Martina Topley Bird, a Goddess of pro-quality artistry

Some might consider that the future of popular music is secured because Dido’s new album is on a scheduling horizon… We’d rather rejoice that Martina Topley Bird is finally to release a solo album, five years after working with Tricky for the last time. ‘Quixotic’ is her debut disc that will simply floor your senses and nail you ears with valiant, innovative, cathartic, soulful, spiritual, enigmatic and magnetic songs.

It arrives at the market that teems with facetious, superfluous and ephemeral offerings, it is like a black pearl in a sea of blandness. “It is… for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated – more exciting, less threatening – mirror works of soaps, Reality TV and celebrity gossip,” is a quote from the Booker Prize winner (Ms) A.S. Byatt and she was pointing a finger at JK Rawling’s ‘Harry Potter and The Order Of The Phoenix’ but the three dots within the quotation marks, originally “written”, could easily be “music”.

Against suchlike ‘sonic sewage’ de nos jours, MTB releases an album that is deep, (aurally) rich, attention-demanding, diverse and, even, disturbing. It doesn’t fit “Lifestyle music, clubbing music, waking-up music, don’t-care music,” MTB numbers ‘designer’ genres. It simply surpasses everything that’s currently around, sounding as free as a bird on a wire. It’s been a long wait for the disc, she last worked with Tricky on ‘Angels With Dirty Faces’ in 1998.

“I did a couple of guest things but people would have only heard David Holmes’s album. That was about three years ago… I didn’t plan to take all this time off, it just that… If I had something to release I would have. My recordings were done in stages and only last year we started really working on the album. I’ve ended up with seven leftovers and they just didn’t fit the mood of the album.”

Valour, pain, spirit, honesty: “These are the qualities I was looking for and I know what I like in other artists. It’s raw, without much filtering and if I didn’t get that, I wouldn’t release it and it had taken three or four collaborations to arrive at what I really wanted. There are still parts on the album which I think may have been done differently but you have to come to a compromise because searching for perfection may not be worth it!”

Gilded chords

Second best? “It is tough to settle for it. Live, I work with some incredible people but I’ve worked with some who’d claim, and I don’t want this to sound elitist, that their work was their best and I’d say that it wasn’t the best I had ever worked with. My previous work was of a very high standard and it is funny that you meet people whose ambition isn’t as high as yours.”

Guest list “I’ve got some great guests on the album, from David Holmes who asked me if I wanted him to work on my album to Tricky, whom I had obviously known from before… David Arnold was suggested to me by my A&R man and Queens Of The Stone Age, I’ve known Josh (Homme) and Mark (Lanegan) for a long time and have been a huge fan of Kyuss, Josh’s previous band, and talked about doing something for a long time and it was right to do it right now.”

No more heroines “Aretha Franklin is probably the last great singer and it all comes from her church upbringing… No other people come through and the reason is that we don’t raise people with a strong sense of community and fighting (for recognition), to a certain extent: people are packaged too soon. The pressure to be part of a wave to be commodity, kids are inspired to be in a boy-band and earn a lot of money, get all the girls… Talent is not important, it is enough to be driven.”

“Some people do come through and there are contemporary people who are inspiring, like PJ Harvey; in spirit, her first couple of albums, there are also some R&B singers… But, we’ll have to wait and see who (and if some of them) will become socially important as the legends.”

Awareness trigger

Right to Fight “How to be heard above the din of pop-tosh? I don’t know… Music is such a subjective thing and I can’t calculate what is attractive to people; I know what is attractive to me and it is up to the marketing department to make it attractive to people. But, you have to do something that is true to the artist and the project and doing a very big ad-campaign may not to representative of the album I’ve made. All I can do is keep making good music and hope it comes through; if it is really good then it will be timeless and, if people don’t discover it this year, they may discover it in five years time.”

Anti-war sentiment “I didn’t go on marches because you never know whom you are walking next to. But, I was against it and my first single, ‘Need One’, in a strange way was an appropriate song for its time because I was part of the awareness, I felt I was a trigger to be guiding your attention towards this thing rather than away. Still, I’m not a politician, I’m not an economist…”

Mother’s pessimism? “I don’t know what you’d call my standpoint but there’s been a couple of times I was very aware of my mortality and as a parent, you always feel vulnerable because there is something very scary… I just do the best I can with what knowledge I have and know of myself as a person and the rest is outside of my sphere of influence. I do all I can do and sometimes I think I should run from London but I feel lucky that I know what principles are, what values, what goodness is…”

Martina Topley Bird fights for the right to – quality.

Tour dates:

24 July – Little Civic, Wolverhampton
25 July – Hi-Fi Club, Leeds
27 July – King Tuts, Glasgow
28 July – Band On The Wall, Manchester
29 July – Scala, London

25 August – Queens Square, Bristol (with Massive Attack)