simply believed feminine men were much more interesting than masculine men. Maxinquaye was released on 20 February 1995 and sold over 100,000 copies in its first few months in the UK, despite no significant radio airplay. The record charted for 35 weeks on the British albums chart, peaking at number three. After it was released in the US on 18 April, Tricky toured the country as a supporting act for the alternative rock singer-songwriter PJ Harvey. According to Nielsen SoundScan, the album had sold 222,000 copies in the US by 2003. By 2012, it had sold over 500,000 copies worldwide. That same year, Tricky performed the entire album with Topley-Bird on 27 April at the Sundance London festival, which was their first onstage appearance together in 15 years. Critical reception and legacy Maxinquaye received widespread acclaim from contemporary critics. Reviewing in March 1995 for Mojo, Jon Savage called it a very ambitious and musically audacious work that brilliantly explored the disparities in Britain's social structure, with Topley-Bird as the "dominant voice" articulating Tricky's vision of uncertainty in an ever-changing world. Dele Fadele from NME said the record was unprecedented, spellbinding and revealed something new with every listen. He found Tricky's production innovative and his fusion of various sounds so seamless, "you can't label the results under any existing genre". David Bennun of Melody Maker deemed the album almost perfect and Tricky's music highly "gripping, original, sublime, his lyrics so abstruse and woven into the sound, that they become inseparable". Maxinquayes combination of "dreamlike ambient music and hip-hop bite" was praised by the Los Angeles Times critic Robert Hilburn for giving Tricky's "soundscapes about contemporary life such a seductive and provocative edge". In Q magazine, Tom Doyle credited Topley-Bird's singing for making Maxinquaye "a highly inventive and intoxicating collection" while declaring that "with this debut, Tricky proves himself to be more challenging and eclectic than his peers". At the end of 1995, Maxinquaye was named the year's best record in critics polls conducted by several English publications, including NME, Melody Maker and The Wire. It also finished second in the voting for the Pazz & Jop, an annual poll of American critics. The record received a nomination for the 1995 Mercury Prize, an annual music award given to the best album from the UK and Ireland, losing out to Portishead's 1994 debut Dummy. Along with Massive Attack's Blue Lines, Maxinquaye was