Free as a bird - Martina Topley Bird interview

Martina Topley Bird is back with a new self-confidence fuelled by a solo album that should see off any remaining Tricky questions, she tells Chitra Ramaswamy

IT HAS been 13 years since we first heard Martina Topley Bird's unmistakable voice, cracked, celestial and as British as bangers and mash on Tricky's seminal album, Maxinquaye. Topley Bird was then just 18, pregnant with Tricky's baby, and mainly spoken of as his sultry-voiced muse and lover, the sweet to his sour, dark soundscapes. Like trip hop's other women, Beth Gibbons from Portishead and Alison Goldfrapp (who also sang on Maxinquaye), Topley Bird was a shadowy figure, even more so than them, though, because it was Tricky's face we knew, not hers.

She sang on three more of his albums before the relationship with the notoriously volatile Bristolian ended in troubled circumstances – he was accused of holding her back by a journalist who, as the story goes, was punched in the face. Tricky went off and made music that suffered from Topley Bird's absence. She disappeared. "Maxinquaye and my daughter emerged at the same time," she recalls. "It was a pretty wacky time, and life was a bit too interesting. So I didn't grudge myself any of the time off that I had when I stopped working with Tricky. It was necessary to normalise things again."

Five years later, she resurfaced with an intriguing solo album, Quixotic, which Tricky had a hand in producing. It was nominated for a Mercury Music Prize, and Topley Bird could well have ploughed a similar furrow to Goldfrapp and gone on to have major success. Instead, she disappeared again.

Well, that's how it looked. In fact, Topley Bird was still making music. She started working on new material immediately after Quixotic, and through Gorillaz she met Brian Burton, the American producer better known as Danger Mouse of Gnarls Barkley. A fan of the layered, menacing sound of trip hop, Burton ended up producing her new album, The Blue God, her first record made entirely without Tricky.

"With my debut I asked Tricky because I was having trouble connecting with the people I was collaborating with," she says. "It was just going back to somebody who understood me… who gets my voice. There was no need with this record. This is the happiest I've been in any constellation of working."

Topley Bird may pick her words carefully when discussing Tricky, but I'm also surprised and impressed by how forthright she is about their shared past. When I ask whether she has played him The Blue God, and indeed whether she has heard his upcoming album, she doesn't hesitate. "No, it doesn't work like that. We keep it all about Mazy (their 13-year-old daughter]."

The Blue God is another impressive offering, combining vintage soul, blues and jazz with electronic beats and that late-night woozy cool that so defined the trip hop sound. "With Quixotic I was just finding my way," she says. "In the beginning, especially having worked with Tricky, my job was a little bit too easy. Now I really feel like everything I do contains the essence of me, so I'm more attached to it."

The Blue God has been four years in the making, yet still it has come out in the middle of a second flowering of trip hop. Portishead have recently released their first album in more than a decade, and Massive Attack are curating this year's Meltdown festival (Topley Bird is on the bill), not to mention Tricky's forthcoming record.

Topley Bird was 15 when Tricky spotted her sitting on a wall, singing to herself. They became friends, sent each other mix tapes when she returned to London, and eventually made Maxinquaye together. "Because I was young it wasn't like I'd bought an apartment and someone came in with a wrecking ball and ruined everything. It was all in flux anyway. I'd left school and wasn't sure what I was going to do."

Did it ever bother her that she was always referred to as Tricky's muse? "I suppose there are connotations of vacuousness, but also a muse is supposed to inspire so I think it's a compliment. My remedy for everything is to get involved in my work. If my brain isn't being used up, I can get caught up in what other people say. But worse things have been said about me. I'm a solo artist now, and I think by my actions it's pretty clear that I do my own thing."

• Martina Topley Bird, The Blue God, is out tomorrow on Independiente

• www.myspace.com/martinatopleybird