by Tricky
‘Where are you?’ he asked.
‘I’m in London.’
‘I’m going to come up!’
‘What for? I’m only here for a couple of days.’
‘I need to talk to you!’
I was sitting in this apartment waiting for him to arrive, and I was getting uptight because I didn’t really have a relationship with him at that point. I didn’t know what he was coming all the way up to London for. I thought maybe he was just coming to hang out, to see me, but why so urgent?
His wife dropped him off and left, and it was a really weird vibe.
‘Alright, Dad, how are you?’
‘I need you to know something,’ he said. ‘The reason I didn’t come to see you when you were a kid was because, if I had, I wouldn’t be here now.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘I would’ve been dead!’
It was cool that he finally said that to me himself. I’d found it out through whispers years before, about the letter Martin sent from prison basically threatening my dad, but it wasn’t coming from him. You don’t know what’s true. I know that my nan didn’t like my dad. I can understand that, because my nan lost her daughter, but that was nothing to do with my dad. She was terrified that she’d be on her own at home with me when I was a kid of three or four, and she’d have a fit, and no one might find out until the next day. I think she killed herself because of that.
My auntie Marlow tells me that my mum was a force. She used to bully my dad, almost. It wasn’t like the stereotypical situation of a Jamaican guy cheating on my mum, hurting her. My mum used to take money off him and spend it. She was a force – she was a Godfrey! It sounds like it wasn’t easy for my dad to be with my mum.
Once I got into music and I left Bristol and travelled, I would forget to call my dad for maybe a couple of years at a time. I didn’t grow up with him, so it was natural – his life was one way and my life was another way. Maybe back then I thought he wasn’t interested, so why should I give a fuck? When you’re young, you don’t so much, do you? My life went to London, then America, so he wasn’t someone I kept in contact with.
Even now, it’s my half-brother Kevin who will sometimes say, ‘Hey, have you talked to Dad?’ My brother has to remind me to call my own dad! Kevin is really close to him. It ain’t a problem; it’s not like I forget about him – it just hasn’t been my habit to speak to him often because I didn’t grow up with him. He’s got twelve or thirteen kids – I’m not sure exactly how many. There are some I don’t know about, apparently.
It’s kind of amazing, but he can’t read and write. He’s gone through all his life, living in Bristol, driving everywhere, living in different places, and he has survived without being able to read and write. He still can’t now. You take it for granted, don’t you?
Me and him were always cool, but in the last year or two, we’ve developed a really great relationship. He’s telling me stuff I never knew. He’s got a good memory, but when he was younger, he wasn’t so outgoing with his information. He wouldn’t say a lot. Now, as he gets older, he’s telling me stuff about my mum, and my grandad – Tarzan the High Priest.
He has mellowed out a lot. He’s a lovely man. He’s quite quiet, and not like Martin, all about money. He has found God at the moment as well, but I don’t know if he really believes it. He feels bad about things. You know, he found my mum’s body. That must be pretty devastating. He’s a really good man, but I didn’t see it when I was younger. What I realise is, we just had a separation, and now our relationship has evolved naturally, and it keeps getting better and better. It’s crazy – he’s one of my best mates!
I might not talk to him for two months, so this is the first time it’s been like this. I’ll call him now and say, ‘Hello, Dad?’ And then we both just start laughing. And when he goes, ‘Adrian?’ we start laughing at that too. It’s like we both know we fucked up. We both know we ain’t very good at this thing called life. He ain’t been a great dad, I ain’t been a great son, or a great boyfriend, or a great family member. We are mistakes. We laugh, and it’s like, ‘Yep, I know you’re crazy, Dad,’ and, ‘Son, I know you’re even crazier! What a mess we’ve created, but we’re still here!’
He puts up with me. I’ll say to him, ‘Oh, I’m coming down in May,’ and he’ll laugh because he knows I probably won’t. I had to call his wife the other day.
‘Tell Dad I love him a lot,’ I said when we’d finished.
‘Why don’t you tell him yourself?’
‘You know I can’t do that,’ I replied, and I put the phone down on her.
I used to avoid Bristol at all costs. I’d go and visit when I had to, and my cousin Michelle would say to me, ‘You should just go home now, you’re hating it here!’
In all the 25-odd years since I moved away, getting back to Bristol from Berlin these days is the easiest it’s been – the shortest journey time so far, including from London. It’s literally only two hours on the plane, so I nip back for a weekend quite often.
What’s mad is, I quite like Bristol now! I appreciate how peaceful it is. I couldn’t see it when I was a kid, but what a beautiful city! I wasn’t really interested in beauty and things like that back then. I go to see Michelle, and she is just amazed. I come out of her house, and I’m like, ‘I can’t hear any cars! Wow, there’s no traffic noise!’ When you’re young, things are moving so fast that you don’t notice things like that. As you get older, you slow down and the penny drops.
Back then, my life was nuts. I wanted excitement, and Bristol wasn’t the place for that. It ain’t a place you go to party, because it’s not got great nightlife. It used to bore the fuck out of me, because there’s nothing to do and nowhere to go.
Nowadays, by contrast, going to a pub is good enough for me. I want less from life now. If you wanna have a beer with your mates, Bristol is a great city to do it. There’s nothing that appeals to me more than drinking in a totally crappy pub – not a happening pub with a DJ, just a shitty little bar – and wheeling out stories from our neighbourhood from years ago, and who is doing what, and, ‘Did you hear about so-and-so? Did you hear about that shop that got robbed?’ I’ve found that I can go back there and relate to people again.
Not much has changed in Knowle West. They still need more stuff to do. There’s no pubs, nothing there, but what’s crazy is, former council flats are selling for 200 grand up there apparently!
I was there for Christmas 2017, and on the day before New Year’s Eve, my friend Darryl Pursey’s mum threw a party at her house, which is literally round the corner from where my nan used to be in Barnstaple Road. I was at his mum Lynn’s house, drunk, dancing, with people I grew up with, in a house right near where I grew up. I was also in pubs seeing guys I haven’t seen since I was seventeen years of age.
I went out with my cousins Mark and Michelle, and Trevor Beckford, and my nephew Jeran, and later on me and Jeran went and saw Danny Shepherd, the guy I was at school with from the age of five. Danny was in the pub with his son, and he is actually married to a girl we used to hang out with when we were kids. It was like I never left.
It’s funny, because people always associate me with Bristol, and ‘the Bristol Sound’, whatever that is, but I never made an album there. I don’t know if there ever was a Bristol scene. I said that in a magazine interview a couple of years ago, and people down there went fucking crazy. Bristolians were like, ‘Waaaaah, Tricky said there’s no scene!’ I had to laugh, because some guy called in to a local radio show, and he goes, ‘What does he know? He’s a millionaire who lives in LA!’ Which wasn’t true on at least two counts. People have no handle on reality.
The irony is, I definitely could see me doing an album there in future. I’ve even talked to Michelle about moving back. She reckons that I should get a place there, but also live in Berlin. If that comes together, I would love to do an album in Bristol, just to see what the vibe would be like.
I’m back with some of my oldest friends, so even though I’ve cut myself off in Berlin, it’s actual
ly got me back to my essence. I’ve also been hanging out with Whitley, who I lost contact with for a while. When I did my ‘Aftermath’ white label and moved to London, he stayed behind and was kind of done with music. He didn’t like how people change around it. He thought it was all bullshit, so he went and got a job, and now he works for a company delivering mobility equipment to people’s homes. He just didn’t want to be involved in it anymore.
WHITLEY ALLEN: A couple of years ago, I got a message from a mate out of the blue, saying, ‘Tricky wants your number.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, sound!’ We didn’t see each other for years. I can’t tell you the details of where he was career-wise, because I wasn’t around him then. I only remember him as the guy I mucked about with, and the couple of times when I have seen him, he was that same guy.
I saw him in London one night when he was over from LA. Someone was going up to see him, and I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll come,’ because I hadn’t seen him for twelve or thirteen years, since the mid-90s when he left Bristol. We went to his hotel in the middle of the night and I could hear loud music in the foyer – I thought, ‘That’ll be him, won’t it?’ Next minute it was thump-thump on the door, and then, ‘Aaaaaaah!’
At that point, I think he was getting caught up with serious people out there in LA. He had a girl in the bed, and I can’t remember which one of his brothers was around, but he was talking all this stuff about guns with someone. We were going down in the lift to get some food, and I was like, ‘You ain’t a gangster and I ain’t coming to your funeral!’ Thinking back about it, people might have thought, ‘Who are you to say that?’ That’s just me. Like, ‘You are still that person I know and you’re messing with the wrong crowd.’
He grew up in that gangster background, and I didn’t – but we did get up to a lot of mischief together. Even though we were kind of amongst it, we both got out of there. We dabbled. He said a funny thing to me: ‘We were a car ride away from being proper gangsters.’ He was really talking about Shaun Fray, the guy who got killed in East Ham. Sometimes we would jump the Tube, but just imagine – if we’d had a car, we would’ve been going out there all the time, and we could’ve got seriously embroiled in his world. That was a realisation for me, even all these years later, because we were hustlers, and once you start getting that type of money, you’ll get used to it and it’s a slippery slope.
We lost a lot of people we knew in Knowle West who fell off the edge. I go up there now and there’s a lot of people missing. Girls as well as boys, who just didn’t make it out. A few people OD’d. You see the people who are still there now, and it’s just like, ‘Wow …’ Going back is a bit painful sometimes, but it was good times when we were up there. It was clean – it was just a bit hard. We drank a lot of cider, and it was good fun. When we vacated the place, that’s when the drugs came in and started wiping everybody out.
Me and Adrian got back in touch properly in February 2016, when he played at the BBC 6 Music Festival in Bristol. We’d been speaking on the phone, and my missus was like, ‘He’s chatting to his girlfriend again …’ She didn’t know that I knew him. Even my daughter was like, ‘Why is he always chatting to this Tricky guy?’ Then she looked him up and was, ‘Oh my God, my dad knows him!’
He’s been around the world doing this, that and the other. I was always happy for him, but he was on a different level to how I was living. He was like, ‘But you could have called?’ I was like, ‘I know Adrian Thaws – that is my mate. You’re the guy from Knowle West and I’m that guy too, and that is our relationship.’
My wife and I went down to the 6 Music show with Michelle and Marie, and I was absolutely blown away, like, ‘That’s my mate, I’ve been with him all day, and he’s onstage!’ I don’t know all of his music. It’s not like, ‘Oh, he’s my mate, I’ve got to buy every album.’ I’ve only really got into it recently through my missus. She plays it more than me. I don’t play it – that would be weird.
As I said before, he’s a nightmare and he knows it. He ain’t changed. The other day he told me that he’s moving.
‘What? You’ve only just moved!’
‘No, I’m going to another place …’
‘But you only just moved!’
My saying for him is, wherever he lays his hat is his home. He keeps it moving constantly, but he’s still that person I knocked about with all those years ago. I piss myself, because I see it – you’re still the same person, and you’re not gonna change. I don’t want him to change – that’s why I like him.
Our getting back together, I class it the same as knowing someone who has been in prison. They get put away at eighteen years of age, say, and they do ten years, and when they come out, they’re still eighteen because their life goes on hold while they’re in there. It was like that, straight back to those eighteen-year-olds, as if we’d never been apart.
TRICKY: Someone else I’ve been talking to again in the last few years is 3D. It’s only him and G left in Massive Attack now, which is kind of crazy when you think there were six or seven of us to begin with. They should be called Missing Attack! Seriously, though, it’s amazing how big they are, playing arenas and stuff – it blows my mind.
Me and 3D are getting on really well. We call each other and talk to each other. We meet up sometimes and get pissed up together. He’s known me since I was a kid. I’ve known him so long, it’s almost like he’s always been there. He’s about three years older than me, but he doesn’t seem it. He ain’t like an old man. He’s youthful-thinking.
A year or two ago, I was talking to him on the phone, and he goes, ‘You’ve been listed as one of England’s Top Five Rappers!’ And then he goes, ‘They didn’t put me in there!’ He’s really funny, D, he’s got a great sense of humour, I must admit. He can make fun of himself.
He knows me so well that I could say anything to him, and he wouldn’t take it personally. I’ve said stuff about him in the press which, if someone said that about me in the press, I wouldn’t be talking to them! Maybe that’s pissed him off, but he’s still my mate, because he knows deep down I’m not like that, and I don’t really mean it. It’s either what I consider funny at the time, or I’m just not very cultured. I’m a Knowle West guy – the one who’s pissed up and might say something stupid. The guy who when he’s drunk you can’t take him places. But D knows I’m a good guy. I’ve got a good heart. I just put my foot in it sometimes. I can be a dick, and he can totally put up with that.
My nickname for him is Vlad, or Vlad the Impaler – like Dracula, because he’s like a vampire. When I text him, I say, ‘What’s going on, Vlad?’ I could post something on Instagram, and he’ll see it on there, and he’ll like the vibe, and do the same thing. He calls me Ivan the Terrible.
In 2016, I did a track with him for a Massive EP, called ‘Take It There’, and I felt like some of the old competition between us was creeping in again. When he sent me back the mix, he’d got effects all over his voice, and mine was dry – no effects at all. I’m like, ‘Vlad, why is my vocal dry as a bone? Why don’t you just put a little bit of reverb on there, seeing as your vocal has triple reverb, delay, echo – every fucking effect in the book!’
I came onstage with them when they headlined at Hyde Park that summer. It’s like a machine when they play live: it costs so much money that if they don’t have a certain amount of success, they can’t tour. I couldn’t work like that, as the pressure to be a mega-success every time would do my head in. I’d feel trapped. But as I say, it blows my mind how they’ve turned out.
I also really rate Nellee Hooper. He is a legend, and he could be playing off it big-time, but he doesn’t seem to give a fuck. He was one of the founding members of Wild Bunch, and he produced Soul II Soul, Björk and Massive Attack. He could be giving it, ‘I’m the ambassador of this, that, whatever,’ but he doesn’t live off his name. He’s just walked away and is living his life. He doesn’t do the celebrity thing. I really rate him for that.
I’d say Massive Attack’s music is ‘bett
er’ than mine, but I think the reason why people relate to my music is precisely because there are mistakes all over the shop. People could never listen to Massive Attack and think, ‘I could do that,’ whereas I’ve put out tracks I should never have released. I don’t know how I got away with it! But that’s how I make music, from the hip, and once it’s done, I can’t take it back. I think that’s why I get a lot of love, because I risk putting it out there. I read a comment about me on YouTube that said, ‘Tricky has always been the dark spirit of Massive Attack,’ and I thought, ‘Now, I get it – I was the mysterious guy!’
Nowadays if I record something and I don’t like it, I’ll usually just erase it. Back in the ’90s when studio time was so precious, you kept everything and there’s a lot of stuff from that era that I never released – music no one has heard that I made with Cyndi Lauper, Björk, Grace Jones, Neneh Cherry and probably a load of hip-hop people. A lot of it may be in amongst the stuff we got digitised from my lock-up in New York. Horst has been trying to get me to listen through that archive. I’m crap at that, though – sitting and listening to hours of old music just doesn’t seem exciting to me. I feel like if I listen to it I’ll get caught up in the past. I’m into doing new music, and I certainly wouldn’t want to bring any of that old stuff onto a new album, as I don’t feel like I need to rely on it.
The way I record today is almost exactly the same way as it always was. When I start off, it’s a completely blank page. I don’t make music, music makes me. If I sit with the keyboards, hit ‘record’ and play around for a bit, I’ll play it back and what I’ve got tells me where I’m going from there. The keyboard part will tell me what the drums need to sound like, then the drums will tell me what the bassline should be, then that piece of music tells me the lyrics – I start hearing words in the music. It really is that easy. There’s no thinking process in it at all, no danger of writer’s block, nor any need to have confidence. It’s always gonna work; you don’t have to do anything – just be present and the music will do all the work for you.