Martina Topley Bird's Personal Best
With her Some Place Simple album newly reissued, Martina Topley Bird talks Alan Pedder through the five songs she’s most proud of in her career.
Martina Topley Bird has never put much faith in inspiration as something divine, crashing in like lightning or teased out of the ether like some celestial reward.
For the London-born, Bristol-raised artist, the work of songwriting has almost always been a labour of love, a gradual process sharpened through vision, through collaboration, and, perhaps most importantly, through learning when to heed her intuition.
Her early solo career, coming off the back of a foundational partnership with Tricky that began at 16, is one she looks back on with both pride and self-critique, and barely a trace of nostalgia. As someone whose origin story has so often been mythologised through chance encounters and titanic chemistry, she’s refreshingly pragmatic in interviews about how it all went down.
There’s affection for Quixotic, her scattershot debut from 2003, but mainly as a starting point for her artistic evolution. She shows some love, too, for 2008’s The Blue God, which aimed for more coherence but left her own creative compass slightly in a spin. Though both records had their strengths, she says, the production and the ever-turning cogs of collaboration didn’t always match with the songs’ emotional core, not obscuring her intentions necessarily, but not exactly protecting them either.
For her third album Some Place Simple, reissued for the first time on vinyl last week, Topley Bird took a cleaner, less fussed over line. “The whole concept was to re-record some of my older songs with the arrangements that I had been playing live, with just percussion and guitar,” she tells Best Fit over the phone from her home in southern Spain. “The idea was to let the songs stand on their own, as much as possible, without a lot of production flourishes and adornment.”
She hadn’t originally planned to document these versions of the songs, worked up as a duo with Fergus Gerrand for a support slot on Massive Attack’s Heligoland tour. The catalyst came from Damon Albarn, who not only came up with the idea but provided the studio space and label support for the record, which was made in just 3 weeks – “one week recording, one week of overdubs, one week mixing and mastering” – and came out in the summer of 2010: five tracks from Quixotic, six from The Blue God, and four new songs, including the sinister “Orchids” and “All Day”, a gospel-inspired mantric march.
“It was a very satisfying way to work, and I’d love to make an album like that again,” she says. “It gives you confidence, in the sense of the recording having a sense of integrity to it. It captures a moment in time, for better or worse. It’s maybe a little too raw in places, but then there are songs like ‘Baby Blue’ that came out so well and have a really enduring quality to them.”
Resisting the temptation to patch up the levels and smooth off some of the edges, the Some Place Simple reissue is presented in the same spirit as it was recorded, unfinished in the best sense of the word. “Like a time capsule, it captures our virtuosity and our (my) limits,” she says, and nothing more is needed.
Read on for more on “Baby Blue” and four other songs from Topley Bird’s career that she feels shine a light on some of her finest moments – from the Mercury Prize-nominated Quixotic all the way through to her most recent album, 2021’s Forever I Wait – and a hint of where she might be going next.
"Sandpaper Kisses" by Martina Topley Bird (2003)
MARTINA TOPLEY BIRD: I’m proud of “Sandpaper Kisses” because it was a significant moment for me. It's one of the first songs that began with me, rather than as a reaction to someone else’s idea. When I wrote it, it just felt right. It felt very me, very mine. And it’s one that I hear the most love about, too.
I remember coming up with the lyrics when I was on a tube ride, writing in a notebook on the way to the studio or on the way back. I was working at Alex McGowan’s studio, Space Eko, over in its original location in Fulham, and it was Alex who selected and lined up the sample that sounds like a harp and swelling water. I remember playing that sample in, then recording the lyrics I’d written on the tube and listening back to the recording. An old school friend was visiting me from out of town and had come to the studio with me and was like, “What is going on here, how did you even do that?” – I guess by that stage Alex and I were in a kind of flow, not needing to say much to each other to get things moving. This song in particular revealed itself so naturally that it felt completely intuitive.
After it was released, I got a request to sync it to a video game called Fahrenheit / Indigo Prophecy. The label told me that it wasn’t very much money but that these kinds of things can have a big reach, so I said yes, they could use it. The game definitely introduced the song to a whole new audience. I’ve often wondered whether people like The Weeknd and Stephen Marley, or producers they worked with, first came across the song through that game. Even Horace Andy used to say this was his favourite song of mine.
"Baby Blue" by Martina Topley Bird (2008/2010)
MARTINA TOPLEY BIRD: “Baby Blue” came out of a period where I was trying to master a traditional pop song structure, and to me, the epitome of that would be a Beatles song. “Baby Blue” felt like the culmination of all my ambitions to write a “Beatles song.” It had the really defined melody: clear verses, clear chorus, middle eight, and a straightforward meaning. The lyric took a long time to finish – what else is new? Actually, the other song that fits in the '60s mould from The Blue God is “Poison” and that arrived fully formed, melody and lyric, in real time, but that happens so infrequently.
After working with so many different people on Quixotic, I was eager to commit to working with a smaller team on the follow-up record and was lucky enough to find Brian Burton aka Danger Mouse – who I’d met working on the Gorillaz record Demon Days – as producer, and Josh Klinghoffer as my dedicated person of many instruments and gadgets.
On the original version of “Baby Blue” I remember going into the studio early one morning and recording the bass for the track. I don’t know what kind of bass it was, maybe a Mexicali synth bass? Then Josh arrived and I asked him to play guitar in all these different inversions. I played him “Wang Dang Doodle” as a reference for the guitar sound, and then Brian came in later and gave the song more of a modern, mashup kind of feel with some sampled drums.
I feel like “Baby Blue” really came into its own on Some Place Simple because the simplicity and fragility of the stripped back arrangement allowed the song to shine and helped to connect to the vulnerability in it. It’s disarming and endearing. Listening to it now, I’m struck by how young it seems.
As much as I’m proud of it as a song, I know I have unfinished business in this realm because I am often getting ideas from that era, whether it’s ‘60s R&B or girl group songs. I have a lot of those kinds of song ideas tucked away and every Christmas, when we start cranking the Motown Christmas playlist, I think to myself, I’ve got to do something with them!
So, it’s been gradually amassing, like a little protoplanet. Last Christmas I started chiseling away at it, just playing all the song ideas on a piano I got for my birthday last year, and the exercise of doing that has really helped me to start to see the bridge between what I’ve done before and the next world I want to go to.
Revisiting Some Place Simple for the reissue has reminded me that the things I was reaching for back then – emotional clarity, space, restraint, and songs that leave room for the listener – are still the things I’m reaching for now.
"Psyche" by Massive Attack feat. Martina Topley Bird (2010)
BEST FIT: This is such an interesting song, and one that’s been the subject of so much speculation online. There’s been a lot of debate about the lyrics and what the story behind them might be. What is it that you personally love about “Psyche”? What does it mean to you?
MARTINA TOPLEY BIRD: I love a good one-word title, and I loved going on tour and hearing how differently everyone pronounced it. I loved that the title worked even if you only thought it meant the mind, but we only named it once it was recorded and D [Robert del Naja] asked me what we should call it.
The legend of Psyche was something I only discovered while I was writing the song. I was trying to decipher the scratch vocal I'd recorded in London, in a little writing room at Damon Albarn’s studio, and it sounded something like "I'm searching / from in the heart / your dart made urgent," and I thought "heart, dart... Cupid!" and that led me to the story of Psyche. Reading her story, I instantly knew that was what the song was about.
Very briefly, in Roman classical mythology, Psyche is put through an extensive gauntlet of incredibly painful and difficult trials in order to prove her love for Cupid. So it is, I guess, a story about the willingness to make sacrifices. About how much you are willing to give up of yourself for the sake of your beliefs, or for the sake of another.
It chimed with me because of how the music made feel. The song has a sample of plucked classical guitar that has a beatific urgency to it. It’s urgent yet serene, and that very particular blend of feeling got me thinking about how interesting it would be to write something that felt urgent but not coming from a place of anxiety.
I also love how the song is structured. It’s not your standard ABABC song structure. It’s more like ABCDE, where each section is different to every section that has gone before. None of them are the same. But there were enough internal hooks within each section, like a repeated melodic motif or rhythm, to keep your attention. To stand back and see the structure like that, at first you’re like, "How is that going to work?" But you can feel that it works and that, as a whole, it has its own integrity. Then, once you go with it, it’s as if you really are going on a journey. I found it super inspiring. It was just so cool.
It’s amazing that people have connected with the song so much, I’ve even seen some tattoos of the lyrics. If you are a literal person, some of them would definitely go over your head, but there are some beautiful lines in there. D had some fun interpretations of the lyrics. I’ve seen him describe them as sort of like the feeling of light dappling through the leaves of a tree when you’re under it and looking up with your eyes closed. You get just a glimmer of what it means, and I like that.
I like any kind of writing or art where the audience is a participant in the story. Because of that I wouldn’t want to correct anyone else’s lyric interpretations of “Psyche” that are out there. There’s a lot of them, but I don’t think any of the ones I’ve seen are really it. My favourite intentionally misheard lyric is “I’m a lost Tardis” from "Pure Heart" on Forever I Wait, courtesy of my friend Jamileh. You could end up really, really lost in a Tardis.
You’ve known of Massive Attack since you were 15, but this song from Heligoland was the first time that you appeared on one of their records, right?
Yeah, that was the first time I went into the studio with them. Their album was close to being finished. They’d been at it for a long time and there were many tracks lying on the cutting room floor. A few different people had tried out ideas over the instrumental for “Psyche”, all of it quite ambient. No one so far had tapped into the urgency I felt when I heard it. Something clicked for me.
The thing is, I had it in mind to do something that didn’t sound like either Massive Attack or me, and I think, in the most beautiful way, we achieved that with this song. And then I heard Christoffer Berg’s remix and it blew me away. That’s the version we ended up doing on tour because, really, that’s the version that sounds most like us. Like, next level.
"Secret" by Clark feat. Martina Topley Bird
MARTINA TOPLEY BIRD: I feel so fortunate and proud to have been a part of this song. It just affirms so much of what I find inspiring about music and I think the vocal is one of the best I’ve ever done.
I flew to Berlin to record this with Chris Clark at his place. He had already written the first section, and I remember being mega impressed with his melody and with the way he’d constructed the track. The patience and diligence he had to record things over and over and over, until they sound perfect! Chris said he was never really a guitar player before the Iradelphic record, but the guitar part he recorded for this song is just beautiful.
We wrote the second section of the song together and then we layered the harmonies on it. I love how they slide and the tension they stir up, and the bom-bom section at the end? I would never have thought to make a motif like that. That’s the best part about working with people you’re a fan of, when they push you to try different things. Chris’s stuff is so cool, it was a real privilege to work with him. I loved doing it, and I love this song.
"Hunt" by Martina Topley Bird (2021)
BEST FIT: The last song you’ve picked is “Hunt” from your most recent album, Forever I Wait, and it’s another track written in collaboration with Robert Del Naja. How did this one come about?
MARTINA TOPLEY BIRD: The way this song worked out is a bit more complicated than most. But before I get into that, the reason I’m proud of this song is because of the strength of the lyric and how it speaks to the rampant unchecked abuse of power we’ve been seeing across the world. Especially in the second half of the song, it ramps up with these incredible lines, “Throne, but you sit alone / Home, but the room is cold / Prize, but it’s not for sale / Mainly need to shut / Lying mouth is sore / Crying tears of blood / Flying a kite that’s stained / Robbing skies of joy / Blinding you with blames / Then asking you for more.”
That’s the era we’re living in, the post-truth era, where there’s so much barefaced lying, so much deflecting, so much hypocrisy and destruction. It’s been crazy to witness how shameless and openly corrupt things have become. It makes my blood boil, honestly. Massive Attack are often very political in their work, so this song is where we kind of crossover in our identities. I’m grateful I got to have this one on my record.
But this is how the song came together. I went to Massive’s studio in Bristol. It was me, D, and Euan [Dickinson], and we’re jamming things out on some pitch-changing DJ software they’d just got. I was singing and they were having fun randomly changing the root note and chords of the instrumental, which was mostly drone and beats. I was trying to keep up with these random changes in real time. It was fun!
They comped a song together from that jam that I really loved, but they decided to re-work it and sent me another comp with a completely different instrumental underneath it. It was a really cool instrumental but it was such a contrast. If the first track was a desert ochre colour, this new one was a cold grey/blue and I couldn’t get my head around it. I think I was too attached the first draft, so the idea lost steam and stalled there.
Fast forward, years later, I was asked to write a song for a DJ, but before they would send me their backing track, they wanted me to sign an NDA, which I had never been asked to do before, and, honestly, I was really surprised. I thought it was a bit over the top. But I signed it anyway, they sent the track over, and I did my freestyle thing over it and sent it back.
Historically, my process when writing songs – and this is something that I am actively trying to grow out of – is to freestyle over something and then fill in the lyrics later, and I can get really stuck on that. So, because we, or they, were in a hurry and they came back wanting to know what the lyric would be, I asked my partner, who is an incredible writer, if she would quickly knock some lyrics out to this melody pattern for me. She found the whole situation super annoying but managed to channel that energy into these fantastically scathing lyrics, which I thought were amazing, but the DJ’s management company didn’t go for it…
Afterwards, I thought, ‘Well, I have these amazing lyrics. What shall I do with them?” so I hunted around in my archives for something that could work. Then I remembered the reworked backing track that Massive Attack had sent me. I remembered how much I liked the cold, blue, steely atmosphere it had, and tried it out with the lyrics.
It wasn’t a simple fit. I had to move things around, because the meter of the music was different to the lyric. It has a different time signature, and I couldn’t use the same melody either because it had different chords, but I just loved how it turned out. If I could do one thing differently with this track, I would maybe have re-recorded some of the vocal parts that I did at home, because I think they could have been clearer.
The reissue of Some Place Simple is out now via Bandcamp.
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