Hell Is Round the Corner

by Tricky

  After a certain point, skunk and all that hydroponic shit was all that was on the market, and it was way, way heavier. None of the giggles and good feelings you got from sensi.

  When I was doing Maxinquaye, it hadn’t quite come in yet. I was still smoking normal weed at that point. Lebanese was as mellow as fuck, and there were none of the crystals in there – I never saw that when I was growing up. That only came in with skunk, and it was strong.

  Everything was still going so fast in my life, moving from London to New York to New Jersey. It was like a whirlwind, and I still wasn’t enjoying being in the public eye, not having my anonymity. On top of that, I’ve had terrible insomnia most of my life, ever since I can remember. My asthma was another complication, which certainly didn’t help. I guess I was self-medicating for all of the stress and upheaval with skunk, booze and other narcotics.

  Through the ’90s I’d been feeling progressively worse and worse, to the point where I thought I had mental health problems. I’d been depressed every now and then, like any normal person – you get moody and you don’t feel good – but this was different. I really felt sick, and I went to every doctor to try and sort it out, but I couldn’t get past it. I felt like I was going crazy. Your mind goes through some mad shit when you don’t know what’s wrong with you, and it was getting so bad by 1998/99, I wanted to jump out of a window.

  One day, I sat on a window ledge a few flights up in Manhattan and mulled it over.

  ‘I’m either gonna hurt myself,’ I thought, ‘or I’m going to hurt someone, like a cry for help.’

  I didn’t know how to get help, though. When you are fucked, that can be your way of thinking. I’ve never been suicidal at any other time in my life. I don’t think I actually wanted to kill myself, just break my legs or something.

  ‘Okay,’ I pondered, according to my twisted logic in that moment, ‘if I break my legs then I could find out what’s going on. Or if I get arrested … Maybe I could stab someone, then I’ll get the help I need.’

  That was where I was coming to – get myself committed to psychiatric hospital so I can figure out what’s going on. When you don’t know what’s wrong, you can’t think of it as a regular illness.

  Finally the day arrived that changed my life for the better. I’d seen so many different doctors and medical people, but then my friend Amani put me on to this guy, and the irony was, he was just walking distance from the old Wall Street apartment with the elevator. I walked into the surgery, and explained to the doctor how I was feeling, and he said, ‘Stick out your tongue – oh, you’ve got candida!’ It was that simple – diagnosed in five seconds. The doctor gave me this detox stuff, and within six weeks I was feeling so much better. Just knowing what is wrong with you makes a big difference, too.

  You should read up on candida, it’s absolutely nuts. It’s basically thrush of the stomach, so a lot of it is about changing your diet and feeling better in yourself in that respect. But candida seriously affects your state of mind. The doctor told me this scary statistic that something like eight out of ten people who have candida are misdiagnosed with schizophrenia or other mental health problems. The problem is, many doctors either don’t know about it, or don’t accept it as a real illness.

  This is where it gets into conspiracy theory territory, because I think it’s a bit of a money thing, right? To treat yourself for candida, the main thing is to watch what you eat. Now, if everybody knew that this was all it would take to cure them, the pharmaceutical industry would be losing all these lucrative courses of steroids and antibiotics and sleeping pills.

  Some doubting physicians say it’s not fully proven to exist, but I think that just suits big business. If you stop giving people steroids and antibiotics and sleeping pills and just tell them to eat properly instead, that’s gonna cost the industry billions of dollars worldwide. I don’t think doctors are totally ignorant. They must know, but they have a vested interest in prescribing antidepressants, so you are never actually curing it, and then you end up in a mental institution.

  How candida affects you mentally is very weird. To this day, if I drink too much it can be a problem. You know with some people, they get really drunk, but they still have some sense about them? With candida, you drink too much and suddenly you have no self-control.

  In social situations, you might say something you don’t want to say, or do something you don’t really want to do, but something makes you cross that line. There is no actual physical pain. You can get stomach pains, but there’s no real physical component to it. It’s just mental stuff – what they now politely term ‘mental health issues’. It goes from depression to actually wanting to hurt yourself. Or someone else. That was my choice in New York – hurt myrself or hurt someone. Stab or shoot someone, and I will get help.

  From that day of my diagnosis onwards, my entire diet had to change: suddenly it was no bread, no sugar, no milk. I had to give up everything; it was extreme and very hard to adhere to. I couldn’t even have ketchup or almond milk or fruit – because almost everything has sugar in it.

  I was just about to start a tour, and I had to employ a chef, who came out and cooked for me on the road – not a gourmet chef, just someone who prepared food for me without the things I shouldn’t be eating. Mostly, it was brown rice with chicken and vegetables, with a bit of sea salt – no sauce, nothing fun or fancy, for six weeks.

  If I hadn’t had a guy cooking for me, I couldn’t have done it, because he wasn’t just cooking, he was watching me. He’d go everywhere with me, so I couldn’t just nip into a shop and buy some chocolate because I was craving sugar. He was watching me everywhere. I couldn’t get room service in the hotel, any of that stuff. No tea, no coffee.

  For the first couple of weeks, I was puking up, then after six weeks, I walked into a convenience store somewhere in America and, after a month and a half without sugar in absolutely anything, I could smell the sugar through the candy-bar wrappers, and I nearly fainted and had to leave the shop. That meant I had fully detoxed. It was a good sign.

  Once the tour was over, I had acupuncture, and loads of other treatments, because once I’d done the detox, I had to get the good lining back in my stomach.

  The doctors who believe in candida think it’s caused by things like antibiotics and steroids, which can destroy the lining and kill the good bacteria in your stomach. My doctor reckoned I’d contracted it from all the pharmaceuticals doctors had given me for my asthma. Whenever you have an asthma attack in England, the first thing they give you is loads of steroids. If you have a chest infection as an asthmatic, you get a course of antibiotics, because all the phlegm on the chest could lead to an asthma attack. Then after I’d had an asthma attack, they’d give me a steroid course – four or five times a year I’d be on steroids, because it’s a quick and easy way to control asthma, when really all I needed to do was have some allergy tests, because no bread and no dairy would have helped the asthma immeasurably. Instead they just give out drugs like sweets, so I grew up on all that stuff.

  I still struggle with candida now, but at least I know what’s going on. It’s like, ‘Okay, I’ve let the regime slip a bit. I need to stop drinking, need to start eating the right stuff again.’ Problems arise when you’re super-busy and you can’t look after it. In my case, that happens when I’m going around the world on tour, and everything is really fast, and you’re not eating the right stuff, because it can be hard to source under time pressure abroad, when you’re not getting regular sleep.

  Then you see how it takes all your self-control away. One time much later, in the 2000s, I was in my apartment and I had a pump-action shotgun under my bed. My two friends came over, we partied, and they slept on my couch. I got up, and I was like, ‘Why is my gun here? Have you gone into my room, and taken the gun out?’ And they were like, ‘No, it’s because you were dancing around with it last night, drunk!’ That’s candida – that ain’t just drink! When I’ve been well, I’ve been as drunk as fuck, but I’ve still kno
wn what I’m doing. But when I haven’t been well, I could dance around with a loaded shotgun – not on safety, pump-action, dancing around in my boxer shorts with loud music on. Why would anybody in their right mind do that? You’ve got to be unwell to get to that place.

  Apart from lapses like that one, it’s actually relatively easy to manage. I don’t do bread, I don’t do milk. You can cheat with a bit of brown sugar, but if I stick to the regime I’m fine. I’ve been doing it for so long now, and things have changed with substitute foods on the market. Back in the day it was hard. When I started, you couldn’t get good alternative bread. The stuff they had was like concrete. Now you can get very good gluten-free bread. A lot of places even have chickpea bread, but not too long ago you had no chance going into a café in Hackney and asking for chickpea bread. Now they have gluten-free waffles as well. As the years have gone by, it has got a whole lot easier.

  Better still, changing my diet dramatically improved my asthma. Just not drinking milk stopped me having major asthma attacks – it clogs up your passages, and if you get a cold in the winter, milk turns to phlegm on your chest, and you’re more prone to an attack. Not eating bread may have had something to do with it too. I didn’t know that I was lactose intolerant, so that was also causing me all kinds of problems. Now, if I smell milk, I want to vomit.

  A lot of people die from asthma, but when you’ve had it for so long, you learn your way around it. I could go and train for an hour and a half in the gym, and you couldn’t keep up with me. Asthma doesn’t make a difference to me anymore.

  AMANI VANCE: Tricky and Martina used to fight really bad. Touring life is insanely hard. Even when you have money and are staying in nice hotels, it can be disorientating. It fucks up your system, so you’re already in a bad mood. Then it turns out Tricky has a really sensitive system, with food allergies he wasn’t even aware of, which do really fuck you up.

  I was watching this interview with Eminem the other day: he was saying how he was addicted to all these pills, and he was depressed, and he was like, ‘I was always walking around so angry, like, why the fuck am I so angry? I’m successful!’ He only realised when he started eating well how much what you eat can affect your mood and behaviour. And that is exactly what happened with Tricky: he was exasperated. When he was in a foul mood on tour, which is already a situation that makes you drink more and do more drugs – all the things that make you feel worse – he would take it out on the person closest to him, who was Martina.

  I remember him saying how insanely smart Martina is, like, ‘She knows what clouds are made of,’ kind of smart. She’s got an IQ that is through the roof. Because she is a beautiful woman with a phenomenal voice, she started getting a lot of attention, because she was singing the songs. There was a point where a lot of people were saying, ‘Oh, it’s really Martina’s thing,’ and then Tricky felt the need to be like, ‘Well, no, it’s my lyrics, it’s my music – she is singing but I’m directing.’

  The Jersey place was a lovely, lovely house – huge but not mini-mansion huge. Mazy had her own room, and Martina even had her own room for when she came, too. It was in this really dope gated community, with tons of character.

  It was perfect, but it was making him unhappy too. It was just a little far out for him. Without traffic it could be as little as a 35-minute commute into Manhattan, but with traffic it would be two hours, which was a real pain in the ass. I know he really liked it out there, but then I started to think that he felt a little isolated, because there were not a lot of people around.

  TRICKY: In the beginning, I felt like the whole New York area was my home. Then the vibe started to change for me. I was with Island still, but none of the people I started with in England were there anymore, and I hardly knew anybody. Chris Blackwell was gone, and it was a big shock to me. Up till then, it didn’t matter what I did – if I did Angels … or Pre-Millennium … or anything else that people didn’t understand – I still always had my home at Island. It was like having a home and then all of a sudden you’ve got to move out. I was like, ‘What the fuck do I do now?’ I was in this total limbo. I wasn’t even interested in doing music. It was like, ‘Okay, my time is over now.’

  At some point around this time, I did some recording with Grace Jones, but only one track really came out of it, called ‘Clandestine Affair’, which I ended up putting out myself as a white label. I took control of it – I used to do things like that! – probably because I didn’t think it was good enough for proper release. Not because of her, though, and we got on great.

  I did another 12-inch called ‘Divine Comedy’, which was inspired by this statement I’d heard from one of the Universal-Polygram conglomerate’s top brass, Eric Kronfeld. He said, ‘If the music industry refused to employ blacks with criminal records, the music industry would employ no blacks at all.’ I don’t think I ever met the guy, but the chorus went ‘It’s who I am Polygram – fuck you, niggers’, because I didn’t think he should be allowed to get away with making such a racist statement. Coming from Knowle West, I have always had that ‘them and us’ stance, and I suppose by then I knew what record companies were all about. The funny thing is, Polygram actually had to press it for me as a 12-inch!

  Chris Blackwell loved that record. I played it to him in the studio. He thought it was really funny. Island was fucked after Chris went. I remember him saying to me, ‘The internet is really gonna change things, Tricky.’ At the time I hadn’t got a clue what he was talking about, but he saw it all coming. All the big labels went through the ’90s getting fatter and fatter, thinking everything was gonna stay the same, but Chris knew otherwise and bailed before it was too late.

  After Chris went, however, Island was merged with Def Jam, the New York hip-hop label, and so, without my real agreement, I veered over onto ‘Island Black Music’ or something stupid like that. Now I was dealing with Def Jam’s MD, Lyor Cohen, who is a good guy, although some people will say he isn’t. He was always cool with me, but we weren’t on the same page at all.

  ‘We’ve got to build up your black fan base,’ he’d declare.

  ‘I don’t think like that,’ I’d reply. ‘Whoever finds my music, finds my music. I don’t care about black, white, any of that.’

  He was basically trying to market me into the hip-hop world, which I was never into. It was almost like they were trying to make me fit with Def Jam, and that was never gonna work, because for starters I’m not a black American. Hip-hop radio has never played my music, so I’m just not a Def Jam artist. To escape this ridiculous mismatch, I did a final album, Juxtapose, for Island really quickly just in order to get off the label, and then I left because I didn’t want to stay with them under those terms.

  People don’t understand: success has got nothing to do with happiness. It’s two different things. I was still successful, but I wasn’t happy. At the beginning, suddenly I was comfortably off. The only thing I had to think about was, when am I going to do my next record? Or, when is the next tour? That’s the most I ever had to think about. When Chris sold Island, he sold my house almost. I didn’t really know where to go or what to do.

  I was thrown into further confusion one night when the phone rang at 2am while I was trying to get to sleep in my house in New Jersey. It was my cousin Michelle on the line.

  ‘Hello, Moo?’ I said – I never call her by her name, always Moo, but I was wondering why she would call at this strange hour.

  ‘Adrian, I’ve got bad news,’ she said.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Shaun Fray is dead.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  I couldn’t compute: my ‘cousin’ Shaun – son of my mum’s best friend who I visited in east London when I first arrived in the capital, and with whom I’d seen Public Enemy at the Hammersmith Odeon – had been shot in the back of the head with a shotgun, in his house in Lonsdale Avenue, East Ham.

  In the weeks ahead, the story was all over the British newspapers: Shaun had taken part in a
security van robbery in 1990 and served three years in prison for his involvement. However, apparently 150 grand was unaccounted for, and when one of his accomplices was released from a longer sentence in 2001, this guy, Merrick Brown, tracked down Shaun, who had started a hi-fi business in the interim, and shot him dead. Brown fled to Florida, but was eventually extradited and imprisoned for thirty-three years.

  Shaun’s murder, aged thirty-six, shocked me deeply. At his funeral, Nigel Benn, the boxer, was in attendance, amongst other East End notables. Shaun was a well-known guy.

  After Michelle’s call, I unplugged the phone and put it away in a cupboard, and I’ve never had a house phone connected since that day.

  INK WORK

  People often ask where I got my tattoos done, and what they symbolise. I’m lucky to have travelled so widely, and to have seen so much of the world, and my ‘full-sleeve’ tattoos were something that came from going to play in Japan in ’99. As soon as I saw them over there on people, I just had to have them myself, because I’d never seen anything like them in my life. I’d had a few done before I went there, but these were totally unique – at that time, at least. Nobody in the West had them. The only people who had them were not musicians, or footballers, or trendy people – it was only people who were properly into tattoos.

  On a day off in Tokyo, I went into a parlour, and said what I wanted, and the artist wasn’t sure about doing it. The ones I wanted were basically traditional Japanese Mafia tattoos, for the Yakuza over there. There’s a dragon in there, for protection, and cherry blossom, which symbolises the fleeting nature of life. These were traditional sleeves – so mind-blowing, literally thousands of years old.