I met tricky on Monday night!!!!!!!!! It was only for about 30 seconds but extremely cool. I went with five friends to the Manchester concert. We just walked into the bar and he was playing pool with hawkman! So I went over, shook hands and got him and hawk to sign my t-shirt. Every one else in the bar was playing it cool like they didn’t notice he was there but I was pretty excited. Then I asked if he was producing hawks album, he said yeah and called hawk over. He then told me it was coming out in January. Tricky was really friendly, there have been all these stories of him telling fans just to fuck off but he was nice. He looked like he was dressed out of an oxfam bin; really scruffy.

    The actual gig was quite good. By anyone else’s standard it would have been better, but it was still good. He played a number of tracks that were good but all dragged out into long metal versions for about ten minutes. This sounded good, with lots of drums and tricky just screaming one line over and over! However, there was a feeling that it was a bit of a waste as he was using up time during which he could have been performing some classic tracks. They played; Black steel, which was the best track live. It was really well performed and sounded great. Pumpkin (excellent). Overcome (good). Hot like a Sauna (Brilliant; the harsh sound of the live music really suited it and it had more flavour than the album version). For Real (cool but instead of doing the proper vocals tricky just repeated ‘it’s my turn to talk’). Girls (quite Good). The moment I Feared (cool-really dragged out and tortured sounding). One of the tracks near the end of Angels….(I Forget
which but it was just an instrumental which wasn’t that good). A track from blowback (I think it was excess; really good) He did about 3 or 4 new songs; two sounded pretty good. The drummer was brilliant & hawkman sounded fantastic live; a bit more rappy, but fitted the music perfectly. The woman (I presume it was ambersunshower but I have no idea what she looks like and did not meet her) was good. At first I thought she sounded really scared and timid but tricky got the mic turned up and she sounded great; a bit more subtle and less strident than martina. She handled the vocals from max really nicely; they were different from the album versions but almost as good. Hawkman should have performed far more, he seems like a pretty talented guy and I think his album could be good, especially with tricky as producer.