Tricky review — a baffling and spasmodically brilliant show at London’s Roundhouse

Artists performing their classic albums in full has long been a nostalgic, lucrative staple of the live music circuit. But it has always seemed unlikely that Tricky would follow that particular course of action.

In 1995, the Bristol producer and rapper (born Adrian Thaws) released his striking debut album, Maxinquaye. An alluring web of slow-tempo electronica, dub beats and long, dark nights of the soul, it reached the top three of the charts and, along with Massive Attack and Portishead, birthed the luscious, mesmeric Bristol-based genre that became known as trip-hop.

It was an unlikely success story at which Tricky took extraordinary umbrage. Named after his mother, who took her own life when he was four, Maxinquaye was a deeply personal document for him, and he bridled at the record becoming a dinner-party staple and what he took to contemptuously referring to as a “coffee-table album”.

His reaction to this phenomenon was extreme. At a London show to promote the album, he enquired of the audience, “Anybody here into trip-hop? Fuck off home, then!” More tellingly, he wrenched his music further left field and moved to New York to escape the commercial success and consequent celebrity he loathed.

Given this unpromising back-story, it was a surprise last year to see Tricky revisit his career-making bête noire for an extensive reworking of the album called Maxinquaye (Reincarnated). Proclaiming that the original record sounded “dated”, he declared that he now wanted to “take the songs somewhere else”.

It was a safe bet that this show to promote the reissued record would not be a cosy retread of sepia highlights. Performing, as ever, in near darkness, Tricky, 56, revisited most, but not all, of Maxinquaye, while comprehensively mixing up the original album’s track listing and subjecting many songs to radical reinventions.

Backed by a three-piece band and alongside an ethereal co-vocalist, Marta Złakowska, he opened with relatively faithful versions of the luscious, pulsing “Overcome” and “Ponderosa”. “I drink till I’m drunk and I smoke till I’m senseless,” he muttered on the latter, the lyric recalling the air of drug-induced paranoia that suffused Maxinquaye.

Tricky and Złakowska were bobbing, weaving silhouettes in the murk on “Black Steel”, his thrilling take on the incandescent ire of Public Enemy, and the sumptuous, Isaac Hayes-sampling “Hell Is Round the Corner”. But lesser album tracks were reduced to skeletal, haunted shadows of the originals, shorn of all hints of melody or warmth.

The Maxinquaye portion of the evening was over in half an hour. Tricky then returned to dispense his usual stock in trade: mumbling in the pitch black, in his Bristolian drawl, over foreboding, claustrophobic clips of warped electronica such as “Vent” and “Take Me Shopping”. At any point, exactly where he was on the stage was anybody’s guess.

A contrary, baffling and spasmodically brilliant evening ended with “Here My Dear”, and Tricky murmuring in riddles for 20 minutes over an incessantly repeating guitar riff. Nobody in their right mind would ever play it at a dinner party. Which will doubtless please Tricky greatly.

★★★☆☆

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