here's a review from TJ Knight:

Tricky at The Palace, Hollywood, June 15, 2001

About 30 minutes before the doors opened, Tricky and his entourage crept past the line waiting to get into the Palace on Hollywood and Vine, scoping out his audience. Well-dressed parents walked past as well, on their way to that evening’s performance of The Lion King at the Pantages around the corner. Which is perhaps what inspired Tricky to wear a black velvet cat-mask as he made his way incognito past the line. He kept the mask on throughout the whole show as well, flipped up so it was not around his eyes, but kind of covering his mohawk. 

The opening dj went on at 8:10pm, and he played til 8:50. The sound system in the Palace is fucking awful—no high end at all, and not much of the low-end body bass Tricky is fond of.

Tricky’s band came on—drummer, bass, guitar player, keys, and two other vocalists-- and played a slow entrance song and then Tricky came on and immediately turned his back to the audience, and began 100 minute concert smoking furiously. The crowd, a mix of ravers on ecstasy, twirling hippy-types, drunken frat boys, Pauly Shore, and me, hollered as he walked onstage.  Tricky then sang on the second song, an extended, anguished, re-done version of Movies Don’t Move Me, featuring a whole new rap by the other rapper (not the female) in Tricky’s crew. The energy began to build, and build. Tricky was motioning his band to increase the intensity. The band consisted of a female vocalist who also danced quite well, and seemed to really enjoy the show, a big male rapper—very big standing next to rail thin Tricky, who again spent the most part of the show with his back to half the audience, wearing only his jeans and socks, gripping his microphone stand as if it were electrically charged, and he couldn’t let go. Ticky shook his head back and forth  frantically, as if in a trance-like state, through much of the show. The concert slowly picked up intensity until the grand finale—the second-to-last track of the main set. Tricky played mainly new songs, as well as hits like Black Steel, Karmacoma, Lyrics of Fury. (However, Tricky did not sing his vocal parts on these. And some songs off the new disc rocked more than others. I was glad to hear a bunch of new songs off the new cd that I haven’t heard before, but I might be able to review them better had I head the new cd first.)

Tricky had two sets of guest vocalists join the band for two numbers, and then Pauly Shore sang the female lead vocalists’ part during the 10-minute encore, Revolution, the single off the new disc. One bad thing about the Palace sound system was the inability to mix the vocalists separately, so all these guest vocalists came out muddied and indistinguishable from one another in the audience’s mix. 

The first guest vocalists were three female rappers, who were very high energy, and the rapper who busted out the most lines was fast.  The second guest rapper was another guy in a wifebeater undershirt, and he joined the three women rappers on a song near the end of the show.  The best song was the second to last track of the main set—Tricky sang the entire track, and the lyrics included a repetitive “I don’t know!”  During that track, Tricky spasmodically danced his way out to the very front of his monitors and faced the crowd and gave us everything.  I am happy to report that the show was only slightly marred by Pauly Shore’s presence.  However, the sound system at the Palace is comparable to an amplifier in a storage shed in term of dynamic range—in other words, the sound is all fucked up.  To conclude, the energy of the show—Tricky’s energy-- made suffering through a bad sound system possible, if not enjoyable.

TJ Knight