MARTINA TOPLEY-BIRD

Martina Topley-Bird has a three-decade career during which she has worked with Tricky, Massive Attack and The Prodigy, but her fifth album, Forever I Wait, sees her embracing a new-found confidence

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“I remember being, like, 13 or 14 and really struggling to work out who I was,” explains a thoughtful Martina Topley-Bird. “My mum was Afro-American and my dad was white. I was keenly aware that most of the black people I knew were either African or West Indian so, culturally, I felt like my family didn’t fit in. I was busy looking for my tribe, but it was obvious that I didn’t come from the same mould as all my peers.

“Looking back, I think that was the point at which music really started to matter to me. My parents loved music and it was always playing around the house – everything from opera to 80s R&B like DeBarge – but music suddenly seemed even more important. It gave me an emotional identity.”

Most of us first heard Martina Topley-Bird on Tricky’s 1995 debut album, Maxinquaye, her seductive yet lonely voice flitting across the cranky, disjointed musical backdrop like some sweet bird of truth. The success of the album thrust Topley-Bird – then barely out of her teens – into a harsh spotlight that seemed to spend as much time focusing on her personal life as it did the music. It’s left lasting scars and, these days, Topley-Bird doesn’t particularly like talking about the work she did on Tricky’s first three albums.