Hell Is Round the Corner

by Tricky

  I’m a year older than him, and a few inches taller, so when he rocked up with me, looking too young, that’s probably why he got in – he’s smart, know what I mean? So we’d go to the Moon Club in Stokes Croft, then as soon as we’d get inside the door, I would only see him briefly for the rest of the night, if at all. He is definitely good with his mouth. He’d go off chatting, like a social animal, whereas I’m more reserved, and if someone chats, fine. Then, at the end of the night, he’d suddenly appear and be like, ‘We’re going on here, let’s go!’ That was how we used to roll.

  We got around a lot. We’d maybe go to a club like that first, where there was a bit of hip-hop, then to somewhere more mainstream in the centre of town, and end up in a blues – a shady unlicensed place where we could have a smoke and a drink, and relax in the early hours – and there it’d be reggae. For instance, we used to go to Reeves, then we’d walk all the way from there to St Paul’s to go to a blues like Ajax, which went right through the night, and then come home Sunday morning – sleep all day, party all night. Mad!

  There used to be a blues near a little roundabout by City Road, and we were over there all the time. Then there was Ajax, which was less relaxed, more serious. That was where his Uncle Michael died, and he was like, ‘I wonder where it happened?’ I remember the person who done it – I didn’t like him, never did. It was uncomfortable for both of us, and I felt the vibe from the dude. He was horrible, and they were all horrible people – not the Ajax venue people, just these people who did the music that night. They’d play heavy lovers rock, and proper grind-up music, but the funny thing is, there were no girls in there.

  Through all this period we were just hustling for money to finance our night-time habits. One time we went to Swansea and stayed with a wicked guy up there who used to grow his own weed. He lived right out in the sticks by Sandy Bay, up near the golf course, and we ended up coming back with a kilo of weed in bags on the back of motorbikes. ‘Shall we do it?’ ‘Yeah, come on!’

  The idea was, the proceeds would put money in our pockets for weeks, but that didn’t happen because we flooded the market in Bristol. We had that much, that every time we went to somebody, they were like, ‘Nah, mate, I’ve already got that one.’ There was no one left we could sell it to.

  One time, I was at home after work, and there’s a knock at the door, and it’s Adrian in a car, with two girls we’d met in a club in Swansea. They were going up Wells Road and they recognised him – ‘Come to Glastonbury!’ He was like, ‘Yeah! I’ll get my mate!’ So he came and got me and off we went. He ended up getting on with one of them, and stayed down there for three days. I was smarter – I was going back and forth, commuting from Bristol with an Asian guy from Totterdown who had a burger van. So I would meet him, he would bring me home and then back down again in the morning.

  Somehow I bumped into Adrian every day – a massive festival, before mobile phones, but I’d always find him. Random! Ruthless! Glastonbury was crazy, man, but by the ’90s it started getting a bit cliquey. A lot of the black St Paul’s guys started going down, dealing, so there would be altercations.

  In Totterdown, there was an older black guy who kind of took us under his wing. His real name was Mike – he’s passed away now – but everyone called him Balkie. He was very instrumental in our musical journey. He had a sound system himself, and he was a lot older than us, but when older people latch on to you, it’s probably because they can see you’re different from other kids. We were just on a different mission to everyone else.

  We used to go to Balkie’s family house and smoke, and then we’d go off and do stuff with him. He used to have a green BMW with a wicked system installed, so he’d pick us up and drop tracks, and we’d be like, mouths open. One time, he got us in this car, and he dropped Eric B & Rakim’s ‘Check Out My Melody’. That was like, wow! By the time we got out at the other end, I’d decided I wanted to be a DJ, and Adrian was going to be an MC. So Balkie was literally our instigation to go off and do music.

  One time, he took us to Newport, and coming back he ran down the back roads, with the music on loud. We had been up all night, but he was driving, and he was falling asleep at the wheel. We just thought he was mucking about, and he would come awake with a start, almost like he was making a joke out of it, then he would go off again, and the next thing we were crashing along the central reservation – we nearly died, know what I mean? Then he just drove back, to standard, and we went home to bed, and he went straight to work.

  He turned us on to a lot of music, but he also told us about ways we could make some money. He was like, ‘Go join an agency, do some night work, fruit picking or whatever.’ We were like, ‘Okay,’ and went down to the agency and we started making money, legit. He was sort of looking after us, and helped us to go legit, with regular money coming in.

  TRICKY: The other people I went out with at night were my cousins Mark and Michelle. I was too young to get into clubs in Bristol on my own, so they’d take me to these places and, because I was with them, I could get in. We’d go to some of the townie clubs in the city centre, but more often than not it was the Dug Out on Park Row, near the university. The Dug Out has gone down in history as this legendary place where the so-called Bristol scene started, but I never saw that. For us, it was just a hangout place, and for me particularly it was exciting to be somewhere I could get in without too much hassle.

  To be honest, I can’t really remember the music specifically but it was probably early hip-hop, and soul-y, rare-groove kind of stuff. It was a really grimy place – not ghetto grimy, because it wasn’t ghetto people in there. Just a grimy basement club.

  When me and Michelle were out on the town, people just couldn’t understand that we were family. Back then she had freckles and really blonde hair, so people couldn’t get it. I don’t know if it would be different nowadays, but people found it strange that our skin was different colours, and that we were related – and first cousins, too, not a distant thing. People thought we were taking the piss.

  MICHELLE PORTER: We’d be in a club, and he’d obviously be trying to chat some girl up, and they’d be giving me dirty looks, and he’d say, ‘Oh, this is my cousin,’ and they’d say, ‘Yeah, right!’ He’d say, ‘No, it is! This is my cousin Michelle.’ And people would look at us, obviously thinking, ‘They’re together, because he’s black and she’s white – and then he’s got the balls to chat me up while he’s out with his girlfriend!’ People thought we couldn’t possibly be related.

  My mum, Marlow, was his mum Maxine’s half-sister. Mum’s surname was Godfrey, but she didn’t find out that her sister Violet was actually her mother until she was fourteen, and then it wasn’t talked about. She just carried on as she was before, and to me, Violet was always auntie rather than great-auntie. It wasn’t something that you confronted, and you’re never sure how much is true and how much not. There are quite a few skeletons in the closet.

  My mum isn’t like the rest of the Godfreys. She didn’t like the things they did as a family. She just wanted to get out of there, get married, have children and live happily ever after. As soon as she could, she moved away from Knowle West. She still went to visit Violet in Barnstaple Road, and if there was ever a crisis or anyone needed money, they would all come to Marlow’s, but as a child, she’d hated being part of that family.

  So she married my dad Ken and moved to Hartcliffe, which is your typical white working-class area. I think there may have been one black family, and one of their lads was in my class at school. Adrian came to live with us when his mother died, when he was four, and it was a happy house with Al Green and Ray Charles playing, and security. Growing up, I certainly didn’t see Martin very often, and we had a much nicer life than that other side of the family, but then unfortunately Adrian’s grandmother demanded that he come and live with her, and he wasn’t treated as well there as he was when he was with us, with his step-grandad beating him.

  Me and Adrian have always been close, since we wer
e kids. We didn’t go to the same school, because I’m that bit older than him, and seven years is quite a big difference when you’re that age. When I had my daughter, Natasha, I was only twenty-one, and he was only fourteen then.

  But when he moved out of his nan’s place, pretty soon he came and lived right close to me. We always lived close by each other, so if there was ever a crisis, or if he had a bloody asthma attack or something, it would always be me who would come to the rescue.

  My mum had always shielded us from the dark side of life, so I don’t know if I ever saw Adrian going to Horfield [prison] as him descending into that. I always knew he was a good boy really, I just knew he was going to be alright – he was going to find his path, and whichever way he went, he was nice inside and that would always shine through. I never had any doubts about him and the way he would turn out.

  Once he was in his teens, we’d be out clubbing all the time, with my brother Mark, who’s three years older. It’d be places like the Dug Out, which was a grotty little downstairs dive where your feet stuck to the carpet. You know, one of those places you wouldn’t want to go in with the lights on – but at the time, you couldn’t care less. Otherwise, it was lots of parties, and nights at warehouses, where we knew someone who was playing. It was always grotty places, none of the glamorous places – backstreet clubs, which attracted the people who came to hear music, dance and have a good time.

  TRICKY: By 1983/84, early rap was coming through, and I fell for it completely. It wasn’t on the radio or on TV much, so I don’t know how I heard it. I guess it was from people like Balkie and my mates, and then in clubs once I’d got into going out. It seemed like it snuck into England, dead underground. It was so different, no one really knew what hip-hop was, which is hard to imagine now, as it dominates the charts here and in America. Back then I didn’t even know it was hip-hop. I just knew I’d never heard anything like it. Like, ‘Whoa, what’s this?!’

  The first records I was buying were things like UTFO and Roxanne Shanté – really good stuff – then once New York hip-hop started getting established, it was EPMD, Eric B & Rakim, and Public Enemy, who everyone was listening to, and maybe a little bit of LL Cool J. I was into the clothes, but not so much total hip-hop fashion. It wasn’t the full kit, except for the trainers, and maybe a baseball cap – it was mostly just the music and the dancing.

  One of my half-brothers was a very good body-popper. There were five of us – my dad’s sons – and one of my two older brothers, Junior, was one of the very best around. Junior was more in the black community, and his brother Kevin played for a black football team in Bristol, a ghetto football team. My two younger brothers, Aron and Marlon, even though they are mixed-race like me, grew up in black neighbourhoods. For kids like us, hip-hop was the future.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  TRICKY KID

  The first time I started getting on the mic was round at a friend’s house in Totterdown. It was with a guy called Neville Lewis, whose parents were Jamaican. He was doing some low-key sound-system stuff in Bristol, and he had a little turntable set-up at his place, so sometimes we’d have a spliff, and he’d hand me the mic – what, me?! – and I’d do some ‘off the top of the head’ stuff. They called it toasting back then, voicing in that Jamaican DJ style.

  What’s funny is, Neville was actually a very talented guy – one of the best toasters I ever heard. He could have been a star, but in those days there weren’t any opportunities in that kind of genre in the British music industry. Who was going to find you and sign you? There was just no way, so it wasn’t about that. It wasn’t about hoping to get famous through it. It was just for the fun of it.

  I was about sixteeen or seventeen then, and it gradually became something I’d do round at other people’s houses and squats, while we were hanging out, smoking weed – not even a sideline to all the naughty stuff I was getting up to with Nicky Tippett and Whitley, just something I did for a laugh without really thinking about it. It was nothing I ever thought I could get a career out of, or would be doing later in life. It was like going to a club, or hanging out with my mates in a pub, or meeting a girl – just fun stuff I’d get up to.

  I wasn’t looking for it at all, on that level, when I got involved with the Wild Bunch. They were a hip-hop crew crossed with the kind of Jamaican-style sound system that me and Whitley had been attracted to. My connection was Miles Johnson, aka DJ Milo, who I’d known since I was seven years of age.

  Miles was one of the main members, and through him I got invited in, because I think he knew I was good before I did. I was never like, ‘Oh, I’m going to be a rapper.’ I was doing it more like a hobby at various squats, at night, and I suppose my name must’ve started to get around. He was the one who kept saying, ‘Come down!’

  It was Grant Marshall who actually started Wild Bunch. He was the first one to have the reggae/hip-hop idea. Grant was calling himself Daddy G, but I think he was working in a bank at the time. He was well educated, but he lived in St Paul’s, on Campbell Street, right around the corner from the front line – a proper dodgy area. A lot of the early Wild Bunch parties were literally in the corner of a room in G’s house in St Paul’s, just a pair of decks on the floor, no lights, people dancing.

  Even if it was in a club, maybe in a smaller side room, I can’t ever remember being up on a stage. It was always down with the people. Wild Bunch came from sound systems, and that was how sound systems used to do it. The only difference between Wild Bunch and sound systems is that Wild Bunch wasn’t Jamaican, and they played hip-hop and funk as well. Maybe G played a bit of reggae, but it was mostly hip-hop and funk. I loved that mix because hip-hop had become such a big part of the culture, it took over everything.

  I’m pretty sure I was technically still at school when I first started doing stuff with them. I would get a call to go down to St Paul’s at twelve o’clock at night, and my auntie Marlow would say, ‘Just go – go down there!’ and I’d be out till 4am.

  St Paul’s had a late-night thing going back there in the mid-80s. The clubs in town would close at one or two in the morning, but you could go to St Paul’s at whatever time, get a beer and smoke some weed. It was the place to go, even if you just wanted food after hours. It was a hangout.

  For me and Whitley it could be a bit dodgy, because we weren’t from there. We knew certain people, but it wasn’t our turf, and for stepping on someone’s toe you could get stabbed. That very Jamaican attitude: something like that happens, and there could be a problem. You had to be careful how you moved around, because if you step on the wrong person’s toe, or you bump into someone and don’t apologise, it’s gonna go off. It’s going to turn from nothing into getting stabbed, and it can escalate very quickly.

  So, we’d go there, be at G’s house, then walk back to Knowle West, Hartcliffe, Totterdown, wherever. As I remember it, though, the crowd that came down wasn’t that ‘black’. Those guys were not in the black community. They crossed over. It wasn’t a St Paul’s crowd; more middle-class white Clifton people, coming down to St Paul’s. It was black, because of some of the people in it, but it wasn’t black, if you see what I mean.

  Previously known as Robert del Naja, 3D, their main rapper, was a white student at the local art college. He’d met Grant, because G was working behind the counter at the local record store, Revolver, in the early days of the post-punk times. That’s how Nellee Hooper came into the picture, too, and he became one of the DJs to begin with. Nellee was a ghetto boy – he grew up in a white ghetto, Barton Hill – and he was the go-getter. In the early ’80s he’d been a percussionist with Pigbag, who had a Top 5 single with ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Pigbag’, and he seemed to have connections in the London music business from that.

  As for Mushroom, aka Andrew Vowles, he grew up with his grandmother in Fishponds, which is not an affluent area. Another of their MCs, Claude Williams, aka Willy Wee, was seeing my cousin Michelle, and he grew up in Redland, a decent area, and went to quite a good school in Cot
ham, same with Miles. Miles was a ghetto boy, as was I, so it was us two and Nellee who were more from that Knowle West, Redcliffe, Barton Hill, council estate background.

  It was a right mix of people actually doing it, and in the crowd too. You might get the odd St Paul’s guy wandering in, but mostly it was 3D’s kind of people turning up – students from Clifton and Cotham, who were into 3D’s whole graffiti thing.

  There was definitely no money in doing the Wild Bunch. Most of them had day jobs – G worked in a bank, Claude was plastering. As for me, I was younger, and at that age you don’t care about the money so much. It was just fun. Cool people, though I didn’t know everybody – it was a very different crowd for me. Everybody seemed to get on, and there wasn’t a lot of trouble. It was just a good night out – like going to a club without going to a club. You could smoke a spliff there, have a drink, and you ain’t got a doorman watching over you. You could go on till whatever time you wanted. When the night ended was when the night ended, sort of thing.

  Other times, we’d play out on the streets. In the summer, G would set up the turntables outside, on the street corner. It felt like freedom, you know? The police didn’t bother anybody, didn’t shut it down, because it was in St Paul’s, so there was no stress. It didn’t seem people were bothered with St Paul’s. It was its own community, so the police didn’t bother with it. You could go to an illegal blues all night, like Ajax, and the police just seemed to let it go on.

  The Wild Bunch was great music. It’s different now: DJs play what they think people want. Back then, DJs played what they wanted. It wasn’t so regulated. The Wild Bunch was the first time I ever heard Public Enemy, from Miles. We were in St Paul’s and he played ‘Bring the Noise’, and I thought, ‘What – the – fuck – is – this?!’ I couldn’t really believe what I was hearing. Back then, DJ-ing was about playing music that people didn’t know, rather than playing something that’s popular. You were a good DJ if you got the music first. That comes from the dubplates thing in reggae. If you got a dubplate from someone, and you could play a tune that no one had ever heard before, you were the top guy. That was important back in the day, but now it’s different. It’s playing the biggest song from last year, kind of thing. And DJs weren’t superstars back then. Now all these guys are as famous as fuck – more important than the music, which ain’t right.