Tricky remembers David Bowie and opens up about mental health struggle
“Alright, mate!” The two words radiated from my phone with an endearing warmth only attained by a hearty Bristolian twang. Far from the West Country, however, Adrian ‘Tricky’ Thaws informed me that he was calling from a sun-soaked Toulouse. As I lamented a grey, drizzly scene in Brighton, Tricky noted that my hometown had hosted his late daughter’s school years and was, in fact, her favourite city. I’d be inclined to concur, but Toulouse sounded preferable on this particular October afternoon.
My path crossed that of the former Wild Bunch and Massive Attack member in the midst of a reissue for his debut solo album, Maxinquaye. The new “Reincarnated” release isn’t your run-of-the-mill reissue, however, with a 49-track spread brandishing live, remixed and reimagined versions of the release’s iconic hits.
When Tricky said he’d like to lay down a few ghost tracks to celebrate Maxinquaye, Universal Music was eminently obliging, much to Tricky’s surprise and delight. “They were so cool,” Tricky beamed. “They just said, what’s the budget? I had that old school major label thing in my head: you know, ‘Us and them’ kind of thing. But no, they’ve been really supportive. It’s been really good.”
Released in 1995, Maxinquaye marked the beginning of Tricky’s highly acclaimed solo career, separate from his prior engagement with Massive Attack. Surely, this monumental record was Tricky’s proudest moment as an artist. “Nah, nah, definitely not,” Tricky retorted. “I meet real young people who come to my shows, and they bring for autographs: Pre-Millennium [Tension], Angels [with Dirty Faces] and Nearly God“.
“It’s mostly those three albums when people tell me things like, ‘I went through a really bad time in my life, and this got me through’. So, commercially, Maxinquaye was the biggest album, but I don’t think it’s affected people the most. If I could figure out which album helped people the most, I’d say that was the one I’m most proud of.”
Despite loving “the fact that Maxinquaye opened a lot of doors, as did Massive Attack,” Tricky made it abundantly clear he’s not one for looking back, admitting that he rarely listens to his old music. When deciding to reincarnate a few tracks for the Maxinquaye reissue, Tricky hadn’t listened to the album for many years.
“I thought it sounded dated,” Tricky told me of his first listen. Then, addressing his 1990s output as a whole, he explained that, after so long, he doesn’t “understand those albums now”.
Tricky revealed that a friend recently complimented his 1998 song ‘Carriage for Two’. “So, I went back and listened to it, and I couldn’t listen to it for more than a few seconds because I just don’t get it anymore,” he recalled.
Despite Tricky’s modesty, Maxinquaye made quite the mark after hitting shelves in February ‘95. Among its myriad disciples was David Bowie, who made a point of befriending the young artist later that year. “He’d been to a show of mine and bought me a Basquait book and wrote me a lovely letter,” Tricky recalled of the pair’s first meeting. “You know, he was a good dude and supporter.”
So intrigued was he by this pioneering genre blender Bowie wrote a short fantasy story for Q magazine in 1995, with Tricky as the central protagonist. “It was a really funny story,” Tricky recalled. “It’s not so much about music, but it’s really interesting the way it’s written; really fascinating!”
Sadly, the friendship was transient, and the Tricky-Bowie collaborative album remains a fond figment of my imagination. “It was all too fast,” Tricky rued. “Do you know what, though? I regret that. I met him, he sent me a book, and then I didn’t pursue it. I wish… I feel like we should have worked together.”
“Things were moving so fast for me at that time,” he added. “I was moving all around the world. it was just a crazy time for me. So I kind of missed out on that opportunity there.”
Returning to Tricky’s transformative mid-1990s output, I began to inveigle a touch of self-appraisal. Despite apparent retrospective myopia, he revealed a cut from 1996’s Pre Millennium Tension as a longstanding favourite. “One of my proudest songs, I’d say, is ‘Makes Me Wanna Die’,” Tricky asserted, reserving additional praise for his 1998 PJ Harvey collaboration, ‘Broken Homes’. “People consider me sometimes as a rapper,” he noted. “But I write songs; those are my lyrics and my melodies.”
Given the recent reissue, pushing Tricky for a favourite from Maxinquaye seemed logical. “It’d have to be ‘Aftermath’, but I don’t know if ‘favourite’ is the right word. It’s the thing I’m closest to.” Released in 1993, the classic track was a kaleidoscopic fusion of rock and reggae instrumentals that would inform Tricky’s imminent debut album.
Although the track was released in 1993, Tricky wrote it several years before, recording a demo soon after with Martina Topley-Bird at a friend’s squat in Bristol. “I sat on it for three or four years,” he revealed. “I actually played it to D – 3D from Massive Attack – and he wasn’t interested in it.”
Had 3D paid heed to ‘Aftermath’, it could have ended up on Massive Attack’s seminal debut album, Blue Lines. Ultimately, fate chose a different path and the single soldiered forth, helping Tricky forge a solo career a few years down the line.
A mystical gent, Tricky is a party to the doctrine of destiny. As it happens, ‘Aftermath’ holds rather sentimental familial connotations. “My aunt used to do tarot cards in Bristol, and I went to do a reading, and she said to me, ‘There’s something to do with eyes which is important to you, and you’re gonna have a lot of success from it.’ And at the start of the song is ‘Your eyes resemble mine.’”
Three years later, Tricky played the demo track to his cousin, Michelle, who demanded, on the basis of fate and the track’s obvious potential, that he put it out as a solo single. “She kept on at me to do it,” he said. “So, I released it myself, and then Island Records contacted me because of that song.”
Maxinquaye derived its title from Maxine Quaye, the name of Tricky’s mother, who sadly passed away when he was just four. The new “Reincarnated” reissue includes new album artwork featuring the only known photograph of Tricky and his mother together.
Considering the reissue as a newfound acceptance of the past, Tricky noted that the mystical lyric, “Your eyes resemble mine/You see as no others can,” inadvertently connotes his mother’s influence on the record. “One time I thought, ‘Where did that come from?’ I didn’t have a child at the time. It’s like my mum’s writing through me almost,” Tricky suggested.
As an early rapper of the UK’s foray into the hip-hop genre, Tricky likes to keep his sound on trend, as the new Maxinquaye remixes attest. “There’s some good stuff,” Tricky said in appraisal of modern UK rap and grime music. “Some of it all sounds the same. In the past couple of years, it seems to be saturated with the same thing. I think it’s gonna have to evolve for someone to turn a grime project into a proper album and make it huge and influence America and everything.”
On the topic of music’s future, I dredged up the all-too-prevalent topic of AI, hoping to unfurl Tricky’s thoughts on the tech revolution. “I was talking to a film producer the other day, and he was talking about AI writing scripts,” he recalled in response. “That’s fucking insane! So you’re gonna get AI producing music, obviously. If you can sell music created by AI and gig with that… Well, that’s insane to me.”
“Obviously, there’s always people who are gonna want to hear real musicians or real producers,” he added hopefully. “But it is kind of scary.”
As precarious as the future might be, Tricky isn’t going to leave any aspiring musicians empty-handed. “You’ve got to find your own sound,” Tricky succinctly replied as I probed for advice. “It all depends on what you want. If you want longevity, you have to find your own sound; not one of my albums sounds the same, but you can tell they’re from the same person.”
“When you hear Jimi Hendrix, you know it’s Jimi Hendrix; when you hear Polly [PJ] Harvey, you know it’s Polly Harvey,” he exemplified. “Sometimes, when I jump in a cab and listen to the radio, you just can’t tell who the artist is, like the vocals or the music. That’s OK if you’re having success and if you just want to be famous and make loads of money. But if you want longevity, you have to find your own sound.”
With last week’s World Mental Health Day in mind, I felt it might also be intriguing and profitable to extract further advice from our musical sage for readers and fans struggling with anxiety or depression.
“One thing I’ve realised is when my daughter died… And it’s not thinking of suicide… But the pain was so much I thought it’d be easier… It’s not that I wanted to die, but the pain was so much that I wanted to stop the pain, and the only way I could think of that was not being here… And I actually thought about it,” Tricky revealed with admirable candour.
“Time!” he urged emphatically. “Time. And you know, it might be difficult, but time does change things. I never thought I’d be where I am now. Three years ago, since my daughter dying. I’m still not good, but compared to where I was is a total day and night. So, I’d say, give it time for change.”
Continuing, Tricky conceded that time’s grinding wheel is of little immediate consolation. “If you need medication, go for medication,” he said. “Also, if you’ve got depression, you can’t be fucking around with weed, and you can’t be fucking around with alcohol. I ain’t Mr Righteous here because I still drink and smoke weed sometimes, but if you’ve got mental health problems, you need to stop. You need to exercise, and you need to eat right.”
Tricky’s daughter, Mina Topley-Bird, tragically passed away in 2019 aged 24. In the months that followed, Tricky endured a pain few can relate to, but which he described as “your soul being fucking ripped out of you.” He told me how the world turned on a sixpence.
“Everything changed,” he explained. “Everything looked different. Everything sounded different. I woke up to a strange world. The worst times were the mornings. I had always thought heartbreak like that would be worse at nighttime, but it’s the morning. I’d wake up, and for a few seconds, you don’t know what’s going on, and then you go through that heartbreak again.”
Initially, Tricky chose a path of self-medication. “I tried the Valium, and I tried weed, and I was feeling even worse,” he said. “I did that for three weeks, and it wasn’t working, so I had to try therapy.”
“It might be for some people, it might not be for some people. But I was so broken that I had to do therapy because there was nothing else,” he added. Thankfully, over time, therapy began to turn the tide, and Tricky seems to be in a much better place for it.
As the conversation wound to a poignant yet encouraging close, Tricky and I agreed that talking openly about mental health can be one of the most effective and natural forms of therapy. I would like to thank and applaud him for speaking so unreservedly on the matter, and I hope his message reaches those who need to hear it.
Before Tricky and I left one another, he to sunny Toulouse and I to rainy Brighton, I asked whether he’d be gracing my home town with any gigs in the coming months. While location and logistics are still firmly under wraps, he assured me there will be a big UK tour in 2024.
With Maxinquaye (Reincarnated) behind him, Tricky looks ahead to new collaborative projects and even mentioned rough plans to reincarnate 1996’s Nearly God in the future, rebranding it as Nearly Good. Who knows what might happen in time?
Listen to Tricky’s reincarnated version of ‘Aftermath’ featuring Marta Złakowska below.
