Words by David KaneWhat Do You Call It? From Grassroots to the Golden Era of UK Rap took me over three years to write. It wasn’t supposed to. Deadlines came and went, and nine months before it was finally finished, I decided to rip it up and start again. Or at least start the start again. Part of that was driven by a change of start date, at first the book begins at the turn of the century a time fraught with tension (remember the ‘millennium bug’?), political machinations, and creative possibilities, where technology and culture were changing faster than it had for decades. But as I dug deeper, I realised I had to go further back, extending the scope to the start of the 1980s, when rap music landed on our odd little island, imported through the electro-driven hip-hop of Afrika Bambaataa, shaped by sound system culture, inspired by punk and accelerated by rave. And one name kept coming up. Thirty years ago, Tricky released Maxinquaye, and that album changed everything.By the early 90s, the excitement and promise of the UK hip-hop 1.0 had almost fizzled out. Dismissed by the media, denied by music industry gatekeepers, and only the most hardcore fans continued to show interest while the US was going through its golden into the gangsta era, attracting a broader—read, white suburban—rap music fan. There was friction within UK hip-hop, as Trevor Jackson, a.k.a Underdog and head of Bite It! Recordings, one of the few labels releasing consistently challenging hip-hop at the time, put it; “Everyone wanted to get a piece of a very small pie. Some UK foundational figures felt they owned everything and were entitled to success.” The energy in the UK had to come from somewhere and sound like something else.Adrian Nicholas Matthews Thaws grew up in Knowle West, a tough, predominantly white working-class area in South Bristol. Thaws was born to a Jamaican father and a Ghanaian-English mother, a poet named Maxine Quaye, who committed suicide when he was just four years old. His grandmother and various aunties brought him up. It was a happy, if unconventional, childhood despite being surrounded by violence; “Where I come from, a lot of people are either on drugs, in prison or dead,” he later recalled. Fortunately, Thaws found solace in music. First, he was known as Tricky Kid, a rapper and sometime member of The Wild Bunch, a loose collective of musicians and artists who were so hip it hurt. They formed in the early 1980s and played at warehouse parties and Bristol institutions like St Paul’s Carnival, Special K’s cafe and the dingy Dug Out club. The influence of reggae sound system culture, punk, jazz, soul, and hip-hop were all present, but there was an unhurried melancholy to the music that was unique to a notoriously laid-back and diverse city.The Bristol music scene is a storied one, but The Wild Bunch — including Miles Johnson (a.k.a. DJ Milo), producer Nelle Hooper, Robert Del Naja (a.k.a. 3D), Grant Marshall (a.k.a. Daddy G), and Andrew Vowles (Mushroom) — were arguably the inception point and ruled the roost. Confident aesthetes, rolling around town on hi-tech mountain bikes decked out in Stüssy jeans and Vivienne Westwood shirts with an uncanny knack for sound. Milo introduced Tricky to the crew. He was a shy and sensitive teenager, but he had a supernatural talent for lyrics–sounding like a troubadour of darkness who had toked his way through a maze of marijuana. The collective dissolved in 1987, with Hooper joining Soul II Soul and Milo moving to New York, which left 3D, Daddy G, and Mushroom to form Massive Attack. Tricky appeared in three singles — “Daydreaming”, “Five Man Army” and “Blue Lines” — from the group's seminal debut album, Blue Lines (1991). A broody, epic sounding and insular feeling masterpiece, it helped redefine dance music and coin a new subgenre, trip-hop–a name almost every artist associated with it utterly detests, particularly Tricky. Both Tricky and, to a lesser extent, 3D rap with regional British accents, which was unheard of at the time, but the intention behind Blue Lines was to “Create dance music for the head, rather than the feet”, explained Daddy G. Yet Tricky was more interested in hip-hop. Tensions within Massive Attack (and The Wild Bunch before that) always seemed to be brimming close to the surface. While working on Blue Lines, Tricky produced the demo for “Aftermath”, a bluesy, smoky single with esoteric wood pipe samples featuring the dulcet tones of Martina Topley-Bird and Tricky’s haunting vocals. Tricky offered the track to Massive Attack as they were finalising their debut album, but 3D dismissed it, telling Tricky he’s “Never going to make it as a producer”. The single remained moored to tape, unreleased for a further three years. Shortly after the release of Blue Lines, Tricky departed the group and began working on solo material at a stoned snail's pace. Although ‘Aftermath’ laid the blueprint for what would eventually become his 1995 masterpiece, Maxinquaye (named after Thaws’ mother), a strikingly original body of work “Which acknowledged and accelerated what was new in the 90s, technology, cultural pluralism, and genre innovations.” As adroitly proposed by author Mark Fisher, a stark counter to the “reactionary pantomime of Britpop,” with its refuge in the past.That Tricky was even prepared to take centre stage was partly thanks to the mentorship of Mark Stewart, ex-frontman of legendary new-wave outfit The Pop Group and Bristol sound linchpin, who met Tricky via The Wild Bunch. Stewart is credited as ‘executive producer’ for Maxinquaye. If Stewart were the mentor, Martina Topley-Bird would often be framed as the muse (Tricky went on to have a romantic relationship with Topley-Bird). But in reality, Topley-Bird, who came from a well-off family with experience in the music business, helped influence as well as inspire the music for Maxiquaye, conceiving the jingle jangle melody of “Ponderosa” and provided an unexpected new take on the lyrics from Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” in “Black Steel”. The legend goes that Tricky met 15-year-old schoolgirl Topley-Bird outside his house, waiting for a bus and invited her to make a song on an impulse. That impulse continued in the eventual studio sessions, where all the vocals were recorded in the first take. Alongside the expected hip-hop, dub and soul influences, there is an art-rock weirdness to the sound, a sludgy filter over the percussion and, of course, that famed dark atmosphere with cracks of piercing light courtesy of Topley-Bird’s soothing vocal. “Let me take you down the corridors of my life.” Tricky beckons on “Hell Is Round The Corner”. Tricky was still in his early twenties when he wrote and recorded Maxinquaye. Yet, he had a pool of life experience to draw from, with no shortage of trauma and complexity, having grown up around gangsters with limited familial affection and often went looking for fights in Bristol’s nightclubs, wearing makeup and a dress. Drugs, sex, dysfunctional relationships, and a broader pre-millennium tension are subjects broached in the record. Despite this heaviness, he appears sensitive as he is streetwise and raw. Two things stand out from Maxinquaye and much of the music Tricky has made since. The first is how quietly Tricky raps, a silently disciplined zig to everyone else's clamorous zag, which demands the listeners' attention. The second is his androgyny as a lyricist; in “Suffocated Love”, a seemingly straightforward track on the inner dialogue of a couple where the man gets the sex, and the woman gets the money, isn't quite what it seems with sexual violence and man's dread of intimacy playing the background; “I keep her warm, but we never kiss / She cuts my slender wrists”. “I think ahead of you, I think instead of you”, Topley-Bird’ teases in response. It’s worth remembering that Tricky is responsible for nearly all the lyrics on Maxinquaye, a morass of gender-bending adventure and sonic contortion. In an interview with Mark Fisher for The Wire, Tricky admits his “Lyrics are written from a female perspective a lot of the time.” This takes us to the fourth significant collaborator on the album—there were others, including The Cure producer Mark Stewart and DJ Howie B, who got burned by the experience, but that’s another story—in the voodoo homage to the mother he never knew, claiming that she channelled his lyrics through him and Martina Topley-Bird. The album prompted universal and hyperbolic critical acclaim, perhaps the most memorable of which was David Bowie's 2,000-word paean in Q magazine. In this, Bowie, in typically Bowie-esc glossolalia, acknowledged the arrival of an heir to his shape-shifting crown (or tiara?) and also recognised that his own game might be up. “Here come the horses to drag me to bed,” Bowie concluded. “Here comes Tricky to fuck up my head.”Despite the success of Maxinquaye—the record proved a completely unexpected commercial triumph, reaching number 3 in the UK album chart, selling over half a million copies since, and regularly appearing in ‘best of’ lists—Tricky’s life didn’t get any easier. There have been battles with mental health, problems with guns (his cleaner’s young son accidentally set off a Uzi in his New Jersey apartment), and a hedonistic lifestyle that almost left him in financial ruin. Most tragically, Mazy, his daughter with Topley-Bird, took her own life in 2019. Like all great minds, Tricky reminds us how noble, tortured, and downright absurd a creature humans can be. And he writes raps as hard as hell. What Do You Call It? From Grassroots to the Golden Era of UK Rap is out now on Velocity Press. The book is available directly from the publisher, all good book and record stores. It’s a book about the evolution of rap music in the UK, when hip-hop landed on our odd little island in the early 1980s. Shaped by sound system culture, inspired by punk, and accelerated by rave, A sound that has evolved from Britcore, UK hip-hop, and trip-hop of the late twentieth century to garage, grime, and drill. What Do You Call It? is also a story about what it means to be seen and to belong to this country. Get familiar with David Kane or head to your local Patta store to get your copy of Patta Magazine Volume 4 now.
