Tricky has always been allergic to celebrity. When his 1995 debut album, Maxinquaye, went No 3 and made him a media darling, his horrified reaction was to dismiss the “coffee-table” record and the trip-hop movement it birthed, and to move his music firmly left field to evade unwanted critical hyperbole.
This aversion to the limelight was best illustrated when he was an unlikely guest during Beyoncé’s headline set at Glastonbury in 2011. Trapped in the spotlights before roughly 100,000 people and a TV audience of millions, he froze, unable to deliver his verse. “I told the press my mic wasn’t working,” he later admitted. “It was working fine.”
He made a recent return to the hated spotlight with the publication of an autobiography, Hell Is Round the Corner. It’s a frequently harrowing read, from his revelation that his first memory, aged four, was viewing his mother in her coffin after she killed herself, to the tragic death of his daughter Mazy, aged 24, this year.
Tonight though, more than two decades and 12 albums on from Maxinquaye, Tricky is back in the shadows he loves, figuratively and literally. As is his wont, the show takes place in near-darkness: he is a whispering half-presence, a phantom wraith, slipping in and out of the on-stage murk.
It is a mesmerising set. Essentially a left-field producer, Tricky weaves hypnotic webs of electro twitches, grunge guitar and husky, half-heard murmurs. The opening track, You Don’t Wanna, both samples Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams and is on the verge of slipping into a warped, barbed take on Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit.
Co-vocalist Marta Złakowska is an ethereal foil to Tricky’s antic intensity. On the ominous I’m Not Going, she whispers, “I’m not really into it”, as if succumbing to a wily predator. As he does all night, Tricky paces the stage and performs a nervous-tic mime, wrestling his black T-shirt as if trying to peel off a second skin.
Every song sounds like a jagged inner monologue that has been externalised. It is claustrophobic, foreboding music, and yet you long to dive into it. On Armor, from Tricky’s latest album, 2017’s underrated Ununiform, he pauses his restless pacing to muse, “How strange it is to love!” – as if it’s the first time the concept has occurred to him.
For the agitated, narcotic Here My Dear, performed twice, he flails at the air as if battling an invisible assailant. It is a violent contrast to his cover of Sia’s Breathe Me, which he reduces to a skeletal, glacial reverie. Virtually nothing happens, and it does so intensely and beautifully.
The show is erratic and unpredictable. Halfway through, the musicians abruptly quit the stage. When they return five minutes later, Tricky signals his disinterest during the luscious Overcome, the sole offering from Maxinquaye, by again vanishing into the wings until it is over.
He is a genius fractured auteur, an enigma wrapped in a Rizla. He and Złakowska perform brilliant reconstructive surgery on Hole’s Doll Parts, replacing the original’s inchoate ire with oceanic melancholy. For the encore, he is joined by tonight’s support act, bearded soul tyro Murkage Dave, to mumble through the latter’s I Pay My Taxes (You Can’t Talk to Me Like I’m a Dickhead). “We just learned that backstage, then we come out and done it!” divulges Tricky happily.
It is a confounding night – and all the better for it. Almost a quarter century after being cursed with unwanted celebrity, Tricky remains an uncompromising maverick; a bizarre, bafflingly brilliant musician.
