Star's trip in an old direction

"HE'S not one for staying still, Tricky; not even when he's dog tired and jetlagged.

Trip hop star Tricky's latest album has taken him back to the touchstones of his music career. Picture: Vanessa Hunter

"HE'S not one for staying still, Tricky; not even when he's dog tired and jetlagged.

The 40-year-old English muso and producer fidgets in his seat, uncomfortable, perhaps, with being grilled in a Sydney hotel suite about his career resurrection five years after his previous album Vulnerable; uncomfortable, as he has always been, with the notion of being a rock star.

The working-class Bristol boy made good has done his best to stay clear of the media spotlight since his debut album Maxinquaye thrust him there 13 years ago, and he has done it in a variety of ways.

He shifted cities several times, from Bristol to London to New York to Los Angeles. He is about to move back to London. Along with these location changes, his music has tripped and hopped in new, multifaceted and less commercially successful directions since that landmark debut.

He has also acted, written and produced music for television, collaborated with everyone from the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Alanis Morissette, gone out with Bjork, started his own record label, Brown Punk, and found time to attend one or two social functions in LA. As he says, "There wasn't a club or party I couldn't get into."

After such a long lay-off, the party could easily have been over for Tricky were it not for Knowle West Boy, the new album that has not only revived the interest of fans and critics, but has also taken him back to the touchstones of his music career and to his English origins.

It has also brought him to Australia for a tour that began in Sydney last night and which includes an appearance at this weekend's Splendour in the Grass Festival in Byron Bay, NSW.

"Usually I do an album and it has nothing to do with the one before," he says. "This one I think has something to do with all of them."

Knowle West is the Bristol council estate where the young Adrian Thaws grew up. His father left home before he was born and his mother, Maxine Quaye, committed suicide when he was four. Raised by his two grandmothers, Tricky learned the importance of family, of community, and about the day-to-day struggle of life on the poverty line. After years of wandering, escaping, exploring and collaborating around the world, he has come back to those roots.

"You lose yourself to a certain extent," he says of his US adventures, particularly of his years in New York, where, despite his social nature and the respect of local musicians, he spent a lot of time on his own.

"Music is a great thing, a great opportunity with travelling and everything, but you kind of forget who you are. It's hard to remember the good things. You start to change your priorities then, when you start flying around the world. I've changed and I've taken some things for granted, which is not always a good thing."

The new album, he says, is his way of not only satisfying his fan base with what he calls a "more accessible" work, but to acknowledge his past. "It's like everything I've done put on to one album."

Albums such as Nearly God (1996), Pre- Millennium Tension (also 1996), Angels With Dirty Faces (1998) and Blowback (2001), featuring various female lead vocalists, maintained Tricky's chart presence on both sides of the Atlantic. Vulnerable (2003), however, while more stylistically attuned to his startling debut, was his least successful work.

Knowle West Boy, with songs such as the album's centrepiece, Council Estate, and School Gates (about teenage pregnancy), revisits his youth and the musical elements -- a mix of ambient electronica, rap, reggae, punk and soul -- that made Maxinquaye and the output of Bristol's burgeoning trip hop fraternity (Massive Attack, Portishead) so innovative and exciting in the early to mid 1990s.

"Knowle West was five generations of my family," he continues. "We all went to the same school. One grandmother lived here, the other lived across the road. All my life was about family. There wasn't a day I didn't see my grandmother, my cousins, my aunts and uncles. I didn't know anything else. It's a poor area but we didn't know we were poor."

From these humble beginnings Tricky found his way into that hotbed of Bristol talent, first hanging out with the Wild Bunch, a sound system crew that later blossomed into Massive Attack. Later, having appeared on Massive Attack's first two albums, he made demos with female vocalist Martina Topley Bird, scored a recording deal and released Maxinquaye in 1995 to international acclaim.

Fame didn't suit his sensibilities, however. The hip hop scene in which he had immersed himself prided itself on anonymity, on being underground.

"Maxinquaye came out, it goes straight into the charts and the next thing you know I'm famous," he says, incredulous even now. "I came from the rap era when you were supposed to be undercover, not like today, where it's pop. Back in the day it was about being heard and not being seen. It was underground and it was cool. That's what I thought I was going to do, an underground album. I wanted to do something that had more of a 'f..k you' punk attitude. Next thing you know I'm on the front of The Sun with Bjork."

Tricky's relationship with the Icelandic pop star was brief and mostly hidden from the press, but it was the media's hunger for their story that led to his fleeing to New York.

"I loved the energy of New York, but I spent a lot of my time on my own," he says. "That's the time when I think I changed a bit. I was lost in the middle of this big place. I didn't really know anybody there at all. Then I met a girl and I stayed there and my family would come and visit me, but it was almost like I didn't know what I was doing.

"I thought I was going there for the right reasons, but really I was going to escape from the English press. It was like separating myself from people, including my family. Instead of calling them every day I called them once a month, once every two months, once every three months. I got more and more away from Bristol, to the point where I didn't ever want to go back there. It's only in the past year that I have gone back there.

"Obviously," he says, "I was running from something, but doing this album has brought it back ... some of the best times of my life, with all my family there."

While this latest venture delves into his past, Tricky is by no means about to rest on his laurels, nor is he completely happy with how Knowle West Boy has turned out.

"Not totally," he says. "It has touched the people who have been listening to me, but I don't think it's as progressive as some of the other albums I've done. People are saying this is the best album I've ever done, better than Maxinquaye. Maxinquaye was new music, totally. This is my music, but more accessible."

His next album, partly completed, will be more urban and beats-oriented, he says.

His pet project, however, is a movie, set for release early next year, which began as a proposed documentary on 12 of the artists appearing on a compilation album of Brown Punk artists. Instead it turned into what he calls a guerilla feature film, shot on location, mainly impromptu, in Europe and the US, featuring Elliott Gould and an otherwise inexperienced cast of actors. It's a film "put together like a jigsaw", he says.

His enthusiasm for this project leaves his jetlag for dead as he gesticulates wildly about the making of it.

He's happy about his place in music, too. He still doesn't crave attention, but he's more comfortable, more appreciative even, of what he has achieved.

"Realistically, this ain't going to last forever," he says. "I see it as being lucky now -- rather than being a stress -- travelling around the world and to have the job I have. I could be a construction worker or something, so I'm very lucky."

Tricky's Australian tour continues in Melbourne tonight, Splendour in the Grass Festival in Byron Bay on Saturday and Brisbane on Sunday.