Hell Is Round the Corner

by Tricky

  When I was in New York, and not touring or recording, my daughter Mazy would live with me part-time. It was always cool with Martina, arranging care for Mazy after we were separated, and one or other of us would bring her to or from the UK. She was only one or two when I first went there, and at the beginning it wasn’t too bad being in such a crazy city. We used to walk around Christopher Street in the summer, Mazy with just her nappy on and her little shoes.

  A really weird thing happened in Christopher Street. I was walking along with Mazy – who was about two years old at the time – and she let go of my hand and ran ahead, and there was this old woman maybe five paces in front of us. Mazy toddled up to her and grabbed the woman’s hand, and she picked Mazy up. Suddenly, the woman started crying – just crying her eyes out. I obviously thought it over many times afterwards: perhaps the woman was someone with no family, and maybe Mazy felt that somehow. Otherwise, I don’t know why she would leave me and go and run and hold this woman’s hand – an old stranger that she had never met, who then started sobbing like fuck. At the time, I didn’t understand what was going on. I wish I’d kept in contact with that woman, and maybe I would have taken Mazy to keep seeing her.

  Over time, I began to feel that taking Mazy to the park in Manhattan was just weird. There might be a dodgy guy sitting around, and there’d be cars everywhere, so eventually I came to thinking: New York is just not good for a young kid. But for the time being, I loved living there.

  I really had no time to think about being a dad. There was no thinking; I just was a dad. It was all instinct, and right from the start Martina and I decided to have Mazy on tour with us. She went on to spend much of her life on tour. If it had just been me, Martina and Mazy in a shitty tour van, that might’ve been more challenging to pull off, but I had money, so I would pay for various family members to accompany us on the road, to help with childcare. Over the years, my cousins Michelle or Mark, my auntie Marlow and my half-brothers have joined us to fill that role. I always liked family being involved, so my family and I have travelled the world together. Having the money to do that made parenting easy for us.

  Mazy was only a few months old when we went to Australia and New Zealand on this touring festival called the Big Day Out, taking in Sydney, Melbourne, the Gold Coast and Auckland. It’s a weird festival, a bit like their Glastonbury, except it moves around. On that trip, we flew out Martina’s mother, CC, with us as well. Sometimes later on we had a nanny, but the best nanny is the real nanny, right?

  CC used to travel with us a lot. CC and Mazy’s grandad Drayton are both really good people. Me and her have not got on sometimes – because she’s Martina’s mother. On one occasion I riled her so badly she nearly glassed me. But she is a great woman, and she really helped with bringing up Mazy. I’m sure she had better things to do than tour with us. She ain’t a woman who likes going to shows; she was coming to help out with the kid, which is amazing. An amazing lady, who’s scared of nothing. She’s had a life: she certainly hasn’t lived in an ivory tower, or grown up privileged, but by nature she’s actually more chilled out than Martina.

  On the Gold Coast, we also had Porno for Pyros helping us babysit. We took her to this amazing waterpark called Sea World – me, Perry Farrell and the rest of the band, while Martina and her mother went off somewhere else. It wasn’t a conventional childhood, you might say. Nor was Perry, who used to be the decadent shamanic frontman of ’80s funk-metallers Jane’s Addiction, exactly a textbook childminder, but my kid had him under control. She was in the pram, and would point and wave him over, and he would go straight over to her. It was quite funny; she had him on lock!

  Going to Sea World was crazy. We got the train to the outskirts of town, with all of their band, and thinking back now, that was kind of mad – me with a pram on the train, not like in a bloody limo or anything! – but how cool was that for them to do that? These are really solid blokes – they don’t want to be in a bloody waterpark in Australia on a day off from doing shows. To me, that is amazing.

  Who’s that English guy who does all the politics stuff? Billy Bragg! He was on the tour, too, a very funny guy. Me and him went out into the audience to watch Porno for Pyros at one of the shows. I hung out with Billy quite a few times. He’s like some guy who works in a factory, or one of your family – dead normal. Me and him would bump into each other and go and walk around in the crowd. We had performed there already, and people didn’t have a clue who we were, or else they just left us alone.

  Anyway, Perry came onstage and Pornos started a song, and the crowd went fucking mental. I leaned over to Billy Bragg and said, ‘Fuck me, look at this, it’s like he’s Jesus!’ And Billy goes, ‘Or the devil.’ I was thinking, ‘Does he really mean that?’ I see Perry Farrell and it’s like he’s touching people’s souls, but then, is that always a good thing? Billy Bragg is an intelligent man, who doesn’t seem the type to say something he didn’t mean, or that didn’t have some sort of truth to it. We didn’t say anything after that. We just stood there and watched him. I was thinking, ‘Jesus or the devil? Fucking hell!’

  So maybe there was a darkness about Perry, but I can always forgive someone when they’ve got a talent like his. He could do anything, because he has touched people’s souls. For me, that is a get-out clause – I don’t see any darkness in him at all. Maybe he was a heroin addict, and that might influence some young kids to take heroin, but for me he will always have that get-out clause.

  PERRY FARRELL: Before we met on the Big Day Out, I knew of Tricky obviously, being a passionate devourer of great music, and I was very anxious to make his acquaintance out there. It was a classic Big Day Out, in that it had Tricky, Porno for Pyros, Nick Cave and Rage Against the Machine on the bill, amongst others. There was also those girls from Britain, Elastica. I was kind of in love with the guitar player, Donna. Everybody was! All the guys on the festival were kind of elephant-sealing around this girl – whenever she was around, they’d be lowing, like ‘Uuuurrrgh!’ and chasing each other away from her.

  My guitar player in Porno, Peter DiStefano, is a zany practical joker. He’s a California kid, but he’s got touches of being Sicilian, with a little twinge of the Mafia, and they have these certain provocative manners and deliveries. So Tricky gets on this big bus that collects us all from the airport, and we get to meet each other for the first time. I go, ‘Hey, Peter, this is the guy I’ve been telling you about – the guy from Bristol with that amazing album!’ and Pete stands up and goes, ‘Hey, Tricksy! Nice to meet you, Tricksy!’

  Tricky goes, ‘My name’s Tricky!’ But Pete goes on with it, calling him Tricksy, and he gave Pete a look like this was gonna be a problem. It got a little tense, but all of a sudden they gave each other a big hug, and basically Pete kept calling him Tricksy for the entire tour, but Tricky would let it go each time, because you could see he had a good heart.

  He was travelling with an enormous martial arts instructor, and every morning we would see him doing a workout. I would say to Peter, ‘You better quit calling him Tricksy, man, because he looks like he’s about ready to kick your ass!’ He’d be out there, shirtless, his body glistening and gleaming in the hot sun of Australia, throwing these combinations. He was real serious about it.

  We loved his music, and it turns out he admired our music, too. His voice almost didn’t match his body, how deep it was, way down there. His whole vibe called up Miles Davis to me. He invited us to a studio on a day off – ‘Come on, we’ve gotta make some music together!’ – and he had Pete recording guitar for him, line after line, doing thirty different takes, but we never heard any more about it. Whatever happened to that session? Didn’t he like the music? Or maybe that was his way of paying Pete back for ‘Tricksy’ – making him work his ass off all day in the studio!

  We had that great day at the waterpark, too: we walked around with a pram and I don’t remember anything really bad happening to the baby, so I think we pulled it off. Martina, the mother of his child, was on that tour
as well, and when Porno got back to the States, she sang backup with us, and we got to know her, and she is just a lovely, lovely person, too.

  TRICKY: When I’m off tour, I don’t hang out with other musicians. At home, I don’t really hang out with anybody. My family call me a loner. I’m 95 per cent by myself. I see people when I tour. There are some musicians I get on with great, like Terry Hall, or Perry Farrell, or Maynard James Keenan from Tool, but a lot of musicians don’t like me. On tour, I might get pissed up, and then have a joke with someone, and they’ll take it the wrong way.

  As you’ve probably twigged by now, I don’t do the popstar thing. I ain’t gonna hang out with you like a popstar. I’m quite fish and chips. Because I don’t play that game, there are musicians who have got love for me, and others who I know hate me. Which is okay, I don’t mind.

  Our family say anything to each other; there’s no boundaries. If you grow up and you’ve got your uncle saying you are a ‘breed’, I suppose that has an effect on how you communicate in later life. I think that’s why some people don’t like me, because I’ll have a few drinks and sometimes I’ll say something to someone, and I don’t mean it in any way badly – because I’ve got a good heart really, and I don’t want people to dislike me. But I might say something to a famous person, and you’re not supposed to talk to them like that – you’re supposed to respect them, and their celebrity, and I don’t know about that stuff. Treating people with kid gloves, pampering them – I don’t really do that.

  Prince was one of them. He didn’t like me, because I didn’t go to his studio, but his engineer told me he used to soundcheck to my music all the time. He invited me to Paisley Park, but on the appointed day I had the flu and I couldn’t go, and ever since then he didn’t like me. One time, my name came up in an interview, and he claimed not to know who I was. If you soundcheck or get your studio ready to my music, then obviously you’re a fan, and know who I am. Obviously his ego was bruised because I didn’t go up there.

  There was a similar thing with Madonna. She turned up in the lobby of my hotel in New York, and I had the worst hangover. She was with a film director – I can’t remember which one – but I’d fallen asleep, and this director guy called up to my room, and I said, ‘Mate, I can’t now,’ and I put the phone down. I was just fucked, so I didn’t go and meet her, so that one was over and done with as well. It was a nice hotel, because in those days I was living large. They waited for ten minutes to see if I would materialise, but I’d just gone straight back to sleep again, so they must’ve fucked off after that.

  I can’t say whether I would have worked with her or not. Thinking about it after I’d woken up again, it was like, what could I have done for her? Madonna needs to get in the charts, right? I thought, ‘What could I do for you? I could help you not get in the charts!’ So I didn’t follow it up.

  Before I actually moved to New York, I used to stay in this really high-class hotel there called the Royalton, and I’d always bump into big stars who were staying there too. Bryan Adams was as funny as fuck. You know, I’m meant to be this street guy, who makes all this dark music, da-da-da, and Bryan Adams is supposed to be the corny one, right? Me and him are standing in the lift, and this old lady was hobbling up, just as the doors were closing, so he shouts at her, ‘FUCK OFF!’ pressing the ‘close doors’ button. As the doors shut on her, he laughed. Then he looked at me and went nonchalantly, ‘Alright, Tricky, mate?’

  I was just, like, open-mouthed. They used to call me the Prince of Darkness – I suppose that was because I’m black – but I was thinking, ‘Who the fuck is the Prince of Darkness here in this lift?’ It was a big shock, too, hearing someone like him say, ‘Alright, Tricky, mate?’

  I got the same thing off that legendary guitarist with the glasses – Eric Clapton. He said that to me once. I was out somewhere, and it really weirded me out. And the Rolling Stones guy, Mick Jagger! I was in this little party – there was hardly anyone there; maybe just ten people in someone’s house in London, and Jagger walked over and said, ‘Oh, hi, Tricky, alright?’ You know, that’s Mick Jagger saying hello to me. I’m from Knowle West, a tiny little council estate in Bristol, so how the fuck does Mick Jagger …

  Some people might think that’s an opportunity to hustle, but I was too busy thinking about it to work it. I was just like, ‘Wow, that’s weird.’ These days, now I’m a bit wiser, maybe I would’ve thought, Ah, you know what, that’s a hook-up. Let’s do a song.’ If I met Mick Jagger now, I would probably try and hustle: ‘Hey, let’s go in the studio!’

  How does Mick Jagger know who I am? He’s really small and he had leggings on, and he comes over and goes, ‘Alright, Tricky?’ It was bizarre.

  Pre-Millennium Tension, the album Island were billing as my proper follow-up to Maxinquaye, was recorded in March–April ’96, mostly at Grove Studios in Ocho Rios, a tropical resort on the north coast of Jamaica. One track was made back in New York, and we did the mixing in the summer somewhere in Spain, if I remember correctly, but the main sessions were for six weeks in Jamaica, and again I took Mazy along, which seemed natural to me. It was me, Mazy, CC, and an engineer from England called Ian Caple. We’d record at night, then I’d hang out by the sea with Mazy in the daytime.

  Jamaica was great but it gets boring after a while. You get island fever if you spend too much time there, and you need to get out of there. Two weeks would probably have been enough for me. Six weeks in Jamaica is a long time, and after that I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m done with this now.’

  What I really loved was the food. Jamaican food is my favourite; it’s the best food on the planet. Over there, you can get good food on the street, guys cook it up by the roadside. This guy called Sky used to cook up fish and rice on the street in Ocho Rios, and I would eat there every day, standing up on the street. He also had a little griddle for cooking chicken, and he’d sell sweets and stuff as well. It was just easy to eat on the go with him while I was walking around, so I would always stop by and eat there. I started talking to him, and eventually it was like, ‘Come down to the studio!’ I put him on the mic, and he just started talking off the top of his head about the realities of life in JA. He was just totally off on one, and that became the track ‘Ghetto Youth’ on the record – him chatting for six minutes halfway through the album.

  I just did whatever I wanted, and again, Island were cool with that. You need that with artists, otherwise artists ain’t gonna grow if you don’t let them do whatever they want to do. If you can’t take risks, and maybe make mistakes, you can’t learn and adjust from those mistakes. That track might have been seen as a mistake, back then, and not a commercial vehicle, but Island stuck by my right to make it.

  While I was in Ocho Rios, I heard from Chris Blackwell, who owns property and hotels on the island, that Bono from U2 wanted to hook up with me there. So I had a meeting with Bono and Chris in Ocho Rios, and he basically wanted me to produce their album, Pop. I was never a U2 fan, but there were tracks off The Joshua Tree which I thought were really great songs.

  Bono played me the demos, and it was a really awkward situation.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘you’ve got a great drummer there, and a great bass player, and some really great songs. I think this stuff is as good as The Joshua Tree, and it doesn’t need anything doing to it.’

  ‘No,’ Bono grinned from behind his shades, ‘but we want some more modern beats on it.’

  ‘Mate, what can I do? All you’ve gotta do is mix it. You want me to put all this shit over it, and you’re going to ruin it.’

  And that’s exactly what happened – they ruined it. I turned it down, because the demos were so good, I didn’t see how I could help them, or make it any better than it was, so they got other people to do it instead.

  I don’t know if Bono thought I simply didn’t want to do it, but it was nothing like that. I would have loved to. But I couldn’t do anything to it. If I’d heard the demos, and felt I could make it sound better, I’d have done it, b
ecause it would have been fun, and I could have done it anywhere in the world I wanted to – Jamaica, fucking Miami, anywhere – because their budget is huge. I could have lived large for two months, and it would’ve been a great experience. I could’ve hired in any session musician, or even the London Philharmonic Orchestra, if I wanted. I definitely would’ve done it if I could have done something, but there was nothing I could do.

  They should put out the demos they played me, but the version of Pop they released was unrecognisable from that. I was shocked by what I heard. I guess what I was supposed to do was just take the money, and the money would have been ridiculous. It would have been so easy, but I would have felt like a dick doing it. If I’d known then what I know now, maybe I would’ve done it, and I would be a multimillionaire still to this day. But money ain’t my thing.

  They weren’t looking for better, they were ‘chasing new’, following fashion – ‘Tricky, he’s the man of the moment, da-da-da.’ I could have done any old shit, and they would have liked it. Some artists want to be ‘now’, instead of just making a good album. If you want to be ‘now’, you’re finished – that’s when you become the past.

  As Island prepared my own album for release, I began to see how cool they were as a label. I delivered the music, and then Julian Palmer helped me to sequence it as an album again, and to choose the singles. It was his idea to put out ‘Tricky Kid’ as a single. I didn’t give a fuck what the single was: I had done the album. I’m just happy with the music I’ve made. I’m an artist – but I wouldn’t have chosen that one, it seemed too crazy to me. Julian was like, ‘That’s the single!’ ‘Really?!’

  That wasn’t what you’d call traditional A&R, which is usually all about the charts, and radio, and trying to get the most out of an artist sales-wise – but ‘Tricky Kid’ was never getting on the radio. That is the weirdest fucking piece of music – what A&R guy would say, ‘Release that as a single’? It was more than taking risks – Julian was a visionary. He was quite punk rock – not as in the genre of music, more the attitude. I remember calling him about something around that time, and he said, ‘You’re Tricky – you can do anything you want!’ He always put that in my head, fuelled me with that idea that there were absolutely no limits to what I could do. Would a corporate company allow any of that nowadays? I doubt it.