism gone sour and makes good use of his plaintive, world-weary voice; while Neneh Cherry’s Together Now is sassier, funkier than the rest but just as dark. The two tracks with Maxinquaye’s singer Martina are predictable stand-outs, especially I Be The Prophet, where Tricky can even make meditation sound like an act of aggression.
Damon Albarn asked for his contribution to be axed, and Tricky has admitted that the track sounded unfinished. But, unlike Albarn, he doesn’t see that as a problem. He claims that Nearly God took just three weeks to record, and it shows. Parts — like Bjork reprising her track You’ve Been Flirting Again on Keep Your Mouth Shut — sound like a rough demo.
Tricky’s second album, Pre-Millennial Tension, will be in South Africa at the end of the year. Until then, Nearly God should be enjoyed as a series of quick sketches, a set of scrawled postcards from the edge. As a record, it makes for uneasy listening. It’s confused, dirty, messy, difficult and uncomfortable. And in case there’s any doubt, that is meant as a compliment.
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