Hell Is Round the Corner

by Tricky

  Finally the paramedics came, and they put those electrodes on my chest, where they shock you, and every time they hit me with it, the lights in this old country house all started flickering and going out, like in a horror movie. They were hooked up to the mains, and every time they hit me, the lights would go haywire – although I obviously didn’t piece that together until much later. I was totally gone, so they hit me with it a couple of times, and all I remember is, it was weird – I saw shadows picking me up, and for some reason I thought they were aliens. Going out to the ambulance … that looked like a spaceship to me because of the blue lights on top. I was absolutely convinced it was aliens taking me away on a spaceship.

  I woke up the next day in hospital with my family around me and my auntie saying, ‘You’ve got to change your life, boy!’ They didn’t tell me for a while that I’d had the electric shocks – they don’t want to tell you because of post-traumatic stress and all that. It’s really weird that I thought I was being taken off by aliens. Why aliens? Why not God?

  It was only three or four weeks later that our daughter Mazy was born, and I’ve got to say the experience of being in a birthing room in Poole hospital while I became a father was very alien, too.

  As any helpless onlooking dad will tell you, it’s weird seeing a kid being born. I don’t believe in aliens, but I used to love the TV shows and films about them. It used to fascinate me even though I don’t believe in it at all. But when you see your kid being born, you think, ‘Well, we are the aliens!’ When their head pops out, and their eyes open and they look around the room – I don’t think you get any more alien than that, do you?

  PETE BRIQUETTE: I was helping out on that album, and Martina had come down, heavily pregnant, to do some vocals. After a while, she got tired, but she did one more take of the song ‘Black Coffee’ and then suddenly her waters broke, actually in the vocal booth. I don’t think either of them had even set it up with the hospital that she was about to drop, so I’m pretty sure I had to ring for an ambulance, and then she got whisked off to have the baby.

  There was a big chemistry between Tricky and Martina, onstage and off, but it was very complicated, interspersed as it was between the relationship ending, having the baby, her being barely out of her teens, and him being an older guy who wasn’t ready to settle down. The thing is, Tricky was just finding his way in life as well, and it all happened maybe a bit early for them both. So the relationship was pushed forward at a quicker pace than it naturally should have been, because of making records together, and having the kind of success that neither of them could’ve bargained for. I doubt that either of them wanted a lifetime partner at that stage, and they’d come to that realisation in the very heightened situation of creatively having a great thing together, and being very successful with it.

  As with all super-talented guys like him, there was an element of the control freak there – most great artists really want to control the creative output, as to what exactly happens. And Martina was the younger, wilder person who didn’t want to be controlled, so there was tension there, too.

  As a singer, Martina was very instinctive. She really did have a fabulous voice. She sings really quietly, just up close to a mic, so you get that intimacy. She would sit beside you at the control desk with the mic and sing so quietly and beautifully. I loved the way she sang.

  What fascinated me about Tricky himself, was that he had no obvious traditional skills as a musician, insofar as he didn’t sing, and he couldn’t play an instrument. He just rapped, and it wasn’t the same as American rapping, as it had become known. What he had was great ears. I used to call him Golden Ears. I like guys who have that sort of talent, and Tricky was one of those. We’d be in the studio, playing away for a while, and he would just pick one bar of everything you’d done, and that’s all he would use. And he would usually be absolutely right – that was the best bit. He had great taste, and a great knowledge of what would and wouldn’t work. And it was innate – a natural talent.

  One day, we got a bass player into the studio who was currently playing with Roxy Music – Gary Tibbs, who was in Adam and the Ants. I got him to play on a track, and he went flying around it, noodling away, and was really pleased with himself at the end. I thought, ‘Not bad, maybe a bit busy!’ Then Tricky came along and listened for a couple of minutes, then he goes, ‘There!’ We stopped the tape, and he took three notes. He binned the rest, took those three notes, looped them up, and that became the basis for a track. I think the guy was a bit put out, like he had just done a great performance and all that was used was three notes. But that was the way Tricky worked.

  I would put Tricky absolutely on a par with other great singers, even though he couldn’t sing well technically – he was a great musician although he didn’t have traditional musical skills.

  TRICKY: I’d decided to have other singers on the record, because it was another way of getting away from Maxinquaye, which obviously had been just me and Martina.

  I’d met Björk through Julian Palmer. He walked me into a party one night out in London, and he goes, ‘Look, there’s Björk … hi, Björk, this is Tricky – oh, you two should work together!’ It was like a set-up: ‘Oh, wow, what a coincidence – look who’s here!’ I’m not saying it was definitely that, but that’s how it felt, looking back on it.

  I was really impressed by her in the studio, because she was not at all scared. She has no fear. She’s not one of these artists that’s going to think about everything too much. I would just get some drums up, and she would try a vocal straight off. She wouldn’t say, ‘Oh, but that’s out of time there.’ She’s got no fear when it comes to recording, just pure talent and instinct.

  One time I was saying to her, ‘I’m thinking about having singing lessons to see if I can sing better.’

  ‘Don’t do that!’ she fired back, straight off the bat. She was adamant about it.

  ‘Why not?’ I said, wondering why she felt that so strongly.

  ‘Because you’ve got weird metering,’ she explained. ‘They’ll ruin that if you have singing lessons.’

  She was kind of saying: It’s not right, what you’re doing, but it works for you. Björk is very smart like that, she knows about music on that level, too. Everyone knows how good she is, how she can write excellent songs, but she’s also the sort of person who can go freestyle. She wouldn’t be scared to just go and vibe on something, on the fly. A lot of artists can’t do that. They’ll say, ‘Oh no, can I have something more like Maxinquaye,’ but she wasn’t fazed at all.

  We ended up dating, and she was a really good girl, and was really good to me. I was just a fuck-up, and not a great boyfriend. I think she loved me at the time, so I reckon I hurt her. She said to me that I’m emotionally numb. Obviously I didn’t see that about myself, but it makes sense, doesn’t it? I didn’t really know my dad, my mum committed suicide – you’re going to be emotionally numb, aren’t you? She sussed me out.

  I have no idea how long we were together, maybe a few weeks. We didn’t live together, our thing was more working together, just music. I really don’t know if she was looking for a more long-term relationship. I can’t say that, but obviously she wasn’t looking for someone who was emotionally numb. When it ended, it wasn’t bad bad, but I can’t speak for how she felt. I just disappeared one day. One day I was there, the next day I wasn’t.

  I’d also met Terry Hall from The Specials, and it was like meeting a family member I hadn’t seen for years. Before I even met Terry, I felt like I knew him. I grew up with him. The Specials were such a huge part of my life, and they never fell into that popstar shit. Those guys never had no ego. They kept it street, which also really influenced me, so when I met him, it felt like we were destined to meet – not at all awkward, like when I met Prince, say. It wasn’t like we had to get to know each other. It reminds me of when I see my cousin from Manchester after I haven’t seen him for years. We just clicked straight away, just natural, like family, and we hung out quite a
bit, not just in the studio.

  Down at the studio in Poole, Terry wrote his own stuff for my album, and he wasn’t one of those artists that takes a long time to do it, either. He wrote the lyrics and the melody for ‘Poems’, which many people these days see as one of my classic songs. Terry is very instinctive. He just writes something and does it. He’s not scared or precious. Some artists, even talented ones, triple-think themselves, but he was very similar to me – I just write something and throw it down. He certainly ain’t the sort of guy who will say, ‘Ooh, you know what, this tune is a bit weird.’ He’s a trier, and that’s what he’s got to be – a guy from a council flat in Coventry is going to be a trier.

  TERRY HALL: I had a copy of Maxinquaye, with Martina on, and I really liked it. I’d heard Tricky was influenced by The Specials, and liked our first album, so I wanted to meet up, and we did. A PR guy at Island got us together. It was just to sit down and have a chat about it all, really – nothing more at that point.

  I related to him on the level that he was from Bristol, and I was from Coventry, both of which are on the outside of what you would call the music business. If you get a band from Coventry that’s really successful, you’ll be the most successful band from Coventry, and the same goes for Bristol, and you can’t really do that if you’re from London. He told me he’d once done a DJ set which was just our album – he played side one the whole way through, and when it finished, he just turned it over, and that was it – so he obviously liked us! Either that, or it was the only record he had with him.

  He was pretty militant against stardom, and I had a lot of respect for that. He’d tasted it on his first album. I remember his reaction to bad reviews: instead of just dismissing it, he would want to kill the journalist! People will either get it or they won’t. It’s when you try and conform to it that it all goes wrong, because you’re not doing what you wanna do, you’re doing what other people want you to do. That’s the danger. You can do that, but you won’t be happy with the results.

  I’d started to write with different people, after being locked into three or four groups in a row, and that’s how we thought about doing something together. We were hanging out quite a bit: I would go to his place in Kensington High Street, we’d have a coffee and talk about records and stuff. All he had at home was a couple of VHS cassettes and a few records, and then there was a tiny keyboard next to the bed – that was about it.

  The recording thing happened in Dorset. Martina was there, and Alison Moyet, and we started trying things out. I found it really different, because I’d been conditioned into how you’re ‘supposed’ to make a record. I’d always been in bands where you wrote a song with an acoustic guitar or a piano, and then get the group to play it. There’s a format to it all, but with Tricky, you didn’t follow that.

  I noticed that the little shitty keyboard by his bed went into the studio, and that was what went down onto tape. It wasn’t a question of, ‘Okay, shall we orchestrate this?’ It was just that keyboard, and that I really, really liked. Plus the fact that he took my head out of that verse-chorus-middle-eight thing. Again, I grew up with the Glitter Band – not literally, but you know what I mean? There was a way of doing things with pop songs, and you expect a chorus after sixteen bars or something. This was a totally fresh approach which I really enjoyed being part of.

  I came in with words already written. I was waiting to see what he was doing with programming stuff. It was all quite new to me at that point, the idea of working on computers and programming. The only experience I’d had with it before was with The Colourfield, where we used a programmer, very rigid, and I hated it, but Tricky’s approach was fresh, and there wasn’t a boundary there. It didn’t seem to matter how the song was constructed, which I found really appealing.

  ‘Poems’ was all about promises. I was on the verge of a divorce at that point, so it was about the promises you make to another person, and the promises they make to you, and how often they are broken, and you can’t always figure out why. A great laugh! The other song I did, ‘Bubbles’, was really loose, created in the studio, whereas for ‘Poems’ there was a definite form in my head.

  I found it liberating because Tricky wasn’t a musician – he just had ideas. That was the most important thing, I think – the ideas. It was all like he used to do it in his bedroom, with the sampler and the keyboard and the headphones, except I think he took his headphones off – that was the development from the first album.

  We talked a lot about Public Enemy, and how we fitted in with it all. We were from very similar backgrounds, that rough-arse small-city thing, and it was all about trying to be creative coming from that. Not having a voice, and people not expecting anything from you, and how the only things they expected were bad things. It was about trying to break away from that and create something.

  During recording, he had an asthma attack, quite a heavy one, so I had to drive him to hospital in Bournemouth, and all I could think about on the way was, how fast do you drive with someone who’s having an asthma attack? Do you speed up to get there quickly, do you stop at traffic lights, or do you just drive straight through? We went from the studio to A&E, sitting there at two in the morning. It’s weird saying that was a fond memory, because he was going through an asthma attack, but it is a fond memory in a funny way. You know, the whole thing! It was a bizarre night.

  TRICKY: For that album, which didn’t have a title yet, I would take samples, and little bits of things, and if I can hear it in my head, there’s no way it cannot work. I never had no rules. I’d sample beats, or it might just be a bass sound. I have no idea about theoretical stuff, or the timing being three-four, or Martina being out of pitch with a song, which someone said about one of the songs on this album. If I hear something and I think it’s good, it’s good. I ain’t gonna question it.

  Most problems artists have, it’s questioning themselves. They do something, and then they think about it and think about it, and fucking think about it more. I don’t do that. That’s why I put out ‘mistakes’. I put out more mistakes than any other artist. That’s good sometimes, other times not so good. But it is good from the point of: I’ve never had writer’s block in my life. I don’t believe there is such a thing, because I don’t control what I do. It’s a natural thing. So how can I have writer’s block, if I ain’t in control of it? Writer’s block – what is that? It should just be called ‘thinking too much’.

  The title of the album came from a writer. I went to do an interview, and the guy shook my hand and we sat down.

  ‘So, what’s it like being God?’ he asked.

  I looked at him a bit nonplussed.

  ‘Or nearly God, I should say!’ he said, correcting himself. He was one of the nice guys, he wasn’t being nasty. He was joking about my success, because after Maxinquaye I was the guy who’d changed the face of music. He was just having a laugh about all the surrounding hysteria, but I thought, ‘Aha, nearly God – that’s my next album title right there!’ So I had that in place before I even started recording it.

  The music itself was all about leaving that success behind. Once I’d turned that corner in my mind, it removed all the pressure I might’ve felt, to sustain my level of success, to play by those rules. I did Nearly God deliberately intending and knowing that it was not going to get in the charts, and it wasn’t going to get radio airplay. That way I left all the pressure way behind.

  As well as the album title, I even managed to get it through Island that Nearly God was the artist name, not Tricky, to distance it – and me – even further from that sound, and that idea, which had been ruined for me.

  Because of how we’d managed to get that extra clause in my contract with Island, I was totally free to do what I wanted. Island didn’t really like what they were hearing – they doubtless would’ve been happier with something more like Maxinquaye – so I was like, Alright, if you don’t want the album, I’ll take it somewhere else.’

  I started shopping the album around, an
d at one point I was talking to this guy Derek Birkett from Björk’s label, One Little Indian, but then Island heard about it and went, ‘No, no, we’ll put it out!’ Of course, no record company wants you going somewhere else when you’re signed to them, so I was kind of forcing them to release things they didn’t want to release. From there on, instead of me having to do another album that Island liked, it was, ‘Here’s the album, do you want it? No? Okay, I’ll go to One Little Indian,’ then they changed their minds.

  All this put me in a great position, because it proved I could actually get away with it!

  MARC HARDT: Tricky was dating Björk, and I heard from Tricky himself that she was whispering in his ear: ‘Well, you could just go and sign to Warner Bros. now if you want to, or EMI, or anyone!’ – even though they probably wouldn’t’ve been able to get Maxinquaye back, he might get a million quid from Warner in America, to release the next record. I had to go to the Hammersmith office of my chairman, Roger Ames, and explain that he shouldn’t worry, because I trusted Tricky, but there was massive scepticism.

  I believe that Tricky is principled – even if sometimes they are strange principles. This was a moment where in absolute reality he could have completely shafted Island Records. We had a draft contract that everybody had agreed but it just hadn’t physically been signed – in reality, funded by a rival, he could have easily sought to sign elsewhere and simply left us with the rights to Maxinquaye.