Martina Topley Bird's Personal Best

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.