Hell Is Round the Corner

by Tricky

  I had to sit in the parlour for hours, then the guy chucked me out at the end of the day without any inkwork having been done, so I went back the next day and sat there again. Now and then he would look at me, and that went on until he knew that I really did want it done. Then he said, ‘Okay, come tomorrow when we are closed.’

  When I went back, the guy was cool and started the work. It was funny, that day: there were a couple of Japanese gangsters in there, and one of these Yakuza guys came over and went, ‘Hurt?’ If I’d lied and pretended I was a tough guy – well, he has just had the same thing, so he knows it hurts – it might’ve started something. So I said, ‘Yeah, hurt.’

  Once we’d played our show there, we had to leave, but soon after I went back to Japan for three weeks by myself, just to continue the work I wanted done. It was literally – hotel, tattoo, hotel, tattoo, every day, nothing else, then back to England. Over the years since, if I had a show out there, I would go out maybe five days before, to have things added. Even in the daytime before a show, I’ve had stuff done. The sessions were sometimes six or seven hours, because I didn’t have time to do two or three hours one day, and then come back.

  Much of it was done by a guy called Horiyoshi III, who is very famous. You have to have an appointment with him, because he is like The Don of tattoos. I can’t remember if I ever actually did this myself, but with some of the tattoo artists out there, you have to sign a contract saying that, when you die, they can take your skin and put it on display in a museum, because it’s artwork and they are so renowned. Then, if they’ve done a back piece, say, they can take that and put it in a museum. It’s like, if Picasso drew on you, someone would want to pay for something like that, right? It’s art, and it might be worth a lot of money. If it was Picasso, you would want that to live forever. You wouldn’t want that to get buried with the rest of you. We are just canvas at the end of the day, ain’t we? Canvas with living organs.

  I soon found out that, because of the Yakuza associations in what I’d had done, I can’t go into a gym in Japan and be sleeveless, because someone will come over and say, ‘Sorry, Mr Tricky, can you put your top on?’ It’s traditionally saying you’re a criminal, so I can’t just strip down and go on the exercise bike in the hotel – they’ll tell me to put my clothes on.

  In New York, I’d get Japanese guys checking me out. If I went into a Japanese restaurant there, say, with a vest on and parts of the tattoos showing, I might notice the waiter or the chef checking it out. That doesn’t happen so much these days, because the cherry blossom is more common, and a lot of sportsmen and hipsters have gone full-sleeve.

  When I first went to New York, the only people who had any tattoos at all were street guys, but there were no black guys who were sleeved down like me. I can remember running into the rapper 50 Cent, and him saying, ‘Yo, I love your tattoos!’ At that time, when I met him, he only had a couple of regular ones, but he soon got sleeved down. I was sleeved down before any of them. I can’t think of any black guys who were sleeved down at that time.

  Tattoos are very addictive. I keep adding stuff and having more done, and you just want more and more and more. It’s not anything to do with me as an artist – it’s not something I did to look good in videos or picture shoots. You don’t need tattoos to have a good photo. It’s about who you are. It’s for me.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  BROWN PUNK

  People were saying I’d changed the face of British music, but now I couldn’t get a record deal. It was only four years since Maxinquaye, which was about to be celebrated all over again across the media as one of the top five albums of the 1990s. Yet, as I put myself about trying to find a new home now that Island was over, no major UK label would sign me. They would sign a band that was ripping me off, but they wouldn’t sign me. There were only two or three conglomerate companies left, and none of the fuckers would go near me! America was difficult, too. Isn’t that crazy?

  I had a meeting at Warner Bros., down a little alleyway off High Street Kensington, with a really nice A&R guy there. He wanted to do business. I played him some rough demos – usually I don’t do that, a label either wants to sign me or they don’t, and they’ll release whatever finished music I give them. But he was a nice guy, so I played him some demos.

  ‘Wow!’ he says, beaming with excitement. ‘With a middle-eight, that is a hit record!’

  ‘Alright, thanks, mate!’ I said, walking out, and I never called him again. It’s not that I was or wasn’t going to put a middle-eight in; it’s just that it wasn’t finished yet. If I say that it’s not finished yet, that’s exactly what it means – keep your mouth shut!

  In the US, meanwhile, I was speaking to this really old-school geezer called Bob Cavallo at Hollywood Records, but I didn’t like his Prince talk. I went into his office in LA and we were going to do a deal. He was sat back in this big chair, and he started giving me stories, like, ‘When Prince was doing his album, I said, “Yeah, we need one more song,” and that’s when he wrote “1999”!’ He was trying to take credit for Prince, almost.

  I thought he was a bit of a cock, giving it large as the big exec. I said to him, ‘Listen, I don’t give a fuck about Prince, he’s had his time – it’s my time now!’ I didn’t really mean it like that; I was just trying to show him I didn’t give a fuck what he’d done. Like, ‘Mate, you are not the talent in the room, so leave your ego at home! Prince would have happened with or without you. There could be a thousand Bob Cavallos and Prince would have been here anyway.’

  After that, I knew I was going to have trouble with him, so I called Chris Blackwell and said, ‘Can you pretend to be my manager and help me deal with this dick?’ Chris was living in New York, because his wife Mary was very ill and needed top treatment which was only available there. Chris said yes, so I called Bob Cavallo, saying, ‘You know what? Talk to Blackwell, he is my manager.’

  Chris had Cavallo fly over to New York for a meeting at Chris’s offices. When he arrived, Chris took him into the stairwell. The guy was crawling all over Chris. ‘Oh, Chris, you’ve had so many artists – Bob Marley and so-and-so …’ and Chris went, ‘Well, you’ve got one of them right here, right now!’ and he pointed to me. Then he says, ‘Anyway, I’ve got to go.’ He never even invited Cavallo in to sit down, so it was a ten-minute meeting in the fire escape! Cavallo left, and that was it – I was good, then. I had my deal, and Cavallo didn’t give me any of the big-exec talk after that.

  For Europe, Chris hooked me up with a guy called Heine, who used to be a director at his publishing company, but was now in Amsterdam, running the European part of ANTI-Records, this cool American punkrock label that had been releasing records by another of his old artists, Tom Waits.

  With deals for America and Europe sorted out, I was partying hard. I’d hooked up with a Jamaican MC called Hawkman and his cousin. First, we were clubbing in New York, and then we’d go to Miami for a week or two, smoking weed and going to clubs and hanging out, and then eventually I brought him out to Los Angeles, where I was starting an album for Hollywood Records.

  At that time, LA felt like this massive sprawling place with no real music scene. The record business was all in New York, and most of the labels only had sub-divisions there. Hollywood Records, though, was an LA operation, because it came out of the movie biz – it was a sub-division of Disney. So I was signed to Walt Disney – I never saw that one coming!

  Their idea was to get a load of big collaborations on the record. Of the ones that came off, there weren’t really any people that I would’ve approached by choice, but I had this lovely woman called Jenny Price as my A&R. She really looked after me there – the only connection I had. That guy Bob Cavallo was from a totally different planet to me, so it was Jenny who would talk me into things. She would say, ‘Why not work with so-and-so?’ and she was so nice about it, I’d say, ‘Okay!’

  That’s how I ended up with two songs with the Red Hot Chili Peppers on there. I’ve got to say, they’re re
ally not my thing. It was all done very quickly in the studio, and I never saw them again – same with Cyndi Lauper. There was a good guy called Ed Kowalcyk from the band Live, who used to carry a gun around with him – a little silver .38. It wasn’t a gangster thing – he is a Christian! I quickly began to realise that guns really are part of the culture on the West Coast.

  The only ‘feature’ on the album I would’ve chosen myself was Alanis Morissette. She was a very nice girl. In the mid-90s, Alanis sold something like 30 million albums with Jagged Little Pill, but I was quite impressed by how she didn’t show the pressure. She just seemed to be totally normal. In the studio, she was very quick, and she would try anything. People might say her stuff is pop, but I could play her the strangest thing, and she’d jump on and try to sing to it off the top of her head, which I really hadn’t expected. Very brave.

  Afterwards, I went to a party at her house. It was really weird; me and her were dancing to some clubby house tune, and I said to her, ‘It’s kind of mad how you dance!’ I’d always viewed her as an ‘alternative pop’ girl, but she was really having a proper dance to a club track. She said, ‘What, did you think I would be moping in the corner?’

  I’d been working in LA for a few months and the album, called Blowback, was mid-campaign when, on 11 September 2001, I awoke to the news that had already shaken much of the world. The World Trade Center, which towered in duplicate just a few blocks from my old duplex apartment in New York’s financial district, had been felled by al-Qaeda, and now lay in ruins, leaving several thousand people dead.

  Like everyone, I was stunned initially, glued to the TV news in my room. As the days went by, I kind of got trapped in LA. Friends were saying, ‘Don’t come back to New York yet – the vibe is fucked.’ The label had put me in a hotel called Le Parc Suite in West Hollywood, but I’d been in there for nigh-on eight months. My manager said, ‘Listen, you’re wasting money on this hotel – if you don’t want to go back to New York, then rent an apartment.’ I found a temporary place, and I just never returned.

  I never meant to move to LA. I didn’t move there for the sunshine, like most people. It was an accident. I just got stuck there. Blame 9/11.

  That terrorist act changed the world. Apart from anything else, when you think back to the way security was conducted in airports, things have got so much more complicated since then. It affected so much in international relations and politics, but from a personal perspective, it also affected my album campaign.

  I went into the record company sometime in October, and everyone was going on about the lyrics of one song, ‘Excess’, which went, ‘I believe in people flying, I believe in people dying’. People were looking at me weirdly, like I’d been talking about 9/11 before it even happened.

  I soon found out that the album title, Blowback, could also be construed to mean more than just a fun way of smoking weed. Apparently, in military reporting, when a country goes to war, the blowback is what happens to it in return. It could mean literally a blowback from a gun, or if, say, America goes and shoots people in a faraway country, and then people from that country come and blow up the Twin Towers – that’s blowback.

  Everyone was agreed that the album itself – the music – was the most commercial and catchy stuff I’d done since Maxinquaye, if not ever, but the connotations with 9/11 destroyed the vibe of the whole record. FM stations across America certainly weren’t gonna parade ‘Excess’ on the airwaves right after the Twin Towers, know what I mean?

  I toured the album. It was my first jaunt for eighteen months, with all the upheaval changing labels. It was refreshing to get out on the road after all that, but, while critics on both sides of the Atlantic were hailing my latest offering as a return to form, Blowback was never going to take off in America, whatever I did to promote it.

  One good thing was that I’d got my uncle Tony back as my security on the road. He was watching my back, but in a way it was just about having one of my family with me while I’m travelling around. He’d started coming out with us for Lollapalooza in ’97, but right around this time he was unexpectedly detained elsewhere.

  TONY GUEST: My job was to make sure nobody mithered Adrian. He rang me up, and then I toured with him all over North America. I knocked a fella out in Minehead, and at Glastonbury. He gets himself in trouble, with his mouth. I told him, ‘The smoking, that wacky baccy – fucking hell, you wanna leave that alone!’ I suppose it’s difficult because it’s part of the game, isn’t it? He has a smoke first, but then he wouldn’t say anything onstage, and he has his back to them!

  I was in the crowd one day, and they were all peering at the stage in darkness, going, ‘We can’t even see him!’ I was circling around to make sure everything was alright, and I went to the lighting man, Angus, and I said, ‘If it’s any darker they’ll be walking into each other!’

  I haven’t got a lot of music myself, but Elvis is my favourite. I like Bob Dylan, but I don’t like this rap. I said to him when I first got on tour with him, ‘God almighty, you can’t even sing!’ He said, ‘But they come to see me, Uncle Tone.’ I’ve seen loads of shows since, and I’ll tell you something: I don’t know about his records, but he is a great stage performer. He moves his head about, and he really gets you – and you don’t know what you’re getting.

  I was with him for about three years on the road, but then I went to prison. We was going to Japan for Fuji Rock Festival in ’99, but I had to go to court, and I thought I was gonna get off. The tour manager, Sullivan, called me and said, ‘Okay, I’ll leave the tickets at the station and all you’ve got to do is go there and pick them up, and then meet us in Japan.’ But I didn’t meet them in Japan because I was in fucking Strangeways!

  I was in for stun-gunning a couple of guys. We had an argument because they were trying to take over one of the clubs that we ran in Manchester. This fellow, Barry, was trying to take it over for protection money, and the owners of the club came and asked us to put a stop to it. They said there was a fat fella there on the sofa with a reputation and they didn’t want him in there no more. So he came in with his minders, this Barry.

  ‘You’re finished, Barry,’ I said. ‘Your protection is finishing right now – I’m stopping it.’

  ‘What do you mean, finished?’ he goes.

  ‘This is our club now!’

  It was quite a fight – I got my thumb bitten off that night.

  I was in Strangeways for six months, but they shipped me to Walton in Liverpool after that, and I finished my two years there. I’ve seen that fucking Bronson in there – the big fella who took his name off that film star, Charles Bronson. They’ve never let him out.

  Adrian came up to see me in Walton, and after I got out I joined him on tour in Canada.

  Everyone in the family was proud of him. If it wasn’t for that, I don’t know what he would have been, to tell you the truth. You know, he went to Horfield for bloody forged notes. Christ knows what he’d be up to if it wasn’t for music.

  TRICKY: I’m an observer and, for some reason, people always look after me. This is what happened with Cesar Aceituno in LA. I met him right at the beginning, when I first arrived in LA, at a pool party on a hotel roof with these stripper girls. Which was kind of crazy because I’d never been to anything like that before. It was a totally different culture, even to New York. Since that day we met, me and Cesar haven’t left each other.

  He’s an ex-gangbanger, but now he’s legit, and he’s got his own gun company. Him and his partner make rifles, for the Sheriff Department, the army and people like that – like legal gun-running, I suppose. They make sniper rifles, suppressors and silencers for sniper rifles. He goes for weekends training people to shoot. I used to go with him sometimes, and he showed me, so I can shoot 800 yards with a sniper rifle, even 850, no problem.

  LA was very hard to get my head around to start with, but with Cesar to guide me, I started having a lot of fun there. We would get in the car, the two of us, and drive to San Francisco, just
for a night out. Or we’d go to Vegas for the boxing. Or we’d stay in LA and hang out at Oscars after-parties. Just living really large, going to all the top parties and top restaurants, and – unknown to me – hanging with ghetto legends.

  Cesar wasn’t a gangbanger when he met me, but his dad did say to me once, ‘Thank you for looking after Cesar.’ I thought, ‘What does he mean by that?’ What it was: when Cesar met me, it changed his life a little bit. A lot of his friends are either dead or doing life. So his dad thanked me, because when he was hanging out with me, he wasn’t going to certain places anymore. We were in Oscars parties instead – and those are good parties, some of them! The Oscars I don’t give a shit about, but some of the parties – gorgeous women, drink, total fun.

  It would be a serious mix of people in the clubs. Britney Spears could be there, and on the next table it could be drug dealers. That’s just the way it is in LA – gangbangers next to Britney Spears – because if the gangsters have got a lot of money, they can afford to go to the same places as Britney. It just mixes.

  One night, we were out at this really small club with a tiny dancefloor and there was nobody in there. Occasionally you’d see people like Puffy in there, probably because it was never busy. Cesar was on one side of the club, and I was on the other at the bar getting drinks. After I’d paid up, I went to walk through the dancefloor, and this bouncer stopped me and said, ‘You’ll have to walk around – Prince is dancing.’ It turned out that this was his own security, so I was like, ‘That’s not gonna happen!’ and I just walked straight on through. Prince was there on his own – doing all these dance moves, like he was performing for himself. Like he was doing a show, but there was no one in there. Weird.

  Me and Cesar went to a lot of boxing. One of the times we went to Vegas was to see Mike Tyson. While we were walking through the casino, we bumped into this fighter, Terry Norris – one of the best boxers that ever lived – and I got my picture taken with him. He was a handful, that guy. He used to do this thing at the beginning of a fight, just look at his opponent, almost like a Roman thing. Boxers try and do it now, some of them, but it don’t work.