As he releases new album Different When It’s Silent and prepares for a set at this year’s Green Man, Tricky takes Manu Ekanayake through his life in 13 songs, from the galvanising effects of hearing The Specials and Public Enemy to an abiding love of The Breeders and more
Tricky is one of British music’s most creative and unique characters. Just consider his output over the last six years: after 2020’s Fall To Pieces album he released a 2021 collaborative album project, Lonely Guest, with a cast of fellow travellers including Idles’ Joe Talbot, Maxïmo Park’s Paul Smith, the criminally underrated Murkage Dave, Denmark’s Oh Land and the dubmaster Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, in one of his last appearances on record. Plus of course his recent collaborator, Marta Zlakowska, the Polish singer who’s provided the female vocal counterpoint he’s always valued since they met back in 2017. He directed a film to accompany that project too.
Then in 2023 his Fifteen Days project with producer Mike Theis came out under the alias Theis Thaws (Tricky’s birth name is Adrian Thaws). Next he released a 2025 album with Zlakowska called Out The Way, this time recording as Marta & Tricky. So you can’t say he’s been idle. But if you weren’t following closely you might think he’d been quiet. After his brief encounter with pop fame in the ‘trip hop’ days of the 90s, when his work with Massive Attack and then his seminal debut album, Maxinquaye, showed the world that he was always going to forge his own path, Tricky has generally preferred to stay away from the limelight.
But something happened in 2019 that would stop anyone in their tracks and would redefine how he saw both his music and himself. His daughter, Mina ‘Mazy’ Topley-Bird, with his former musical partner Martina Topley-Bird (his collaborator on Maxinquaye) died by suicide at just 24. “That changed things for me,” Tricky tells tQ. “I’ve never been a pop star really but that really made me want to take the focus off me. But it’s this new album that’s made me want to do my own music again. Alan [McGee of Creation Records] my manager, he’s the one who heard it and said it was a Tricky record. I was going to release it as a side project, but he made me see it’s me. He says it’s my best work since Maxinquaye.”
tQ can only agree. Different When It’s Silent, out on Tricky’s own label, False Idols, is the his most vital project in years, as it marries a rare-for-Tricky male vocal partner, Island Records newcomer and “a Hengrover, a Knowle Wester” Mitch Sanders, a Bristolian ‘nephew’ of Tricky’s who’s the son of one of his oldest friends from his old manor, with music that is by turn heart-rending, viciously punk and absolutely haunting, but always very much from the heart.
As such, tQ sat down with one of Bristol’s most hard-to-pin-down artists to talk about the music that made him. We find him in good form, friendly and focused. He lives in Toulouse in France these days but he still records in Bristol and seems as close to the area as ever. The Bristol brogue that mixes rural and inner city influences is undiminished as he tells tales of living in London, France and New York, of growing up mixed race & caught between Black and white communities in Bristol and of going rabbiting and ferreting as a kid, which frankly we did not expect. But that’s Tricky for you; he’s still capable of surprising after all these years. And he’s still one of a kind too, thankfully.
Tricky’s new album Different When It’s Silent is out now via False Idols. He performs at this year’s Green Man festival, which takes place from 20 to 23 August.
To read his Baker’s Dozen, click ‘First Selection’ below.
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