by Tricky
You know, I could be out the night before, so I don’t know if I can be up at twelve o’clock. To be able to meet someone at a certain time, when you’re a young kid – you’re all over the place, aren’t you? I could walk out of my house to get some breakfast, and then by teatime I could be up in Manchester for six weeks. Seriously, that’s how my life works, so telling me where and when to be places was just not convenient for me back then.
I was living a different life to them. I was still knocking about the streets, still getting into little bits of trouble here and there. I wasn’t like, ‘I’m going to be famous!’ I was notorious for not turning up to interviews, or to the studio, or for videos. If we were doing a video, I might just not be there – they’d eventually find out I was in Manchester with my family, or in London. It wasn’t particularly that there was any separation or resentment, just that I’d rather be doing something else other than a video.
To start with, I think it amused them. They even made a short promo film to go with an early track they’d done called ‘Just a Matter of Time’, and they ended up titling the movie, Where Is Tricky? The whole thing was like, ‘Where is he?!’ like a shaggy dog story, so they must have thought it was funny.
I can see now that they must have been a bit frustrated at times, too. I think I was too young really to want success, while they were that bit older – G was almost ten years older – so they were more prepared to work hard to achieve it. G was actually quite a mellow guy, he would probably have been happy staying at the level of doing sound system stuff; it was really 3D who had that get-up-and-go, which I don’t in any way mean as a criticism. It was him dealing with the management, and the label. I knew those people and I was cool with them, but it wasn’t my band, or my future.
When I first got into it, I was used to writing by myself, like, ‘Oh, St Paul’s festival is coming up, I’d better get moving with some lyrics for that!’ With Massive Attack it became, ‘Let’s meet at my house at twelve o’clock and sit there for six hours, trying to write lyrics.’ When you’re young, you don’t want to do that – sitting there with the cassette going over the same lyrics, over and over again. I just go in and write the lyrics and put the vocals down. It’s not a big deal. You write when you’re inspired, not when you’re told.
Doing the album just became a hassle to me as a kid. I can remember saying one afternoon, ‘Why are we doing these vocals again? The vocals are fine.’ Then we stayed until midnight and ended up using the original vocals anyway!
When we were doing ‘Five Man Army’, we had done our vocals, and I went back the next day, and the mix in the part where I voiced had changed, and certain things were dropped out so that, to me, I wasn’t sounding as good as I had the day before. Maybe I was being paranoid, but I was thinking, ‘Has this turned into a competition?’ But I wouldn’t say anything. I would just keep quiet about it, thinking, well, maybe I ain’t gonna be with them much longer anyway.
The first time I ever went on a plane was to do a couple of Massive Attack shows in Europe – in France, I think. I would probably never have got a passport otherwise, because there would’ve been no real reason for me to have one. If it hadn’t been for music, I might have never got on a plane, either – just like my nan. At most maybe I might’ve gone to Jamaica, because of my heritage – usually people with family ties in Jamaica visit there at one point or another.
I got myself a passport and started that part of my life’s adventure full of optimism. I have very few positive memories associated with those trips, however, because Massive Attack was anything but an established live operation, and now we were expected to put on a show, a real live show. In the UK, it had been possible to stay true to our roots as a product of sound-system culture, throwing parties more than formal gigs, with DJing instead of traditional instruments providing the music. There would be decks on the floor, down with the punters just as it had been in Wild Bunch days, but as Blue Lines started to take off at home, and gradually abroad as well, pressure mounted to put on some kind of show.
America was the place that really wouldn’t allow us to stick to our preferred format. We were booked onto a club tour of six or eight dates, in a handful of major cities, playing up on a proper stage to 500 or 800 people, with a couple of turntables and us rappers. It just didn’t work. For one thing, being onstage with a microphone means being a singer, and an entertainer, which neither me nor G nor D were prepared for, and there was no vibe whatsoever at the shows. It was horrible standing up there with people staring at you like fucking doughnuts.
Worse still, the album was only just taking off in America – America’s a big place – so a couple of the shows weren’t even that busy. At Prince’s club in Minneapolis, they apparently pulled the plug on the gig before our set was even finished. It wasn’t simply a problem of bringing hip-hop from England over to its country of origin, because it wasn’t all hip-hop – both Shara Nelson and Horace Andy were on the tour, bringing soul and reggae vibes respectively.
I didn’t get to know either of them that well, because I hadn’t been around that much for the record, and on tour I kind of kept myself to myself. I didn’t know America like I do now, and initially I didn’t really like it. It was too much of a culture shock being in such a strange environment, when you’ve never been before. Back then I didn’t understand it. I just wanted to come home.
I now know that it ain’t going to be the greatest thing for any band, coming from England for your first US tour. New York and LA are going to be alright, but then the places in between will be tough. Now, I love Detroit, but back then I saw the place, and went, ‘Fucking hell, where is this?’ It was so strange. The others were ambitious for the group, so they were probably excited from that point of view.
While we were out there, we kept bumping into Happy Mondays, who were touring there at the same time – imagine them in America in 1992! It must have been chaos. I’m surprised they got back alive.
The only place I was really impressed with was New York. That was like, ‘Woah, this city is crazy!’ I think the show at Irving Plaza was okay, but I can remember getting off the plane at JFK airport and the energy went right through me from my feet to my head. That was so exciting. I knew one day I was going to live there.
When we got home, Massive Attack was in a state of flux. Shara was leaving to pursue a solo career. She was a nice girl, but I didn’t know her that well because we weren’t around at the same times until the US tour. One of her songs, ‘Unfinished Sympathy’, was the biggest hit, so it must’ve been a bit of a blow.
By that point, even before we’d finished promoting the first album, I knew I didn’t want to be in it either. For me, it was too much like having a job. I did a couple of bits for the second album, Protection, which eventually came out in 1994. I left soon after, but I didn’t leave thinking of doing anything in particular. I literally left and did nothing for a few months. There wasn’t any plan whatsoever.
It was a year earlier, around 1992/93, that I met Martina Topley-Bird. She was a boarder at a huge private school called Clifton College, which was right around the corner from my home in Fosseway. She was in the middle of her exams, and that day, she’d just finished school and happened to be sitting on the wall right outside my cousin Michelle’s place, humming to herself, as I was walking past. We talked for a bit. ‘Can you sing?’ Boom! ‘Let’s get in the studio.’
I knew deep inside that I was going to do something of consequence musically, and even if I didn’t fully know it at the time, there Martina was, my means of achieving it, hiding in plain sight a hundred yards from my own front door.
Today more than ever, I see artists who are chasing their dream, and obviously you have to work hard to get anywhere with music, but in all honesty, I never chased it. It just happened for me, so I almost feel a bit too lucky. People ask me, ‘How do you break through? Can you give me any advice?’ And I can’t, because I never had that struggle. I had street struggle, but when you’re young
you don’t notice being poor – you’re just having fun.
By that stage, I’d been rapping for eight or ten years, and I noticed with rappers, they would always be with a producer, like Rakim with Eric B. Then I noticed that when the rapper and the producer split up, the rapper would have no career any more and just disappear – rappers didn’t survive when their producers left. So that scared me. I thought, ‘I don’t want to have a career and then for it to end,’ so I realised that if you want longevity in this game, you had to learn to produce music as well, or suffer the consequences.
Up until then, rapping was just fun for me. I wasn’t making music at home. I was a music lover. I’d been writing words since I was five, so that part of being a rapper seemed to be the part that came naturally to me, the part that I was good at. Producing music was something I gradually forced myself into, because otherwise I thought I wouldn’t survive as a vocalist.
This realisation set me on the path to try out sampling with the Akai S1000, because there was no proper instrument I could play. First, I came up with ‘Daydreaming’, and after that I took any opportunity that came my way to keep experimenting in that area.
Still, what’s mad is, it wasn’t exactly me who took the first step to making a track completely on my own. It all just happened to me. One day, around the time that I met Martina, I was in the squat in Totterdown and I ran into Mark Stewart. He goes to me, ‘I’ve got a day’s studio time booked and I can’t be there – do you want it?’ My first step was almost taken for me – I wasn’t pushed into it exactly, but I obviously said, ‘Yeah!’
It wasn’t a proper studio, it was just a friend’s home studio at a squat, but Mark obviously saw something in me where I might use that time productively. He thinks I’m a bit mad, but I think he’s a bit mad as well. At one point, he had nowhere to live so he came and stayed at mine for a while. Still, it’s a bit bizarre that he offered me the time – what was I gonna do with it? If he hadn’t, I probably wouldn’t be here now. I might just be doing the odd vocal for Massive Attack still.
By the appointed day, Martina had finished her exams, and she turned up with some mates, all pissed on cheap cider to celebrate that their exams were over. Why did I need her? I guess it was all about masking my own vocal inadequacies, because I didn’t think I was that good a vocalist, so I obviously felt I needed someone else to carry it – like, ‘Okay, let’s have a girl come and be at the front.’
In my head, I had matched up a slowed-down break from an LL Cool J track with an old Marvin Gaye guitar riff, and I’d got some lyrics ready. When I heard Martina sing them, that was the most beautiful thing – to hear her female voice singing my words, it blew my mind. It wasn’t just because I didn’t like the way it sounded from me, but, because I was into words, I just saw it as such a compliment to hear a girl singing something I’d written so beautifully. Like, you wrote a song. If you rap, it’s just a rap. But giving the lyrics to a girl made it something else altogether, and I’d sing in there too, softer, you might not even notice me, but it was always the two vocals over each other, and that would become my thing, and after that first try-out, I soon got addicted to it.
It’s possible that we tried out two or three tracks that day, but there was only one that I kept, the Marvin Gaye/LL Cool J one called ‘Aftermath’, on a C60 cassette. Once everyone had recovered from the American tour debacle and there was talk of another Massive Attack album, I took my prized new track to 3D and offered it up for inclusion.
It was weird, because the first song they released was ‘Daydreaming’, which I produced, and that song blew them up. I’m not saying it’s any better than the stuff they did – ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ is much better, and I didn’t work on that – but it was the introduction where people said, ‘What the fuck is this?’ There was nothing like ‘Daydreaming’ out there, and I felt the same way about ‘Aftermath’.
3D listens and says to me, ‘Don’t worry about that, focus on Massive Attack,’ which I understand, because if I’m in Massive Attack, indeed being paid by Massive Attack, I should be focusing on that. But I was like, ‘Come on, let’s put this on the album!’ and he just wasn’t into it. I guess they’d just had a hit with ‘Unfinished Sympathy’, so they didn’t need me to produce independently any more, just to be a part of the band, and write lyrics.
For the moment, there was nothing I could do with ‘Aftermath’, and I kept that cassette, and over the following months as I drifted away from Massive, I’d play it to people occasionally, but not in a hustling way to try and get a deal. It wasn’t at all like I quit Massive so that I could go solo and release my ‘overlooked masterpiece’. Most people would say, them not wanting to use ‘Aftermath’ – that’s a good reason to leave. At the time, I didn’t give a fuck: they just didn’t want to use it, that’s business. What was the end for me? When I couldn’t borrow that £2.50 so I had to drive all the way back to Bristol feeling really hungry – that was it. I’m a funny guy like that.
After leaving Massive, I literally sat about partying and not doing much else for a few months. Occasionally, I’d play the cassette to people, but it was my cousin Michelle, who has nothing to do with the music business and generally doesn’t talk music with me, who intervened.
‘You’ve got to do something with that song,’ she told me, in no uncertain terms.
‘But I played it to Massive Attack,’ I replied, ‘and I don’t think they want it.’
‘Well,’ Michelle reasoned, ‘you should release it yourself, then.’
That sounded a great idea in principle, but I wasn’t on a wage from Massive anymore, so how could I release it? After thinking it through for a couple of days, I remembered a weird encounter in The Montpelier, where this white hippy guy who used to sell weed in there came up and said to me, ‘If you ever want to do anything, I’ll give you some money.’ At the time, I thought, ‘That’s strange, why is he choosing me?’ But after thinking it over, it all started to make some sense, to me at least. That night, I went down to The Montpelier, found the guy, had a short talk with him, and got 500 quid off him.
With that money, I pressed up some white labels of ‘Aftermath’ on my own Nyeeve label. A bunch of copies I took to local record stores in Bristol; the rest I took up to London and dropped off at radio stations and record labels. Six weeks later, I had my own record contract with Chris Blackwell’s iconic label, Island.
I often wonder what might’ve happened to me if Michelle hadn’t given me a nudge at that crucial moment …
CHAPTER SEVEN
ISLAND RECORDS
My auntie Sandy used to do Tarot cards. She was my mum’s brother Michael’s wife, and she was just as much family to me as, say, my uncle Tony. I never really liked that Tarot stuff, it weirds me out, but she was my auntie and she used to say, ‘Come down, I’ll do you a reading.’ Usually, I’d be like, ‘Uh, oh, um, maybe …’ but one day I finally went down to see her.
She was a white woman who lived on the verge of the black ghetto in the Montpelier/St Paul’s area. She was quite well known with the students in Bristol, because she used to do readings for all of them, and she was well known by everybody for being spot on with the Tarot.
One day, I went down to her house and she did mine. She laid out my cards on the table and started looking at them. Eventually, she said, ‘There’s something to do with eyes that is going to make you successful.’ I’m sat there thinking, ‘What the fuck is she talking about?’
Years and years went by, to the point where I’d all but forgotten about Auntie Sandy’s prediction that day. And it was only a good while after I’d circulated those white labels and started my solo career that I realised: the first line of the lyrics to ‘Aftermath’ go, ‘Your eyes resemble mine’, and that’s the song that got me my record deal. Crazy, right?
The whole verse goes, ‘Your eyes resemble mine, you’ll see as no others can/Here, inherit my kingdom, speak of our people’s plan.’ If I had written those words in later life, you cou
ld say, ‘Oh, he wrote that about his children,’ but I had no kids at that point. So, that’s my mum speaking. And as my auntie said, ‘something with eyes’.
I usually remember writing my lyrics, but I can never remember where they come from. When I write, I’m not really thinking – they just come into my head. I always used to think Auntie Sandy was a bit different, even though Tarot was never really my thing, but when I thought about her reading, I began to think my mum had been speaking through me.
The whole business of getting signed was more mundane. Me and the hippy geezer from The Montpelier pub drove to London in his car and dropped the white labels off at radio stations and label offices, and then everything went mad. It was getting played in clubs in London, and on the radio – just unreal.
Then me and this geezer had a disagreement. I got calls from four different labels, everybody wanting to sign me for that single, or more. Straight off, I wanted to sign to Island, because of their amazing history in music going back to the late ’50s. This other guy wanted to wait and wait and wait. I don’t know if in the back of his mind he wanted to start a record company himself or something, but I was like, ‘Island Records is the one,’ so I went with them.
Then it got a bit complicated, because I had another meeting there and it seemed like they weren’t so sure. Basically, they were interested in ‘Aftermath’, but I didn’t get a deal straight away, it was just a one-off deal for that single. Maybe they weren’t totally convinced, like, ‘Alright, you’ve got a good single – is there anything else?’