Tricky - reviews, interviews, retrospectives

the making of Tricky's Maxinquaye 
 Spin feature package on the Best Albums of the Nineties
1999
by Simon Reynolds

Although all but one of its tracks were recorded in London, Maxinquaye has
everything to do with Tricky's home town Bristol. Mark Stewart, ex-frontman of
avant-funk legends The Pop Group, traces trip hop's hybrid sound back to the
city's subcultural "interbreeding" in the early Eighties. "In Bristol, all the
different ghettos were mixing-- we'd go to reggae 'blues' parties, industrial
punk events, and hip hop jams at this club called The Dugout. Back then, Bristol
was actually more connected with New York's rap scene than even London was."

Through his friendship with The Wild Bunch (the DJ collective that evolved into
Massive Attack) Stewart became a mentor to Tricky. It was Stewart who first
pushed Tricky onstage (at a Smith & Mighty show), and who encouraged him to
start a career outside Massive Attack. "He's my chaos," says Tricky. "When
people say I'm weird, I say 'you've got to hang around Mark'. See, he's not in
society--he lives out of a suitcase which contains, like, a jar of mayonnaise,
cassettes, and articles clipped out of magazines. He lived with me for two
months and got me chucked out of my flat!" It was while they were room mates
that Stewart persuaded Tricky to scam funding off Massive Attack's management
for some solo recording. "His idea was to spend most of it on booze!" laughs
Tricky. "So we got them to send us 600 quid, drank half of it and used the rest
on studio time." The result was "Aftermath", a downtempo drift of "hip hop
blues" that eventually became Tricky's debut single. Stewart was "executive
producer, really", says Tricky. The track came together haphazardly; Stewart
remembers the session as "just me and Tricks messing about on an 8 track,"
building a groove out of looped beats and samples that Tricky pulled from "some
guy's pile of records". Outside his house, Tricky saw Martina Topley-Bird--then
a schoolgirl in uniform--waiting for a bus, and on impulse he invited her to
sing on the track. "I laid down a guide vocal for her to sing over, but we
decided to keep my voice in, 'cos it sounded haunting." This slightly
out-of-synch pairing of Martina's dulcet croon and Tricky's bleary rapping
became the model for much of Maxinquaye. There was a fourth collaborator on
"Aftermath"; Tricky believes he channelled the post-apocalyptic scenario lyrics
from his mother, who died when he was four. "I found out later that she used to
write words, poetry, but never showed them to anybody."

Tricky offered "Aftermath" to Massive, who were still pulling together their
1991 debut Blue Lines. But, chuckles Tricky, the band's 3D "told me 'it's shit,
you're never going to be a producer". "Aftermath" stayed on cassette for three
years, unreleased; Tricky also fell out of touch with Martina. After Blue Lines
came out, Tricky was in limbo, living on a retainer wage from Massive but doing
nothing. "All I did was smoke weed and drink, hang around in bars, and go to
clubs from Wednesday to Sunday." He sank into a torpid slough of despond,
aggravated by marijuana-induced paranoia; after an all-night session, he'd
sometimes see demons in his living room.

This dark period inspired Tricky'd next recording, "Ponderosa," with lyrics like
"I drown myself in sorrow" and references to "different levels of the devil's
company". "Ponderosa" was one of a number of tracks recorded in London with
engineering wizard Howie B, after Tricky had procured some demo time off Island
Records. "Tricky was living with me and my girlfriend Harriet for a while,"
remembers Howie. "Kippers for breakfast, and him kipping on a couch in the front
room." The drunkenly swaying, metallic percussion of "Ponderosa" was "inspired
from Indian music, bhangra, that sort of tabla feel," he says, while the song's
ultra-morose atmosphere, he speculates, stemmed from "Tricky being in flux with
Massive, not knowing if he was in the band any more".

Howie B. believed that he was set to be Tricky's partner in the album project,
but management conflicts led to "a legal nightmare" and resulted in almost an
album's worth of tunes being stranded in limbo. Although "Ponderosa" helped
clinch Tricky's deal with Island, Howie was left in the cold. "I got shagged, I
walked away with a sour taste in my mouth." Meanwhile, Tricky bought a home
studio and started work on the album in Harlesden in North West London, where he
and Topley-Bird were ensconced as house mates, although they barely knew each
other. "It was a spacy time," Tricky recalls. He'd moved from Bristol to a town
where he knew hardly anybody, and "I got so into making the record, I cut people
off, stopping using the phone." Aggravating his desolate Harlesden surroundings
and isolation, Tricky was listening to a glum soundtrack--Billy Holliday, The
Geto Boys and his boyhood favorites The Specials. The "concrete bleak sound" of
Specials classics such as "Ghost Town" is just one thread in Maxinquaye's
tapestry. There's the obvious rap ancestry: the cinematic hip hop noir of Erik B
& Rakim's "Follow The Leader", Public Enemy (Tricky hailed Chuck D as "my
Shakespeare" and got Martina to sing a gender-bending indie-rock makeover of
PE's "Black Steel"). But Maxinquaye is also steeped in the influence of English
art-rock and post-punk weirdos---Bowie, Gary Numan, Japan, Peter Gabriel, and
Kate Bush ("I think she's in the same league as Bob Marley and John Lennon,"
Tricky gushes). Even more unlikely, Tricky claims that the gorgeous aural
malaise of "Abbaon Fat Tracks" got its curious title because "it reminded me of
Abba-- Abba fucked up, and with phat beats."

An enigmatic tribute to his mother Maxine Quaye, the album's title was
originally intended as Tricky and Martina's collective band name until the
rapper capitulated to record company pressure and agreed to record under his nom
de microphone. Released in 1995 to massive acclaim, Maxinquaye worked
simultaneously as an autobiographical account of one man's struggle and as a
wider allegory; the record captured the era's pre-millenial tension and
sociocultural deadlock without ever making an overtly political statement, let
alone anything as crass as a protest song. Evoking the orphaned drift of the
Nineties just as Sly Stone's 1971 There's A Riot Goin' On expressed the caged
and curdled idealism of the post-counterculture moment, Maxinquaye seemed to be
about the inability of Tricky's generation to imagine utopia, let alone reach it
or build it. "We're all fucking lost!", Tricky told me at the time. "I can't see
how things are gonna get better. I think we have to de stroy everything and
start again. I can't pretend I've got the answers. Bob Marley, he could write
songs about freedom and love. I'm just telling the truth that I'm confused, I'm
paranoid, I'm scared, I'm vicious, I'm spiteful." Yet despite it's unrelentingly
gloomy vision, Maxinquaye is ultimately a redemptive experience. The best album
of the decade?

TRICKY: ENTROPY IN THE UK 
essay about Maxinquaye
director's cut version - Village Voice, 1995

by Simon Reynolds

    From rhythm-and-blues to house, Britain invariably comes

up with its own spin on whatever Black America originates,

often following it up by invading White America.  Not with

rap, though.  After the pathos of early UK attempts at rap

(forever symbolised, in my mind, by the Anglicised moniker of

Derek B), things have improved somewhat with such solid

Public Enemy-modelled crews as Gunshot and Fun-Da-Mental. But

none of these "homegrown rap" units have managed to matter in

their own land, let alone made an impression in America.

    For various reasons, hip hop has never achieved the focal

cultural role for black British youth that is has for

African-Americans.  If you want to make a really strident

anti-assimilationist statement of blackness in the

UK, you re-affirm your Caribbean roots via dub or dancehall,

become conscious Rasta or rude-boy raggamuffin.  Hip hop, a

US import, can't compete with the recreation of Jamaica as an

internal colony within the UK.,

     Which is not to say that hip hop hasn't had a major

impact on the British subculturescape, just that it's been

one of many imports (soul, jazz-funk, dub, Chicago house,

Detroit techno) to take its place in a spectrum of 'street

sounds'. When acid house hit in 1988, the first generation of

British B-boys, like just about everybody else, were swept up

in the rave fervour; because of Ecstasy, but also 'cos

aciiiied's futurism eclipsed a hip hop that was already

retreating to trad R&B grooviness.  By the early '90s, the

hip hop influence reasserted itself, but through rave as

opposed to against or outside it.  This new style (techno's

electronics plus hip hop's breakbeats and b-b-b-bass) was

called 'hardcore', then 'jungle', then 'drum & bass'.  Drum &

bass is the UK finally coming up with its own spin on hip

hop, by working from a neglected lineage: the phuturism of

electro, the sampladelic wizardry of Mantronix, Steinski's

cut-up collage.  Suppressing the verbals and storytelling

side of rap, drum & bass producers have developed a science

of breakbeats (multiple loops, weird treatments), a veritable

rhythmic psychedelia.  Meanwhile US rap sounds more and more

'plausible' every day, as producers use real musicians and

draw from an ever more circumscribed range of approved '70s

soul & funk samples.

     Elsewhere in Britain--the West Country port of Bristol--

hip hop had become an element in a new sound-system culture,

descended from dub but more ecumenical, drawing from a wider

range of 'deep' musics (soul, jazz-fusion, reggae,

soundtracks, ambient) .  Where London jungle is inner city

music, Bristol's sound-with-no-name is inner-spatial: feed-

your-head, head-nodding fare oriented towards LP's rather

than 12 inches. Hence album artists like Massive Attack,

Portishead, Earthling and Tricky, plus Bristol-in-spirit

producers like DJ Shadow, a white Californian kid who

releases 12 inch singles that sometimes last as long as

albums, via London's Mo' Wax label.  The question of whether

this "trip hop" is entity or figment has incited fierce

debate; personally I think the term does the job of pegging a

hazy-round-the-edges but distinct area of post-rap activity

that's 1/ mostly UK in origin and certainly UK in

critical/commercial favour 2/ decidely out-of-synch with

what's selling in America.  'Trip hop' is often instrumental;

when there are vocals, they are sung as often as rapped; when

there are raps they tend to be sotto voce soliloquies as

opposed to ego-projectile tantrums.

     For all their origins in B-boy culture, jungle and trip

hop share a crucial difference from their estranged US

cousin: race is not the crucial determinant of unity.  Trip

hop and drum & bass are full of multiracial crews and

black/white duos; all-white practioners (Portishead in trip

hop, Droppin' Science and Omni Trio in drum & bass, to name

just a few) don't have to justify themselves like their rare

US equivalents do.  I'm not saying that Britain is a paragon

of racial tolerance and integration, just that there's a

generation who grew up in the '80s who speak the same argot-

alloy of Cockney slang, Jamaican patois and imported B-

boyisms, and who were nourished by a thoroughly miscegenated

aural diet. And so, on their 1991 album "Blue Lines" Massive

Attack cite Public Image Limited and Mahavishnu Orchestra as

influences alongside Joe Gibbs and Marley Marl, while art-

core junglist Goldie of Metalheads digs black (Miles Davis,

Detroit techno-head Carl Craig) and white (David Sylvian,

Brian Eno) alike.

     Racially, stylistically, sexually, Tricky is one

slippery fellow. You can't pin down his meaning or his music,

and that's the way he wants it. "You say what is dis?/mind

your bizness?" he taunts the listener at one point on his

awesome debut "Maxinquaye" (Fourth & Broadway).  He's

actually rubbing your nose in the perplexity aroused by

the perturbing "Suffocated Love", but it could just as well

serve as an epigram for the entire album, a statement of

malignant intent.  "Maxinquaye" hybridises club music and

bedroom music, black and white, rap and sung-melody,

sampladelic textures and real-time instrumentation; it sucks

you into the poly-sexual, trans-generic, mongrelized

mindspace inside Tricky's skull. How did he get 'here'?  I

claimed earlier that race is not the signifier of belonging

when it comes to trip hop and jungle; instead, it's a shared

open-ness to technology and to drugs.  It's the drug/tech

interface that is Tricky's enabler, the boundary-blurring

agent. (It's also his psychic ruination, but later for

that....)

    Throughout 'Maxinquaye', Tricky's words are as smeared

and raggedly enunciated as his textures.  For much of the

album, he hides behind the mesmering Martina, either ceding

the spotlight to her or literally shadowing her vocals,

lurking low in the mix and repeating the words in a slurred

mumble, just a little out of synch.  When he does take the

centrestage, Tricky talks in forked-tongues, double-backs,

evades definition. You can see why he would go on record as a

fan of Kurt Cobain, the king of incoherence, and Polly Jean

Harvey, provacateuse non pareil. Like them, he's into gender-

bending; on the cover of the "Overcome" EP he's wearing a

wedding gown and smeared lipstick, and clutching a pistol in

each hand, while Martina plays drag king as Tricky's groom.

     Shades of the video "Boys Keep Swinging", here, and at

one point I thought "the black Bowie" would be nice'n'corny

tag for Tricky. Actually, early Roxy is better as semi-

spurious reference point, for Tricky is a bit like Bryan &

Brian in one body: as a soundscape gardener, Tricky puts the

'psycho' into Eno's 'fictional psycho-acoustic space', while

he easily matches Ferry's reptilian creepiness and facility

for dissecting affairs of the heart using the most cruelly

inappropriate metaphors as his surgical implements.

"Overcome", sung by Martina, and "Suffocated Love", sneered

by Tricky, could be two sides of the same "not exactly

lovers" love-story; kissing as symbol of intimacy-kept-at-

arms-length appears in both songs, with the former's ""don't

want to be on top of your list/never been properly kissed"

and the latter's ""I keep her warm but we never kiss". On

"Overcome", Martina's voice--which seems to crumble in her

mouth like shortcake---is at its most wanly seductive even as

she fends off all boarders: "sure you want to be with

me?/I've got nothing to give...for now emotional ties/they

stay severed".  On the surface, "Suffocated Love" sounds more

upful than the clammy, clingy "Overcome". But Tricky's

gloating, poisonous delivery of the love/hate lyric is so

conflicted and contradiction-riven that you feel nauseous.

 Rhyming "spend your life with me" and 'stifle me",

"Suffocated" is up there with the Sex Pistols' "Submission"

and Nirvana's "Heart-Shaped Box" as a song about the

desire/dread of feminine engulfment.

     "Abbaon Fat Tracks" (quel title!) is even more

unnerving. One minute, Martina's the all-healing mother,

promising "fuck you in/tuck you in/suck you in", the next

she's the sadist threatening "fuck you in the ass/just for a

laugh"--and all in the same listless, crumpled, ghost-of-her-

former self croon, framed by hobbled guitar like the missing

link between 'Shaft' and Keith Levene.  Suck or be sucked:

"Maxinquaye" is all about voracious, oral need,  about just

how far people will go to fill that psychic, void. Hence a

song-title like "Feed Me", or a couplet like "my brain thinks

bomb-like/beware of our appetite": a limitless hunger that

can be extroverted into limitless violence, just as in the

middle of "Suffocated Love" Tricky abruptly shifts from horny

reverie to the Cypress Hill catchprhase "I could just kill a

man".

     For the most part, Tricky directs his rage against

himsel. "Ponderosa" is a grim tale of alcohol and the demon

weed, of addiction as a journey through "different levels of

the Devil's company".  Over clanking, lurching percussion

redolent of Tom Waits 'Swordsfishtrombones, Martina intones

Tricky's black-humorous wordplay--"underneath the weeping

willows/lies a weeping wino", "I drown myself in sorrow"--

while Tricky's backing vocals consist of stoned grunts and

asthmatic exhalations.

     As with the horrorcore rap crews, Tricky's

blunted'n'paranoid anxiety sometimes detaches itself from the

particular and swells into a cosmic, millenarian dread. Hence

titles like "Hell Is Round The Corner", where the svelte

orchestral lushness of Isaac Hayes' "Ike's Rap II" (as also

borrowed by Portishead for "Glory Box") is hollowed out by

a vocal sample slowed to a languishing 16 r.p.m basso-

profundissimo that sounds impossibly black-and-blue.  And

like "Aftermath", where Tricky trumps the morbid fixations of

Gravediggaz, Jeru et al, with a song he's said is an attempt

to see through the eyes of the dead.  Pivoting around a

pained flicker of wah-wahed guitar (on the "Aftermath" EP,

one mix is subtitled "Hip Hop Blues") and a wraith-like

flute, Tricky's post-apocalyptic panorama harks back to the

orphanned, desolate expanse of The Tempations' "Papa Was A

Rolling Stone" and Miles Davis'"He Loved Him Madly" (an elegy

for Duke Ellington).

     Where "Aftermath" seems to find a serene, ghostly

beauty in the depopulated, devastated cityscape, "Strugglin'"

is grimmer because it refuses the lure of entropy, won't

succumb to death-wish.  Its fitful, stumbling beat--whose

sampled components comprise a creaking door, vinyl crackle,

waterdrips and the bloodcurdling sound of a clip being loaded

into a gun--make "Strugglin'" the most disorientating track

on a relentlessly experimental record.  But it's Tricky's

words--blearily confessing how he's "exhausted by the mundane

simplicity" and spooked by "mystical shadows, fraught with no

meaning"--and his voice, as fatigued and eroded as Sly Stone

on "Thank You For Talking To Me, Africa", that are most

disturbing.  "They label me insane (but I think I'm more

normal than most", he sniggers at the end, then collapses

into mirthless, wheezing laughter.

     "Feed Me", which follows and closes the LP, is somehow

even crueller than "Strugglin'", it's twilight beauty

tantalising like a mirage.  Lines like "raised in this

place/now concrete is my religion" and "lost our origins"

again bring to mind Sly, but this time "Africa Talks To You

(the Asphalt Jungle")"; the same sense of exile from the lost

Motherland (the album title "Maxinquaye" obliquely alludes to

an African tribe).  Consider also that he's described

"Aftermath" as a song about "the end of the world and about

my mother" (who died when he was four), and it's easy to see

why Tricky might feel like "sorrow's native son" (to steal a

line from another mama's boy, Morrissey).

     Like Kurt Cobain, Tricky's "non-symbolisable, unnameable

narcissistic wound" is also his gift, making him morbidly

sensitive to the currents of dread and anguish percolating

through the culture.  "Feeling like distortion/the English

disaster": "Maxinquaye" is an anatomy of the cloudy,

contaminated consciousness of a smashed, blocked generation;

'blocked', because it lacks any constructive outlet for its

idealism, 'smashed' cos it can find utopia only through

toxins. Shame attaches itself to this self-medication, all

too apparent in Tricky's use of the word "cheap" --"I roll

the blue bills/"I snort the cheap thrills", "brainwashed by

the cheapest").  Any old stupor--bad Ecstasy, coke, ganja,

booze--will do so long as it blunts an intellect otherwise

too sharply conscious of the impasses and deads end that

constitute the present situation.  It's the revolutionary

impulse turned back against the self, introjected--just as

Marianne Faithful talks of addiction as perverted idealism,

an implosive alternative to the explosive release of

terrorism.  Damp down those fires; 'tis better to fade than

burn.  Like 'Maxinquaye''s cover art--metal surfaces mottled

with corrosion, an abandoned car overgrown with brambles,

flaking paint and posters--Tricky's music makes entropy

picaresque.  But rust never sleeps.

Tricky interview
 Melody Maker, 24th June 1995

by Simon Reynolds,

"I had this psychic drawing done," says Tricky, sucking greedily on the first of the four joints he's to consume in the next hour. Behind his smoke-wreathed head, the Cubist Alps of midtown Manhattan's skyscraperscape is visible through the hotel suite window.

"See, I wanted to know where all this silver was coming from, cos lately I've been wearing loads of silver," he continues. "And the psychic woman told me it symbolises Mercury, the messenger god. She gives you a massage and each different muscle tells different stories. She wrote that I came to this earth too quick. I wasn't ready, but I said, 'F*** it, c'mon, let's go.' And she wrote, 'When he lands, there shall be peace.' Mad, innit?"

Tricky tells me he wrote a song last night inspired by this psychic analysis (on impulse, he'd booked a New York studio and used two days between making his live debut and supporting PJ Harvey to knock out a quick EP). The song's called ‘Prophet’ and Tricky plays it for me on his portable DAT-Walkman. It's an uncanny feeling, listening through the headphones to Tricky's eerie rasp, then glancing up and looking straight into his eyes. The music – to be released under the name Starving Souls – is brittle, diffuse and denuded, peculiarly reminiscent of the Raincoats' Odyshape. Unlike Maxinquaye and the forthcoming Nearly God project (featuring Damon Albarn and Tricky's old hero/new soulmate Terry Hall), Starving Souls isn't sampler-based, it’s all live; Tricky describes it as "world music". Or did he say "weird music"? That goes without saying.

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Tricky as prophet? That might be going too far. Tricky himself exhibits a healthy scepticism: "I'll believe anything! I'll pay you 80 dollars, you can tell me a story and I'll believe it. It provides me with material!" And yet I think there's a sense in which Tricky is a conduit for the cloudy, contaminated consciousness of British youth; Tricky as aerial, maybe, tuned into the frequencies of anguish and dread emanating from a jilted generation. He talks of the origins of his lyrics in such terms: "Something passes through me and I don't know what it is."

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Who is Tricky? A Sly Stone for the post-rave generation (the Maxinquaye/There's A Riot Goin' On analogy is already a critical commonplace). Chuck D without the dream of a Black Nation to hold his fragile self together. The greatest poet of England's ‘political unconscious’ since John Lydon circa Metal Box. Brian and Bryan in one wiry body, Eno-esque soundscape gardener and Ferry-like lizard of love/hate. The ‘black Bowie’.

I invoke the latter because Tricky's gender-bending imagery (the wedding dress and pistol pose on the cover of Overcome, the mascara and lipstick-caked diva on Black Steel) are reminiscent of nothing so much as the video for ‘Boys Keep Swinging’, where Bowie impersonates an array of female stereotypes. There really aren't too many black artists who cross-dress (it's hard to imagine Ice Cube in a miniskirt, high heels and false eyelashes, for instance). This shows the extent to which Tricky belongs as much to a British art-rock tradition (Japan, Kate Bush, Bowie, early Roxy) as to the more obvious hip-hop lineage. But it's also yet another indice of the compulsive, almost pathological nature of the man's creativity; like Courtney Love's kinderwhore image, Tricky's transvestitism proclaims ‘something's not right here’. Especially as cross-dressing isn't a marketing gimmick or jape, but something he's done since he was a 15-year-old kid.

"All my mates thought I was mad anyway," he says. "I don't know what my nan felt, though – she never ever said a word, even when I walked out the door with a dress on. I was really lucky, I had mates around me who said, ‘He's mad, leave him alone’."

Did you use the role of weird or holy fool as a kind of armour?

"It was to get attention. Before that, I used to do things like fight, or steal. But that didn't last very long. I found out I didn't have to do anything to be liked, just be myself, and people thought I was weird."

You've said before that you were quite feminine as a child, at least in comparison with your family of hard men.

"I was brought up by women. My nan taught me to defend myself first. But I never had the passion for violence. It was too easy. I got nothing out of it, and it weren't my life."

The fact that Tricky lost his mum at the age of four, and was brought up by a grandma who was convinced that he was the reincarnation of his own dead mother (she'd spook the child out by staring at him intensely for hours) – all this must have a lot to do with Tricky's extravagant forms of ‘acting out’ (as the Americans term dysfunctional behaviour). There's a theory that the sartorial flamboyance and effeminacy of the ‘dandy’ constitute a form of symbolic allegiance to the mother, a perverse attempt to assume her subordinate position in the patriarchal order. In Tricky's case, it could be both a homage to the mother he barely knew, and a way of proclaiming himself an alien even among the B-boy band of outsiders he ran with, his surrogate family.

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Although there's nothing literally dub-wise, no heavy echo or reggae basslines, on the record, it's clear that the influence of dub permeates Maxinquaye. The way that Tricky works – f**ing around with sounds on the sampler until his sources are unrecognisable wraiths, ghosts of their former selves; composing music and words spontaneously in the studio; mixing tracks live as they're recorded; retaining the glitches and inspired errors, the hiss and crackle – all this is strikingly akin to early Seventies dubmeisters like King Tubby. And of course there's also the fact that Tricky breathes sensimillia fumes like they're oxygen...

"Dub's an influence in that it isn't perfectionist. Dub, it's just bottom-end heavy with loads of noises, and it's not musically 'correct'. But my biggest influence from dub is the chatters, all the Saxon Sound posse, and especially this guy from London called Champion."

When it comes to the organisation of sound, Tricky's only rivals are artcore drum 'n' bass-heads like Dillinja and Droppin' Science. Like Tricky, these guys are descendants of both dub and hip-hop. See, in Britain, hip-hop's greatest impact didn't come through all that non-starter ‘homegrown UK rap’, but rather as a crucial element in the sound system culture that evolved through the Eighties, and eventually bore fruit in the form of Bristol trip-hop and London jungle. In a sense, in Britain hip-hop returned to its roots in dub (in the proto rap of DJ ‘talkover’ and MC chat, in the reggae sound-system's bass-science, both imported to the Bronx by Jamaican immigrant Kool Herc, the DJ who later invented the art of looping breakbeats).

More than just dub-derived sonic traits (music as a maze-like mix-scape), Tricky and the junglists share a mood, a worldview, even. There's a palpable sense of the demonic pervading both Maxinquaye and darkest drum 'n' bass tracks tike Dillinja's ‘Warrior’ and ‘Angel's Fall’. On the other side of the Atlantic, horrorcore hip-hop units like Gravediggaz (with whom Tricky's just collaborated to create two tracks for his new Hell Is Round The Corner EP) exude the same clammy-palmed emotion: blunted paranoia, swollen into cosmic, millenarian dread. A sense that we're living through Armageddon Time; Babylon's last days.

"Sometimes, I think everything is going to fall apart," says Tricky. "When I had the psychic reading, this woman was really positive; she was, 'No, the world isn't in trouble, we're all going to be all right.' Sorry, I just don't feel that. Especially with money; it's the corniest thing to say that money is the root of all evil, but how true is that?! I can't see how things are gonna get better. Sometimes I feel this is the living hell.

"Look at the conditions we're living in. Living in a city can't be healthy. Look at the way we build these," he says, gesturing vaguely at the corporate concrete monoliths through the window. "I think we've all got a touch of psychosis. In a city, you've got all this energy of people who ain't quite normal; that abnormal energy just reflects off everything and pushes us further down the path.

So it's like psychic pollution, poisoning our minds?

"Yeah, exactly. I could never understand how someone can kill people for money. But the first time I came to New York, I understood it right away. It's just the way these people are living."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The difference between a Rastafarian worldview and Tricky's is that, for the natty dread, the evil is out there. Through their dress and rituals, Rastas exempt themselves from a Fallen World, elevate themselves as the pure in heart destined for Zion. As such, they’re like all fundamentalists; really not so far from the Christian Right Militia in America, in fact, except that the latter direct their fantasies of cleansing apocalyptic violence against the US Federal Government/United Nations conspiracy, and against the ‘mudpeople’ (the racially impure). Unlike the believers, Tricky doesn't distance himself from Babylon, from the system or shit-stem (as some dread put it); he's intimate with evil, on first name terms with the Devil. In his words and his music, Tricky opens the (l)id and lets all this contamination and corruption speak itself, in its own vernacular as opposed to the cut-and-dried polarities of the message-mongering ‘political’ songwriter (who also imagines himself ‘clean’).

"I'm part of this f***in' psychic pollution. I'm just as negative as the next person. I think we have to destroy everything and start again. Everything has to end before it gets any better. And it's not going to happen in our lifetimes. Everything needs to burn and be rebuilt."

Lines like "We're hungry/We take our fill/My brain thinks bomblike/Beware of our appetite"suggest you identify yourself as a part of the problem, that you're convulsed by the same voracious will-to-power that's ruining the world.

"It's like, I can be as greedy as you, I want money, I want cars. I'm conditioned to want that, and the conditioned part of me says, 'Yeah, I'm gonna go out and make money, and build an empire. I'm going to rule my own little kingdom.' But part of me knows that's bullshit. But I am hungry, and you have to watch out for someone who's hungry."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

"An 'ungry man is an angry man", so sayeth the prophet Prince Far I. In black music, it sometimes seems that everyone's searching for the kingdom, the kingdom of heaven. Some want it now, and they will not wait: the gangsta tries to build that kingdom on earth, makes a deal with Satan (who himself decided "'tis better to rule in hell than serve in heaven").

Trouble is, there's always a bigger king out there to make you his slave, his boy; at the ultimate degree, there's the State. So the smarter rudeboys turn ‘conscious’ and dream of the lost kingdom of the righteous, calling it Zion, or the Black Nation; the pot of gold at the end of Time's Rainbow. Other black mystics – Hendrix, Sun Ra, Clinton – dub this lost paradise Atlantis, or Saturn, or the Mothership Connection.

Tricky has come up with his own proper name for Zion – Maxinquaye.

"Quaye, that's this race of people in Africa, like Mancunians or something... 'Maxin', that's my mum's name, Maxine, and I've just taken the ‘e’ off."

Maxinquaye = the lost Motherland. And Tricky, he grew up an Exile on Main Street. On Knowle West High Street, Bristol, to be precise.

"Raised in this place/Now concrete is my religion " – ‘Feed Me’

"What that's saying is, my religion was Knowle West. You grow up in a certain place and you grow to be like the environment. I knew how to pinch, how to get along in that environment."

Tricky talks about how "we all have this animal hunger. It's quite a strong force; if we were cleaner of mind or body, this energy might be good." In the concrete jungle, the natural impulses of the young mind toward prestige and belonging get twisted out of shape, distorted into badmuthaf***'a-hood and gang loyalty. Sly Stone wrote Riot songs like ‘Thank You For Talking To Me, Africa’ and ‘Africa Talks To You (The Asphalt Jungle)’ because "in Africa, animals are animals. The tiger is a tiger, the snake is a snake, you know what the hell he's going to do. Here in New York, a tiger or a snake may come up looking like, uuuh, you."

When Tricky talks about being stoned and paranoid in supermarkets – "I feel alien, and like someone's going to recognise me in a minute as an alien" – I wonder if that's how he feels all the time, deep down. Has he ever felt like he belonged anywhere?

"Well, there's nowhere I want to live. I've travelled everywhere. I find some place where I think I want to live and after two weeks I find out it's not. So I haven't got a home and that's something I'm desperately looking for. And I think I'm never going to find it."

It's Tricky's ‘primal narcissistic wound’ – the loss of his mother – that makes him morbidly sensitive to the currents of anguish and dread in the culture. Like that other mamma's boy, Kurt Cobain, he seems to have no defences, no skin. And being an aerial-for-angst is taxing.

"It takes up a lot of energy, it ends up sapping me sometimes. I do soak it all up. I was in Paris doing a photo session with Massive and there was this old lady, and she looked very old and very sad. Now, that catches my eye, and it really, really hurts me. I don't like feeling like that. But it's something I can't control. It hurts me to such an extent that it confuses me. See, if some geezer comes up to me on the street and starts asking me for money, I get an instant rage. When someone comes up to me and I see this person ain't got a life, my emotions get confused. No one likes seeing that, cos that could be you or me. It's too scary. It's like a mirror, almost."

When people go on about how ‘sexy’ Maxinquaye is, I sometimes wonder if their ears ever penetrate through the sensuous sonic murk and Martina's shortcake-crumbling-in-mouth voice to the desperation and dread-of-intimacy in the lyrics. As a seduction soundtrack, ‘Overcome’ and ‘Suffocated Love’ ain't exactly amorous or arousing. Tricky is highly bemused when people tell him that his album's an aphrodisiac.

"I get beautiful girls in Italy come up to me and say, ‘I have sex with my boyfriend to your album'. I really don't need to know that. I say, 'Why don’t you have sex with me listening to my album?’ "

Maybe what the Maxinquaye-as-sampladelic-Let's Get It On posse are cueing off is the voracious oral craving in the songs: from the line "F*** you in/Suck you in/Tuck you in" from ‘Abba On’ to ‘Ponderosa’s litany of implosive violence (inflicted via alcohol and spliff) against the self ("See the scars of my rage"). That song documents the same abyss of despair – down and down through "different levels of the Devil's company" – that birthed ‘Strugglin’’, the albums' most gruelling feat of avant-gardism. Sonically, ‘Strugglin’’ sounds like a faithless Public Enemy; PE if they somehow lost grip on the "black steel" of their ideology, foundered, hit rock bottom.

"Heheheheheh! "wheezes Tricky. "I dunno quite how to take that! That track, it is the last resort. It's based on real depression, but not through something terrible happening to you, which is what most people think causes depression. It's easy to get a depression, if you don't have a job, don't have a passion, don’t exercise your brain. After doing 'Blue Lines', I was getting a wage into a bank but not actually working. Massive were paying me, so I had money, and that was the worst thing, cos it enabled me to have weed and drink. All I did was smoke and drink, hang around in town, kill time in bars. And go to clubs, from Wednesday to Sunday."

This two-year, endless weekender-bender nearly drove Tricky round the bend. After the party, utterly wasted, he'd contemplate the waste of his life, until, in his weed-distorted paranoia, all that killed time would assume the grotesque shape of a spectre, a nameless apprehension of doom: "Mystical shadows fraught with no meaning". Out of this wasteland eventually emerged a prophet, a sonic wizard conjuring up the paranoiascapes of ‘Aftermath’ and ‘Abbaon Fat Tracks’, aural allegories of a generation's dereliction; music that makes cultural entropy seem as picturesque as the photos of corroded, rust-mottled metal and flaking paint inside the CD booklet of Maxinquaye.

Along with everything else, Tricky's album is an inventory of the cost of this country's recreational drug ‘culture’; of the venomous blooms that sprout when a whole generation, finding no political outlet for its idealism, turns to self-medication/self-poisoning to provide its provisional utopias, each and every weekend. Where a lot of groups glamourise drugs, Tricky raps lines – "I roll the blue bills/I snort the cheap thrills", "Brain washed by the cheapest" – which seem to attest to a healthy quotient of shame.

"Cocaine is the cheapest thrill I've ever experienced in my life, the lowest, lowest thing. Cos it's totally unreal. You feel so good about yourself, but you've done nothing to deserve it. The times I've taken it is with other artists, and you stand there and say loads of bullshit, how you respect them, love their lyrics, and you pat each other on the back all f***ing night. E is just as bad: I like loads of nice things being said to me, and you say loads of nice things back, and you get all deep. Some things ain't worth talking about."

For the jilted generation, all that festering rage is vented through going mad at the weekend; all that blocked idealism is expressed through chemicals. Short-term measures. As Irvine Welsh's A Smart C***, paralysed by the seeming futility of political activism, puts it: "I think I'll stick to drugs to get me through the long, dark night of late capitalism."

"We're all f***ing lost," says Tricky. "Heheheheh. I can't pretend I've got all the answers. Bob Marley, he could write songs about freedom and love. I'm just telling the truth that I'm confused, I'm paranoid, I'm scared, I'm vicious, I'm f***ing spiteful."

And yet the album's last song, the unspeakably beautiful ‘Feed Me’, seems to hold out a cruel glimmer of hope, a dream of the promised land (Maxinquaye itself?)...

'"We found a new place to live/Where we're taught to grow strong/Strongly sensitive'," Tricky quotes himself. "It's not the sort of stuff I write about usually... it's really hopeful!"

But tentative, almost taunting – like a mirage.

"Unreal, yeah."

TRICKY with DJ MUGGS & GREASE
Juxtapose (Island) 
Uncut, 1999

For those of us who revere Maxinquaye as this decade's greatest album, Tricky's 
trajectory thereafter has been perplexing. For all its creator's 
denizen-of-the-darkside shtick and compulsive experimentalism, Maxinquaye worked 
as a twisted pop record; it was full of haunting melodies, lovely textures, and 
lyric after lyric that lodged itself in your head. With Nearly God and 
Pre-Millenium Tension, though, Tricky embarked upon on a wilfully erratic 
anti-pop course, increasingly shunning hooks and rapping with a slack, offhand 
bleariness. Last year's Angels With Dirty Faces was acclaimed in routine, 
knee-jerk fashion, but was really only notable for its uncharacteristically 
frantic tempos and the utter failure of any song to leave an imprint in the 
memory. 

Tricky has done some of his finest work in collaboration: Maxinquaye's 
"Aftermath" and "Ponderosa" were co-produced by ex-Pop Group frontman Mark 
Stewart and Howie B respectively, there was the brilliant Hell EP with Gothic 
rappers The Gravediggaz, and Tricky co-wrote/co-produced two of the best songs 
on Bjork's Post, "Enjoy" and "Headphones". So the collaborative nature of 
Juxtapose seems encouraging. But if the involvement of hip hop producers DJ 
Muggs and Grease suggests an attempt by Tricky to connect with an American rap 
audience that's so far eluded him, think again. Very little here connects with 
current hip hop, and nothing resembles Muggs's work with Cypress Hill (who've 
long parted company with rap's state-of-the-art anyway). It doesn't even sound 
like the trio are using sampling much on Juxtapose; instead, the music seems 
like a hybrid of live, rather rudimentary playing with rhythms programmed on 
archaic drum machines. 

Dry, brittle, and deliberately underproduced, Juxtapose is a world away from 
Maxinquaye's lush, sensuous murk. "For Real", the opener, sounds like slightly 
shaky New Wave--a very early demo by The Cure, say. "Bom Bom Diggy" is a sketch 
of a groove overlaid with sprinkles of acoustic guitar. "I Like The Girls" has 
the cheap peppy energy of Eighties action movie soundtrack themes. All angular 
stab-riffs and Mantronix-style edit-slashes, "Hot Like a Sauna" similarly sounds 
like a Hong Kong movie knock-off of Eighties hip hop, although it may actually 
be a nod to the contemporary electro-influenced subgenre of rap called New 
Orleans bounce. An alternate version of "Hot" adds bad metal riffs, a 
thin-sounding guest-rapper, and a wailing diva, to end up like something Rhythm 
King would have put out in 1987--Brit-rap pioneers 3 Wize Men, say. 

On Juxtapose Tricky takes his blurry enunciation to new levels of 
indistinctness--consonants are crumbly or smudged, vowels hoarse and muddy. 
Generally, his voice is buried in the thick of the instrumentation; 
occasionally, it's shoved high in the mix but doubletracked slightly 
out-of-synch to ensure illegibility. On "Contradictive," the odd striking phrase 
leaps out of his parched, bronchial flow--the stoner philosophising of "time 
isn't real" rubs up against the video fiend's fave Godfather quote "Luco Brazzia 
sleeps with the fishes." The trick is to stop squinting your ears to decipher 
his stream-of-consciousness (which isn't pulling off the random resonance trick 
often enough these days), and just enjoy Tricky's voice as a sculpted smear, a 
braid of grain and gristle. 

Glints of pure sonic delight are scattered throughout Juxtaposed: the mesmering 
loop of sampled croon in "Contradictive", the ultra-fast simmer of Last Poets 
percussion in "She Said," the Smiley Culture-esque ragga-Cockney speed-jabber of 
the guest MC on "I Like The Girls". But unlike Tricky's best work, they rarely 
build off each other to become the proverbial bigger-than-the-sum. Ultimately, 
Juxtapose too frequently crosses the thin line between improvisation and messing 
about, throwdown and throwaway. 

Let's Eat Grandma profile

LET'S EAT GRANDMA

director's cut version, NPR, June 26th 2017

by Simon Reynolds

Let’s Eat Grandma arrived last year as a perfect  package of pop-not-pop oddness.

The back story was intriguing.  From Norfolk, one of the more remote regions of England, came this freakily talented pair of teenage girls whose close-verging-on-telepathic friendship dated back to pre-school, clutching a debut set of sophisticated yet wonderfully askew songs. Every instrument on I, Gemini was played by the duo of Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth themselves.

Let’s Eat Grandma’s image in the break-out video “Deep Six Textbook” – long golden tresses, buttermilk skin, white lace frocks – compounded the idea of  Walton & Hollingworth as virtual twins and as out-of-time figures seemingly plucked right out of Picnic At Hanging Rock (Peter Weir’s eerie film about disappeared schoolgirls in Victorian-era Australia).   Songs like “Welcome To The Treehouse,” “Chocolate Sludge Cake” and “Rapunzel” seemingly sealed the child-eye’s viewpoint running through the album, something exacerbated by the homespun feel  of the playing and instrumentation choices like recorder and glockenspiel, which conjured the atmosphere of the elementary school music room.  “Sax in the City,” the most recent video off I, Gemini, regresses even further into the nursery: Walton & Hollingworth are togged out as Edwardian toddlers in pink onesies, bonnets and bibs.

A year on from the release of their acclaimed debut, Let’s Eat Grandma are sporadically touring the album while preparing to make the follow-up. And they’re giving the occasional interview too, like this one, which took place in an Echo Park café shortly before their debut Los Angeles concert. But here’s a funny thing: Walton and Hollingworth appear keen to shed – even shred -  the public perception that’s wrapped itself around them, despite the fact that it’s solidly based on a sound / lyric / image approach that they’ve rather concertedly worked to establish. 

Take that album title, I, Gemini.  The word “gemini” is Latin for twins.  But Walton and Hollingworth now claim the title was always “a joke,” a subtle riposte to those who liked to imagine they operated as a single mind stretched across two bodies.  Yet onstage and in videos – where so far they’ve always worn identical clothes – they’ve played up the almost-twins image, and it was certainly part of the framing of their advance publicity.  Even their singing voices are uncannily alike, to the point of being virtually indistinguishable. In interview, they regularly answer questions with the same single simultaneous word, creating an eerie unison effect.  Still, Hollingworth stoutly insists that “when we write songs it’s not like we become one personality. We both have very different skill sets and are very much individuals.”

The friendship, which began when they were just four, was forged from the start through creative projects. “It’s our way of processing the world,” says Hollingworth.  They started with a series of increasingly ambitious tree houses, built by themselves, unsupervised. But that’s a subject – one of several – that they’re now reluctant to be drawn on, precisely because reviewers and interviewers have found it so charming in the past. Walton & Hollingworth seem wary of being infantilized (well, except in videos like “Sax in the City”, where they sport pacifiers and crawl hands-and-knees through the city).

After the tree house phase, Jenny and Rosa progressed to making short films, each taking turns handling the camera while the other acted. And then, aged thirteen, after making “loads of films”, they decided to “try something else. So we formed a band”. 

Perhaps the duo’s eagerness to sidestep received ideas of what Let’s Eat Grandma is about is more understandable if you take into account that they are currently repping songs written as long ago as four or five years.  The recording process for I, Gemini started when they were fourteen and it took two years to finish. They had management early on, but no record company at that point: the album was laid down for free in a recording studio at the local college where they now study.  But because they were still in high school back then, Walton & Hollingworth could only access the studio during the summer holidays, which is why it took so long to complete. 

This long, fitful process has led to the mentality gap between I, Gemini and where the duo’s heads are at today. Think of how different you felt about things aged thirteen from how you saw the world aged eighteen (the duo’s current age). Let’s Eat Grandma are keen to surprise everyone with new songs they’re writing that address social issues. “When we were younger we were obviously less clued in on politics – we were writing about what we were experiencing then,” says Walton. They are also forthright feminists, indignant about the sexism they’ve encountered in the music industry. It’s not just a case of being taken less seriously on account of their gender and age, says Hollingworth. “It’s more blatant than that.  When we’ve done festivals, and we haven’t gone with our own engineer, people have said really objectifying things to us. It’s the kind of thing that happens so subtly that you don’t really notice at first.”

Let’s Eat Grandma might have started to put away childish things, but they are still very much teenagers. There’s an incommunicative tendency that any parent will find familiar. Even a hint of  “whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not” intractability. That’s a saying of Arthur Seaton, the bloodyminded working class young factory worker in 1960’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, that later adopted by Arctic Monkeys as the title of their debut album.

One evasive tactic in evidence this evening is “wait until you see the show tonight, that’ll help you understand”.  Yet their performance at the Echo is largely in line with the expectations created by the videos and the album.  The live rendition of “Deep Six Textbook”, for instance, involves a patty-cake handclap routine to generate a percussive pulse.  Then there’s their disconcerting stage moves, like Hollingworth sitting on the floor beneath the keyboards during one number, or the pair lying flat on the stage during the first part of another song, as if hiding from the audience. These stunts are wonderfully suspenseful (you start wondering, ‘are they ever going to get up again?’) but recall nothing so much as children throwing a sulk.  The couple of new songs in their short set sound terrific and do showcase new sonic directions (they feature electric guitar, in the form of Walton’s elegant lead patterns, for the first time). But I couldn’t really discern a new social consciousness.  Even their refusal to play an encore seems characteristic, which is to say, a bit bratty.   

Rewind to early that night and back in the café, after another line of enquiry is parried, I try a different tack. What is the least Let’s-Eat-Grandma-like fact about Let’s Eat Grandma that is actually true? What information about them would most thoroughly blow their image and blow the minds of their compact but devoted following of fans and critics? Like, are they secretly into sports cars? Do they avidly watch Top Gear?

“That’s quite a hard question.... there’s so many things,” says Hollingworth, not very helpfully.

“Everything!” says Walton, less helpfully still.

Finally, they think of one secret truth, or one they’re prepared to share, at any rate.

“Even though we like them...,” offers Hollingworth cautiously. “We’re not really inspired by CocoRosie.... or Kate Bush.... or Bjork... or—“

“Cocteau Twins!” they both say, in that charming, chiming unison way of theirs.

“People just like to compare us to any female performer who’s doing something slightly different,” complains Walton.

Another thing that vexes Let’s Eat Grandma is language – terms like “kooky” or “ethereal” that get applied in a gendered way to any female artist doing something unusual or arty. “If we were a male band,” suggests Hollingworth, “people wouldn’t say ‘kooky’, they’d probably say ‘psychedelic’. Because, in lots of ways, our music is quite psychedelic.”

“Eat Shiitake Mushrooms”, one of the most delightful tunes on the album, might - they hint - be inspired by a mushroom trip. But just try to get them to elaborate.  “Can’t disclose this information,“ says a coyly tight-lipped Hollingworth.

One hallucinatory form of inspiration they do talk about freely is the hypnagogic state between wakefulness and sleep.  “I get lots of inspiration for lyrics from that phase just after I’m gone to bed and I’m very tired and falling asleep,” says Walton. “Lots of images and interesting combinations of words come into my head. When I’m in that state, I can wake myself up a bit and write things down or record them, then I slip back into the state.  I’ll keep doing that over and over for maybe half-an-hour, until I’m just too tired and feel like I really need to fall asleep.”

Hypnagogic imagery is quite different to the mind-movies you get in the rapid-eye-movement phases of deep sleep, which are more, well, dreamy. “You have more control over the images,” says Rosa. “I can think of myself as being somewhere and then I can change things and they become weirder and they start controlling themselves.” She points at the air-conditioning vent hanging off the ceiling, near our table in the upstairs balcony section of the café. “If I was in a [hypnagogic state] now, I could look right up  that pipe. And then as I went up the pipe the dream would start controlling itself.”

Let’s Eat Grandma’s fascination for dream worlds is very psychedelic-Sixties. But it’s also harks back to the surrealism, to psychoanalysis in both its Freudian and Jungian schools, and to all manner of religious and mystical belief systems going back to antiquity that have set great store in the oracular truths revealed in our night visions. What it’s not, this interest in dreams, is contemporary in any sense. We live in an era that has lost all interest in dreams as an artistic or spiritual resource, as a deeper truth of the self or of the collective unconscious.  As a teenager growing up in the Seventies, when books decoding the symbolism of dreams were popular, I kept an incredibly detailed dream diary. But nowadays “dream” generally refers to secular ambitions of fame and glory: the sort of dreams where if you keep on believin’ they’ll come true, or if you work your butt off they’ll be achieved. Instead of dreamed otherworlds we have the virtual realities of games and CGI. So when Rosa talks about writing her dreams down in her diary “as soon as I get up” or exalts the dream life as “free entertainment when you’re sleeping”, it’s a sign that the duo are probably not typical of their own generation. 

Let’s Eat Grandma’s music often has an oneiric aura. The twinkly upper-octave piano trills at the start of “Rapunzel” have the quality of a cinematic dissolve, or the kind of vaseline-on-the-lens effect that lends  gauzy enchantment to a movie.  Sometimes the songs appear to evolve according to dream logic, starting somewhere and ending up somewhere completely unexpected, as with the multi-part suites of “Sleep Song” and “Welcome to the Treehouse Part 1 and 2”, or the listener-ambushing eruption of the rap section midway through “Eat Shiitake Mushrooms” (albeit rap as if performed  by a eight-year-old with a mouthful of dulce de leche).

When I ask Let’s Eat Grandma if they enjoy playing tricks on listeners like that, they predictably downplay. “It wasn’t so much ‘Ooh we’re going to surprise people with a rap bit here’ as ‘this bit needs a rap’,” says Walton, the MC in question on this song. True children of the post-internet, listen-to-everything generation, Let’s Eat Grandma have in the past described what they do as “experimental sludge pop” or “psychedelic sludge.”  Well, that’s how I took those descriptions anyway: tags for a messily smushed-together splodge of flavours, like the cup of a kid at a frozen yoghurt joint who’s gone a little crazy with the toppings. Actually, sludge - they say, in unison again – refers to “drone notes”, their love of extended-notes that create a smeary, woozy feeling in the music.

Asking Let’s Eat Grandma about specific bands that possibly have an affinity with what they do – if not an outright inspirational connection – isn’t a productive pursuit.  Most of the groups that tend to get mentioned in reviews as reference points or influences  - like Kevin Ayers, Caravan, Virginia Astley - are ones they say they’ve never heard or even heard of.  “I don’t think there’s anybody who’s fully got it right yet,” says Walton, sounding neither pleased nor displeased.

So what is the most misguided, off-base thing that a professional pundit has ever said about Let’s Eat Grandma?

“The worst one,” says Walton, wrinkling her nose with annoyance, “was someone who said ‘I think there’s a few very clever adults behind this’. That just made me sooooooooooo cross.” 

Let’s Eat Grandma bitterly resent this reverse-ageism, finding even praise of the “oooh, look how prodigiously and precociously talented they are!” type to be “a bit backhanded, like it’s surprising,” complains Hollingworth. “People find us quite confusing, that we’re two girls and we bond over being creative,” she adds. “Like teenage girls are just supposed to go shopping together or something! But I think there’s loads of girls like us out there.”

[version as published at the end]


LET'S EAT GRANDMA

I, Gemini

The Wire, June 2016

by Simon Reynolds

Nationality feels like an impermissible topic to bring up when writing about the appeal of music.  Like something that’s vaguely discredited, or at least outmoded:  left behind for good (in both senses) in our post-geographical, distance-shrinking world.  Celebrating hybridity, intermixture and impurity is always going to seem more progressive than fetishising the essential, the unchanging, the parochial.  Yet national character continues to have a potent attraction.  Englishness of a particular musty sort seeps from every pore of eMMplekz’s dankly addictive Rook to TN34. And Englishness of a brightly enchanted kind forms a fragrant haze around I, Gemini , the debut album from Let’s Eat Grandma.

This teenage duo could hardly be more English, from their names – Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton—to their singing voices, which have the crumbly texture of Wensleydale, reminding me at various points of Sophie from The Detectorists, Cassie in Skins, and Lola from the kids’s animation series Charlie and Lola. The only time they break the spell of quintessential Englishness is their name – they should really be called Let’s Eat Granny.

Musically, too, they summon to mind a bunch of frightfully English things:  Danielle Dax, Matching Mole, Pram, Kate Bush.  Not that they ever really sound much like any of these. But the ballpark –  or should I say, cricket pitch – is the same: quirky, homespun, a little precious, child-like in a way that teeters close to twee but never crosses the line.  

Let’s Eat Grandma play up their Englishness and their tender years with the way they present in photo sessions and in the video for the single “Deep Six Textbook”. With their lace frocks, long golden tresses, and milky complexions, they come across a bit like modern-day equivalents of the miscreants behind the Cottingley Fairies photographs – girl-cousins who let their imaginations get away with them and fooled half the world. On “Deep Six Textbook,” Jenny and Rosa sing as classroom daydreamers who’d rather be communing with the starfish and the ocean than stuck indoors being trained for productive adulthood: “we live our lives in the textbook... I feel like standing on the desk and screaming ‘I DON’T CARE!’”.   Listening to their motley sound-palette, you often picture a school music room full of battered instruments: recorder, ukulele, electric organ, xylophone, triangle, rough-toned violin, the stray components of a drum kit, a long outmoded synth.  

Song titles like “Chimpanzees in Canopies” and “Welcome To The Treehouse” evoke Nature Studies projects, school trips to the zoo, and back garden fun ’n’ games.

But the innocence doesn’t feel forced. At sixteen and seventeen, Hollingworth and Walton are barely out of childhood.  More like sisters than the friends-since-age-four they are, their voices appear to have grown alike through prolonged proximity, like plants entwining together in a neglected garden. Gemini is the Latin for twins and the album title I, Gemini seems to speak of a near-telepathic bond: a single mind shared across two bodies.

One of the emerging clichés of today’s brainy music-making (and music-reviewing) is “world-building”. Everybody’s at it: constructing sprawling concept albums that are the audio setting for Game of   Thrones- scale sagas or epic near-future dystopias. I, Gemini sounds like a world, yes, but not one consciously assembled, just the byproduct of a private space of pure imagination that flourished between constant companions. Think Heavenly Creatures, without the upsetting ending. 

Sometimes the organic quality of I, Gemini feels a little off the cuff.  “Eat Shiitake Mushrooms” coalesces haphazardly at first, like a primary school music class converging around a tune, while “Sax in the City” sounds like a one-man band with its ukulele, toy cymbal, and honking horn. But the thrown-togetherness is deceptive:  there’s a consummate attentiveness to texture, structure, and, most vividly, space in evidence.  “Deep Six Textbook” sounds like a song heard with a seashell cupped to your ear. Its muzzy washes of Caravan-keyboard and stoic tick-tock beat set deep in the distance have me casting back to late Eighties recordings by A.R. Kane and Cocteau Twins for an equivalent sense of intimate emptiness. 

Norwich, the girls’ hometown, is a bustling city in a county that’s largely rural, full of flat expanses, and often considered a bit of a backwater.  Like an audio illustration for Raymond Williams’s English culture study The Country and The City, the album shuttles back and forth on a branch line that stretches from Virginia Astley to Lady Sovereign.  Just when you think they’re all about winsome pastoralism, Let’s Eat Grandma will starting rapping – sounding, on “Eat Shiitake Mushrooms”, like Cranes’s baby-voiced Alison Shaw reborn as a grime MC from E3.  Whether sung or spat, Hollingworth & Walton’s slack enunciation belies their out-of-time, Picnic At Hanging Rock image:  this is actually a rather modern style of singing, something you hear across the spectrum from Calvin Harris and Ellie Goulding to AlunaGeorge and James Blake.  But Let’s Eat Grandma push it further, smudging  fricatives and bilabials, making syllables fold and kink sideways,  half-swallowing their vowels or swilling them around the palate. It’s like they’re delectating in their own voice-stuff, and who could blame them?  

This meld of savory-sweet singing, moreish melody, glistening texture, strange space and surprises galore makes I, Gemini the best pop-not-pop album since Micachu & the Shapes’s Jewellery. (Without ever resembling it at all).  And as with that album, Gemini is backloaded: each new song better than the one that precedes. Things really take off as we pass the half-way mark. “Rapunzel” is their “Wuthering Heights”:  romanticism so gauchely gushing only 17 year olds can get away with it. The song starts with an upper-octave piano cycle that spins an atmosphere of twinkly magic, like the moment in Le Grand Meaulnes when the protagonist stumbles on the lost chateau in the forest. Then it gathers to a pounding pitch of tempestuous grandeur, with a storyline about a 7-year-old runaway from domestic discord suddenly stricken with the realization “I’m not having fun in this fairy tale”.  “Sleep Song” likewise starts gently with wheezy harmonium and plangent crinkles of guitar, then the lullaby bends to the sinister with a babble of increasingly clashing voices, before spiraling into a sort of soaring plummet of night-terror.  A song in two parts, “Welcome To The Treehouse” is their “Cloudbusting”: the angelic screech of the vocals is the sound of hearts exploding, but who can tell whether they’re bursting with joy or dread.

The star sign Gemini  (mine, as it happens) has among its strengths imagination, quickness, and adaptability; among  its weaknesses, impulsiveness, flightiness, and  indecision. That all just sounds like the checklist for adolescence.   I Gemini ‘s allure for me as an aging expatriate is not just the reassuring idea that Englishness abides, but that adolescence is much the same as it ever was.  The trappings have changed – Instagram and Snapchat, rather than scrapbooks and pen pals – but the fundamental things apply:  boredom, longing, restlessness, wonder, lust, spite, curiosity, confusion.  “Oh yeah life goes on / Long after the thrill of livin’ has gone”, warned that least-English of all singers Johnny Cougar, before advising: “Hold onto sixteen as long as you can/Changes come around real soon make us women and men”.  If you can’t find still and grasp tight within yourself those sensations of unformed possibility, then second-best is to grab them vicariously, through music that’s as thrillingly alive and ardently awake as this.  

LET'S EAT GRANDMA PROFILE FOR NPR AS PUBLISHED

From Norfolk, one of the more remote regions of England, came this preternaturally talented pair of teenage girls, Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth. Their close, verging-on-telepathic friendship dated back to pre-school, and they emerged from pre-pubescence clutching a debut set of sophisticated, wonderfully askew songs. Those recordings – collected on I, Gemini – had the duo playing every instrument themselves.

Growing Up

A year on from the release of that acclaimed debut, Let's Eat Grandma is still sporadically touring behind it. But here's a funny thing: Walton and Hollingworth now appear keen to shed — even shred — the public perception that's wrapped itself around them, despite the fact that it's based on an aesthetic approach to the project that they've rather concertedly worked to establish.

Most teenagers hope to look as adult and sophisticated as possible. They're keen to grow up in a hurry. But the way Let's Eat Grandma has presented itself up to this point, in live performance and in promo videos, is the complete opposite. The pair's image in their break-out video "Deep Six Textbook" — long golden tresses, buttermilk skin, white lace frocks — casts Walton and Hollingworth as virtual twins and as out-of-time figures seemingly plucked right out of Picnic At Hanging Rock, Peter Weir's eerie film about disappeared schoolgirls in Victorian-era Australia. Songs like "Welcome To The Treehouse," "Chocolate Sludge Cake" and "Rapunzel" seemed to cement the child-eyed viewpoint running through the album, exacerbated by the homespun feel of the playing and instrumentation choices like recorder and glockenspiel, which conjured the atmosphere of the elementary school music room. "Sax in the City," the most recent video off I, Gemini, regresses even further, into the nursery, with Walton & Hollingworth togged out as Edwardian toddlers in pink onesies, bonnets and bibs.


Their friendship began when they were just 4, forged from the start through creative projects. "It's our way of processing the world," said Hollingworth. They started with a series of increasingly ambitious treehouses, built by themselves, unsupervised. It's a subject – one of several – that they're now reluctant to be drawn on, precisely because reviewers and interviewers have found it so charming in the past. Walton and Hollingworth seem wary of being infantilized — except in videos like "Sax in the City," where they sport pacifiers and crawl hands-and-knees through the city.

After that treehouse phase Jenny and Rosa progressed to making short films, taking turns handling the camera while the other acted. Then, aged thirteen, after making "loads of films," they decided to "try something else. So we formed a band."

Only In Dreams

Let's Eat Grandma's music often has a dream-like aura to it; twinkly, upper-octave piano trills at the start of "Rapunzel" have the quality of a cinematic dissolve, or the kind of vaseline-on-the-lens effect that lends gauzy enchantment to a movie. Some songs appear to evolve according to dream logic, ending somewhere completely unexpected, as with the multi-part suites of "Sleep Song" and the two-part "Welcome to the Treehouse," or the listener-ambushing eruption of the rap section midway through "Eat Shiitake Mushrooms."

As it happens, dreaming is where the duo derive much of their inspiration. "I get lots of inspiration for lyrics from that phase just after I'm gone to bed and I'm very tired and falling asleep," says Rosa Walton, referring to a stage in the onset of sleep called 'hypnagogic'. We chatted in an Echo Park café shortly before Let's Eat Grandma were to perform their debut Los Angeles concert. "Lots of images and interesting combinations of words come into my head," continued Rosa. "When I'm in that state, I can wake myself up a bit and write things down or record them, then I slip back into the state. I'll keep doing that over and over for maybe half-an-hour, until I'm just too tired and feel like I really need to fall asleep."

Hypnagogic imagery is actually different to the mind-movies you get in the rapid-eye-movement phases of deep sleep, which are more, well, dreamy. "You have more control over the images," Rosa said. "I can think of myself as being somewhere and then I can change things and they become weirder and they start controlling themselves." She pointed at the air-conditioning vent hanging off the ceiling, near our table in the upstairs balcony section of the café. "If I was in a [hypnagogic state] now, I could look right up that pipe. And then as I went up the pipe the dream would start controlling itself."

The pair's fascination for dream worlds is very psychedelic-'60s. But it also harks back to surrealism, to psychoanalysis in both its Freudian and Jungian schools and to all manner of religious and mystical belief systems going back to antiquity that have set great store in the oracular truths revealed in our night visions. What it's not, this interest in dreams, is contemporary in any sense. We live in an era that has lost all interest in dreams as an artistic or spiritual resource, as a deeper truth of the self or of the collective unconscious. As a teenager growing up in the '70s, when books decoding the symbolism of dreams were popular, I kept an incredibly detailed dream diary. But nowadays "dream" generally refers to secular ambitions of fame and glory, the sort of dreams where, if you just keep on believin', they'll come true, or if you work your butt off they'll be achieved. Instead of dreamed otherworlds we have digital, the virtual realities of games and CGI. So when Rosa talks about writing her dreams down in her diary "as soon as I get up," or exalts the dream life as "free entertainment when you're sleeping", it's a sign that the duo are probably not typical of their own generation.

Evolution! Evolution?

Perhaps the duo's eagerness to sidestep received ideas of what Let's Eat Grandma is about is more understandable if you take into account that they are still repping songs written four or five long – especially relative to their chronology — years ago. The recording process for I, Gemini started when they were fourteen and took two years to finish. Because they were still in high school back then, Walton & Hollingworth could only access the free studio at their local music college during the summer holidays, which is why it took so long to complete.

This long, fitful process led to an inevitable mentality gap between I, Gemini and where the duo's heads are at today. Just think for a moment how different you felt about things aged thirteen from how you saw the world aged eighteen (the pair's current age).

Let's Eat Grandma are keen to surprise everyone with the new songs they're writing, which they say center on social and political issues. "When we were younger we were obviously less clued in on politics – we were writing about what we were experiencing then," says Walton. They are also forthright feminists, indignant about the sexism they've encountered in the music industry. It's not just a case of being taken less seriously on account of their gender and age, says Hollingworth. "It's more blatant than that. When we've done festivals, and we haven't gone with our own engineer, people have said really objectifying things to us. It's the kind of thing that happens so subtly that you don't really notice at first."

Let's Eat Grandma might have started to put away childish things, but they are still very much teenagers. There's an incommunicative tendency that any parent will find familiar — even a hint of "whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not" intractability.

"Wait until you see the show tonight, that'll help you understand," they said. Yet that performance, at the Echo, was largely in line with the established image they were ostensibly in the process of shedding. The live rendition of "Deep Six Textbook," for instance, involved a patty-cake handclap routine to generate a percussive pulse. Then there's their disconcerting stage moves, like Hollingworth sitting on the floor beneath the keyboards during one number, or the pair lying flat on the stage during the first part of another song, as if hiding from the audience. These stunts are wonderfully suspenseful — you start wondering, are they ever going to get up again? — but can recall, too, children throwing a sulk. The couple of new songs played in that short set sounded terrific — and did, indeed, showcase new sonic directions, featuring electric guitar, in the form of Walton's elegant lead patterns, for the first time. It was hard to discern a new social consciousness.

What We Are Not

Back in the café, after another line of enquiry was parried, it was time to try a different tack. What is the least Let's-Eat-Grandma-like fact about Let's Eat Grandma that is actually true? What information about them would most thoroughly blow their image and blow the minds of their compact-but-devoted following of fans and critics? Like, are they secretly into sports cars? Do they avidly watch Top Gear?

"That's quite a hard question... there's so many things," says Hollingworth, not very helpfully.

"Everything!" says Walton, less helpfully still.

Finally, they think of one secret truth, or one they're prepared to share, at any rate.

"Even though we like them...," offers Hollingworth cautiously. "We're not really inspired by CocoRosie.... or Kate Bush.... or Bjork... or—"

"Cocteau Twins!" they both say, in that charming, chiming unison way of theirs.

"People just like to compare us to any female performer who's doing something slightly different," complains Walton.

Asking Let's Eat Grandma about specific bands that possibly do have an affinity with their sound – if not an outright inspirational connection – isn't productive, either. Most of the groups that tend to get mentioned in reviews as reference points or influences — Kevin Ayers, Caravan, Virginia Astley — are ones they say they've never heard or even heard of. "I don't think there's anybody who's fully got it right yet," says Walton, neither pleased nor displeased.

Another thing that vexes Let's Eat Grandma is language – terms like "kooky" or "ethereal" that get applied, in a gendered way, to any female artist doing something unusual or arty. "If we were a male band," suggests Hollingworth, "people wouldn't say 'kooky', they'd probably say 'psychedelic'. Because, in lots of ways, our music is quite psychedelic."

"Eat Shiitake Mushrooms", one of the most delightful tunes on the album, might, they hint, be inspired by a mushroom trip. But just try to get them to elaborate. "Can't disclose this information," says a tight-lipped Hollingworth. That song, which surprisingly erupts midway into a deliciously unexpected rap section, is a wonderful example of Let's Eat Grandma's unconfined approach to genre. True children of the post-Internet, listen-to-everything generation, Walton and Hollingworth have in the past described what they do as "experimental sludge pop" or "psychedelic sludge." Well, that's how I took those descriptions anyway: tags for a smushed-together splodge of flavors, like the dripping cup of a kid at a frozen yogurt joint who's gone a little overboard with the toppings. Actually, sludge — they say in unison, again – refers to "drone notes", their love of extended-notes that create a smeary, woozy feeling in the music.

So – on the subject of critics and their misperceptions — what is the single most misguided, off-base thing that a professional pundit has ever said about Let's Eat Grandma?

"The worst one," says Walton, wrinkling her nose with annoyance, "was someone who said 'I think there's a few very clever adults behind this'. That just made me so cross."

Let's Eat Grandma bitterly resent this reverse-ageism, finding even praise of the "oooh, look how prodigiously and precociously talented they are!" type to be "a bit backhanded, like it's surprising," complains Hollingworth. "People find us quite confusing, that we're two girls and we bond over being creative," she adds. "Like teenage girls are just supposed to go shopping together or something! But I think there's loads of girls like us out there."