Tricky

Tricky is Adrian Thaws, born in Knowle West, Bristol, in 1968 to a Jamaican father and a Ghanaian-English mother. He became one of trip-hop's defining voices, folding hip-hop, dub, ragga and alternative rock into dense, whispery, claustrophobic productions. First as a guest vocalist with Massive Attack, then solo from his landmark debut Maxinquaye (1995). "Aftermath" was one of the first things he made with Martina Topley-Bird, then a teenager at Clifton College. He found her singing to herself on a wall near his house. He offered it to Massive Attack, they passed, so he put it out independently in Bristol in 1993 before it resurfaced on Maxinquaye. Topley-Bird went on to her own solo career, including the Mercury Prize-nominated Quixotic (2003) and Forever I Wait (2021). Tricky's kept working steadily since, with Nearly God (1996), Pre-Millennium Tension (1996) and False Idols (2013), and put out his fifteenth studio album, Different When It's Silent, on his own False Idols label on 17 July 2026.

From the notes for Episode 09 · fact-checked Oct 4, 2026.