by Tricky
HELL IS ROUND THE CORNER
HELL IS ROUND THE CORNER
TRICKY
WITH ANDREW PERRY
Published by Blink Publishing
The Plaza,
535 Kings Road,
Chelsea Harbour,
London, SW10 0SZ
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Hardback – 978-1-788702-22-5
Trade Paperback – 978-1-788702-29-4
Ebook – 978-1-788702-31-7
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CONTENTS
Note to Reader
List of Contributors
Family Tree
Chapter One13 Padstow Road
Chapter TwoThe Godfreys
Chapter ThreeFounding Fathers
Chapter FourTarzan the High Priest
Chapter FiveTricky Kid
MICRODOTS
Chapter SixDaydreaming
Chapter SevenIsland Records
Chapter EightAnonymity
BOWIE
Chapter NineNearly Good
Chapter TenDurban Poison
BRITISH AIRWAYS
Chapter ElevenSpeaking in Tongues
INK WORK
Chapter TwelveBrown Punk
MASTER CHEN
Chapter ThirteenGhetto Youth
GLASTONBURY
Chapter FourteenThe Taxman
Chapter FifteenSearching for Maxine
WHAT A FUCKING GAME
Acknowledgements
Index
NOTE TO THE READER
We’ve got other people talking in this book apart from me, just because it’s better! It’s unconventional for an autobiography, I know, but that’s alright. It’s just how I wanted it.
Some of what follows in these pages, people might not believe if I say it. I’m sure when some people do autobiographies, they dramatise things. They exaggerate stuff, so some of the stories, if I told them, might sound like exaggeration. Like, ‘He’s not serious, that didn’t happen!’ Coming from someone else, maybe they’ll believe them, because they are true.
There are family members talking about things that happened before I was born, or when I was too young to know what was really going on. And then there are friends who might remember things better than me – I had years of smoking weed, all kinds of drugs. Know what I mean? Sometimes it’s more reliable someone else saying it.
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
MARTIN GODFREY – Great-Uncle
TONY GUEST – Uncle
MICHELLE PORTER – Cousin
ROY THAWS – Father
MARLOW PORTER – Aunt
WHITLEY ALLEN – Friend
RAY MIGHTY – Smith & Mighty
ROB SMITH – Smith & Mighty
MARC MAROT – Island Records MD
JULIAN PALMER – Island Records
TERRY HALL – The Specials
SHAUN RYDER – Happy Mondays, Black Grape
BEN WINCHESTER – Booking Agent, Primary Talent
PETE BRIQUETTE – Former Live Band Member
PERRY FARRELL – Jane’s Addiction, Porno For Pyros
AMANI VANCE – Friend
LEE JAFFE – Photographer
CESAR ACEITUNO – Friend
MAI LUCAS – Photographer, Friend
CHARLES DE LINIERE – Friend
HORST WEIDENMÜLLER – !K7, Manager
MAYNARD JAMES KEENAN – Tool, A Perfect Circle
MARIE – Daughter
FAMILY TREE
CHAPTER ONE
13 PADSTOW ROAD
My first memory is seeing my mum in a coffin, when I was four years old. In those days, when somebody died, you had the coffin at home for a week or two, so all the family could come and say their goodbyes before they buried the person. When you’re that young, you don’t really understand what’s going on. Obviously I could see a lot of people were sad – family members coming into the house crying and stuff – so I knew it wasn’t good. She’d committed suicide, and I didn’t understand that, either.
They’d put the coffin in the room opposite mine, so I would go and stand on a chair and look inside when everyone was asleep. The coffin was kept open, and the body was right there. I didn’t feel anything. I knew she was my mum, but I couldn’t really get the concept. So that’s my first memory: at four years old, going into that room.
I can’t remember anything before that. I can’t even remember my mum: that’s my first memory of her, seeing her dead. I’ve never looked at it as bad or horrible. Most people’s first memory is about school or home or whatever, but that’s mine.
This was in my grandmother’s house in Barnstaple Road, Knowle West – a white ghetto area of Bristol, which was built in the 1930s to help clear the slums out of the city centre. It was my great-grandparents who first moved there, when they were young, into a council housing development that had just been constructed.
People probably know I’m from a tough family, but no one knows the details. We were one of the first mixed-race families in England, going back three or four generations. My grandfather was an African serviceman briefly stationed in Knowle West. There’s a tribe in Ghana called Quaye – but no one knows exactly where he came from. There’s bound to be some slave history in his bloodline.
He met a white woman named Violet, and they had a kid together. He eventually left England, so their daughter – my mum, Maxine Quaye – grew up with the white side of her family in Knowle West. Even though she was mixed-race, culturally she was very ‘white’ and, given the area she grew up in, you would’ve thought she’d have gone on to marry a white guy.
Instead, she got together with a Jamaican man called Roy Thaws, and had me. I don’t know for sure how they met. Roy was in London first, before he moved to Bristol, and his dad had a sound system, one of the best-known sound systems in England, called Tarzan the High Priest. My dad didn’t come here and become Anglicised. He was still very Jamaican, and kept up the Jamaican traditions with the food he ate, and he even ran a dominoes team that played around England.
The first Jamaican my mum probably got to know well was my dad. They used to go to the same clubs, like the Bamboo Club in St Paul’s, the black ghetto of Bristol, which was a very popular place for music with all locals, not just black people, so I like to think they met there.
They never got married, but when I was born, on 27 January 1968, my mum got him to give me his last name. If I’d taken my mum’s name, I’d have been a Quaye, and if she had kept her mum’s name, I would have been Godfrey, but back then, people wanted you to take your dad’s name. It obviously wasn’t something I chose: I was Adrian Nicholas Matthew Thaws, and that was that.
The rest of the family say I was very close to my mum, but I can’t remember anything about being with her, apart from seeing her body in the coffin. One thing I found out lat
er was that she wrote poetry. When Channel 4 in the UK made a documentary about me in the mid-90s called Tricky: Naked and Famous, one of my family must’ve given them a poem she’d written, because my auntie Marlow read out the whole thing in the programme. I didn’t even know about it until I watched the finished documentary: by that point, I’d made two or three albums, so it all began to make sense to me after that.
There was obviously no opportunity for her to go anywhere with her writing. She could’ve written until her hand fell off, but there was no way she was going to be able to publish a book. She wrote for her own pleasure, and apparently she used to do it a lot. That poem is about individuality, being an individual, which also kind of makes sense.
On the day of her suicide, in 1972, she got dressed in her best clothes and went visiting all the family. In those days, you’d really only get dressed up on a Sunday. So they were like, ‘Where are you going? Why are you all dressed up?’ And she was like, ‘Oh, nowhere!’ Then she went home, wrote a letter asking her auntie to look after me, and killed herself – with tablets, probably sleeping pills. I’ve always been told that none of the family saw it coming, because she didn’t show any signs that she was about to do anything like that. There was no inkling. The only thing they thought was strange was, why was she all dressed up?
My dad found her, and he’s never really got over that. He’s still a bit fucked up by it, and he never talks about it. He rarely talks about my mum to me, come to think of it. He said to me once, ‘Your mum would be proud of you,’ but he has rarely mentioned her otherwise. He was a young guy when he found her. Imagine finding your girlfriend dead at that age.
Everyone in the family was cool with Roy up till that point, but afterwards things changed. My nan didn’t like him very much. I think she blamed him for my mum’s suicide, but it wasn’t nothing to do with him. My mum had epilepsy, and what I think is, she had two kids, and you can have an epileptic fit any time, so it’s hard for you to look after your kids. It’s dangerous if you have an epileptic fit and you’ve got two kids in the house by yourself. I think she just didn’t want to be here because of epilepsy. But obviously you’re going to blame the boyfriend, ain’t you, if you’re her mother. It’s easier if you have someone to blame.
Dad used to come and see me to begin with, but then my great-uncle Martin wrote a letter to my great-grandmother saying, ‘Roy has a lot to answer for.’ He was doing seven years in Dartmoor at the time. Basically, he was saying that when he got out, he was going to deal with my dad, and the news got back to him. Dad told me later, ‘If I’d been around then, I wouldn’t be around now.’ He stayed away because my uncle Martin was threatening to kill him.
You’d probably think I had a tough or unhappy upbringing, but it never felt like that to me. Knowle West was poor, but it didn’t feel dangerous. You were just aware that people who weren’t from Knowle West didn’t want to go there. It had a rough reputation.
Because I’m black, people imagine it must’ve been a black neighbourhood, but it was actually almost completely white, including most of my own family. The funny thing is, even being one of a tiny minority I never experienced any racism whatsoever growing up. That only happened when I became famous and had money.
Our family is very ethnically mixed in itself. My great-great-grandfather, Daniel Lawrence, was a sailor, quarter Jamaican and quarter Spanish, who came over from Jamaica in 1915 to make his home in Cornwall, but my great-great-grandmother, Minnie, was from a totally white family, who I think were in the tin mines down there. They must have had a horrendous time with racism, because there were no black people in Cornwall back then.
Their daughter, my great-grandmother, Margaret (‘Maga’), was mixed-race, and when she married my great-grandfather, his family disowned him. He was a Godfrey, which was the family name of a big landowner from Wales or Ireland. They might have even been a little bit royal or aristocratic – there’s even a Godfrey crest. They weren’t super-rich, but they owned farms and were wealthier than most.
When my great-grandfather was younger, he was a horse dealer, and everyone called him Farmer. He would import horses from Ireland to England – I don’t know if it was legal or not. The Godfreys were dead against him getting involved with my great-grandmother, though, and when they married, that was it for his connection with them. It was them that moved to Bristol and ended up in Knowle West.
Going back a century or two before then, Bristol was a city built on slavery. It was where all the English slave ships got built. It’s pretty dodgy, but the city’s main seated concert venue, Colston Hall, is actually named after the guy who built them, Edward Colston, although I’ve heard there’s plans to change the name. Bristol was also a big slave port, with hundreds of black people being trafficked in and out of the docks every year, which is probably why you’ve got street names like Black Boy Hill and Whiteladies Road.
A lot of the black in Bristol comes from the American soldiers stationed there in the Second World War – like my mum’s father. But these black GIs weren’t always welcomed with open arms: my great-uncle Martin saw a guy get kicked to death outside my great-grandmother’s house.
When people see pictures of all my relatives over the years, they’re like, ‘Wow, there’s so many different colours!’ but for us it was normal. We never knew any different. It was totally normal to have my grandmother look white, and then my great-grandmother look American Indian, my dad black, my auntie Marlow a bit Spanish or Italian, and then for my cousin Michelle to look white as well. None of it mattered to us, and we are a very close family.
After my mum passed away, everyone rallied around to look after me and bring me up. I lived with my auntie Marlow until I was eight, then in Knowle West with my great-grandparents, Farmer and Maga, at 13 Padstow Road, and with my grandmother Violet in Barnstaple Road, and it was only a five-minute walk between the two houses. In those days you could leave your door open without any worries, so I could go back and forth from one to the other, and wander right in.
Although it was a rough area, it wasn’t all tiny flats in council high-rises; more red-brick semi-detached houses on hill-top streets lined with occasional trees. I’m so happy I didn’t grow up in a tower block. At my great-grandparents’ place, it was just them two and me. I was really lucky, I think, because my great-grandmother was alive until I was thirteen or fourteen, and not many people get to see theirs. I’ve got pictures of three or four generations of my family – including me and my mum – all on the same doorstep outside that house at 13 Padstow Road. I’ve got that number tattooed on my neck – it’s my lucky number, and my uncle Tony’s, because it was obviously special to us.
Farmer used to play the thimbles, and Maga would whistle and play washboard and sing prison songs, because her son, Martin, was in prison so much. There was no carpet, just concrete floors, and a coal fire – my great-grandmother taught me how to make a fire. You didn’t sit around watching TV there, because there was no TV, so we were out all the time.
Every June in Padstow Road, the whole street would come out for the Queen’s birthday. It was like the Jubilee, every year. There would be stalls and tables laid out with food in the middle of the street, and everyone had cups with the Queen’s face and the Union Jack on. It’s weird: a lot of ghetto people are fanatical about that shit. Even though they’re getting fucked over by the elite, they love them. You’ve got football thugs who love the Queen. It never made no sense to me.
I went to Connaught Road Junior School (now known as Oasis Academy Connaught), and me and my younger sister Leanna were the only black kids there. After Mum passed, Leanna lived at Nanny Maga’s for a year or so, but after that we didn’t grow up together and we’ve never had much to do with each other since then.
Connaught was right across the road from Padstow Road, and barely ten minutes from Barnstaple Road, so I could walk to school on my own – everything was right there, and I never had to leave the area. To a kid of five or six, that’s a lot of fun, and i
t was safe back then because everybody knew each other. You didn’t hear of dodgy stuff happening to kids, because there would be people on the gates. You’d come home from school, have your tea and then get straight outside. In those days, you were encouraged: ‘Go on, get outside and play!’ We’d be in parks, on bikes, hanging around outside chip shops, getting chased and stuff.
Me and my mates used to hang out on Filwood Green, right across from my nan’s place and the local youth club. In the summer we all used to sit on the grass and play football. On the other side of the green, there was a chip shop, with pinball machines and arcade games. Sometimes the youth club would do bus trips to Weston-super-Mare, but mostly we would hang on the green, which I could see from my bedroom window – I’ve had some good times on that grass, I tell you, just sat in the sun, doing nothing.
One time, when I was about seven, my nan Violet was driving past and she saw me having a fight with a guy over a football. When I walked into the house later, she got me on her lap, and said to my step-grandad, ‘Did you see him fighting, Winston? He done good!’ She was proud of me. This was the guidance I was getting.
We weren’t rich, but I always had good clothes. There’s this great old picture of me from the ’70s wearing a red tank-top jumper, a cream patterned shirt and beige broad-checked flares. I dressed dapper, mate! I wore a Marc Bolan T-shirt all the time, too – the first and only music T-shirt I ever had. I used to go into Weston-super-Mare wearing it, and Blackpool with my nan on holiday. I loved his lyrics. You know that song ‘Cosmic Dancer’? It goes, ‘I danced myself right into the tomb, is it strange to dance so soon?’ Proper lyrics, and what’s mad is, he died young. To me, that guy was just somewhere else – he was a psychic genius.
I was never a sad kid. I was a mischievous, naughty kid. The only time not having a mum used to frustrate me was when I used to go to school, maybe, or if I was going to pick up a friend from their house, and I’d hear them say, ‘Alright – bye, Mum!’ Hearing other people say ‘mum’ – that was the only time it really hurt. Otherwise I was mischievous, having loads of fun.
