Tricky to Perform ‘Maxinquaye’ in London
Trip-hop pioneer Tricky will perform his 1995 breakthrough album Maxinquaye in full at Sundance London, a four-day event spun off from the popular Sundance Film Festival. Tricky will reunite with singer Martina Topley-Bird for the show on April 27th, and it will be their first collaboration since falling out both personally and professionally in the late Nineties.
Topley-Bird was just a teenager when she and Tricky recorded Maxinquaye in 1994. The two were an item at the time, and they had a child together in 1995. She sang on three more Tricky albums in the late Nineties – Nearly God, Pre-Millennium Tension and Angels with Dirty Faces – but has not worked with him since. She has recorded four solo albums over the past decade, and has appeared on tracks by Massive Attack, Common and Diplo.
Maxinquaye, along with Portishead’s Dummy and Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, set the template for the trip-hop genre. After the album took off, Tricky rebelled against his own success and pushed his sound to often deeply uncommercial extremes, performing nearly unrecognizable live arrangements of his hits in concert.
You can watch a video of Tricky and Topley-Bird performing the Maxinquaye highlight “Hell Is Around the Corner” just before winning the album of the year honor at the Mercury Prize ceremony in 1995.