by Tricky
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SEARCHING FOR MAXINE
I’ve got away with murder in my career, all because my mum committed suicide. People have got behind me and supported me because of that story in my early years – not just for the music itself. I think people can tell that I’ve been searching for my mum in my life and through the music, and maybe that’s the thing they identify with most, for whatever reason. I’m only really noticing that now, years later, because when you’re living it, you don’t see it, do you?
When I found out that my mum wrote poetry – which was after I’d made Maxinquaye and become famous – it made me really think about my place in everything. Back in her day, there was no outlet for a mixed-race woman living in Knowle West to write poetry. I started to feel like my mum gave up her life so I could have my life, because really, without her death, there ain’t no me.
Some people look at it like, ‘Oh, your mum committed suicide, that’s like the ending for you,’ but that was my beginning. If she’d not killed herself, I couldn’t have written any of that early music. I certainly couldn’t have written any of the lyrics. I felt that she was writing through me. I’ve realised that many of my lyrics are written from a female perspective. ‘Overcome’, all those songs – it’s like a woman wrote them.
‘Broken Homes’, the one I did with PJ Harvey – I wrote those lyrics, but it’s not a bloke writing them. How did a young guy from Knowle West write those lyrics? It’s not a man’s way of thinking: ‘Those men will break your bones, don’t know how to build stable homes’ – why am I writing from inside a woman’s head? Eventually, when I sat down and thought about it, I realised: it’s my mum writing them.
Everything I did was based around my mother. Without her committing suicide, there is no Tricky, no albums, no nothing. I might’ve had a good life with her being alive, but there would’ve been no music, which I find kind of weird, because you would think of suicide as being negative, wouldn’t you? Like, fucking hell, my mum killed herself, but I can’t even think negatively of it, because without that there is no me.
At least my mum killing herself means I never had to go through that thing of grieving for her passing in my adult life. To me, it’s worse when you’re older. As a kid you just get on with it, but how the fuck do you deal with the loss later on? That’s one of the worst things imaginable. People feel sorry for me, like, ‘Aw, your mum committed suicide!’ Listen, losing your mum or dad when you’re already grown up and you know about life, and you know about love – my mum committing suicide maybe looks sadder on paper, but that to me is the most awful, cruel thing I can think of.
I realise that I’ve spent much of my life so far thinking about losing my mum, trying to understand it, trying to remember things about her (even though I can’t), and trying to process the feelings I must’ve had back then as a four-year-old boy.
There was a song on my last album, Ununiform, called ‘When We Die’, which was about the younger me having a conversation with me now. The younger me is saying, ‘My mum’s dead, what do I do now? Where do I go? What happens to me? I don’t die young, like Michael?’ Michael was my uncle, the one who got murdered in the blues in Bristol, but it was weird because around the time I wrote the song, George Michael passed away, so a lot of people connected that lyric with him. Anyway, the older me says to the kid, ‘Everything’s going to be alright, you’re gonna end up going on tour, going on trips abroad – it’ll all be fine in the end!’
Between those two versions of me, I suppose there have been many years of searching for the truth about Maxine. As you’ve already heard, there are many secrets in my family through the generations. Not everything is crystal clear. Things get buried and not talked about for years, if ever again. Only very gradually have I found things out about her from family members who were around at the time.
MICHELLE PORTER: Being seven years older than Adrian, I have a lot more memories of Maxine than he does. She was amazing, and me and my brother Mark absolutely adored her. She was very tall, slim and attractive, and also very bubbly and outgoing. You definitely knew when she came into a room – she would be chatty and friendly and really vibrant.
She and Roy were so different. There was Roy – very tall, too, but very quiet – and he was happy to just sit in the background, because it would all be about Maxine. She always had something interesting to say, and there was always some drama going on. She was very drama queen-y. Everything in her life was a crisis. She definitely should have been in the theatre. She dressed really outrageously and was a bit adventurous for her era. She always had that spark in her eyes, a bit cheeky.
Considering her upbringing, she was very cultured. She was really into poetry, and theatre, and she was always going on about these French actresses she idolised – I swear she thought she was French!
Put it this way: she wasn’t a dull auntie. She used to tell us fantastic bedtime stories. Mark and I would go to bed, and she didn’t read a story from a book – she would make a story up, seemingly off the top of her head, about someone in the jungle, or whatever. The only one we can ever remember was about Sabre the lion having this great adventure. After a while, she would finish the story off, and we would have to wait till the following night before she told us any more, so she would leave us hanging there in suspense. It wasn’t your usual Disney stuff, and we absolutely adored her for these wonderful stories.
My mum, Marlow, was like a mother figure to Maxine. They were incredibly close. They often used to go out together, and then they would go out with Roy and my father Ken, the four of them, to clubs and shebeens, so their social life was very much bound together. Maxine would always look amazing in what she wore, with her hair all done up. She was always one step ahead with the fashion of that time.
Maxine was always at our house, with Adrian and Leanna. If my mum didn’t see her for a day, she would think something was wrong. She wasn’t an aunt that you saw every now and then, she was someone who more or less lived in our house. My mum used to laugh and say, ‘Haven’t you got a home to go to? Roy will be back from work soon.’ She would say, ‘Oh yeah, yeah, in a moment …’ Adrian would be like, ‘It’s late now, Mum, we may as well stay.’ They were always with us – they never went away! We had such a lovely relationship with Maxine, and my dad absolutely adored them both. He had a real soft spot for Adrian, and I think it was because he was cheeky like Maxine.
When she passed away, we were all obviously devastated. We came home from school, and Roy was there with my mum and dad, all of them sobbing. I don’t think my brother Mark has ever spoken about her again, since that day.
It must have been hard for Adrian – at that age, having your mother around, and then she’s gone. I remember my mum saying he’d done something naughty, and she’d said to him, ‘You’ve got to be a good boy, because your mum is looking down on you from up in the sky,’ and later on he was in the garden, saying, ‘Look at me, Mummy, I’m being a good boy!’ It was heart-breaking at times.
Adrian used to stay with us a lot anyway, but all of a sudden having to do it without Maxine – that must’ve been really tough for him. What must’ve been going on for him emotionally, I hate to think.
MARLOW PORTER: When all the Godfreys went to Manchester, Maxine went for a while but ended up staying in Bristol and living with me in Hartcliffe. Though she was actually my younger half-sister, I was like a mother to her.
When she was fifteen, she found out she had epilepsy. She had the idea, which was probably true back then in the 1960s, that people would think she was mental. The day it first started, she was in our kitchen making a cup of tea and she lost control of her hand, so she missed the cup. People made a joke of it because they thought it was an accident. She said, ‘It’s not funny.’ Little things like that were happening, until she started getting the full fits.
She went to the hospital and had all the tests done, where they put the electrodes on the brain. She got prescribed phenobarbital, which is what they gav
e you in those days. It was a heavy barbiturate with very bad side effects – depression and things like that.
Still, Maxine was a free spirit, and as a young adult she loved the excitement of life. I think she was born before her time. She would fit in now, you know, but back then? I would say to her, when she was off to a club with Roy, ‘You’re not going out like that, are you?’ She was very close with Sandy – a lovely girl – who was married to her brother Michael, and Sandy used to make a lot of clothes for her. Say she’d made her a shirt, Maxine would have it tied above her tummy! You didn’t do that in those days. She didn’t see the wrong in it. She liked it, so that was what she was going to do.
The four of us – my husband Ken and I, and Maxine and Roy – often used to go out on double dates together. There was one funny time, when we were going to the Mayfair Suite, which was a big club in the centre of town, with an ice rink, and Roy was having a Christmas do there or something. This is where she was wicked: Roy had given her some money to get a dress made, but she didn’t have enough for what she wanted, so what she bought was a night dress, and she had Sandy put in a lining for her. It looked beautiful – long, flowing and grand, a bit of a strappy number, better than any dress you would buy in a shop these days – but it was still a night dress, for going to bed in. It wasn’t for wearing out!
‘You can’t wear that, Maxine!’
‘Of course I can,’ she shrugged, twirling in the mirror, ‘look how beautiful it is!’
‘But it’s a fucking night dress!’
She liked the attention, and creating a scene. One time we were laughing and joking, and Maxine said, ‘When I die, I want to go out like Edith Piaf! I want all the people there …’ She thought Edith Piaf was wonderful: she had seen pictures from her funeral with all the people of Paris lining the streets and that was what she wanted too.
With her having fits all the time, it was good that she almost always lived with me. By then we had a bigger house in Bishopsworth, and she pretty much had her own room there, once she’d had the kids. Often Roy worked nights at the bakery, long hours, so it made sense for her to stay with us. It didn’t break them up because he was at work anyway, and otherwise she would’ve been on her own. I suppose he felt better with that too, that she was with someone.
Once the kids got a little older, though, they got a flat not far from us, and my husband Ken went down and sorted everything for her – a nice bedroom suite, all nice things.
She could get my husband to do anything. They used to go off to bingo together, and I would be looking after the children. I loved her that much, I liked it. It was never, ‘Oh, they’ve left me here on my own,’ or ‘What are they up to?’ I never once had that feeling.
Once, she was in the house and she was trying to aggravate me: she was putting music on loud, and I still wouldn’t say anything. Afterwards, she wrote me a note saying, ‘I’m so sorry, you are my crutch,’ all this. There was never a confrontation between us, ever. There were never arguments. Mark and Michelle have never argued, Adrian has never argued. There were no rules, except we always sat at the table for tea, everyone, and they were good as gold.
The trouble was that she didn’t like the new flat. It was too much for her to do all the household chores on her own, and look after the children, do this, do that, and she was frightened about having a fit. She’d had to have nurse visits because of her epilepsy. It was too much, but she stayed there, and that’s where she passed away.
On the actual day, she’d come out of hospital on the Sunday, and on the Monday she was down at our house, wasn’t she, putting my clothes on, and ‘I’ll borrow this and that,’ doing her eye make-up. I remember saying, ‘Maxine, are you going? I’ve got work to do.’ We were in the kitchen, and I had my back to her and Ken, and there was cake on the table. She said, ‘Look, Mar, he won’t let me cut my cake – he’s only doing it so he can hold my hand!’
She’d got all dressed up in my clothes. It was what you wore in those days, black trousers tight at the waist and wide at the bottom, with a long-sleeved camel-coloured dress over the top, and a belt at the waist. She had my coat on as well: it sounds horrible, but it was lime green with big collars, which was very trendy at the time. We both liked to be in with the fashions – different from the norm.
That was the last time I saw her alive. She went down to Sandy and Michael’s, and Ken dropped her home. She said she would be over at one o’clock the next day, but no, that was it.
When we heard the news, Ken went up to her flat. I couldn’t. I froze, and that’s not me at all. Just, ‘No, I can’t do it.’ It would’ve killed me. Ken went up, and he said that she was still warm, and that she had a tear in her eye. I thought, ‘Well, if she was still warm, did she and Roy have an argument?’ They didn’t have an argument at all apparently, but it leaves you thinking all sorts of things – like, did she really mean it? Did she take the phenobarbital tablets near enough to when she knew he was coming home, but it went wrong?
She was only in her early twenties. I still think she might have meant it as a cry for help. I told you, she was a drama queen. The things I used to have to do … I would get phone calls, like, ‘Could you come up and talk to Maxine? She says she’s taken some tablets.’ Because I was like her mother, I’d go up, and I’d say, ‘Maxine, I haven’t got all day! I’ve got a family to go back to! Have you taken tablets?’ No, she hadn’t. That was that, so I don’t think she had actually tried it before.
The night she died she left a note on the table. I didn’t read it, but my husband did. I don’t know what happened to it. They wouldn’t have let me have it. It was awful when she died, because all the Godfreys turned against me. Even then, nobody talked about Violet being my mother. Maxine always wanted me to come out with it. I’d say, ‘But I can’t, Max, I’m too afraid of them. They would come and harm me or my kids.’ I couldn’t come out and say that Maxine was actually my sister.
I went up to Violet’s house in Barnstaple Road where they took her body, and all the Godfreys were there talking. Arthur was bossing everybody about – not Martin, because he was in prison, and anyway, with us Martin wasn’t as confrontational as Arthur. Martin did things openly with his mouth, whereas Arthur was very sly. Anyway, Arthur said, ‘In the first car, there will be Violet, Tony, Michael and Winston.’ I don’t know where I got the courage, but I said, ‘No way on earth! I’m the eldest, I’m going in that car. Winston can go in the other car!’
I also took charge of writing the notice to put in the paper. At the bottom – oh God, I can’t believe I did this – I put, ‘From your devoted sister, Margaret’. They went mad with me. When I next went over there, Maggie said, ‘You let me down – now everyone knows!’ I said, ‘But everybody knew anyway!’
I went up to see Maxine in the bedroom and she had her hair all over the place. I thought, ‘No, people can’t see her like that.’ I got some elastic bands and clips, and I did her hair up in a bun. She used to shave her eyebrows, and as I was doing her hair, I looked at her and I thought, ‘Your eyebrows need shaving, girl!’
When I went to the funeral down at Arnos Vale, nobody was speaking to me, and I sat in that car and I stayed looking at the coffin, and I said, ‘Maxine, you’ve got your wish. They’re all out watching you.’ Loads and loads and loads of people had come out to see her go. I was smiling at her: ‘It’s your birthday, innit, Max, and you’ve got your wedding dress on!’ – they’d put a white shroud on her – ‘You’ve got your wedding dress on … you’re loving this, aren’t you, girl?’
When she died, I wrote a letter. I ain’t no good at poetry, but I wrote the most amazing thing. I can even remember parts of it: ‘wherever I am, I look up through the window, you’re reading a book …’ In later years, I thought, ‘How did I manage to write that?’ I think it was her doing it.
When Adrian left us and went to live with his nan Violet, we were heartbroken, but now I can see that maybe his passion wouldn’t have come out if he’d stayed with us. W
e were just a happy family. His rawness has made him who he is, in the music. His songs are very deep and meaningful, aren’t they? They go right down. I don’t like listening to them, because sometimes it’s like, ‘Oof! I’m seeing what’s in his head!’
For many years, he was angry – very, very angry. When he first made it big, and he was in America, and he had the most beautiful house in New Jersey, and the grounds it was in – it was amazing, but he didn’t know who he was. I went over, and it wasn’t the Adrian I knew. One thing I have always done: when he called himself Tricky, I wanted him to know that he is still Adrian to me. I have never once called him Tricky. He is not Tricky to me. He is Adrian – that is the real person. Tricky is the persona. With him, I think it was like a lot of people: too much, too quick.
Since then, coming back to Europe, and settling in Berlin, he’s not that person anymore – he’s Adrian again. He has changed immensely, so much for the better.
TRICKY: For the last five or six years, I’ve been getting on with my dad again. When I was in my late teens and early twenties in Bristol, I’d see him out and about in clubs. I’d go into places like The Tropics, and he would be stood there, with all his gold on, and his green safari suit, with the green waistcoat, green trousers, with the safari-style pockets. I’d go in there and say, ‘Alright, Dad?’ He’d be out with his mates, stood against the wall like a bad man, and he’d nod back.
Back then he wasn’t the angelic grandad he is today. He was a Jamaican with a bad temper. He might pull a switchblade on you, and he sold the best weed in Bristol, but over the years he has mellowed.
A few years ago, I was in London, maybe doing some shows, and I was staying in this apartment in King’s Cross. Out of the blue, my dad called me.