by Tricky
I don’t consider myself to be a fighter, but I’ve always gravitated towards boxing or some form of martial arts, because I can’t exercise without learning something. If I’m not learning, I’ll quickly end up not wanting to do it. I’m not going to do circuit training, or run on a treadmill just because it makes me fit. In hotels, I rarely use the gym. It always has to have an element of education to it. If I’m learning moves, and I know I’m getting somewhere, then I love it. But going to the gym to get your body looking good, or just feeling good – that’s not for me.
Lots of people play football: that can be fun for about ten minutes, then I’m bored as fuck. Running about chasing a round thing seems ridiculous to me, even though I was actually a good footballer. I was in my school team all through school, and if I’d have focused, I probably could have got somewhere with it. I was always a left-winger: I had speed and I was left-footed, so I could play left wing, which can be a hard position to fill, but ultimately I found it pointless. You know, chase the ball, run around, pass it, score a goal – after ten minutes, my mind would lose focus.
If I’m learning how to do something, however, like a kick or a punch, that keeps me focused and entertained. I can get into something when I know that I’m learning something people have been doing for hundreds of years. That helps me get through, when I can’t be bothered to go.
I think doing any discipline is good. When I was fifteen, my auntie Marlow sent me to the boxing gym. I wish I’d stayed with it, because that’s good discipline. When I moved to London, now and again I did a bit of Muay Thai, or Thai boxing, in a club above a shop in Harlesden. I went to a boxing club in Notting Hill a few times when I was living in Kensington, and then when I moved to New York, I started doing a bit of Muay Thai again. I’ve since gone on to do Brazilian Ju-Jitsu, and some Russian martial arts. Wherever I travel, I have always found a place to do a bit of something.
The longest I’ve stuck at anything was Tai Chi, which I did in New York for seven years, with a guy called William C.C. Chen. He was taught by Cheng Man-ch’ing, so he is second generation from one of the all-time originators of Tai Chi, and that was my first time doing it, which was an amazing experience.
Tai Chi is the closest I’ve come to meditation, but it’s different, because it’s all about learning ‘a form’, or a routine, and having patience in that process. It takes seven minutes to do the form: you think seven minutes is not a long time, but that seven-minute form could take from eight months to a year to learn. I learnt it in about seven months – but that was still a long time to do something for seven minutes! That blew my mind – patience!
When you get the form, your hands heat up and then you go somewhere else – you stop thinking about the outside world, and then you start thinking, ‘Ah, negative, I know that word, but what does it mean?’ and you can’t figure out what negative means. You think, ‘Depressed – I know that word but what does it mean?’ Then you think of happiness: ‘Oh yeah, I understand that,’ and, ‘Oh yeah, I did this in the womb!’
It just makes you realise that all of these things are just words, and if you didn’t know the words, would they really exist? So when you’ve got the form down, and you know it well enough, it can take you somewhere else where you can’t think of the word. You’ll be like, ‘I know I know that word, negative, depressed …’ but you just can’t think of it.
So, it’s not typical meditation, but it is kind of close to that.
After a while, I was teaching in Master Chen’s class as well, for the old people. He gave me the old people because he was teaching me more about patience – to teach someone who is eighty years of age requires that virtue in abundance.
From being my teacher, Master Chen became more like my dad in New York, this little Chinese guy. I used to hang out with him and go to his house. We would have dinner together.
When I played shows in New York during that period, he would be my support band. He would do a form onstage, and the crowd would go totally silent. They would go from talking, then they would see him, and then you could hear a pin drop, because they were feeling his vibe. Then me and my band would go on afterwards. One time, I did TV news with him: some big American news organisation wanted to do a feature on me, and I said, ‘I don’t really want to talk about music, but you can come to Tai Chi with me!’ so they interviewed the two of us together instead.
Tai Chi is the sort of thing you would want to keep up, but I was unlucky in a way, because the best guy in the world taught me at the start. I’ve been to teachers since, and they think they are just doing a meditation, but Tai Chi is a fighting art without the contact. Its origins are in disguising fighting movements. Master Chen used to be a competitive fighter – I think he won a silver medal for China in the Olympics or something crazy like that. Tai Chi is still very healthy for you, it produces blood flow in your body, but everything you’re doing is actually a strike.
After Master Chen, I’ve gone to clubs, and I’ll do the form better than the guy teaching me. I’ve gone to classes and they don’t even know why they’re doing it. They think it’s all for health and relaxation. ‘No, that move you’re just showing me – that turns into a strike!’ I’ve been to a class in London, and I said to the teacher, ‘That’s a good strike!’ And he went, ‘What do you mean, “strike”?’ I said, ‘What you are doing is a strike. Like, this one is a strike to the throat, you do it slow, but if you speed it up, it’s a strike to the throat. This one is a fist. That is a push …’
I tried to keep up with it, but when my form is better than the guy teaching me, it’s hard to stay motivated. I was incredibly lucky meeting Master Chen, but also very unlucky. It was almost a curse, because after you’ve trained with someone like him as your first teacher, where do you go?
After I moved to LA, I never did Tai Chi properly again. Instead, I did a little bit of Muay Thai – never competitive, just training, and then I did some Brazilian Ju-Jitsu for about three years. I happened to bump into this Brazilian guy, who showed me some moves. If you’ve ever seen UFC, aka Ultimate Fighting Championship, it’s a bit like that – wrestling, with submissions. If a fight ain’t over in the first thirty seconds from a punch, it goes to the floor and then it’s basically fighting on the floor – grappling, chokes, arm bars, ankle locks, wrist stuff, all leading to submissions.
I’ve also done a Russian martial art called Sambo, which is punching, kicking and wrestling – like Ju-Jitsu but Russian style – and then a Filipino martial art called Panantukan – affectionately known as Filipino Dirty Boxing – which I found by accident near my home recently. It’s boxing, punching, kicking, but in the Philippines they start with knife-sticks, and when you are really good, you move up to hands. This is because it’s easier with sticks – like in real life, if you have a problem, pick up a stick (or a bottle or a knife). That is their culture: they learn to fight with weapons first. Once you master the weapons, then you go to hands. But in Europe they teach it differently, it starts with hands, then after two years I started learning the sticks.
Again, it’s contact – elbows, punching, knees, kicks, and stick fighting. You’re not padded up – if you’re getting a leg kick, you’re getting a leg kick! It has its own form, but not like Tai Chi or even karate. You learn forms like moving forwards and backwards, using both elbows – punch, elbow, elbow, elbow. Or – left, right, front kick, right left, back kick. You learn both sides as well, so you do a technique one side and then the other side. Palm, elbow, hook, strike, do that forwards, then you do it backwards on your back foot, then you do it to the side.
As I mentioned earlier, the only sport I actually watch is boxing, to see what they’re doing technically. When you’re watching someone like a Floyd Mayweather, he can do stuff that other people can’t. The guy’s skill level is amazing, and the attitude as well. I really respect the work ethic. With someone like Mayweather, it’s art – a top level of talent and intelligence. People think boxers are dumb, but you have to have Ring IQ.
Everyone watched Muhammad Ali in the ’70s, even all the little white kids in Knowle West. I can remember staying up really late to watch his fights on TV. He was a very intelligent man, and what a life he had. I was too young to know what he did outside the ring, but I would stay up with my uncles and great-grandad to watch him fight, because he was just such a huge figure.
With the various disciplines I’ve attempted myself, it’s never been any kind of spiritual quest. I don’t know about that shit, or care. I’m probably looking for discipline – imposing a structure that I never had when I was growing up, what with being allowed to bunk off school and stay out all night. It’s also about learning: I didn’t learn anything in school, because I wasn’t interested, so now I can learn in my own time, and learn something I am interested in. Apart from that, it’s about keeping me entertained while I’m getting fit. It keeps my mind occupied.
When I’m training my way, by contrast, I’m not thinking about anything at all. I’m focused on learning something in the moment, and when I come out of there, I’m so tired that I can’t even manage to think what I’m going to eat that day. And that’s a good thing.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
GHETTO YOUTH
In June 2008, I had a couple of TV appearances lined up in Paris, so Cesar and I decided to escape from LA’s unrelenting heat and book a week or two’s holiday in the French capital, just to hang out in a different environment. Our usual lifestyle came with us, though, and one lovely spring afternoon, we dropped loads of Es and sauntered around the city enjoying its famously romantic atmosphere. We were meandering down this tree-lined walkway in the middle of a particular boulevard – I’m afraid I don’t remember which one, for obvious reasons – and suddenly all these pigeons flew from the branches up into the sky. We watched this private display the birds had put on for us with a mixture of joy and wonder.
‘Woah, this is so beautiful,’ I said to my buddy. ‘I’m gonna live here!’
Within two or three months, I had moved to Paris. I’d been feeling it was high time that I changed things up in my life. I’d realised that I needed to get out of LA because, much as I loved knocking about with Cesar and had been having the most fantastic time, I was simply not doing anything productive out there. All I was doing was partying.
One day, I was doing an interview, and the journalist said in passing, ‘As you haven’t done an album in five years …’ I was like, ‘Fucking hell – really?!’ I knew I hadn’t made a record in a while, but hearing it said like that – ‘no album in five years’ – was a real shock.
I loved America and, after thirteen years of living over there, I actually thought like an American. The shops, I could relate to. Going to supermarkets in America, everything, I could relate to. While I was living Stateside, I didn’t go to many places outside America. When I was living in LA, I hardly travelled at all. I would fly over to Bristol to see my family quickly and fly back again. Or go to London, do a few work things, then rush back. With no albums to promote, my touring schedule had all but dried up, so my only excursions would be with Cesar to other places within the US. I’d been in America so long it was like I was Americanised.
When the two of us went to Paris, it was like discovering Europe again. Even though I’d been to Paris many times before, I thought it was incredible. It was like seeing the place with fresh eyes, and that experience made me want to discover Europe again, to live in a different culture, with more variety. In America, you could go to one city and then go to another city, and they will both be quite similar. Go from New York to Philadelphia – yeah, there are differences, but still …
Paris was something else – just ‘wow’, after all those years away from Europe, so I thought, ‘Okay, I want to live here for a while, and I want to start recording again.’
I ended up living in Paris for six years and, like in New York and LA, I had loads of different apartments, in very contrasting areas. Sometimes I’d live really ghetto, sometimes really posh – from as expensive as fuck, to very poor. I didn’t feel outside of things because of the language. The language barrier didn’t bother me at all. I don’t feel any different in London or Paris. It’s just another very different culture. It’s also quite a small city in the centre, so I walked everywhere and got to know the streets well.
LA hadn’t really been like a home, it was more like a party city, all about going out three or four times a week and getting fucked up. I was going out sometimes just because I was bored, because I wasn’t doing anything substantial. I still went out in Paris, but more because I was actually invited somewhere. I became much more settled there. Sometimes I would just sit around at my place, chill out, record some music, then go out and eat. I had a favourite butcher’s shop where I would buy fresh meat, and I knew where the health food stores were to get my special bread that I need to eat. I had a couple of favourite restaurants I’d go to regularly, so it was all about living like that, simple and regular, rather than partying, and that’s how Paris became my home.
Right at the start of my time in Paris, I got involved in the opening of a new arts complex at 104 rue d’Aubervilliers in the 19th arondissement. Called Centquatre, or just 104, the building used to be a morgue, and the idea was that they’d invite artists in residence to use its 29,000 square metre space for installations and contemporary art events.
Through a Parisian girl called Mai, who I’d first met in New York in ’95, I was initially asked by the Mayor of Paris to play a free gig in their vast hall to mark its inaugural evening in October 2008. The whole point was, Centquatre is right in the middle of one of the inner city’s poorest neighbourhoods – the 19th is ghetto as fuck – so for them to throw open these big wrought-iron gates at the front and let the locals in might’ve been seen as risky.
On the night, there were 3,000 people crammed in there, and apparently there were just as many outside trying to get in, but we never had no trouble. The mayor and the organisers were so happy with how it went that they asked me back there in December to do some kind of installation – whatever I wanted, for three months.
They were really cool, and weren’t trying to force me to do one thing or another – it was all up to me. I said, ‘Listen, if I can work with the ghetto kids there, I’ll do it.’ On the first day, I had them just open the gates, so that anybody could come in and mill about in the main space. In one of the side studios, there was all the stuff for painting and drawing, while in another one, I got in some musical instruments and recording equipment.
One day I would do football in there, then I’d have a martial arts teacher, or I would be sparring with the guys. Then sometimes there’d be a graffiti studio, and usually a studio where they could record music. And then other times we would just hang out.
It soon fell into two shifts, with young kids dropping in at 4–5pm on their way home from school. By about 8pm they would all go home, then at about 10pm, thirty ghetto guys would waltz in and they’d do graffiti or make music into the small hours.
In all the three months I was in there, we didn’t have one single fight situation, even though everybody was telling me beforehand what a rough neighbourhood it was. Initially, they didn’t want the ghetto kids coming into their expensively renovated cultural centre. In fact, crime went down locally while I was there – all kinds of crime just stopped, because these kids that had been causing it actually had somewhere to go.
We had really good fun in there, although I did have one guy who brought a gun in. He took me into the bathroom and said, ‘Hey, Tricky, check this out!’ He was very polite about it. I don’t know why he was showing me the gun – maybe it was his way of telling me, ‘It’s real here.’ But you could see it was real – you didn’t need to see a gun to know that.
I said, ‘I can feel your energy, I know you’re for real, but you don’t need that. Can you not bring it in here?’ The guy was cool after that. He never brought the gun back again, and we never had any problems with that kind of thing. Paris is k
ind of hectic like that. There are loads of ghettos there, and 19th is only one of them. While I was in 104, I lived around the corner in Rue de la Chapelle, so I got to see it for myself every day.
I got a lot of love for letting these kids hang out, which was very touching. After a while, I had people’s families bringing me food and presents. Mums were coming down, dads were coming down, hanging out with their kids.
When I used to walk out to go to the shop, all these kids would follow me. Sometimes I was buying pizza for them, or cans of Coke, but a couple of guys would always come along, making sure I was okay. Even though I was good there, they were looking out for me. It was like I joined the family.
MAI LUCAS: I’m a photographer from Paris and my ethnicity is half Vietnamese, half French. I’ve known Tricky for more than twenty years, and I consider him family – he is the godfather of my first daughter, Taika.
We met in 1995 at a very bright moment in both of our careers, when we were defining our lives and who we were. I was doing street photography in New York, and one day in downtown Manhattan I saw this guy with an amazing face – Tricky. I asked him, ‘Can I take your picture?’ He was smiling at me, and he was like, ‘Yeah, no problem! I’m an artist, maybe I’ll use your photos. Come to my hotel tomorrow.’
We took photos out on the street and had a lot of fun. When we were done, I told him that another musician I knew, Ben Harper, was staying at the same hotel, and wanted to meet him. We made our way up to Ben’s and I rang at the door but there was nobody there. I was behind Tricky with my camera, and he was like, ‘I’m sure I can hear someone in there,’ and he got onto his knees, trying to look under the door. I took a picture of him with his feet sticking out behind him looking under the door.