by Tricky
A song like ‘Hell Is Round the Corner’ came about because I was living by the front line in St Paul’s. I had no money, so I was staying in someone’s basement there for a short time. One day I was sat around, talking with a mate about hell for some reason, and he goes, ‘Hell? Hell is round the corner, mate!’ Literally, the next street was where everyone was selling drugs on the ghetto frontline. So that became a song a few years later.
When I released ‘Overcome’ as a single, various people commented like, ‘Oh, he’s using the lyrics from Massive Attack’s “Karmacoma”.’ Actually, those were my lyrics that I gave 3D to sing on their track, and I’d written ‘Overcome’ way before ‘Karmacoma’ ever happened. When ‘Overcome’ finally came out, people thought I was using the same lyrics again, but it wasn’t like that. They are mine, so I’d given them to Martina, too.
Once I’d finished recording, there were things to think about, like the album cover. Island probably put a lot of thought into it. I wasn’t concerned about having an image as such. It was just having fun, so if I had a photo shoot, I’d think of something, and do it on the spur of the moment. I didn’t do any of the marketing meetings. I’d just turn up, ask for a make-up artist or some sort of clothing. It gets boring doing photo shoots, so I’d just try and make it into a laugh.
I was having fun with images, in the same way that I was writing dark lyrics for Martina to sing with her sweet voice. It was turning things upside down. That photo shoot for the Maxinquaye album artwork was done in London somewhere, with Island’s art director, Cally Callomon. The idea was to have me and Martina dressed as a married couple, with her as the groom and me as the bride. Back in those days, you wouldn’t have seen that kind of gender reversal from a ‘rapper’.
Once the album was done, I didn’t know what to do with myself. Often, I’d go down to Island’s offices in Chiswick. I didn’t use Island like a record company. I used to go in there just to hang out, because I didn’t really know anybody in London. There were a few places I’d go to in Harlesden, but when you live somewhere, you ain’t there all the time, are you? You’ve got to do other things, and in a way, the album had actually come from being isolated up there, with no distractions. I had my cousin Shaun, but he lived miles away over in East Ham, so I used to go into Island to kill some time, listen to music, and smoke a spliff. It wasn’t that London felt alien, so much as I simply didn’t know anybody.
That’s how much of a loner I was, right? My album is done and dusted, I’m waiting for it to come out, and I go to hang out in the record company because I have nothing to do. There was a very comfy couch in their offices. I used to go in there, talk to people, maybe put on the latest Public Enemy release, or a PJ Harvey record, then I would just fall asleep on the couch for an hour or so. I never really had a life. I could smoke weed there, because it wasn’t like a corporate vibe there back then.
Island Records was my hangout, and there was a point where I’d see Julian Palmer almost every day. He was a constant, and I quickly trusted him totally.
JULIAN PALMER: Fourth & Broadway was my label within Island. In the mid-80s, I was fortunate enough to find the Wild Bunch, which was Nellee Hooper, Daddy G, Mushroom, 3D, and Tricky was loosely involved, but really Nellee and 3D were driving it. We never met Tricky at the label offices at all in those days. It was always Nellee with his long fur coat, looking very rock ’n’ roll.
Much like Tricky, when they came aboard, they had a punk ethic and weren’t overly ambitious, certainly not in terms of making albums and being big recording artists. We put out what I thought was a brilliant record in ‘Friends and Countrymen’, which was so out of kilter with everything else that was going on. Everybody thought it needed to play at 45rpm, when it was cut at 33. It was just way too slow compared to everything else around – so different from the whole house thing, and commercial hip-hop, fusing reggae, funk, rare groove and early breaks.
When Wild Bunch split, to be honest I never thought anything would come of it, but obviously, Massive Attack were born out of the ashes of it. I knew Tricky was a fringe player there, and when I heard ‘Aftermath’, I thought, ‘That’s that little kid who used to do live stuff with Wild Bunch.’
That was sometime in 1994, and I was absolutely captivated by the white label he’d circulated. I knew it was heavily sampled because I’m a Marvin Gaye obsessive, but like everything with Tricky, it was so fucked up, distorted and recontextualised, and so menacing, it felt really valid to me. That’s what Tricky had to do in order to express himself. He was born out of this DIY sampling/hip-hop world, which we both thought was the new punk – kids sitting in their room, borrowing from anywhere and everywhere. As long as you were creating something new from all these pre-existing components, and doing it inventively, then great! It was open season, wasn’t it?
Eventually I got him in the office, and he was like, ‘I don’t want to make an album. I just want to put tracks out. I don’t want to tie myself down.’ Some of the discussion we had was about how he might be compensated for the money that he wasn’t going to be making anymore by being a bad boy. He thought he could make more money doing those little jobs outside of doing music.
I impressed on him that at Island it was all about making albums, pushing boundaries and being original. Singles were merely how artists were introduced to people. Island was known for reggae – beyond Bob Marley, there were core bands like Black Uhuru and Aswad – then increasingly hip-hop with NWA, Ice Cube, etc., and those artists would always be able to trigger the options in their contract to make more records, because there was a big enough audience, slightly under the mainstream, to justify continuing.
It took a while to convince him that that was the way to go, with singles as enticing moments from a bigger body of work, but once he had bought into the idea, he went off and experimented, and I kept encouraging him to experiment and delve deeper and deeper.
With Tricky, it was all-encompassing. He had to get it out. I think he knew that once he got into it, it would be a different kind of pain in the creation, not the kind of pain that most people would endure. It would take him to the very edge, which is the mark of real artistry.
I think Massive had been love–hate from the beginning with him, for the simple reason that he found it difficult to have anybody close to his own creative process. Everything was so personal, even down to the way that he mixed the record. Most of it he did at his tiny flat at Harlesden, on his headphones. To begin with, he’d be blasting it out through the speakers, which would fuck the neighbours off, so after that he used to do it all on headphones – him sat on the floor with a stack of records and a sampler. I remember even thinking at the time that some of the whispered voicing was just to keep the neighbours from complaining. All the initial mixes he did on headphones, at home, immersed in his own world.
Martina played a prominent role, and that was certainly part of the reason why it was a long process making the record. It was a fractious relationship – he didn’t like people getting too close to him. Sometimes she was there, and then other times she wouldn’t be. No one ever put any pressure on him about her from our side, other than saying how beautiful the two of them were together, sonically, whether they were in love, or out of love, or hating each other, or whatever it was. The friction was probably the thing that made it click.
He had this obsession, an anxiety about being seen as a radio artist, pandering to those fickle demands. The music industry has been hits-driven since day one, and I just assured him that we would quite literally shut the door so that no one would interfere or judge. I just said, ‘Everything I say to you is true, and I will shut out the world, and it will be just you and me until you say to me, “We’re done.” Then we’ll go to Mr Blackwell, and we will blow his mind!’ That was perhaps dangerous territory, looking back, with such a raw talent, but I was young and I wanted to change the world as much as he did – and that was to succeed on his terms.
After ‘Aftermath’ came ‘Ponderosa�
��, another demo of his, and then all this stuff just flew out of him. The cover of Public Enemy’s ‘Black Steel’ got recorded because Martina took him to a gig the night before and they’d got chatting to the support band called FTV afterwards, and I think it was maybe even the next day they came to the studio to provide the full-band backing. We loved it in the office – it didn’t need to be all polished. It needed the rawness that the band added – pure ramshackle chaos and noise.
With some tracks, the rhythms and patterns and general dynamics were so off-beam. None of it was considered like traditional musicianship. It was abstract, uncompromising and at times hard on the ears. The soundscape was everything, and once he was done it just needed somebody to mix it and finish it off. We called in Mark Saunders, who was best known for his mix work on Neneh Cherry’s Raw Like Sushi album.
He and Tricky worked at a studio in Westbourne Park, and he immediately said he had never delved into anything quite like it before. A great mixing engineer knows where everything should sit – to add the final flourishes that ensure things sit subtly in the right place, and, in this case, to achieve the dramatic effect Tricky was going for. It certainly wasn’t creative input, like a producer, more helping Tricky arrange the songs slightly differently. The record was entirely Tricky’s vision.
My favourite aspect of the process was sequencing Maxinquaye with Tricky. The one nod to the commercial world was: there used to be listening booths in record stores, where you could select a CD and give it a listen. The thing was, if you didn’t capture people within the first four tracks, then you had lost a sale. The first four on there – ‘Overcome’, ‘Ponderosa’, ‘Black Steel’ and ‘Hell Is Round the Corner’ – were all singles. Then, as it got deeper into the record, things got darker and edgier with stuff like ‘Strugglin’’ and ‘Feed Me’, but once you had been drawn in, they would become just as important as the ones front-loading it. He was sort of commercial by default.
We sat there forever going through that, me saying, ‘We can hoodwink people into thinking this is going to be a comfortable listen for them, Tricks, and then they have to live with it as a body of work, and it might disturb them in places.’ He definitely liked that idea. ‘Fuck ’em all, Jules!’ All that menace that’s in him came through. Hearing Tricky is like watching The Exorcist for the first time. It’s something you’ve just never experienced before.
We were proud of it as a body of work, a story, something that came from a troubled place. I identified with that in him, and we partied a lot together in ’94 and ’95. The industry was totally drug-fuelled by then, so it wasn’t just us. The biz wasn’t the squeaky-clean place of the ’70s, prepunk, when I was a kid trying to get into it, working in clubs in Soho. Back then, record-company people stood out a mile, and they weren’t let in – they were dinosaurs with piano ties and Cuban heels and long grey hair, and you just spotted them a mile off. They had no edge; it was a nine-to-five job to them.
It had all started to change by the mid-80s: the old guard were pushed away, as we younger recruits brought the whole club/drug sensibility with us. It was an opportunity, at the right label at the right time, to make that kind of stand, and in Tricky I had somebody that was as anarchistic about doing it as I was. I was just the right side of knowing the mechanics of how to do it, without glossing over the emotional trauma that fuelled the record.
How we went about marketing him was very much the alternative route. He was a trailblazer for British black music, but he wasn’t representing the British black music psyche of that moment. That fraternity saw him as quirky, an outsider. British black music wasn’t spawning artists like Tricky, so to go to the black music community and expect them to embrace him was unlikely. We were trying to cross over and break the mould. In multicultural Britain, Tricky grew up listening to a diverse range of music, and his references reflected that, and he was instantly embraced by the alternative scene – that is, the music press and indie radio.
The reaction to Maxinquaye came from all the places that we’d hoped: the most influential of all publications at the time – the NME – were totally sold on him and his warped, twisted vision of the world. Everybody in that London indie media world understood it immediately. He went on to be the first black artist to have the NME front cover twice in one calendar year.
There was no obvious home for it in America, because white music and black music are always separate on the mass scale over there. But you can’t make records thinking about those boxes that you can squeeze into, and Tricky initially wasn’t built to be a big glossy American Top 200 crossover thing.
Preparing the album for release, there was a tight little unit of people, including Cally Callomon, Island’s art director, who played a massive part with the artwork, and everything about the presentation. The album cover keyed into the ancient, dilapidated look of higher-budget reggae reissues at the time.
Everything about that record was like a perfect storm. Then there was the photo shoot of Tricky and Martina as a cross-dressing wedding couple. At that point with British black music, there were rules, and it could often get very America Lite, but Tricky came out more like a black Bowie. When Bowie ended up recognising his work very enthusiastically, it was like, yeah! You couldn’t hoodwink Bowie.
Release was delayed for three months while we got samples cleared. You weren’t quite sure where things were coming from, and Tricky certainly wasn’t taking notes. A famous one was the lift from Isaac Hayes’s ‘Ike’s Rap II’ on ‘Hell Is Round the Corner’, which Portishead used concurrently on their single ‘Glory Box’. I absolutely stand behind Tricky, who maintained it was his idea to use it first. People behind Geoff Barrow from Portishead say the opposite, but Tricky’s is the genius one, isn’t it? It was a sample that was out there anyway, on the underground. I recall hearing it a few times.
It was the brave new world, wasn’t it? Sampling to me was part and parcel of the work we were doing. I can probably say, there were some things that we maybe didn’t declare, because he’d torn them apart and reversed them and turned them into such a decomposed state that you couldn’t possibly recognise what they were. That method is integral to what he was. What came out the other side was either genius or lunacy, but often when we needed to find out the rights owner, he didn’t even know what it was he was sampling.
While all that legal side was getting sorted, in early February ’95 I wheeled him into the Brits in a wheelchair. He came around my house first, and we dyed his hair silver. He wasn’t nominated at this early stage – those were the days when you just had to be spotted. Back then, the ceremony took place at Alexandra Palace, which had a big flight of steps leading up to the front doors. We were getting snapped by paparazzi as I wheeled him along, and then when we got to the bottom of the steps, he got up out of the chair and walked up with me. As an emerging artist, we certainly got him noticed!
Once we were inside, I was saying to him, ‘We’re gonna take this next year, Tricks, this will be us!’ We had that single-mindedness, to get his art into that kind of mainstream place, without selling out, without it being a radio thing, without making all the concessions that made him uncomfortable. I think that stance made people buy into him more, because he rebelled against playing the game.
Here I had a man that could change the world, I knew that. I didn’t know quite to what extent. Without having hit singles, we made a bit of history. When the album finally came out on 20 February 1995, it was absolutely huge. The ‘trip hop’ moniker that the press gave to him and all the Bristol scene – in spite of him not wanting to be associated with it – definitely helped. Call it a scene with a catchy name, and everybody buys into it. That first month or two, it was the album that all the people we didn’t think we’d get to – coffee-table listeners, the middle classes – were chin-wagging about at dinner parties. They probably didn’t know what they were listening to, but we infiltrated them!
MARC MAROT: It only bloody went in at No.3 and caught everybody by surprise! W
e knew something was there, but the entire industry – retail, the media, the rest of the record industry – nobody saw it coming. I would say that we probably thought we would have a sleeper hit album on our hands that might take a little while to get going, but it was a big success, straight out of the traps – and I still didn’t have a record deal!
TRICKY: I was never interested in being famous or successful. Like everyone, I have bills to pay, so I have to make money, but I’ve never been interested in being the richest guy on the planet. Driving around in a Rolls-Royce or Bentley sports car does nothing for me whatsoever. Making Maxinquaye, my attitude was, ‘I’m going to turn music upside down.’ That was a bit of a competitive hip-hop thing, like, ‘No one can fuck with me! I’m gonna make music that no one has ever heard before.’ There was always a bit of that. But being the biggest artist – it doesn’t bother me.
The only thing that came out in the ’90s that was new, was my album. I’m not saying it was the best, I’m just saying it was the only new music. When Maxinquaye came out, there was nothing that came before it or sounded like it. Things have come after it and tried to sound like it, but when Maxinquaye came out, there had been nothing like it. And it wasn’t because I’m a genius, it was because I don’t know what I’m doing.
Still, I thought I was going to be an underground artist, making my own little weird music. Because I was coming from hip-hop, it was cool to be underground. I was going to be the background guy – the guy who was hardly ever seen. That was the plan. Then all of a sudden, I’m on the front of Time magazine, and on the front of The Face, and David Bowie’s writing fictional stories about me in Q magazine and sending me letters.