by Tricky
ROB SMITH: As Smith & Mighty, we supported at that Shepherd’s Bush show, and it was to a big audience. When Tricky came onstage, he asked the crowd, ‘Who likes trip hop?’ Some people cheered and shouted ‘Yeah!’ and Tricky replied, ‘Well, fuck off home then!’ It’s really great to be recognised in any way, but artists in Bristol generally don’t like the term ‘trip hop’. It’s a journalistic phrase.
RAY MIGHTY: For all the artists in Bristol, though, it seemed like the stars were aligning. Everyone was doing their own thing, and everyone was coming out with something good. You had Massive’s second album, you had Portishead, you had Tricky – these three things all from one town, and all completely different to what everybody else was doing. We all felt proud of Bristol; at that moment it was musically the hottest place on the planet. You had tourists turning up, asking what was going on.
I don’t so much remember the Shepherd’s Bush show, just the after-shenanigans. Damon Albarn, amongst other big names, were backstage, then we went to a club called Brown’s, which was really arsey. We were all supposed to meet down there, and Tricky said, ‘You guys have got to come, or I’m not going.’ We all met up outside, and the bouncers wouldn’t let us in: ‘Nah, mate, I don’t care, we are not letting anybody in now.’ Then Nellee Hooper came out and got the lot of us in!
MARC MAROT: Island had gone through the incredibly expensive process of bankrolling Tricky’s live show, and once he was up and running with it, I took Roger Ames, the chairman of Polygram, to see this first major headline show at Shepherd’s Bush Empire. Roger wanted to see what all the fuss was about. From the start, I was incredibly angry with Tricky because he had a doting, sold-out audience, but he wouldn’t turn the fucking lights on. He played virtually in the dark, with just some tungsten lights and none of the coloured lights – all the stuff we had paid for, and it costs a lot of money! – and he performed the whole set with his back to the audience.
At the end, the place was going mad for an encore, but he waited until the house lights went up and 90 per cent of the audience had gone, and then he came out and did an encore. I’m there with my chairman, who I have already had to sit with and say, ‘Don’t worry, he is going to sign the contract!’ Now I’m having to say, ‘Oh well, that’s Tricky being Tricky! It’s all part of the legend!’
I don’t think at all that it was him trying to be clever. I think it was anxiety, and I’ve read later interviews where he refers to his early anxiety onstage. He was significantly more anxious about being thrown into the limelight than we knew, and I think you have to look into his past for that. I don’t think he had anything in his background that allowed for the success to come comfortably and naturally to him.
So that was the moment where the lightbulb went off for me. I was used to working with shy artists: when we first saw PJ Harvey play, she literally couldn’t look the audience in the eye. She would perform looking down at her shoes. It’s part of doing a decent job in a record company, to coax the success out of your artist, but I think with Tricky it was just a little bit too much of a shock, with not enough stability in his life to begin with. He went from nought to sixty really fast, so it was very difficult for him.
JULIAN PALMER: He never did talk about the trauma in his past. Some days he was angrier than others. We used to just have a laugh, and then when he was on his own, this stuff used to come out in the music. I wouldn’t analyse it with him. I just used to spend all my time trying to protect him from the various pressures.
We both enjoyed a lot of what went on that year. He dressed as the devil on the cover of the NME, which was a fun day, but then sometimes we’d go out and he’d scare people – just staring at them or whatever. I always thought it was part and parcel of Tricky – that menace. I also thought it was a temporary, transient thing, that he just needed to get this out of his system, and then he would move on, but he seemed to stay in a dark place.
Some days he was angry, others he was dark, very rarely was he actually jovial. But he was always creative, and that was all we were worried about. Sometimes it was a struggle, and as soon as the album was out there, it was like he wanted to step away from being Tricky.
I don’t remember him not being ambitious, but it was all about doing it on his terms. We weren’t trying to make something that nobody would ever hear, but success does strange things to people. Maxinquaye was such a deeply personal record that it might’ve freaked him out a little bit having to explain it on such a broad, big scale – a much bigger scale than anticipated.
TRICKY: Most of the first touring I did was with Polly Harvey, who is a West Country girl, too. We went through England, Europe and America. Polly is lovely, and very chilled out. She ain’t got none of that popstar bullshit about her. Just as real as they come.
I was lucky to tour with her at the beginning, because she’s one of the best live artists you could ever see. Normally when I’m watching a live show, I get bored, not because the show is bad necessarily, or the person is bad, it’s just that from this point on performing onstage became part of what I do for a living. It’s not that I’m not impressed, or I don’t like the songs, it’s that thing of not eating chocolate if you work in a chocolate factory. Watching Polly, though, it’s always been, ‘Fucking hell, that is some power!’
Once, I left her a message at reception in the hotel we were staying at – a smiley face with an upside-down mouth, and tears running down it. I’ve long since forgotten why I may have done that. Then I saw her in the lobby the next day, and her cat had died. I left this message before it had happened, a sad face, and then her cat had died. I thought, ‘Oh fuck, that’s bad timing!’
As our shows got better and I was feeling the crowd more, I started really loving the live thing. Pete Briquette, my musical director for those first couple of years, is a really nice guy, salt of the earth. Again, just like a normal bloke, and very funny. But there was a part of touring I immediately found confusing. After the first show we ever did, I was sat backstage by myself, and Pete walked in.
‘So, what the fuck’s this about then?’ I asked him, a bit bewildered. ‘What do I do now?’
‘Meet people, meet some girls, have fun!’ he beams at me.
I’m like, ‘Yeah, but we did the show … what the fuck do I do now?’
It’s the same sequence, every night: you’re out there with a crowd, then you finish the show, and then you’re sat in the dressing room by yourself. Because Pete had been touring for years, I really was looking for answers.
So what happens now, then? Is that it? You do a show and then you sit in your dressing room?
He was like, ‘Have a drink, meet some people, have a laugh!’
On that level, I couldn’t see what it was all about. I didn’t get it. It was so weird to me. You’re onstage, and then it’s all over.
Elvis Presley was The Guy, right? He sold millions of records, more records than anybody – a ridiculous amount, like a billion or something. The biggest artist, the first popstar. I watched this documentary once, about him doing these huge shows in Vegas. Then they showed him in the dressing room, and it was a shit dressing room. It just made me realise: it doesn’t matter how big you are, you could be playing in front of 100,000 people, but you’re still going to have a shit dressing room. I mean, I have experienced that, but you wouldn’t think Elvis ever did.
Going back into that shitty room, you’re returning to real life with an almighty crash. Even Elvis, who you don’t consider being real, is there in this horrible little hole with graffiti all over the walls, where hundreds of other bands have been before, having to face real life. That’s the reality of things.
It was only through working in the music industry – making records, and touring – that I started taking cocaine, and drinking more. As I said before, when I was younger, when me and Whitley used to hang around, if you snorted cocaine, you were a crackhead. In the reggae culture, it was not cool. It was something you didn’t do.
Then, pretty early on
in my days in the music industry, I took cocaine. I admitted that ‘I snort the cheap thrills’ in the lyrics of ‘Abbaon Fat Tracks’, on Maxinquaye. I’ve certainly never been a cokehead, but I’d never have got into it if I’d not got a deal and been successful. Look at Whitley: he was doing music for a bit then, once I moved to London, he gave it up and he never took cocaine, and that was my best mate.
When I left and got successful, that’s when I found all this shit like cocaine and alcohol: for me thus far, drinking was a casual thing, of going to a club and having a whisky and a spliff to help you get into the music. Then I got successful, and alcohol became a survival mechanism. When I was as tired as fuck on tour, and I didn’t want to do a show, I’d have to have a drink just to be able to do my show, to push back the exhaustion. So drug culture came into things because of the music, because of the success.
Once you’re no longer anonymous, or just a normal person, that’s when mad things start happening to you. When I was off tour, back at the flat in Kensington High Street I was a total insomniac. I couldn’t adjust my body clock from the night shift on the road, to daytime at home. I would stay up all night, and then in the morning, when the shop was open, I would walk over in my pyjamas, with just a coat on over the top, and I’d buy a packet of crisps, a Lucozade and a Twix. I would walk back, eat and drink all of that and then go to sleep.
One day, I walked into the shop, and there was a woman in there with a kid of about eight with a posh school uniform on – and the kid goes, ‘Mum, it’s Tricky!’
Around that time, I had a photograph done with this guy for the London listings magazine, Time Out. I did so many shoots in those months, I didn’t really know what it was for. I thought it was just for some article and forgot all about it.
On Easter Sunday, I come out of my apartment on Kensington High Street, I go to the same shop where the kid said, ‘Mum, it’s Tricky!’ – only this time, on the railings outside, I see this poster of me from the cover of Time Out, with me as Jesus, wearing a crown of thorns. I don’t go in the shop – I just turn around and walk straight back inside the apartment.
That really fucked me up. I can’t explain what the feeling was, but it was when things started going very, very wrong for me.
BOWIE
When I was young, living in the Porters’ house in Hartcliffe, I would hear David Bowie playing while I was getting ready for bed. At weekends, Milo, Trevor Beckford and my cousin Mark, who were all older than me, would be having showers and getting dressed up ready to hit the town, and they would play all of Bowie’s classic records as their ‘going-out’ tunes.
That’s how I know his music. I can’t say that I then went on to become a massive fan of David Bowie. I never exactly followed his stuff, but once Maxinquaye came out, David Bowie was my fan. He came to my show at Shepherd’s Bush Empire and dropped by to say hello afterwards. And Kylie was there, too!
Bowie then wrote me a really beautiful letter, saying: ‘Iman and I loved the show the other night – I’ve loved the album for some time.’ Also in that package, he sent me a copy of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s The Notebooks, because he said I reminded him of Basquiat. I don’t know if Bowie had ever met him, but he told me it wasn’t the way I look, just a similar energy that I had.
In the letter, he also warned me that he’d written a story about me for Q magazine. David Bowie never wrote about another artist ever! It was actually a mad six-page story, imagining a meeting with me before we’d actually met. That story is genius. It’s like a stream-of-consciousness fantasy, where he sort of interviews me while we both climb up the side of a building.
Bowie had obviously been around a lot longer than me, but the way he wrote to me, and about me, you’d almost think that I’d had the thirty-year career before that, not him. In person, he was humble. He was a businessman, too. When we first met, he brought his own private photographer, but get past that and he was as humble as fuck.
What’s crazy is, I didn’t even reply to the letter. He signed off saying, ‘I hope we get to meet again,’ and I never answered. I met him a couple of times, and I didn’t engage. I think about that a lot. I can’t believe that kid from Knowle West with not much future has grown up into a guy David Bowie writes a letter to. I didn’t try and meet him – he came to my concert to try and meet me. If that happened now, I’m old enough to think, ‘You know what, I wanna meet this guy, and make a connection.’
Back then, I didn’t give a shit. Like, ‘Oh, alright, David Bowie wrote a story.’ I didn’t care about it at all, I didn’t reach out, I didn’t try to meet him, I was not interested, I didn’t give a fuck. You know when you’re younger, everything is moving fast, and right around that time, I was moving way too fast. Now I think, ‘Why didn’t I call him? Why didn’t I send a letter back to him?’ All that love he showed me … I didn’t return it. I didn’t even say thank you. Which is a bit shit, really, because he’s dead now.
It’s still weird, thinking that he is dead. I almost forget, almost like he would always be with us. But he went out like a soldier, didn’t he? He knew he was dying, he made his final album, Blackstar, did videos, made all the arrangements for it. He went out like a soldier. Fucking hell, what a brave man!
CHAPTER NINE
NEARLY GOOD
For the British music industry, 1995 was a massive year. Britpop was peaking, CD sales were at an all-time high, and my album – whatever they wanted to call it – was right in the mix, too: loads of different music magazines (including the all-powerful NME) and radio shows would vote Maxinquaye as the best album of the year.
Amongst all the touring, interviews and general craziness, one quiet afternoon off I took Martina down to the Odeon at the far end of Kensington High Street to watch Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction – the movie of the moment, according to those same commentators. I didn’t end up taking away many recollections of the film itself, because my attention had been swallowed up during the preamble before it actually started, with one ghastly observation – all the fucking ads sounded like Maxinquaye!
That’s when I knew: it was over. They had ruined Maxinquaye already. So many people liked it and embraced it and followed it, it had become what they call a coffee-table album – a horrible phrase, not a compliment.
When it initially came out, Maxinquaye was weird. That’s what people have forgotten ever since: upon impact, it was different, dangerous, a serious head-fuck. It was hardcore, a militant album. When my A&R guy went in to hear ‘Strugglin’’, he turned into a beetroot. There was nothing like it, but that record became so successful that it wasn’t different anymore. It very quickly became the norm – normal. My punk-minded album had suddenly gone mainstream, and everyone was ripping it off. There were lame imitations of my music everywhere, and even big American producers like Timbaland started copying me. Listen to the song he recorded with Aaliyah. It was like music had changed, to sound like me.
Luckily, I realised that that’s not a good position to be in. If I’d made a second album that sounded just like Maxinquaye, then I wouldn’t’ve been different anymore. I’d be the same, and then I’d be stuck. That’s how artists get trapped by their own success. In a way this predicament was good because it told me where to go next. It forced my hand. I was like, ‘Right, I’ve got to get somewhere else now.’ I wanted to say to these coffee-table people, ‘So, you like what I do? I’ll test you – let’s see if you really support me!’ I felt that there was only one thing to do: give people something harder, less easy to listen to, almost challenging them to stay with me, so I could get away from all that fucking success.
Even though Island had released Maxinquaye, and it had got to No.3 in the charts, we still hadn’t signed a proper contract. From their point of view, if you’ve got someone with that much buzz about them on your label, it becomes more urgent that you sign them. You don’t want to let them go. I knew all that. There was one show in ’95 where I spotted Dave Gilmour, my red-faced A&R, in the crowd, waving a contract in
the air at me.
Island didn’t A&R me as such, but if I’d already signed and then decided to change course to something less commercial, they could’ve said, ‘Look, this isn’t gonna do as well as Maxinquaye, so we don’t want it.’ Then you’d be in trouble. If I had signed that deal earlier, and had an album refused, I would’ve had to record another album more on the vibe they thought they could sell.
But because I hadn’t inked the deal, I kind of had them by the short and curlies! I said to my manager, ‘I want it stated in the contract that if Island don’t accept a record for release, I can take it to any other label I choose, and they can release it.’ I don’t think any other artist has had a contract that said that before. What’s mad is, thinking back now, I don’t know why I would’ve stipulated that, because I didn’t know enough about contracts and the politics of it. It must’ve been instinct, because through that I landed up in a position where they couldn’t control my music, and I could release anything I fucking wanted.
In rural Somerset in early ’95, I had my first near-death experience. We were between tours, recording at a studio down that way, in Poole in Dorset. We were staying at Martina’s family’s house in the middle of nowhere, and one night there I had a serious asthma attack. Asthma can be controlled quite easily: there are certain things you’re not supposed to be eating or doing, but of course I was just not looking after myself, eating badly and what have you. People often said I wasn’t gonna live long, even that guy who wrote the book about Bristol – if he makes it to twenty, he could be someone.
Well, on this occasion, I really didn’t think I would make it through the night. It was funny, though: Martina was eight months pregnant by that point, and she was freaking out. She was thinking that the child she was carrying wasn’t gonna know its dad. As for the poor doctor! When he arrived, he couldn’t do anything, because he didn’t come with the right equipment. He wasn’t prepared for how far gone I was, so he was shitting himself. I said to him, ‘I’m gonna fucking die here! Do something!’ and he just sank down into a chair, closed his eyes and basically gave up. It was mad seeing this guy’s face. He’d thrown in the towel.