Trip Hop
109 articles
Interview by Steven Daly, Rock's Backpages Audio, 1991
The Bristol trio talk about the time being right for their music; what they listen to; albums vs. singles; the Bristol scene and sound, plus the influence of reggae; their recording and mixing process and the place for remixing.
File format: mp3; file size: 42.3mb; Interview length: 44' 04"; sound quality: **
Massive Attack: The Bristol Bunch
Interview by John McCready, The Face, January 1991
MASSIVE ATTACK were part of Bristol's Wild Bunch crew, a posse who pioneered UK hip hop. In 1986 they helped put together ‘The Look Of ...
Massive Attack: Massive: Blue Lines (Circa)
Review by Jim Arundel, Melody Maker, 30 March 1991
RHAPSODY IN BLUE ...
Massive Attack: Massive: Young Guns IV
Interview by Jeff Lorez, Blues & Soul, 2 April 1991
Massive have always been known for their individual stance in music making. Now the hard work appears to be paying off for the Bristol based quartet ...
Massive Attack: Blue Lines (Wild Bunch/Circa)
Review by Dele Fadele, New Musical Express, 6 April 1991
IMMENSE AT WORK ...
Profile and Interview by John Robb, Sounds, 6 April 1991
It's taken three years and a war, but MASSIVE have finally risen to the top of the charts. JOHN ROBB listens to their stunning debut ...
Review by Adam Sweeting, The Guardian, 25 April 1991
Massive unfinished sympathy ...
Review by Dele Fadele, New Musical Express, 27 July 1991
NO CELL OUT ...
Overview by Simon Reynolds, The New York Times, 18 August 1991
SO VOLATILE is the club scene that few artists have been able to make a career out of dance music, which is released mostly as ...
Horace Andy, Massive Attack: Keep on Runnings
Report by Sean O'Hagan, The Guardian, 15 February 1992
Bob Marley's music is not the young music in Kingston today. Ragga not reggae is king. And that took the British group Massive Attack to ...
Massive Attack: Wheeling In The Years
Interview by Jim Arundel, Melody Maker, 22 February 1992
BRITAIN IS CRAP, we decide over lunch in a Bristol restaurant where we're waiting for Massive Attack. The food is cold, the service is virtually ...
Massive Attack, Martina Topley-Bird, Tricky: Tricky & Martina: Slack Magic
Interview by David Stubbs, Melody Maker, 14 May 1994
Remember Massive Attack's languid, smoky, shuffling, bluesy 'Unfinished Sympathy'? Former MA maverick TRICKY has done it again, with the languid, smoky, etc, etc 'Ponderosa'. DAVID ...
Interview by Sean O'Hagan, The Face, August 1994
When Shara Nelson and others moved on to new projects, the faces and spaces of Massive Attack's Blue Lines were superseded by silence. Three years later, ...
Portishead: Dummy (Go Beat/All formats)
Review by Stephen Dalton, New Musical Express, 13 August 1994
POOR PORTISHEAD. The town, I mean, not the slo-mo sound sculptors who have made this innocuous seaside hideaway sound so relentlessly tragic. For this is, ...
Massive Attack: Protection (Virgin)
Review by Ben Thompson, The Independent, September 1994
THEIR FIRST ALBUM, 1991's sumptuous Blue Lines, opened up a whole new imaginative world for British dance music, in the same way that De La ...
Massive Attack: The Three Racketeers
Interview by Dele Fadele, New Musical Express, 17 September 1994
With the follow-up to their 1991 monster Blue Lines in the can, MASSIVE ATTACK are out to prove that homegrown soul fusion can take on ...
Massive Attack, Portishead: Trip Hop Don't Stop: Massive Attack and Portishead
Interview by Simon Reynolds, Melody Maker, 17 September 1994
Imagine a cross between ambient and hip-hop. Imagine a Brit version of Cypress Hill or Gravediggaz's spooky Gothic Hop. Imagine the sound of 'bombs exploding ...
Massive Attack: Haçienda, Manchester
Live Review by Dave Simpson, The Guardian, 7 December 1994
MASSIVE ATTACK promised us a "multi-media experience" and, boy, they gave us one. The traditionally grey, post-modern confines of the Haçienda were swamped in camouflage ...
Portishead: The Reluctant Debutante
Report and Interview by Ben Thompson, Independent on Sunday, 11 December 1994
IF YOU WERE the most compelling and enigmatic new group in Britain, playing your first proper gig in the sort of London club where Christine ...
Massive Attack: The Leadmill, Sheffield
Live Review by David Bennun, Melody Maker, 17 December 1994
ASSAULT AND FLATTERY ...
Interview by Everett True, Melody Maker, 21 January 1995
From a tiny town outside Bristol came last year's best album, the piercing, lovelorn and sexy-as-f*** Dummy by PORTISHEAD. EVERETT TRUE meets the band to ...
Massive Attack, Portishead: Massive Attack: Surprise Attack
Report and Interview by William Shaw, Details, February 1995
Massive Attack invented a loping, trippy dance sound that could have turned them into international stars. When they decided they'd rather stay home in Bristol, ...
Profile and Interview by Calvin Bush, i-D, February 1995
BEING UNIQUE means both having no equals and standing alone. Celebrating freedom, lamenting solitude. The infinite vastness of the air you breathe and the pressured ...
Interview by Sean O'Hagan, The Face, February 1995
Tense, nervous and paranoid, Tricky has emerged from the dark heart of the Bristol beat with an extraordinary album that is almost as strange and ...
Tricky: Maxinquaye (4th & Broadway)
Review by Dele Fadele, New Musical Express, 18 February 1995
THE SEVERN ALLIANCE ...
Review by Jon Savage, MOJO, March 1995
THIS IS A brilliant record: densely layered, full of barely controlled nervous energy, paranoid under surveillance, at times more intimate than you’d wish – like ...
PJ Harvey, Tricky: Town & Country Club, Leeds
Live Review by Paul Moody, New Musical Express, 18 March 1995
THE REBIRTH OF GHOUL ...
Renegade Soundwave, Tricky: Tricky, Renegade Soundwave: The Grand, Clapham, London
Live Review by Caroline Sullivan, The Guardian, 15 May 1995
Cool, calm and very, very strange: Caroline Sullivan is haunted by Bristol rapper Tricky ...
Massive Attack, Portishead, Tricky: Trip Hop: Another City, Another New Sound
Report by Simon Reynolds, The New York Times, 28 May 1995
POP GROUPS hate being identified as part of a scene centred on a city. But if there's one thing bands resent even more, it is ...
Interview by Martin Aston, Q, June 1995
Avonian ingénu Tricky has pulled quite a rabbit from the top hat they're calling "Bristol trip-hop". Martin Aston meets the Number 1 rapper with plenty ...
Portishead: Usher Hall, Edinburgh
Live Review by Stephen Dalton, New Musical Express, 3 June 1995
TORCH ME I'M SLICK ...
Report and Interview by Stephen Dalton, Vox, July 1995
Trip-hop is now part of pop's international language — but the pioneers of Britain's most successful musical export in years refuse to admit it exists... ...
Report by Bethan Cole, Mixmag, August 1995
One year ago we coined the term 'trip hop' for a new, instrumental school of stoned hip hop rhythms and psychedelic wizardry. Since then, the ...
Profile and Interview by David Sinclair, Rolling Stone, 10 August 1995
"YOU 'AVEN'T got any rizlas, 'ave you?" Tricky says, asking for rolling papers by way of an introduction. The 27-year-old rapper and songwriter — "I ...
Interview by Sean O'Hagan, The Observer, 22 October 1995
Hip, maverick rapper Tricky talks exclusively about the dark reality that inspires his music ...
Report and Interview by Gavin Martin, New Musical Express, 28 October 1995
Forget all you may have read about TRICKY. Forget that he once admitted being the father of MARTINA's child. Forget that he and Björk, at ...
Review by Steffan Chirazi, San Francisco Chronicle, 28 April 1996
Mad Professor Mixes Some Magic ...
Report and Interview by Ian Watson, Melody Maker, 25 May 1996
Martin Rossiter as Eric Cantona? Liam Gallagher squaring off against Damon Albarn? Robbie Williams and Steve Pulp in the same footie team? No, you're not ...
Live Review by Andy Crysell, New Musical Express, 15 June 1996
DO MOLOKO have something to hide? Is there something missing from their kooky take on trip-hop that can only be disguised by a vast dollop ...
Neneh Cherry: Spirited: Neneh Cherry: Man (Hut) ***
Review by Mark Cooper, Q, October 1996
Neneh Cherry: she deserves better. ...
Interview by Steven Daly, Rock's Backpages Audio, October 1996
The Bristol maverick discusses his treatment by the music press and talks about being pigeonholed; about not repeating Maxinquaye; about recording in Jamaica and what went wrong with Massive Attack; about Trip Hop and his relationship with Martina Topley-Bird; about his criminal past and his gangster uncles; about his memories of Bristol, the Wild Bunch and Smith & Mighty; and about his role in Luc Besson's The Fifth Element...
File format: mp3; file size: 74.3mb, interview length: 1h 17' 26" sound quality: ***
Tricky: Pre-Millennium Tension (Fourth & Broadway BR 623 CD/MC/LP)
Review by David Toop, The Wire, October 1996
ANY MUSICIAN who debuts at creative boiling point is going to slap into problems before too long. A couple of years of press saturation, blind ...
Tricky: Pre-Millennium Tension (Island, 10 tks/42 mins)
Review by Simon Price, Melody Maker, 9 November 1996
2000 A SPACED ODYSSEY ...
Tricky: Things That Go Bumpkin The Night
Interview by Johnny Cigarettes, New Musical Express, 9 November 1996
After his darker than dark period, West Country imp Tricky comes back from the other side with a new LP, Pre-Millennium Tension, proclaiming New York ...
Interview by Steven Daly, Rolling Stone, 14 November 1996
Each year, Rolling Stone looks to the far edges of rock & roll in search of new artists who march to the beat of a ...
Report and Interview by Emma Warren, Jockey Slut, December 1996
More than any other British city Bristol has always had an identifiable musical sound. From Smith and Mighty, Massive Attack, Tricky and Portishead, to current ...
Tricky: Pre-Millennium Tension (Island BRCD 623)
Review by Mark Cooper, Q, December 1996
Tricky: no way is everything getting to him. ...
Overview by Pat Blashill, Details, December 1996
PAT BLASHILL TRACES THE HISTORY OF ELECTRO, THE UNSUNG SOURCE OF RAP, TECHNO, AND TRIP-HOP ...
Live Review by David Bennun, Melody Maker, 18 January 1997
FRONTIER BASHING ...
Massive Attack, Radiohead: Radiohead, Massive Attack: RDS Arena, Dublin
Live Review by Sean O'Hagan, The Guardian, 23 June 1997
Storming through the downpour ...
Portishead: Roseland Ballroom, New York NY
Live Review by Neil Kulkarni, Melody Maker, 16 August 1997
'HEAD OVER HEELS ...
Review and Interview by Paul Trynka, MOJO, September 1997
The marriage of beat poetry with hip hop beats. Released in the UK on September 29 before one-off London show on October 13. ...
Massive Attack: Essential Music Festival, Finsbury Park, London
Live Review by Calvin Bush, Muzik, October 1997
SCROWFFHHI! Whumphh! Elbows in face. Solid wall of pressed flesh barring entrance. Distant sounds of something vaguely musical happening on the horizon. Looks like it's ...
Portishead: You Only Live Twice
Interview by Paul Trynka, MOJO, October 1997
They inspired with Dummy. And nearly expired making its successor. As Portishead finally deliver their eagerly-awaited second album. Paul Trynka uncovers the turmoil behind their ...
Portishead: Dread again — Portishead: Portishead (Go! Beat) *****
Review by Caroline Sullivan, The Guardian, 3 October 1997
If Portishead's first album spooked you out, their second one will really get to you, says Caroline Sullivan ...
Portishead: Portishead (GO! Beat 11tks/50 mins)
Review by Ben Myers, Melody Maker, 4 October 1997
GLOOM, GLOOM, SHAKE THE ROOM! It's dark, it's gloomy and it's brilliant. Yep, PORTISHEAD are back ...
DJ Shadow: Camel Bobsled Race (Q-Bert Mega Mix) (Mo'Wax/CD/Tape)
Review by Andy Crysell, New Musical Express, 6 December 1997
ALL THIS SCRATCHING'S MAKING ME BITCH! ...
Retrospective and Interview by Chris Campion, Ray Gun, 1998
FROM ITS ACUTELY localised inception, the influence of Bristol's Wild Bunch has spread far and wide. The sound system that spawned Massive Attack, Tricky and ...
Interview by Paul Trynka, Guitar Player, January 1998
PORTISHEAD, THE British band who spawned the trip hop genre, appear to represent the cutting edge of electronic pop, but it's the guitar of Adrian ...
Groove Armada: Northern Star (Tummy Touch/CD/LP)
Review by Stephen Dalton, New Musical Express, 21 March 1998
JUST ONE of the trade names of Tom Findlay and Andy Cato, London club promoters and jazz-funk veterans, Groove Armada's debut album is an oddly ...
Massive Attack: Band of the decade: Massive Attack
Overview by Sean O'Hagan, The Observer, 29 March 1998
What is it that makes them so different? Well, one of them's called Mushroom. ...
Massive Attack: Mezzanine (Virgin)
Review by Keith Cameron, New Musical Express, 18 April 1998
FLOORED GENIUS ...
Massive Attack: Looking for Identities: Massive Attack
Interview by Ben Thompson, Daily Telegraph, May 1998
A STATELY HARPSICHORD looms up out of a gently tapping drumbeat. A piano escorts an exquisite female voice through a bass guitar archway with the ...
Review by Rob Chapman, MOJO, May 1998
Eagerly-anticipated follow-up to 1994’s Protection, 64 minutes of guitar-driven downbeats, featuring the toppermost tonsils of Horace Andy and the angelic ambience of Liz Fraser on ...
Thievery Corporation: Super sharp suiters
Interview by Andy Crysell, Muzik, May 1998
Smouldering bossa-nova, bespoke tailoring and white-collar audio criminality: are Washington DC's Thievery Corporation the new Kruder & Dorfmeister? Or just the new Corduroy? ...
Dallas Austin, Tricky: Tricky: The Mad Father
Interview by Craig McLean, The Face, May 1998
They used to call him Tricky Kid, now they call him The Boss... He is the overworked businessman with his own label who is to ...
Propellerheads: Metropolitan University, Leeds
Live Review by Neil Mason, Melody Maker, 2 May 1998
'HEADS THEY LOSE? ...
Massive Attack: Mezzanine (Virgin)
Review by Marc Weingarten, Los Angeles Times, 10 May 1998
MASSIVE ATTACK'S 1991 debut album, Blue Lines, has become a watershed album in the history of electronic dance music for a number of reasons. By ...
Live Review by Caroline Sullivan, The Guardian, 22 May 1998
Choking on his own venom ...
Tricky: Angels With Dirty Faces (Island)
Review by Neil Kulkarni, Melody Maker, 23 May 1998
Cherub Thumping! ...
Live Review by Ben Myers, Melody Maker, 30 May 1998
PRE-MILLENNIUM TEDIUM ...
Massive Attack: The Bristol Method
Profile and Interview by Will Hermes, Spin, June 1998
Trip-hop pioneers Massive Attack heat up the chill-out room ...
Interview by Tom Doyle, Q, June 1998
Demonised by the media, deified by the art set, the real Tricky still struggles to be heard above the hubbub. Q parts a curtain of ...
Tricky: Angels With Dirty Faces (Island)
Review by Nick Coleman, MOJO, June 1998
A fourth album for the Bristolian angst-meister, now removed to the US and working with real instruments played by real musicians. ...
Horace Andy, Massive Attack: Horace Andy: Still massive after all these years
Retrospective and Interview by James Maycock, The Independent, 19 June 1998
He was big 30 years ago, but Horace Andy is singing sweetly to this day. ...
Red Snapper: Dingwalls, London
Live Review by Calvin Bush, Muzik, August 1998
SO WE all thought Red Snapper were something to do with "jazz"? Richard Thair's lot have been called many things since they first stormed to ...
Book Excerpt by Ben Thompson, 'Seven Years of Plenty' (Gollancz), October 1998
"A recent article in the New York Times proclaimed Newport as The New Seattle..." Caroline Sullivan, The Guardian, 13 December, 1996 ...
Portishead: Tangled Up In Blue
Interview by Rob Young, The Wire, December 1998
After three albums and a world tour which nearly put paid to them, the members of Portishead are resting up. In Bristol, Geoff Barrow and ...
Massive Attack: London Arena, Millwall, London
Live Review by Caroline Sullivan, The Guardian, 7 December 1998
Chilled-out prog hop struggling in a massive arena ...
Massive Attack: London Arena, London
Live Review by Neil Mason, Melody Maker, 19 December 1998
THE VICTORIOUS BIG ...
Massive Attack: Singles 90/98 (Virgin)
Review by James Hunter, New York Observer, 15 February 1999
What Big Ears They Have! Massive Attack's Remix Art ...
Review by Eric Weisbard, Spin, September 1999
IT ONLY SEEMS like Tricky is making the same album every time out. 1996's Nearly God stripped out whatever commercial possibilities Maxinquaye's paradigmatic trip-hop held; ...
Interview by Stephen Dalton, New Musical Express, 25 September 1999
From Euro-disco trance nutters to Mercury-friendly rock'n'soul pluralists finally getting the respect they deserve — you've heard the word, now come worship in the house ...
Review by Devon Powers, PopMatters, 19 June 2000
IT'S BEEN SO long since I've listened to something and truly felt it was new. Something so daring, so confusing, you want to swear by ...
Morcheeba: Barrowland, Glasgow
Live Review by Ian Gittins, Q, December 2000
Moving On Up: bumper sales crop turns sleepy trip-hoppers into the new M People. No! ...
Massive Attack: He used to be massive
Interview by Lisa Verrico, The Times, 11 February 2003
Massive Attack have just one original member left. Robert Del Naja tells our critic about the struggle to create a fourth album alone. ...
Review and Interview by David Stubbs, Uncut, March 2003
Sombre fourth album, featuring guest vocals from Sinéad O'Connor ...
Review by Will Hermes, Spin, 26 June 2003
BETWEEN U.K. MC Ms. Dynamite's debut and the rhyme battle rumoured to be brewing between Birmingham's Mike "the Streets" Skinner and Brixton's Roots Manuva, 2002 ...
Live Review by David Stubbs, The Wire, August 2003
ON PAPER, what a line-up, what a dub melding of nonconformist minds: The Mad Professor (aka Neil Fraser), who through his remixes of Primal Scream ...
Martina Topley-Bird: Scala, London
Live Review by Simon Price, Independent on Sunday, 2 August 2003
WHEN MARTINA Topley-Bird made her first fateful encounter with Tricky, she was a mere schoolgirl, and went on to become his muse and partner-in-rhyme over ...
Review by Todd L. Burns, Stylus, 1 September 2003
ONE OF THE FEW SURVIVORS and true innovators of the trip-hop movement, Lamb returns here with the re-release of their third album. Placed on the ...
Live Review by Tim Cooper, The Independent, 31 March 2005
IN RECENT WEEKS it has become de rigueur for big names to launch their new album with small dates in London. Last night, after club-sized ...
Live Review by Stephen Dalton, The Times, 23 January 2006
LONG BEFORE Basement Jaxx or Fatboy Slim, Matt Black and Jonathan More were Britain's original kings of big beats. ...
Press Release by Paul Moody, WME Entertainment, January 2008
"I'VE GOT something to say" whispers Martina, barely ten minutes into The Blue God, her first album for five years. "Have you?" It's a neat ...
Portishead: The Curse of Portishead Lifts
Interview by Stephen Dalton, Scotland on Sunday, March 2008
IN DECEMBER last year, three black-clad ghosts from the pop past clambered onstage at an off-season holiday camp in an icy, wind-whipped corner of Somerset. ...
Portishead: Brixton Academy, London
Live Review by Ian Watson, Yahoo! Music, 17 April 2008
PEOPLE WHO don't like Portishead sneeringly dismiss them as dinner party music, something the sickening middle class stick on in the background while they discuss ...
Review by Paul Trynka, MOJO, May 2008
Long delayed, "troubled" follow-up to Portishead's long-delayed, "troubled" second album. ...
Massive Attack: Festival Hall, London
Live Review by Rick Pearson, The Evening Standard, 18 June 2008
THE FILM score to Ridley Scott's 1982 classic Blade Runner was always more than a fanfare for Harrison Ford's on-screen heroics. Eerie and ambient, Vangelis's ...
Portishead is reunited and ready to play in the desert
Interview by Phil Sutcliffe, Los Angeles Times, 25 Spring 2008
MANCHESTER, ENGLAND — As Portishead takes the carefully backlighted stage at the ancient, tatty Manchester Apollo, heavy shadows fall across the band's members. The concert ...
Massive Attack: The Return of Massive Attack
Profile and Interview by Will Self, The Sunday Times, 24 January 2010
SOMEWHERE BACK in the early 1990s, when Britain was dull in a different way, I first heard Massive Attack's Blue Lines. Then in my early ...
Profile and Interview by Stephen Dalton, The National, October 2010
THE GREAT LOST BOY of British music, Adrian "Tricky" Thaws has been on an exotic, erratic musical odyssey since he first added whispered raps and ...
Deadmau5, Portishead: Portishead: Hammerstein Ballroom/Deadmau5: Roseland, NYC
Live Review by Maura Johnston, The Village Voice, 12 October 2011
AT A LIVE MUSIC event, your eye naturally is drawn to what's happening onstage: guitarists thrashing and sawing at the air, vocalists preening between yawps, ...
Memoir by Michael A. Gonzales, Complex, 20 April 2012
"Most marijuana smokers are Negroes, Hispanics, jazz musicians, and entertainers, Their satanic music is driven by marijuana."— Harry J. Anslinger, America's First Drug Czar ...
Massive Attack: Blue Lines: Massive Attack's blueprint for UK pop's future
Retrospective by Sean O'Hagan, The Guardian, 28 October 2012
In 1991, the laidback Bristol collective roused themselves to unleash their debut album. Reissued 21 years on it remains a landmark. Here, an early champion ...
Leslie Winer: "If I Hit You, You'd Feel It": Leslie Winer, Trip Hop's Forgotten Pioneer?
Retrospective and Interview by Wyndham Wallace, The Quietus, 29 October 2012
Some argue that Leslie Winer aka © invented trip hop in 1990 with her ill-fated album, Witch. Now she's back with &c, a retrospective compilation ...
Neneh Cherry: Blank Project (Smalltown Supersound)
Review by Rob Young, The Wire, February 2014
NENEH CHERRY's re-emergence as a solo artist has been a long, gradual process. ...
Morcheeba, Skye|Ross: Skye | Ross
Profile and Interview by David Burke, Classic Pop, October 2016
Morcheeba, helmed by Paul Godfrey's immaculate production, Skye Edwards' ethereal vocals and Ross Godfrey's luminous guitar, mapped out their own singular sonic territory in the ...
Essay by Simon Reynolds, Pitchfork, 3 April 2018
Unlocking the mysteries behind the Scottish electronic duo's hallucinatory classic, which turns 20 this month ...
Tricky: Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
Live Review by Ian Gittins, The Guardian, 27 October 2019
After a year of tragedy, the spotlight-shy producer stays in the shadows during this erratic yet utterly mesmerising set. ...
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