“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.
This story is from the March 2022 edition of Computer Music.
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This story is from the March 2022 edition of Computer Music.
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