Live Review: Tricky - Cologne 2017

Luxor, Cologne, Germany
30th November 2017
Tricky - “Ununiform Tour 2017”

The UK mastermind of Trip Hop TRICKY came to the cosy club Luxor in Cologne to promote his new album ‘Ununiform’. Adrian Nicholas Matthews Thaws, aka TRICKY, is often referred to as the pioneer of Trip Hop, a wildly successful music genre in the 90ies. TRICKy’s early works can best be described as dark, claustrophobic, as well as melancholic. This has brightened up a bit with the release of his last album ‘Ununiform’, where also some lighter moods and some rock elements can be found. You can find out more about the band via www.trickysite.com or https://www.facebook.com/TrickyOfficial.



Music & Performance
Instead of featuring an opening act, the crowd at the Luxor was entertained by a DJ. The place was packed and everyone waited in anticipation for the band to appear. Shortly after 9 pm, the singer walked on stage, accompanied by his drummer and his guitarist to the tunes of an instrumental track. He toasted the crowd with his drink and started to walk/ dance manically around on stage like a tiger in a cage, lifting his shirt and staring intently at the crowd. The sound of the instruments was nicely balanced, but the voice of TRICKY is at times difficult to hear properly because of delay effect and him moving the microphone all over his body while singing.



For the third song, he was joined by a female singer named Martha, who took over the female voice parts of his songs (TRICKY collaborated with countless female singers for all his albums). She did a very nice job of providing vocal stability to the songs. Things were on a smooth course, when all of a sudden TRICKY threw the mic onto the ground and stormed offstage in the middle of the song ‘Here my dear’. The rest of the band barely finished the song and then followed him, leaving behind a rather puzzled audience. Was it some anger about a technical problem? Did some of spectators offend TRICKY by filming with flash or making offensive comments? We will probably never find out, but after a few minutes break that felt like ages, the band members returned to the stage under the applause of the crowd and continued the show.



TRICKY joined them a song later as if nothing had happened and continued to perform a few songs. After barely 60 minutes playtime, the band left the stage again after the song ‘Sun Down’. The applause after this performance seemed noticeably muted. However, the band reappeared after a while for an encore of two songs, of which the first, ‘Overcome’ from the debut album ‘Maxinquaye’, was played without TRICKY. The last song was ‘Vent’, another treasure from TRICKY’s earlier works. The evening ended on a nicer note for those concertgoers, who were hoping to see TRICKY perform also some of the older songs.



All in all, this was clearly not one of the better nights for TRICKY, as he seemed a little off during his performance. His band members however were able to compensate for some of that, but I doubt that TRICKY was able to win over many new fans with this performance.

Setlist
01. Vybes
02. I'm Not Going
03. New Stole
04. Armor
05. When We Die
06. Doll
07. Nothing's Changed
08. Here My Dear
09. Running Wild
10. Parenthesis
11. Dark Days
12. Daughter
13. Sun Down
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14. Overcome
15. Vent

Rating
Music: 6
Performance: 4
Sound: 7
Light: 4
Total: 5 / 10



All pictures by Maximilian K. Unuetzer