by Tricky
I may have recorded more tracks with Martina that day, but ‘Aftermath’ was the only one I kept on cassette, and so that was the only song I had. It’s hard for me to say exactly how much time went by between that studio day and the day I got signed for ‘Aftermath’ – maybe as much as four years – but the one thing I do know is, I hadn’t seen her in the meantime.
As a rapper in those days, you didn’t take yourself so seriously. People didn’t used to think of rappers as poets, or the new Shakespeare. It used to be just, ‘Ugh, what’s he doing?’ Coming at it with that attitude, to hear someone sing your words was mind-blowing. The first time I heard it was with Shara Nelson on ‘Daydreaming’, but that was just the chorus. With it happening for the whole song, it was like, ‘Wow!’ It takes your lyrics somewhere else, and I knew Martina was the one to do it.
When I think back to me being my mum’s ghost while I listened to Billie Holiday with my nan, and then one day coming out of my house and there’s Martina, and I say to her, ‘Can you sing?’ and we do ‘Aftermath’ and she’s like the new Billie Holiday – how the fuck did that happen? How do you come out of your house, and someone is sat on your wall, and they are the new Billie Holiday?
What’s double weird is, Martina has a similar look to my mum. She doesn’t look like my mum, but there are definite similarities there. Her vibe, and the big eyes. If you see old pictures of my mum and you see pictures of Martina, they aren’t identical, but you can see the connection. And the vibe and the tone of her voice are definitely Billie Holiday. No English girl was sounding like Billie Holiday back then, they couldn’t do it.
When I got my record deal, I thought, ‘I’ve got to find this girl. She is the voice for my music!’ How the fuck did I even find her again? It’s ridiculous, I don’t know how it happened. I didn’t stay in touch with her, then all that time elapsed, and then I’m looking for her, and someone saw her on the street. Insane, right? It was meant to be.
That search had given me time to write ‘Ponderosa’, and the two of us duly went up to London to record it with this lovely Glaswegian guy called Howie B, who was engineering in the studio. When that one went mad as well, that’s when Island properly wanted to know.
MARC MAROT: I’d been the managing director of Island for four years or so when we started our association with Tricky. I was a protégé of Chris Blackwell, and I started out in music publishing with him. My introduction to the Bristol scene was that I signed a band called Startled Insects in 1985, who went on to work with Massive Attack on Blue Lines – and the last act I signed before I got the job as Island MD was Massive Attack.
I was well aware of this mysterious character called Tricky, when Dave Gilmour – not the Pink Floyd one, but one of the scouts at Island’s dance subsidiary, Fourth & Broadway – excitedly brought the ‘Aftermath’ white label into an A&R meeting.
Island, as a major label, was supposed to be commercial but in that period we were the antithesis of commercial. We were trying to turn over stones that nobody else was. Chris had a fervent belief that it’s the distance an artist stands from other artists that measures them, rather than the closeness and the similarities. We were always looking for things that were different, and there was something mysterious about ‘Aftermath’ that really turned everybody on – particularly Julian Palmer, the young guy who ran Fourth & Broadway.
Tricky was incredibly difficult to pin down, we found. Our opinion initially was that he didn’t really believe in himself as an artist. He saw himself as a rapper and a producer, but that didn’t necessarily mean fronting something was on his agenda. To him, he was just knocking out tracks, with the mindset of the sound-system background he came from. From Island’s perspective, it was just like the early days of reggae before Bob Marley came along, where there were no artists per se, only records.
The Chris Blackwell philosophy was that you signed people who were auteurs, who had a vision for who they were, not just for their music. If you look at the people we signed under my tenure, like Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails, or PJ Harvey, or Jarvis Cocker, or Elbow’s Guy Garvey, they didn’t come to the record company to dress them, or tell them what to say, or get co-writers to write the songs for them – they came as a complete package.
We effectively bought the rights to the ‘Aftermath’ single, without entering into any major record deal, with a view to building trust. Chris Blackwell very much took a personal interest in Tricky. Tricky absolutely fitted into that continuum of Island Records in Chris’s head, and was nurtured by him as the perfect artist to carry it on.
The second single was ‘Ponderosa’, which everyone absolutely loved as well, but chart activity was slow to begin with. ‘Aftermath’ we got to No.69, and ‘Ponderosa’ we got to 77, so you might ask, why would a record company that is going backwards with an artist, as it were, feel like keeping on with the investment? Doubly so, bearing in mind that at this stage we still didn’t have anything in writing – we were funding the recordings, and putting them out with absolutely no right to them, in some respects.
The more that came out of the studio, the more we realised he was growing into that role as an artist and beginning to feel a little more comfortable with it in terms of public persona and presentation, because of the critical reception that was building. We began to really get some traction, not from Radio One, just occasional John Peel-style plays, and exceptional press that made us feel like we needed to carry on. All the component parts were falling into place, but we still had no contract.
This is where Tricky could have become really tricky. He was being managed by Debbie Swainson and Caroline Killoury. They were in London, but I felt they didn’t have a lot of experience, and where that showed is that they had little control over Tricky. No one did! Nobody has control over Tricky, other than Tricky. Even once his album was coming together and slated for release, we could not get the two managers to focus on closing the deal. You might suggest that it was actually a strategy, but I didn’t ever think it was. I never thought that I was being played, I just thought it was their inability to get Tricky to focus on the business details of what putting a record out actually means.
It was almost a career ruination moment for me. I trusted Tricky. I looked him in the eye, and I asked him whether he was going to sign our record deal, and he said that he was. As such, I committed to the marketing spend, the videos, everything, even though I still didn’t have a bloody contract.
TRICKY: Before I gave ‘Ponderosa’ to Island, I was planning to put out a white label myself – I guess I wanted to test the water, to see if people liked it – but Julian Palmer caught me at it. He calls me into the office and goes to me, ‘No, no, no, you don’t put it out, Tricks – we’ll do that for you!’
I have to say, from that point on it was fucking easy for me to write my album. I never had no problem. I never thought about it. I moved up to London, to a flat up in Harlesden, and got down to it there. My manager found me the place, and at the time that was all I could afford, just renting. I had signed to Island, but it wasn’t the full deal yet, so I didn’t have lots of money. It was an apartment on the second floor of a normal house just off Harlesden high street. I went and looked at it, and said, ‘Yeah, I’ll take it.’ I didn’t need to take anything in there, all the furniture was already provided, so I just moved right in.
I used to hang out on the high street. It was ghetto as fuck, but obviously I didn’t have no problems there, because I’m not from there. Sometimes you can have problems in an area, if you are involved in stuff. But no one knew me, and I wasn’t involved in anything dodgy. You could still feel it was ghetto. You would hear gunshots sometimes, and the odd murder going on. But I wasn’t involved in anything, so it was okay. It was a good place. I lived there for a year or so, and that was where I recorded my album.
I would sit on the floor in the living room, with a bunch of records and a turntable, looping up breaks and taking sounds and bits of music, all using the Akai S1000 sampler. T
hat was a really good machine – the only piece of machinery I actually ever liked using. Pro Tools, Logic, and all that studio software – I hate them. You just spend all day staring at a screen. The S1000 was fun, real fun – very simple, and you could build a track in no time at all, once you’d heard it in your head.
My early stuff sounded so different from everything else because I didn’t know how to make music. When I first did ‘Aftermath’, I had a guy playing the flute on it. At one point, he looked all flustered.
‘That’s two blues notes next to each other!’ he goes.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You can’t do that,’ he says, ‘it’s not correct.’
Apparently, you’re not allowed to put two blues notes next to each other. That’s why my stuff was different: I had no rules. I’ve always had weird time signatures, not because I’m trying to do it – some artists use them to try and make their music weird. My music is weird because I don’t know what I’m doing. You know, I kick with my left foot, and I write with my right hand. I am a weird time signature already!
While I was recording, Britpop was going on, and I just couldn’t see any of that as being new. Everything I was seeing around me – there were new bands, but there was no new music. That’s why I wrote ‘Brand New, You’re Retro’, about all these bands coming along, like, ‘This is the new shit.’ My answer was, ‘No, you sound like The Beatles, you sound like the Rolling Stones, you’ve even got the same haircut, you wear sunglasses in a nightclub – there’s nothing new about you at all! You’re just a retro band that’s having some success.’
There were people doing soul music in the charts, straight up – like, why the fuck are you doing soul music? How are you new? It’s like secondhand emotions, acting all traumatised on TV. It was like, ‘You ain’t Billie Holiday!’ I just thought I’d heard it all before, and I wanted to be different, and turn it all upside down.
Some of what I was listening to came from Martina. She was a rock chick, and at the time she was listening to Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins, which is why there was a sample from Smashing Pumpkins’ Gish album on my song ‘Pumpkin’. She also got me into Polly Harvey, before all these people were as famous as they are now. She used to rock a pair of Dr Martens because she was into that music, so that’s how I got into rock. Before that, all I knew about was reggae, hip-hop, and English pop like Marc Bolan.
You can hear that influence from Martina on our version of Public Enemy’s ‘Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos’, too. That song was about not going into the army in the Vietnam War. Chuck D used to write stories. I don’t know what the rappers are talking about anymore. I’m not saying it’s not good, but back then Rakim and Chuck D were writing like a movie unfolding in front of you. It was like watching a movie or reading a book, and people like Chuck D and Rakim and Slick Rick were my poets, my Shakespeare. With them, you could smoke a spliff, close your eyes, and let your imagination go with it.
I used to get frustrated, because I was absorbing all kinds of music, but I knew for sure that most average people didn’t know who Rakim was, and the same probably went for many of the people who might eventually listen to my music. Sampling or covering Chuck D or Rakim was my way of showing them the way.
Then, getting Martina to sing ‘Black Steel’ – that was gonna make someone know about Chuck D who didn’t know about him already. Because if someone listens to that and then finds out where it comes from, they might go back and hear the original, and discover Public Enemy. I just wanted to take those heroes of mine to another crowd.
I felt like these artists deserved to be opened out to a wider audience. You can’t just call Rakim a rapper. That guy is a genius. Some of his words are the most amazing poetry. It frustrated me when people said, ‘Rakim, the rapper’. He isn’t really, he’s a poet who doesn’t sing; instead he uses the avenue that is available to him. People called me a rapper, too – why? I find it weird; it puts you in a box – ‘rapper’! I might have started off thinking I was a rapper, but even from when I first started, I have never been one really.
When Martina and I first met, there hadn’t been any relationship between us. We only started seeing each other once we started making the album. She was five or six years younger than me, and it didn’t work out. When we started seeing each other, she got pregnant straight away. Suddenly she was pregnant, so that changed the dynamic of the relationship, and I don’t think there was supposed to be any relationship in the first place. We used to drive each other crazy.
She was a posh girl – very posh, but tough as well. She went to a very good school in Bristol, but she has family in Connecticut who are ghetto. She has black American ghetto in her background, and she’s definitely got that in her. She used to go to rock clubs, her and her friends, and they would fight. Martina was a rucker, someone not to mess around with.
People might see her as serious, but she is a very funny person, too. She’s got a good sense of humour. We make fun of each other. Still these days, when we talk about music we’ve made together, I’ll say, ‘You sound alright, your chorus sounds okay – but the track is about me,’ and then she will say something sarcastic back. We make fun of each other. Harsh maybe, but funny. We just take the piss. It’s always been like that.
Looking back at it now, I realise that we weren’t supposed to be together – we were just supposed to have a baby together. We weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend material. We met to make music and to have a kid, and that was it.
In a way, her getting pregnant was good because it took away from the career pressure. We were doing the album, and then the videos, and it took the pressure away. You’re not just sitting there, thinking, ‘Oh shit!’ I think it would’ve been a lot harder, doing either of them on their own – sat in the house thinking, ‘Oh God, we’ve got to get the pram, the nappies …’ There was no time to worry or think.
Once I’d recorded most of the tracks in Harlesden, I finished the album off with an engineer in west London called Mark Saunders. This guy was just an engineer, but he later claimed in interviews that he’d created me, or something. He’d worked with The Cure, Neneh Cherry and a few other people before, and he is a great engineer – great at making things sound great – and a good mixer. But he’s definitely one of those wannabe musicians. An upper-middle-class white kid who seems like he’s got connections to record labels, and probably was in a band years ago, but it never went right. He’s a corny old dude.
For instance, I would take a sample, then I would tell him, ‘Put this on a keyboard.’ I would do loops, add to it, write some lyrics for Martina, and then me and her would leave for the day. When we turned up in the studio the next day, there would be guitar parts all over what we recorded the night before. I’d hear it and think, ‘What the fuck is this?’ He was trying to inject himself into the music, and I would have to make him take it off. Maybe I might not have been gentle with him. Instead of saying, ‘Oh, sorry, Mark, this doesn’t work,’ me and Martina would just laugh at him. Maybe I hurt his feelings, and this is why he still goes on about it today. Because he’s engineered The Cure and a few other big bands, but he’s never claimed to have made any of their records. So, I think his problem is with me.
The irony is that at the time, with songs like ‘Strugglin’’, you could see he just didn’t get it. He just couldn’t understand the music.
‘Musically, you can’t do that,’ he’d moan.
‘Listen, if I can hear it in my head, it can be done!’
The arguments would go on for hours, but luckily enough, it was my record and he didn’t need to understand it. The guy is a proper doughnut.
The A&R guy from Island, Dave Gilmour, used to come down occasionally to see how things were progressing. One time in Harlesden, I think we’d done ‘Overcome’ and ‘Black Steel’ and I’d just written ‘Strugglin’’. He said, ‘Can I have a listen?’ I pressed play for him and went in the other room. I was sat there smoking a spliff, and soon Dave came
back in the room, and his face was red.
That’s when I first knew: fucking hell, my music is affecting people! He was red-faced and uncomfortable. He heard ‘Strugglin’’ and I could see in his face it was an experience he had never had before. To me it was normal – I don’t see what the big deal is. That’s what was in my head, but I could see in his face that it had fucked him up. He didn’t know what the fuck was going on.
Anyway, I have Mark Saunders to thank for that. We should interview him and ask him how he did it.
When I cast my mind back to the day I looked into the open coffin of my deceased mother, as a small kid – that’s definitely left a mark on me. You could say I was always gonna make dark music after that.
You’ve heard my family stories, and perhaps you realise how lucky I really am. Yeah, I lost my mum, but then when you look at what my uncles went through – they had such a hard life. They became criminals, not because they wanted to look cool or look good, they just didn’t know any different. When you see that, it almost makes me look lucky.
My whole life went into that first album. It’s like my soul laid bare, and it’s the album that got me everything. Initially when I signed to Island, I was going to present myself as a band called Maxinquaye, which was effectively me and Martina, but Island persuaded me not to. It was written as one word, because if it had been written as Maxine Quaye, people might have thought that was Martina’s name. Island were like, ‘No, no, your name is out there already – stay Tricky!’ and they convinced me.
At least then I had a name for the album, but I never actually planned to go under Tricky. All this was never planned by me! I wasn’t going to be a top producer or a top artist. I can remember having meetings with Julian Palmer and saying to him, ‘Are you sure that you want to sign me? I’m not a commercial vehicle.’
I was never a tough guy or a gangster either, but I grew up in that kind of world, so there was a moody atmosphere to the album because I’d had a dark life. I’d been in a blues smoking weed, shortly after my uncle got murdered, wondering where in the room he’d died. I have certainly seen some darkness.