The Tricky club concert in Munich - a must for every fan! And that night the since one year re-opened Strom was like the place to be! Packed and people in expectant anticipation! And it was good fun to come back to the location where we enjoyed concerts as teenagers. The support band brought the audience what it was looking for: Cool music, an eccentric performance and good vibes!

Tricky not so much: enthusiastically welcomed, he brought a bottle of champagne as a gift to his fans, but soon disappointed and showed a somewhat moody behavior. The sound was so low that you could listen to people´s conversations which led to the music not being transported to the right extend and it just didn´t touch. I think Tricky started motivated but then somehow lost contact and the scene changed. Seeing the dull reaction of the crowd, soon he called it an evening and left the stage after not even a full hour of playing his set! He had his fans waiting for so long that the atmosphere switched from unbelieving to faint hostility. Some even left. Then the master came back with a start not too bad and a more promising performance. The Munich fans couldn´t restrain themselves from shouting sarcastic comments, "I feel you!", "There you go!!".

But it was not all bad - a few songs were like gloomy gems played with hardly any lights on, in others Tricky´s genius shone through, but in the end it was "not loud enough, he was not in time, sometimes didn´t know his text..."

Tearing on his shirt, with his boxer´s posture, shaking the head violently - Tricky´s performance is quite unique and weird. Having seen his show in 2010 as well I can say that he was more present this time but didn´t accomplish the surprising thing he did then. In 2010, he stood with his back to the audience for the most part and it could easily be argued that his singer Franky Riley threw the show. But when he managed to come to the mic and hiss a few syllables it was shockingly, convincingly fantastic! His talent accumulated outrageously to a crescendo during these rare moments. But not now!

The new album False Idols is highly appraised and he thinks of it as coming back to playing his own music, subsequent to the great debut Maxinquaye. He says False Idols is "his" album and it was recorded within just two weeks. For him the only way to make music is not to think about it which he overdid in his former work. Thought-through or not, I miss the punk elements that break into the soft flow and the darker atmosphere of his earlier albums. False Idols contains touching, fragile songs like Valentine, written as apology to his former lover Björk or Nothing´s changed. All said and done, Tricky still excels in the brilliant fusion between delicate melodies and hard beats.

In the end of the concert he performed his magic trick to get people up on stage and then he himself came down to join his fans, singing inbetween them, retreating slowly backwards. People seem to love that and it quite made up for the rest of his performance.