Above, an extract from Mark Fisher's keenly perceptive and positive interview with Tricky in this month's issue of The Wire. Fifteen years after Maxinquaye Tricky is very much on-form with Knowle West Boy. Council Estate is a monumental track which demonstrates that Tricky is still brimming with righteous class-rage, supported by Fisher who applauds Tricky's 'timely intervention in a British cultural climate in which a website like chavscum.com can propagate class hate with impunity; in which the BBC's recent White season can treat working class as if it were synonymous with 'white'; and in which the Labour government has long ago given up any pretence of representing a working class that it likes to think has disappeared. New Labour's disdain, suspicion and condescension towards the proletariat it has abandoned is perfectly in tune with the assumptions of a complacently middlebrow mass media, for which the notion of working class intelligence is a contradiction in terms, and for whom working class culture is cast as brutish, brash and populist...'
Among other stand out songs Cross to Bear demonstrates Tricky's strong empathy with other fascinating, prophetic, outsider figures:
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