In 1993, Tricky met with Martina Topley-Bird, then a teenager at Clifton College, after he saw her sitting against a wall near his house singing to herself. “That’s really how it happened”, she recalled. “A few weeks later, I went around to his house with some friends. We’d been drinking cider after our GCSEs. We were banging on his door, but he wasn’t in. Then Mark Stewart, who lived there, came up to us and said: ‘Yeah, this is Tricky’s house, jump in through the window.’”[5] Tricky’s lyricism had matured from raps about street violence and sex to more personal and introspective writing, but Topley-Bird described his material for Maxinquaye as “quite depressing”, which he believed was because of her more privileged background: “It’s just reality. She’s been a student all her life, grew up in Somerset, and I don’t think she’s ever faced the real world. She finds it all a bit weird. But she’s my best mate.”
She and Tricky formed a musical partnership, and Topley-Bird collaborated with Tricky as a featured vocalist on his debut album Maxinquaye (1995)[7] (a printing error credited her as “Martine”). Almost all of her vocals on the album were recorded in a single take.[8] In describing the recording sessions, she recalled: “It was totally instinctive. There was no time to drum up an alter ego. I liked the idea that the information people needed about me was what they would hear when they put the record on. Anything else was sort of extraneous. I didn’t think there was anything in my biography that would explain my musical choices.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxinquaye
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martina_Topley-Bird