by Tricky
It was then that he got the name Tricky Kid. Up till then he’d always been known as Adrian Thaws, but we were supposed to be somewhere with this crew, and he didn’t wanna go, and because he’s got family all over the place, he just said he was in Manchester. But they were like Klingons, like, ‘What’s he doing?’ We were leading them, and they were like sheep. They were like, ‘You’re tricky, you are – the Tricky Kid,’ because he was never around when they wanted to find him.
We both realised at the same time that it wasn’t for us and we wanted to leave it, and luckily we were able to get away to London. I always said to him that he’s very advanced in his thinking. He’s five years ahead of people. I don’t know if it rubbed off on me, but at that point I was just chilled. If I don’t want to do something, I ain’t gonna do it, and we were getting away from a negative energy.
Towards the end of the two years in London, he was getting into doing music more seriously. He was spending more time in Bristol, and I was still spending more time in London, just going back to party on odd weekends. We were getting into different circles socially, but we’d always had a pact that if we were ever going to move back to Bristol, we’d do it together, so I rang him.
‘You’ve moved back, Jack, haven’t you?’
‘I heard you had!’ he goes.
We moved back, but he didn’t tell me that he was as far along with music as he actually was. He’d been connecting with people, like we’d been walking back from Camden to York Way Court one night, and we bumped into Milo, and they’d started doing stuff again.
Back in Bristol, he started moving with Claude, doing a lot of MC-ing together. There was obviously a connection between them, but Claude is a nightmare – a major party animal, whereas Ade was more about dealing with the craft by then, taking it more serious.
Before we headed up to London, I was just starting this thing we called Un Deux Trois, with a couple of mates from Totterdown. When we came back, I went to do that again, and me and Adrian kind of started drifting apart.
TRICKY: The Wild Bunch came back to life again for a short time when some record-company people in London contacted them, offering to put out a couple of singles. I never did any of that with them. I didn’t know anything about going in the studio then. I was younger, and I was still knocking around with Whitley, and we had a totally different lifestyle to those guys. Those guys were part of a trendy, arty crowd in Bristol, and we were still hanging out in shitty little pubs.
When I rapped with Wild Bunch, I would go down there with Whitley; I’d rap, then me and him would go off and do our thing – probably go out to a bar, or go off and smoke a spliff and have a drink. If I’d been more focused on hanging out with them, perhaps I would have been on the records. In my head, it was just turn up, do a few vocals, then maybe go and get some food.
I had more time for people like Smith & Mighty. Those guys are one of the foundations of Bristol music. They are very ghetto, as in: they don’t care that much. In the late ’80s, they got a huge deal with FFRR Records, and they didn’t go off to London, didn’t change the way they dressed, didn’t change their attitude, they just stayed the same – solid, solid people. They were solely about the music, and they did their own thing – they had their own sound, which was kind of dub, with breaks in there.
Rob Smith and Ray Mighty are the real deal, proper musicians, with no bullshit about them. They were retiring to the point where you were lucky if you could even get them out to DJ sometimes. They built a studio in the ghetto, right where they lived on City Road in St Paul’s, and me and Whitley used to go down there and hang out and smoke.
RAY MIGHTY: In the early ’80s, all you ever got told was, if you wanted to make it in the music business, you had to go to London. It was like, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ because then obviously you had to breathe the London air, and you’d end up making stuff that played by their rules. Whereas we knew what would drop in our town, and just went for that. That’s why it ended up sounding different to what was going on anywhere else, because it was made for Bristol.
Most people around us had exposure to reggae, and were used to hearing music really loud, so we all understood bass and sound systems and what works in that environment. The music from Bristol always has that vibe under it. When we started out, that swing/go-go thing was in fashion, and rare groove, with breaks. London is great, but at that time it did change styles really fast. Like, right, it’s go-go time, everyone gets into it, let’s all wear fucking Lycra shorts, then something else starts to take off and everyone fucking runs and follows that – rather than just mastering your art.
If you do anything long enough, you’ll get good at it, so we stayed with our style, and learnt through experience what kind of sub-bass and drops and phrases would work in our town – take the bass out, take the bass in, drop the beat in certain places – and what samples to use to get everyone going. You just make it for local ears. You would take little bits from everything, like a little synth that you heard from a go-go track, always some dub in there somewhere along the line, and definitely something hip-hoppy – always hip-hop and reggae, with serious bass on a big system.
The local celebrity on our scene was Mark Stewart, because he’d been out there touring and releasing records with the Pop Group. After they split up in ’81, he went to New York for a bit and started making these crazy electro-dub records. In Bristol, he was the one that everyone was looking to and influenced by – this punk-rocky indie sound with heavy dub effects and electronics. We had all seen him doing it, so we realised it was possible – you could get away with mixing up all these really over-the-top, brash effects. I’ve heard it said that he brought back loads of early hip-hop tracks on record and cassette, and turned a lot of people like the Wild Bunch crowd on to it all.
The Dug Out was the main place people went to. That was where you met and got to know everyone. You might see them out at different nights in bars here and there around town, but the Dug Out was the central place, in Park Row near the university. When that got shut down and turned into a Chinese restaurant, the next place was the Moon Club in Upper York Street, but it had more of a live-venue feel, with hard floors and a hard sound about it.
By then, hip-hop had been around a few years, and it was steeped in what people like the Wild Bunch and DJ groups like 2 Bad Crew were doing. That was what we would all go out and listen to, and Tricky was part of that scene. I always associated him with Wild Bunch and, as far as I was concerned, he was a part of that set-up. I would almost call him one of the Wild Bunch, but it turns out he wasn’t. To me, he was around as much as Mushroom was, doing his little things on the mic, with Mushroom DJ-ing, and 3D – or ‘Delj’, as we call him – and Willy Wee on the mic too.
Most people in Knowle West were definitely not into what Tricky was into. Up there, he stood out for the fact that he wasn’t fucking white, but also for the kind of music he was listening to, and the people he was hanging around with – not middle class exactly, but trendier kids, rather than the sort who would blatantly just go downtown, get pissed up, find a bird, have a fight, eat a kebab and go home. Because that is your average Knowle Wester.
If you don’t know it, Knowle West just looks like a quiet, orangey-brick estate, but it’s definitely the roughest place in Bristol. It’s known as the white ghetto. You’ll go into the pub there, and it’s one of those places where, if you don’t know someone there, someone is gonna call you out. It’s not a place to hang if you don’t know anybody.
Tricky definitely doesn’t play the game, does he? I never saw him in drag, but I did hear of it. He was not a big guy, he was black, and he’d got a bit of an eczema thing going on – living in Knowle West with all that, every fucker would have picked on you, so you’d have to learn to fight. You’d have to be able to punch back. Knowle West toughens you up. You can’t be a wanker around that area. They’ll just call you out every day.
I came out of the Moon Club one night, and saw him fighting two guys, bot
h bigger than him. These two guys were trying to beat him up, just as I stumbled out for some fresh air. He was up for it as well, and he tried having a go, so I just jumped in and grabbed one of them off, and left Tricky to the other one, but that one didn’t want to know, so they both fucked off. But he was up for it!
The first time we played out as Smith & Mighty, it was just me and Rob Smith, at a little gathering that a friend of ours was putting on, called the Après-Ski Party – this was probably sometime in ’86. We didn’t even have any vocalists to start with, only a sequencer, some synths and a couple of drum machines. It was just instrumental tracks, with the sequencer playing, and us playing live over the top of it. Mark Stewart was in the crowd, with Tricky, because those two had been hanging out quite a bit. Mark was the celebrity of the day, so it was actually good for us that he was there to see us – Tricky we only knew from clubbing it, and seeing him as Tricky Kid with Wild Bunch.
There was a guy compèring the night, so there was a microphone onstage, and as we were playing our cover version of Erik Satie’s ‘Gymnopédie No. 1’, Mark Stewart got up and shouted, ‘This is fucking brilliant!’ and pulled Tricky up there too. He started to chat over what we were doing, riding the sort of style you’d hear on early Massive Attack stuff – which instantly made us realise that we really needed vocals over what we were doing.
Apparently that was Tricky’s first time up on a proper stage. The Wild Bunch used to put on odd things in different little places, and derelict buildings. We did that a couple of times, too, all of us as a group of people, so you had that cooperative, supportive element to what was going on.
St Paul’s Carnival used to be the highlight of the Wild Bunch year. They always pulled the best crowd, and those were definitely the best gigs they played. They’d have a sound system going all day at the top of Campbell Street, which is near my family’s home, and they’d fill out the whole street from the off. They’d get different MCs to come through, and it really was the best part of the festival. At that point, it was almost entirely a reggae festival. There was lots of good stuff going on all over, but then you’d have this one hip-hop, reggae, soul, funk thing going on in the middle of it.
One time, not when the festival was on, I ran into Tricky and Grant coming down Campbell Street, after they’d been stopped by the Old Bill. One of them had just bought some weed, I think, and the Old Bill were putting them in the back of the van. I went down and stood in front of the van and held it up. I said, ‘This van is not going anywhere!’ After a crowd had gathered and surrounded the van, I went around the back, opened the door and got them out of the van – then we all scarpered!
We helped each other on a personal level – it wasn’t just music; it was day-to-day stuff as well.
TRICKY: Smith & Mighty used to play all over, and the Après-Ski was the first time I ever went on a proper stage – no rehearsal, no warning, just ‘Get up here!’ Before that, I’d always rapped on the floor, next to the turntables. I was out at this party with Mark, and he came up to me in the crowd and said, ‘Are you going to get up and do a vocal?’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah!’
Mark’s mad, though, so I didn’t take him seriously. Then, all of a sudden, he’s up onstage introducing me, so I have to get up there and I’m shitting myself. I’d always been next to the turntables where no one can really see you, with my back to the crowd.
Doing music, you don’t know how serious to take it sometimes, but Ray’s partner, Rob Smith, said to me once, ‘Your voice makes the hairs on my arm stand up.’ Little things like that made me think, ‘You know what, I’m gonna do this!’ Another time, he came up to me in the street and said, ‘Universe – one verse!’ He said a couple of things where, if you’re not feeling confident, he’s just encouraging you.
I was a kid, and these things have stayed with me all these years, from Wild Bunch days. At that age, you don’t know if it’s all just for fun or not. I liked doing it, but you never thought, ‘I’m going to have a career out of this.’ Those couple of things Rob said to me were like, ‘Right – okay!’
Mark Stewart was a different animal – very intelligent, to the point of making him eccentric. He used to make albums splicing together pieces of cassette tape. He used to have people following him around in London, these weirdos who would find out where he was staying and then follow him around on the street. When I was living in York Way Court, he came to stay with me for a bit, and this guy actually had a record deal with Mute Records. Like, couldn’t they put him up in a hotel?
One day, we went over to the record company, because they wanted to renew his deal, and the guy there obviously didn’t have a clue who I was, because by that point I was Tricky, but I wasn’t Tricky – I was just a guy living in a squat in London. So, Mark marches into the meeting with a brown paper bag and a Bible, and he goes, ‘I want the money in this brown paper bag, and we’re not signing a contract – you just have to swear on the Bible.’ Mark was different, alright.
After the two years in London, I went back to squatting in Bristol, but it wasn’t long before I moved into a rented bedsit in Saville Place in Clifton. My cousin Michelle had moved up there and, because she was like my sister and my mother rolled into one, I moved into this place right across the road from hers. After that I got a flat two minutes down a lane called the Fosseway.
I don’t think I would have lived in Clifton if it wasn’t for Michelle. There wouldn’t have been reason for it. She’d moved up there for her daughter, because it had better schools than Hartcliffe. From Knowle West to Clifton, it was like two different worlds. You won’t see many Knowle West guys drinking in pubs in Clifton, and you certainly ain’t gonna see Clifton people hanging out in Knowle West.
After growing up in Bristol’s poorer neighbourhoods, and then sampling London lowlife in King’s Cross, I suppose I’d come to see Bristol as a great place to live. I can’t think of anywhere I didn’t like in Bristol, and you can walk everywhere – not like living in London. London is hard. At York Way Court, I knew that if I was skint and hungry, I could go out to see Shaun and auntie Iona in East Ham, and they’d feed me and lend me a tenner. But you can’t walk to East Ham, so how do you get there, if you ain’t got no money?
Bristol is an easy place to live. It makes you wonder why there’s crime there, in a way. There’s crime in Knowle West, and I can understand that, but it ain’t like living in London. Crime makes more sense in London. I can understand why people are hustling and dealing drugs there. In Bristol, it makes less sense, because you can survive in Bristol a lot easier than you can in London.
MICRODOTS
Weed was a cultural thing. For me, in my teens, it was a part of the music, it heightened your sense of listening. You have a smoke, you listen to a cassette of Saxon sound system, and it’s like you’re there! With some good sensimilla, it’s like you’re in the place – sat there, stoned, you’re actually in the place. That was my buzz.
When me and Whitley started smoking in the ’80s, there was none of that skunk or hydroponic shit on the market. We had sensimilla, which we could only get every now and then. That was really strong weed, but a different kind of strong – it wasn’t chemicals. Then we had Lebanese, and hashish, and the thing with all of these types was, we used to get the giggles, just laughing the whole time, and vibing on the music.
I’ve never seen weed as illegal. It was totally normal to me, just part of the culture, especially with my Jamaican background. Knowle West guys used to smoke it, too. It was just something you did, that you fell into at a very early age, and you probably dealt a bit as well.
I didn’t see it as an illegal drug, maybe because my dad smoked. He was nothing to do with Rasta, but he used to sell it, too, at one time, and he would get some of the best weed in Bristol. Sometimes, once I was in my twenties, I used to go up to his house and get some. The best weed I’ve ever smoked in Bristol was from my dad, but he wouldn’t give it to me for free – definitely not! I’d have to buy it.
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Growing up in the reggae culture back then, alcohol and weed were fine, but if you took coke, you were a crackhead, so it really wasn’t cool to take it. It ain’t like now, where you get a young black kid dropping an E or taking coke, and it’s accepted. It was in Jamaican lyrics that taking cocaine wasn’t cool. In our circles, if you snorted cocaine, you were a dirtbag, so it was something you didn’t do. We wouldn’t have even known where to get it.
The strongest thing we ever got was microdots. I took a lot of acid. I would do it around Bristol, and at Glastonbury, and even in London. I would do it anywhere. I would do it in York Way Court, in Tube stations – fucking everywhere! I’d do it with friends, and also by myself – just drop a tab then wander off alone and sit around watching things. I wasn’t big into it, like for any spiritual dimension or hippy nonsense. I would just take it. It was a thing I did. I used to like taking acid and going for a walk, standing around watching things – drop a microdot and walk around Bristol in the rain, with all the floor shiny underneath your feet.
Me and Whitley took a load of mushrooms out in the countryside near Swansea, and we did a load of microdots at Glastonbury, before it got corporate. I’ve had some bad trips as well – real bad trips.
One of my worst trips ever, though, was on weed. Me and Whitley went to this blues in St Paul’s where my uncle Michael got murdered. It was only about two months after he’d died, and I was smoking a spliff, getting really stoned, thinking, ‘I wonder where he got it? Fucking hell, what part of the room did it happen in?’ We’re talking about a small room maybe twenty-foot square, like the front room of the house. He didn’t make it out of there, so he actually died on that floor somewhere. I’m smoking and paranoid and I’m looking around the place thinking, ‘Where did he die?’ I can remember being stoned and everything was alright, then I had a few more drinks and all of a sudden it got very dark and weird.