by Tricky
When I first met Tricky, these guys from the Gambino crime family were trying to force him to make them his manager. Me and my business partner Mike – both sides of his family are really mobbed up back East – went over there to their office, and one of these guys is smoking a cigar, and he goes to Mike, ‘Who are you with?’ I waited till he had a puff on his cigar, then I told him, ‘My buddy Tricky’s uncle considers Mike family.’ Then I went up to his ear and I whispered, ‘Tony Guest!’ and he literally coughed on his cigar. After that, they never tried to move in on Tricky again.
Through all the partying, Tricky always remained fit. He practised Brazilian Ju-Jitsu out here, and he does have a thing of self-preservation. He will party for a while, but then he’s real healthy for a good stretch. A lot of musicians and actors go overboard and destroy their health – like, everything in excess. Tricky has a really good balance, walking that tightrope. His life could have gone so different, with his family and uncles being top-notch gangsters, and he has had tons of temptations to go down that route, but he has stayed focused to keep his career going.
He was still making music out here. He had this manager who was a lawyer for Linkin Park, and the guy would get him work for TV shows. He was dating a girl from one of the biggest black sitcoms out here, Girlfriends, and he ended up acting in two or three episodes.
TRICKY: I’d been around long enough by then doing music that I didn’t really need a record company. I was already established. Hollywood Records, to me, was just distribution and getting money. I did another album for them in ’03 called Vulnerable, which was less about collaborations, more just songs with my live band and a couple of new singers.
Title concepts tend to just pop into my head, and Vulnerable was saying something about myself which maybe people hadn’t realised, about my shyness, and looking at my background in a different light.
The cover pictures were taken in my apartment in Venice Beach, with the big window that opened out, and where I had to get the guns in because there was only one way out. I took the front picture with my own camera, on timer, with this mad messy green and brown wall painting a woman did for me in the background. The little mohican I’ve got grew pretty long in the end! You can see how hot it got in there from the back picture with the light streaming in, and me with a towel on my head.
To be honest, being with Hollywood Records was just something to do. I’d got to the point where nothing was ever gonna be like Island again. I didn’t have much motivation, and after doing those two records with them, I floated around. Somehow, being in LA, I stumbled into the movie world, doing music for this huge producer called Jerry Bruckheimer, who’d done stuff like Beverly Hills Cop, Armageddon and Pirates of the Caribbean.
My connection came through a very powerful Hollywood woman. I was in her office and she goes, ‘Do you want to do any film scoring?’ She starts punching into the phone, then it was, ‘Jerry? I’m sending Tricky over,’ and suddenly there was a car there for me. I said to her, ‘Listen, you’ve got to watch this actor in a little Australian movie called Chopper – he is amazing!’ She wrote down the guy’s name, Eric Bana, and the next thing you know this guy had the lead role in Hulk!
I went over to meet Jerry, and he turned out to be not what I expected. He was actually a proper music fan, and I did soundtrack work for a couple of his movies and a couple of his TV shows, including CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. I said to him, ‘I’ll find it difficult watching some film and then writing a score to it.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll set you up with the studio and you just do loads of sixty-second bits of music.’
He put me in this little garage with all the gear I needed, then I’d write loads of pieces of song that were about a minute long, and go into his office and he’d say, ‘I’ll take this one, this one, I don’t want that one.’ What’s funny is, I’d give him maybe ten dark things and ten lighter things, thinking he’d choose the lighter stuff, but every time he chose the darkest stuff. From how he dealt with me, he was a very good guy. Instead of saying, ‘Tricky, we need you to do this and this and this,’ he just let me do what I wanted.
In one of his movies, Bad Company, I went in front of the camera, singing a song called ‘Breakaway’ onstage then doing some dialogue afterwards. I was also on two or three episodes of this black TV show called Girlfriends, which was like Friends, but black. To be honest, I never watched it, but it was a huge show in America.
My first experience in movies came a long time before, in 1997, in Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element, which I didn’t enjoy. I was playing Gary Oldman’s sidekick, called Right Arm, which sounds fun but it really was the most boring thing. It was great meeting Gary Oldman, though, and that’s how I got him leaving messages on my ansaphone in Jamaican patois.
On one of them, he went, ‘Yo! Trick-ay! Where the bloodclaat … where you at? Pick up the fuckin’ phone!’ Gary Oldman, all in Jamaican patois! Now I realise I should have kept that apparatus – imagine having Gary Oldman talking Rasta on the beginning of a record.
Acting in movies is tedious, because you are just sat around waiting for hours, and you might not even do your scene that day, but you have to be there just in case. You could be there for eight hours in a room, not doing anything. After that experience, I was like, if I ever do a movie again, it would have to be something where I don’t have to do a screen test. If you want to put me in a movie, and I like the script, I’ll do it, but I can’t learn lines. I’m not going to rehearse for it, and I have to be able to talk off the top of my head, where I know what it’s about and then I can just shoot.
I just found it all to be bullshit. I didn’t get it, and you have to go through the same thing over and over. It wasn’t inspiring for me. Learning lines and trying to get a part in a movie? Forget it. After The Fifth Element, my thing was, ‘You either wanna put me in the movie, or you don’t!’
But I do like directing. Most of the promo videos I’ve ever done, I have either done myself or at least it was my ideas. I’m not trying to be a video director per se. I just like having ideas, and letting someone else execute it, so all I have to do is turn up. I don’t mind someone else getting the credit. As long as the video was good, I never cared too much about the credit.
Through reconnecting with Chris Blackwell, I ended up starting my own label, called Brown Punk, and kind of directing a movie, also called Brown Punk, starring the real people who were signed to the label. The concept was for a street version of The Office, which was definitely what it was inspired by – like a documentary almost, but in this case, we blurred the lines a bit more.
The plot was loosely me scratching around, trying to hustle money to get the label moving and to make music. It wasn’t scripted. There was just a general story outline, so each scene would be improvised, kind of making it up as we went along. For instance, with Elliott Gould, who was the only famous actor in it, I would give him the general idea – like, ‘Alright, you’ve lent this guy money, and you want your money, then you make it up from there.’ I would put people in the situation – no writing, just, ‘Okay, this scene is, you are trying to get your money back off me, and I’ve had this idea: say, “What do you mean, you’ll get it to me in two days? You’ve got forty-eight hours!” Then make it up from there.’ Elliott was great – he knew what he was doing.
We had a screening of an unfinished cut in a cinema in London, and a girl said to me, ‘Is that your life?’ I was like, ‘If that was my life, I would either be dead or in prison now!’ Some people honestly thought it was real.
One of the guys in it from the label was Kyrill, from the white punk/blues band The Dirty, who has actually passed away. He died of alcohol poisoning in a little hotel in Thailand. He was born in England, but his parents were Russian, and he was a very troubled boy – you could see that on screen, and you could tell when you met him that he wasn’t going to make all of the bonus.
Unfortunately, neither did Brown Punk. Chris Blackwell put quite a bit of money into it, an
d when he watched it, he said to me, ‘This is so good, it changes movies! We need bigger distribution. I don’t think my company Palm Pictures is big enough.’ He was describing stuff with serious directors, like I’d seriously changed the face of movies. But the trouble was, I didn’t know the movie industry well enough to get it off the ground, so I couldn’t get it released, and nothing happened with it. I put a few clips up online, but apparently Chris still wants to release it properly.
Also working on this movie was a guy called Lee Jaffe, who is a weirdo and a bit of a legend, because he actually lived with Bob Marley.
LEE JAFFE: I met Chris Blackwell in 1972 when a girlfriend took me to one of the first screenings of the Jamaican rude-boy movie The Harder They Come in London. I went to see one of Chris’s acts, Traffic, at Madison Square Garden the following year, and when I went back to their hotel suite afterwards Bob Marley was there. I was a multi-media artist, doing conceptual art, photography and film-making, and Bob and I really hit it off.
I went to Kingston with Bob and Chris in ’74, and Chris had bought this house uptown, a few hundred yards from the Prime Minister’s residence at 56 Hope Road – an old colonial house with a backyard, and in the backyard was a shack which had formerly been the slave quarters, but The Wailers had transformed it into a rehearsal hall. When I arrived there, Peter Tosh and the Barrett brothers were rehearsing this song, ‘400 Years’. Just, wow! I didn’t want to leave.
I didn’t know what I was gonna do with my life at that point, but I felt there was nothing more interesting going on in the world. There was an extra bedroom in the house, and I just stayed. At that time Island didn’t really have a presence in the US, and Chris asked me to help organise a tour for The Wailers. I organised the first two North American tours, and eventually played harmonica on Natty Dread, and worked with Tosh producing Legalize It. Soon after I’d moved out of Hope Road in ’77, people came and shot Bob, so who knows, I might’ve been dead if I’d still been there.
After Legalize It, I moved to New York, and started making political art again. I did a load of photos with Jean-Michel Basquiat, and we made a trip around the world together.
By the 2000s, I was living in LA, and when Chris Blackwell came to town, I would drive him around, because being alone with him in a car, you get to have quality time. One time I picked him up, and he said, ‘I have to go and meet Tricky.’ I was already a fan, and I’d seen Tricky play at the El Rey Theatre, maybe in ’97. I was a little late, and the stage was completely black. There were no lights on any of the musicians, or Tricky. I thought that was brilliant. It was so anti-pop. He is very anti-celebrity, and my work is very much about that, too, so the work I went on to do with Tricky definitely pursued those ideas.
He was starting this label with Chris, and I was going to be the cameraman, shooting videos with some of the acts that were gonna be on the label. I suggested Tricky make a story out of it and use some of those people as actors. I considered him a bit like Bob and Peter, or Jean-Michel, on that level of importance and brilliance. He’s an amazing video artist.
Doing the movie in the UK, there was a lot of bad weather. It seemed like it was cold and raining for months. That was actually good for the pictures, and the video. The title Brown Punk started to make a whole lot of sense to me. We went to Bristol and met some of his family. He has family who are social workers and have PhDs, and then others who are gangsters – or rather, former gangsters! But they all love each other.
It was Easter and they were all getting together. His auntie told me this story about Tricky’s great-great-grandfather who was a slave in Jamaica, but then when they freed the slaves, he got a job on a boat bringing bananas to the UK. He gets off the boat and he sees this white woman in Cornwall, they fall in love, and that was the beginning of the end of the idea of race in the UK. It was like, wow!
The idea of race started with colonialism; it was a construct that was built to justify the subjugation of people in other parts of the world. A lot of Tricky’s work, I think, is deconstructing that idea, it runs through all of what he does on some level.
The scenes we shot with Bob’s daughter Cedella were just beautiful, I thought. We also shot with Elliott Gould, who’s a friend of mine. He said, ‘Just tell me where and when, and I’ll be there!’ He didn’t even know who Tricky was, but they got along great, and we shot in my apartment in Santa Monica.
So many things happened during filming. Flat tyres in the middle of nowhere. One time we were shooting a scene with a lot of money, and the rapper guy we were shooting with brought his own money – £30,000 in cash – and his own blood. The scene needed blood. We didn’t have any fake stuff; he actually kept vials of his own blood in case he got shot or stabbed or something.
We shot with these kids in Manchester who were working for organised crime. They had new clothes and new bicycles; they were too young to be driving. It was pretty intense, and visually it was powerful. There were a lot of real guns – and people think there are no guns in England! That was not true. It was more prevalent at that time than people realised. Two of the kids got shot right after we were filming with them.
We made some great music videos, too. Tricky edited one really cleverly with this boxing match between two girls – one of them was a welterweight Muay Thai champion that Tricky knew, or some gangster was managing. It was like Raging Bull.
Tricky thinks the movie is finished, I don’t. You can see it in pieces online. We actually shot quite a bit more. I think he’s a great director, but he quickly moves on to other things. It needs so little to finish it off. Maybe it’ll happen someday!
TRICKY: What’s crazy about LA is, with all the partying, five years went by, just like that. It wasn’t even planned. I just went to LA, loved it, made a couple of records, then half a decade disappeared in a flash. I was hardly making music myself, just trying to get artists on my label recorded, and partying and having a good time. I didn’t have to work, because I had money, and I could do the odd little bit to keep it coming in.
Mad things were still happening to me. One morning I woke up and looked out of my apartment, and I had paparazzi outside. So I went out – ‘What the fuck is this all about?’ Because I was in LA, I wasn’t hearing about what was in the papers at home. One of the photographers goes, ‘Did you play pool with David Cameron’s missus?’ It turned out that his wife Samantha went to college in Bristol years ago. She used to go to this particular pub, and she reckons she played pool with me there. Bizarre. I can’t remember that, obviously. Anyway, I never hang out in Clifton pubs, know what I mean?
Being in LA I was very cut off from home, but I’d also lost my motivation. As long as I had enough money rolling in for my daughter’s school fees – that was all I cared about. Martina wanted Mazy to go to good schools. Martina is a Somerset girl herself, and she made the decision Mazy should go to school in the UK – the same sort of boarding school that she went to herself. I would have just let her go to a school around the corner, but Martina is a good mum, because she was like, ‘No, it’s got to be the best school,’ so she went to Roedean, just outside Brighton on the Sussex coast.
Martina and I weren’t in a relationship anymore but we were always happy to collaborate as parents – we never had any problem with that. She planned it all out school-wise, and I paid for it. Roedean is old English – old money! Put it this way – I didn’t see many other black parents. And there were definitely no guys from Knowle West sending their kids there.
The facilities are unbelievable. They have a proper theatre and a proper recording studio! Mazy loved it there, and it made a very English girl of her. For me, it became all about paying the fees. That’s when things start getting real, isn’t it? Every quarter of the year, I had to have her school money. Before that, I could just spend whatever I had. In a way, though, it made life easy, because as a dad you don’t care about yourself anymore. You care about the kid. I didn’t give a fuck about anything else, so long as I had the money to send M
azy to school. I could be broke and living in a bedsit. It put everything else in perspective. What’s mad is, I knew she wasn’t going to use any of this education. I knew that she was going to be a musician.
That chapter was closing, and my stay in Los Angeles was coming to an end. The problem there was, it’s Party City, and I ain’t got no discipline. The hardest part about being a musician is that you ain’t got nine-to-five, so you ain’t got any reason not to party all night. It was time for a change.
MASTER CHEN
The reason why a lot of musicians have drug or alcohol problems, I think, is because we ain’t got no consistency, no routine. Most people have a nine-to-five, which for better or worse gives their life a regular pattern. Whereas a musician might tour on and off for six or seven months of the year, then all of a sudden you might have three months off. You ain’t doing anything, and you’ve got money, so what are you going to do with that time?
If you don’t fill the gap with some form of physical exercise, then maybe you’re gonna do it with drugs or alcohol. When I come off tour, what I try to do is have a week where I train hard two or three times, and then I’m knackered, and I wanna do things like cook food and chill. If I don’t do that, I’ll want to go out and do stuff, and I’ll end up partying all weekend.
I’ve found that if I don’t train in winter, I get depressed. At that time of year, I can’t sit outside and have a coffee and watch the world go by, so I have to do some form of exercise otherwise I start to feel down. I’ll get up and it’s a shit day, and I’ll be like, ‘Fuck, I don’t want to leave the house,’ so I’ll go training, then I’m ready to tackle the winter. I’m a guy who never stops thinking, so exercise helps occupy my mind.