Ponderosa (with Pitbull)

I have often thought that hip hop died on the day that The Guardian called that bloke out of The Streets a contemporary William Blake. Even if Blake had spat lyrics about going to clubs and not the angels who hung out in his back garden, there's a qualitative difference. 

However, due credit needs to be given to that serial collaborator with the baldy. 

Tricky, on the other hand, had a better way of balancing male and female voices than slapping in a polished rap about partying. The making of Maxinquaye (articles about which seem to be the only critical discourse on this brilliant album) always mention that Martina's vocals were first takes. On Ponderosa, you can hear him giving her the lines.

It is almost impossible to work out the exact lyrics (check out the various websites that try for gibberish transcriptions), but Ponderosa is the one that has bits of Sarah Kane's Crave in it ('I smoke til I'm senseless). It's one of the few tracks from his debut that isn't about depraved sex, concentrating on mental chaos ('the mind's a crowd', indeed) and social coercion ('they lead us outside to the cages'). 

Tricky's relationship with Martina, vocally at least, is minimal on this track (as with other tracks at the start of the album). He acts as a prompt, or mumbling accompaniment, but retains a presence. He is constantly in control, feeding her the lines, softly elaborating. Spectral, he becomes her echo, emphasising the disorientation that the dense production and enunciated words offer.

In the hour of chaos, only defeat

Some context: early nineties, the joy of the rave scene was turning drab (bad drugs sneaking in, the division of the clubbing nation into tribes, the state attempting to legislate against repetitive beats et cetera et cetera). More experimental electronic artists emerging, mostly making self-consciously intelligent music. Spiral Tribe still up to stuff but winter of paranoia after summer of love noticeable. 

Closer influence: the soon-to-be workmanlike Manic Street Preachers express joy that Public Enemy refused to work with them, because 'we are shit.' Such awareness soon lost as Manics turn towards the lumpen socialist rock they were supposed to transcend. 

Revival of grunge mad misery and guitars hip again.

Tricky, known quantity. Part of a Bristol scene that had eclectic tastes and hip-hop connections. Worked with Massive Attack and Portishead (or at least shared a vinyl collection).

First blast - a cover version of Black Steel by Public Enemy. Transposed from America to UK, dropping Chuck D's stentorian declamation (and optimistic fantasy of prison escape) with a disorientated female voice. Lyrics half-remembered, repeated. Unlike in source, singer remains in prison and doesn't bust out of prison. Tricky's voice only turns up to sound like a prison warden tapping on the cell bars.

Ruins of hip-hop, in which Tricky retains themes of arbitrary law and paranoia, removing machismo of Chuck D, leaving a woman captive. Dynamic metal guitar races into psychedelia but never jumps the groove to funk or wail

Best of 2012

For an album that takes such care over the details - promiscuously sampling everything from "details of Asian melodies" to snatches of Japan's Ghosts - Maxinquaye has a famously diffident opening line. "You sure you want to be with me? I've nothing to give," sings Martina Topley-Bird, before Tricky demonstrates that he has "some many things I need to tell you, things you need to hear."

Clocking in at over an hour, and visiting more musical styles than the current Top Fifty - Black Steel converts metal into an alienated wistfulness, You Don't resembles reggae, Strugglin' would stand duty on an album of experimental electronica - Maxinquaye never wallows, stumbles or meanders. Held together by a loose narrative - there's a single relationship between two ambiguous characters that moves from discomfort, through erotic dependency into a powerful unity - the album has a similar structure to Tchaikovsky's ballet scores. There are variations, returns to themes, musical quotations and,  after the solos (Brand New, You're Retro, You Don't), a triumphant finale.

Perhaps it's the sinister undertow of the bass - sometimes funky, sometimes brutal. Perhaps it is the contrast between Topley-Bird's jazz inflections and Tricky's gutteral growl. Perhaps it's the honesty of the lyrics - Tricky really is exorcising his mother issues, and the descriptions of sex acts ought to keep Simon Cowell away from appropriating any of the tracks. But the occult magic of the central triptych (Hell is Round the Corner, Pumpkin and Aftermath) remains the most visceral deconstruction of dark sexual desire of the twentieth century. That it is followed by a typical intrusion, the upbeat diss, is typical of Tricky's mercurial humour.

Tricky's roots in hip-hop are not so evident in the textured depths of Suffocated Love or Ponderosa - it's impossible to imagine even the most sensitive rapper vocalising these emotions - but in the sudden lurches of Black Steel. It starts off as a Public Enemy cover version, but drops Chuck D's urgent clarion call to resistance for a more ambiguous repetition. The march of rap into the twenty-first century as the music of drab consumerism or, at best, broad wit or political anger is diverted into a far more English sense of doubt and hope.

Every track becomes a blueprint for a future music, still unheard, still awaiting consummation - You Don't doubles as a statement of confident brilliance and a satire of other musicians who can't even imagine following in his footsteps - and Maxinquaye softens towards the end, Topley-Bird's voice now calling to Tricky across the wastes of crackling percussion breaks and the click of guns. Slow, still, beautiful...

Latitude 2009 Part 2: When Tricky attacks...

I am lost in the woods. There are neon signs on the trees, above my head, proclaiming PURITY, TRANQUILLITY  PEACE and TRUTH. There are faeries from the Royal Opera House appearing around me. I thread my way past a collection of apparently random road-signs suspended from the branches and out into the Film and Music arena.

SonVer have created an instrumental suite exploring alchemical transformation. Accompanied by films that illustrate the stages of a simple alchemical process, they go heavy on the moaning cellos and rippling, chiming guitar, the percussive effects gradually rising into an urgent, martial drumming. They build and ebb, clearly indebted to Godspeed You Black Emperor and evoking far more of alchemy’s mysterious exoticism than the videos, which are either simple narratives on a theme or sparkling, psychedelic light shows. The attempt to merge film and music is as sadly unsuccessful as the quest for alchemical gold, even if SonVer’s extended instrumentals are uplifting and driven, standing alone without the unimaginative short films.

I lost track of Tricky when the clash between his pop sensibility and abrasive beats was resolved into a dense obscurity. He starts off slowly, wearing a dress, backless and black, facing away from the audience and letting his band introduce his deep-frozen rhythms. The set is initially formless, lurching uneasily between heavy rock and his pulsating, erotic bass vibrations, his voice hoarse and fragments of piano slipping in and out of the harsh but muddy sound. A man next to me begins to flirt with a girl in a red tracksuit top. He lights a cigarette and she sips shyly at her drink. He puts his arms around her and talks about his festival in a loud voice. Even a rousing 'Black Steel' can’t distract from his seduction, and Tricky seems to be struggling. He has gone topless now, pacing about the stage, disappearing.

Image: Luke Winter

The man’s friends arrive with shouted greetings. They hug each other, and ignore the girl. I notice her look of utter disgust when, suddenly, Tricky tears into 'Ventoline'. The asthmatic bass takes up the melody, Tricky wheezes out disgust and desire and movement radiates out from the stage in concentric half-circles. The guitar takes up the melody, rougher and harsher, Tricky’s voice floating, bruised on the surface, the dancing becoming wilder. He pauses, the band stops, the only sound the bass, barely breathing. The man shouts out.

The band kick back in, and around me an eruption of dancing. A sixteen-year-old girl in a wedding dress is propelled backwards, striking the 3 friends who slip backwards, lost in the crowd. A stray fist strikes me in the throat, knocking me over two bodies lying on the floor, curled together. Tricky moans. “I can hardly even breathe.”

He strikes himself on the chest. My head goes beneath the line of the crowd and for a moment, the music is muffled, as if I am hearing it beneath the water. The band pauses. Tricky is at the front of the stage, his hands in prayer and he kneels, penitent. The band kicks back in. Dark blue light, Tricky slides into the crowd, surfing above them and out of the hall. The vicious bass still pulses steadily.