Tricky – Maxinquaye (Reincarnated) (Island, 2023)

I was about 23 or 24 the first time I listened to Tricky. I was a student in a State university then. I remember that sometimes I was waiting to take the train to go to the city in which I was studying history, literature and classical music reading some alternative rock magazines I was buying near the train station. I was reading also on the train. That time, there was Tricky on the cover of the magazine. It was 1996 and he was releasing his second soloist effort issued by Island Records, Pre-Millennium Tension.

The fact is that I was always going in love easily with paranoid people. I understood this fact while I started reading William Burroughs. The fact that a paranoid is only a “well informed person” was clear to me after reading Naked Lunch. Please don’t misunderstand me. Tricky is not a paranoid in the worst sense of the word. He is because he cares. In the interview on that magazine, he called back the woman who was interviewing him after few days because of the fear she was misinterpreting something he said about his daughter.

Sensitive people is the people I love the most, so I decided, in an era in which buying an album by an unknown musician was a bet – spending 20 euros for a music previously unknown, I mean – to buy a Tricky album, intrigued as I was also by the dark blue cover with that red globe, and completely noob as far as Hip Hop music. Luckily enough, I would say. In those years Hip Hop was, more or less as it happens today with Trap music, an affair of gangs and killings, with the music being as a patinated sountrack to it after losing his decennial potential as music for a revolution that didn’t came.

I loved both Pre-Millennium Tension and Nearly God. I was constantly listening to those albums. Maxinquaye, Tricky’s first record and masterpiece, came only after for me. But those three LPs and the fourth Angels with Dirty Faces, Tricky last decent output, were like pure gold to me. So I was happy to know this year that a re-release of Maxinequaye, fleshed out with a second disc full of reinvented songs and live performances, was ready for october. Curiously enough I bought it only yesterday afternoon, while there was a transport strike and I was, once again, waiting for a train.

For many lovers of rock and punk music, Trip Hop was the first approach to electronic music. I still remember how many discussions I had in those days with lovers of New Wave about the fact that, as an example, The Prodigy were not serious musicians to listen to because their music was completely or mostly sampled. The same thing didn’t happened with the Massive Attack, Tricky first approach to music, or with Portishead, or with Tricky himself.

Taken for a revolution in sound and music, Trip Hop is nowadays the quintessence of nostalgia. Time passes. But put in perspective, even if some critics are telling us that Trip Hop was pure escapism from an unfriendly world, with those slow soundscapes, the use of marijuana – Tricky smokes it in order to avoid his anxiety for being onstage – and a use of the recording studio as another instrument as it happens to reggae and dub – Mark Stewart had a hand in it, so Trip Hop was black music for Post Punk white guys basically – it’s a fact that this style and genre has renewed Hip Hop itself in a few years. No Run The Jewels or Anti-Pop Consortium, nor Dalek without Tricky.

Coproduced by Tricky and Mark Saunders, Maxinquaye takes his name from Tricky’s mother, Maxine Quaye, who committed suicide when the singer was four years old. The album is full of samples reworked until they become mostly unrecognizable – see the sample from Michael Jackson’s Bad on Brand Now You’re Retro – and of an attempt to use synthesizers and effects in order to create a sombre sound, the aura of death is scratched by a use of the opposite voices of Tricky and Martina Topley Bird, a young girl who started singing – and her relationship with Tricky later – when she was 15 – she was 17 years old while recording her vocals for this album.

But, far from easy scandals, the musical relationship between the twos, and in particular the presence as a lead character of Martina on Maxinquaye – differently from Tricky subsequent outputs – drives us up to a gender overturning that is interesting even nowadays. Tricky co-signs all the pieces on the album, but the main singer is Martina, with her subtly raucous but also sweet amd deep voice that creates a nice contrast with Tricky’s openly black intonation – listen to Hell Is Round The Corner to understand better, or Pumpkin, with his Smashing Pumpkin’s sampled beat.

Maybe predestined to be a petty criminal if not for the music – as a teenager he stayed also in jail for a while for small thefts – Tricky entered the court of Massive Attack renamed Tricky Kid from Adrian Thaws, but sooner some of his earlier productions made record companies look for him to make him debut with an entire album. The second disc included in this reissue features five ‘reincarnated’ versions of Strugglin’, Aftermath, Ponderosa, Hell is Round The Corner and Pumpkin that are basically vocal tracks – where Tricky’s new muse, Marta, substitutes Martina, with minimal drums and a few effects.

Nocturnal and pensive as the new reworked tracks are, and quite different from the original pieces so that they make us think of a rewriting more than of a simple remix of the old songs, after them there are live versions of some of the album tracks taken from some BBC Radio sessions from 1995 and from a Glastonbury live concert of the same year where Allison Goldfrapp embellishes Pumpkin and the electric guitars are more preeminent than in the studio versions, leaving us with the feeling of a suture between Trip Hop and the aforementioned Post Punk, that years before Tricky combined black and white music – see Pop Group, Gang of Four and similar.

Between the following ‘rough monitor mix’ there are the previously unheard on the album She Devil and Just for the Hate of It where Tricky and Martina presences are more balanced, as in the following Pre-Millennium’s Christiansands, while Overcome and Black Steel are possibly, net of some d’n’b sensations, more similar to what Mark Stewart, originally coopted as producer but soon defenestrated because the music he gave life to was too dissonant, intended them. Finally, Leftfield remix for Brand Now You’re Retro closes with an interpretation of Tricky from another, different perspective and sensitivity.

If you missed the opportunity or are too young to have been able to listen to Tricky when a teen or so, this is possibly one of the best opportunities you’ll ever have. Reissues are usually an occasion to beat cash for every artist, but this time, as it happened to Tom Waits few months ago, and in a way also to Nirvana with the recent reissue of In Utero, is the opportunity to reckon with a form of art that says so much about the times it was conceived in. Since also Pre-Millennium Tension, as Massive Attack’s Mezzanine has been reissued this way, we hope to see also Portishead or other Trip Hop heroes being re-released this intriguing way.

 

Don’t Go Gentle – A Film About Idles by Mark Archer, Milano, Ariosto Spazio Cinema, 05/11/2023

Filming music is easier than photographing it. Herman Leonard, one of the greatest music photographers, was accustomed to capture jazzmen in smokey clubs and venues, where smoke was taken as a direct emanation of the sound of the instruments. Filming music is easier, as we were pointing out, since you have both movement and the sonorous aspect of it all.

Having a great film of a performance by a musician is always so fine. You can see how musicians approach physically their instruments, how they produce their sounds, and finally many things that previously, while you were listening to your albums, were up to your imagination, now are real in front of you, as something your eyes can almost bite.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to see Don’t Go Gentle – A Film About Idles thanks to a small review in a small cinema in Milano city not far from the train station and the center of the city itself. It was the fourth and final act of a review featuring movies about Kurt Cobain, Joy Division and a documentary about the NY city scene. The movies were introduced by a nice panel discussion held by music journalists, musicians and other people coming directly from the music business. 

Obviously the movie about the Idles was the most interesting since Idles are the most contemporary musical act between the ones featured in the review. They tell so much about what can happen to musicians nowadays, about how they relate to music, to business, to fans and to themselves, and about the present time.

We are, so, introduced in Bristol, a city open to otherness through immigration and love for music like reggae and dub since the 1970s. It’s not a chance that musicians like Tricky, Massive Attack and Portishead, but also, way before them, The Pop Group, come from this city. Joe Talbot and his pals started playing for fun and in the end they become professionals.

This road is filled with mournings, like Talbot mother’s and son’s deaths, great encounters, like the community revolving around the band, and obviously great music. The movie is both enojoyable and strange in a way. It is strange to hear a band in 2020 proclaiming that they don’t like Pink Floyd as a symbol of progressive rock in general, as an example.

This is obviously part of an old script, and if it is thought as useful in introducing Idles’ music, it doesn’t help in understanding what this music is made of. Possibly Archer’s and the band’s idea was to let the music talk about itself, focusing all the interest into the human factor. A winner’s game, since if we all are aware and well known about post-punk, it would have been useless mimicking Simon Reynolds. A musician is not a critic.

The movie cover Idles since their beginning until their first release for Partisan Records with the album Joy as an Act of Resistance. During this first years they gave life to music that was in a way a soundtrack for Brexit, problems with immigration, recession and more intimate topics like the aforementioned mournings, love, friendship and mental health just to name a few.

Hated by conservatives all around the world, even by rock fans who in front of them discover to be conservatives – it’s full and they’re cultivated also by some magazines as such – because of their ‘sloganistic’, or better said anthemic approach to politics, critisiced as a bunch of white privileged men who try to criticize white privilege itself, Idles are nonetheless one of the most intriguing band nowadays.

Because of their approach to music, precise as a razor blade, because of their approach to life, with this attitude made of bringing to light every possible weak point and made a force out of it, because of their relationship with fans, that are allowed to feel fragile and open to each other during meetings and online, they in a way say nothing new in the realm of the history of music, but say something relevant as far as human being in the present times.

When Joe Talbot in an interview reported in the movie says ‘I want to become a better man through music, and so in the end I want to create better music from it’, these are the exact same words pronounced decades before by John Coltrane. And if the music is different stylistically, the importance of this thought is nonetheless that of a person who want to create a virtous relationship between his art and his life.

The fact that this approach to both reality and sound is explicit and appreciated is something not completely new but interesting in a world, that of the art, where we are accustomed to hear things like “political correctness is impossible to manage because we should erase the memory of most of the artists in the world because of their behavior towards other human beings” – think about Picasso and women, or Gaugin and native Tahitians as good examples.

Far from wanting to create a Police of the morals through music, Idles and Coltrane, or Idles and other musicians, like many in the punk and post-punk scenes all around the world, are part of a history of music and of musicians wanting to create a community to make life more bearable for its participants. We sould not erase artists, but also we should not erase the importance of these attemps.