by Tricky
Gripper was a lovable rogue – massive, but fast as hell. He should have done boxing. When Tyson was around, this trainer guy wanted to get him into boxing, but he didn’t have that mindset. He was just a crook, into stealing bikes – motorbikes and pushbikes – that’s all he used to do. Then he got into burglary and got hooked on crack, but that was after we left. When we were around, he was still clean – he didn’t even smoke pot.
He was the same age as Nicky. They were about the same, but on different levels – Nicky was supreme compared to Chrissie. Nicky was in the elite class.
TRICKY: HMP Horfield, a Category B men’s prison, sits in the north of Bristol. It’s way up on the other side of the city centre from Knowle West, but most of the kids I knew in the neighbourhood were kind of resigned to the fact that they’d be locked up there at some point. My uncles had been there, my cousins had been there, my friends had been there, and even my friends’ sons went there later on, so I almost knew that I was going there as well.
I’d been arrested a few times and taken into the cells at Knowle West police station. You start getting into trouble before prison, and you get locked up for the night. That would be for just fucking around, but you are too young, so they can’t keep you there. So that’s where you start, and deep down you know where you’re going to end up. Going to prison is almost like the next step.
When I was finally sent to the young offenders’ part of Horfield, aged seventeen, it was hardly a shock at all. How it happened was, a mate and I used to buy forged £50 notes – for a fiver each, I think it was. We’d buy loads of them, and then send people into shops, or go into shops ourselves, and buy stuff and get the change. It was like small-scale money laundering, but they called it Forgery of the Crown, which makes it sound really serious, and I eventually got nicked for it when the mate I did it with grassed me up – at least, that’s what I think happened. There’s no way they could’ve known about it unless he’d told them.
It wasn’t like he gave evidence in court or anything. I was just a young guy from Knowle West who couldn’t afford a decent lawyer. I was going to jail, it’s as simple as that. Money makes a difference in these things. They don’t have to have someone stand up in court to send you to prison. If I’d had enough cash to get a proper lawyer, there’s a good chance I could’ve got off with it, because there was no proof of me having those notes, just hearsay.
I wasn’t surprised when the judge sent me to prison, because before me was a woman who had two kids, and she couldn’t pay a fine. The guy sent her to prison, so it’s obvious where I was going. This judge was just a horrible rich dude. To be a magistrate, you’ve gotta come from a good family. You ain’t getting judges or magistrates coming from Knowle West, so it was a rich guy who had no idea what real life is like. If you can send a woman with two children to prison for not paying a fine, what kind of person are you? My case was up next, so I knew I was going to jail. It was just fucking obvious.
My nan was there in court, and she spoke a little bit. She was a good actress, my nan. She was all tearful, like, ‘Oh, he lost his mum when he was four.’ She might have been able to get me off, because the judge was listening to her, he liked the fact that she was pleading. He liked the power, it puffed him up, he was getting off on it, but I wasn’t gonna let her do that for him. He was nothing compared to my nan. My nan was like a soldier. There’s no way I was letting this coward – that’s what he was – reduce her to that, because she was a lot stronger than he would ever be in his life.
I said to her, ‘Sit down, Nan!’ and she sat down and changed from looking all sad, to looking more normal. I could see him looking at her, and then straight off he sent me down for two months. I thought, ‘I’d rather go to prison than have my nan beg this fucker for anything.’ I sent myself to prison, really. I’d rather go to jail. I didn’t give a fuck.
Seriously, my nan could’ve got me off with her acting skills if I’d kept quiet. After I got sentenced, she came over and gave me a little slap and said, ‘Look after yourself!’ Then she walked straight out of the court – from, ‘Oh, he lost his mum’ to that casual farewell! She didn’t visit me in prison or anything. She knew, she had been through all that.
As they led me out from the courtroom and down into the little holding cell below, I honestly wasn’t scared. It wasn’t a shock. It was just part of the journey. When you’re that age, it’s almost like just another adventure. You ain’t seeing it as prison, more like, this is where you knew you were going to end up, and here it is.
After waiting around for a bit in the holding cell, they put you in a van, which is divided up into tiny cubicles narrower than your own body, and you are chained through these armholes to the person in the next one along. If you’re claustrophobic, or if they have an accident, you’re fucked.
When you arrive at the prison, they take you in, and you’re put in another holding cell, where all the other new prisoners are. One guy I felt really sad for. He was a lot older than me, probably in his late forties, and he was picking up dog-ends off the floor to make himself a roll-up. He was in there because he murdered a guy for cheating with his wife. He shouldn’t have been there, really. He wasn’t a hardened career criminal. Affairs of the heart make people do crazy things. I don’t know how much he got, but it must have been fifteen years.
Then my natural instincts kicked in. Someone came and offered me, like, ‘Hey, you want some cigarettes?’ I said, ‘Nah,’ because if you take a cigarette, then you owe him two. Your natural instincts kick in. I also realised that it’s important where you are in line. A guy two people before me said the wrong thing and got a smack from one of the screws, so I knew what not to say by the time he came to me. You learn from someone getting a smack in front of you.
While you’re still in the holding cell, you get fed, and the food’s disgusting. I’ve always been a really fussy eater. I grew up with good food. With my uncle Ken, we’d eat spaghetti Bolognese, roast dinners, and then even with my great-grandparents, it would be fresh fucking rabbit, with vegetables out of the garden.
In there it was worse than school dinners. I had this thing on my plate – this lump of fish, peas and mashed potato – and I was just looking at it.
‘You gonna eat that?’ asks this guy next to me.
‘Nah!’
He takes my plate and starts scoffing it down.
‘How long are you in for?’ I goes.
‘Two years.’
He said it like it was two minutes. There was another guy who was doing seven years for arson, and he was just the same. I immediately realised: I ain’t like these people. Just that mentality … I mean, I didn’t care, but they really didn’t care – there is a difference. I was there because I had to be there. They seemed like they’d been there before, and they were gonna go there again, and they were totally comfortable with that. I wasn’t. I knew I hadn’t got nowhere better to go, but how was I gonna be a prison guy if I couldn’t even eat the food?
I was just watching everything, and that’s what hit me, how conditioned you could get, and how he ate the food like it was fresh rabbit or spaghetti Bolognese. That was like, wow.
After the holding cell, you see a doctor, and you get all your stuff – pillow, bed sheets, blankets and all of that, and carry it through to your cell. And that’s it – from then on, you are locked in your cell for twenty-three hours a day until they let you out again. Every other day, you get what they call ‘association’, where you go into a room for an hour where there’s a television, pool table, darts.
At eighteen, you go to the full adult prison, but I was only seventeen, so I was in the youth custody wing. My cell was at the front of the building, overlooking the main road. There were just two of us in there, me and this other guy. He had a picture of his girlfriend on the wall – a ballerina, not professional, but she did ballet – and he drove himself crazy about this girl, wondering if she was cheating on him. He was there for longer than me, and he’d been in before as well, b
ecause he knew how to make the beds and stuff – you have to make the beds a certain way, and if you do it wrong, you can be given punishments.
In that respect he knew the game more than me, but he was driving himself crazy about this girl, worrying about who she was cheating on him with. I think if you go to prison, you can’t be worrying about your girlfriend. He was totally comfortable there, he had his roll-ups, he was totally cool – it was just his girlfriend.
In the first couple of days, I had an asthma attack, because they’d taken my inhaler off me. The other guy in my cell, who I didn’t even know at that stage, he was scared to death, even more than I was. The screws outside could obviously hear me but they just didn’t come to give me my inhaler, so I could have died in there, and they wouldn’t’ve given a fuck. Only the next morning did they bring me my Ventolin – gave me two puffs and took it back off me.
As you can imagine, that made me a little bit angry. I could understand sending someone to prison, but letting someone nearly die of an asthma attack? That experience made me even more anti-authority than I was before I went in.
Otherwise, I never had any problems in there – no bullying, none of that. It wasn’t that I saw terrible things in there. The only thing that really got to me was the boredom. Prison is just mind-numbing. Unbelievable. You’re in a cell the size of a bathroom for twenty-three hours a day, with literally nothing to do. You just sit in the cell and talk with the other guy, smoke a roll-up, and talk some more. You aren’t like, Oh, I wish I could listen to music now. You are just bored. Twenty-three hours a day, watching the walls. I never got one visit when I was there, so it wasn’t nothing except boredom. Nothing else came into my head except wanting to get out.
That, in a way, was my journey. Shit food, bored out of my mind, and people saying, ‘Yeah, I’ve got seven years, I’ve got two.’ That really got into my head in all those empty hours and days. I was only in there for two months, but it was that mentality, just seeing how conditioned you can get.
When I got out, it felt like it had been a rite of passage. I felt good. I was seventeen, and I can remember going back to Knowle West, like, ‘Yeah, I’ve been to prison!’ Because when it finally happens, for some reason you almost feel a little bit good about it. I was at my auntie Marlow’s house, and I remember my cousin Michelle said to me, ‘How was it?’ And I said, ‘Easy!’ And she said to me, ‘No, it wasn’t easy – you did it because you had to do it!’
Because of the boredom, and the conditioning, and the Ventolin episode, I really didn’t like it, and it was like I made a life choice right there. I won’t say I didn’t get in trouble after that, but I knew that that life wasn’t for me, so I didn’t go into it full-on. So sometimes, when I didn’t have money, I’d get an agency job and other work instead of robbing or doing something dodgy. But without seeing that little prison stint, who knows?
My uncles were hardcore, and it’s only because I’m not tough that I didn’t end up like them. I really admired them, how they had a name in Manchester and Bristol. If I was a tougher person, I would definitely have chosen that way, because if you admire somebody, you want to emulate them. It’s only the fact that I’m not a tough guy, and luckily I realised I’m not, that set me on a different path.
There were definitely people around me at that time in my teens who weren’t sure I’d be around for long. I met this guy who was writing a book about the streets of Bristol, and he said in the book, ‘If this boy makes it to twenty, he could really be someone.’
Some of my relatives and old friends say they always knew I would do something with my life. Whitley always says he knew it as well. He says that I could go in a room and it would go quiet, or I could walk into a club and the vibe would completely change, or if I started telling a story, all of a sudden everybody would stop and listen. There were little signals telling me I was going to be who I am now, but I couldn’t see them yet. It was almost like people were telling me a story I didn’t know. Because sometimes I do wonder: how the fuck did I get where I am now?
CHAPTER FOUR
TARZAN THE HIGH PRIEST
The Specials changed everything. Their first album was like my life on a record. Just called The Specials, it came out in 1979, and I was only eleven then, so I can’t quite remember how old I was when I first actually heard it, but I knew right away that they were the ones for me. Seeing them on TV was the first time kids like me had a band representing us – someone like myself on television!
Suddenly it was like, ‘Ah, now everything makes a bit of sense … I have a voice.’ I used to think, ‘Where do I belong? I’m in Knowle West, growing up with white people, then I go and visit my dad in St Paul’s, where it’s predominantly black.’ It was like I had two different lives almost, and then I myself was mixed-race, surrounded by a family of varying colour.
When I saw The Specials – black and white people together in one band – it was the first time I could relate to anything. Like, ‘Ah, there’s people who feel like I do.’ All the songs on that record were describing life as I lived it – getting chased on the street, hanging around council estates, and later on going to nightclubs – so they were the first artists I ever heard talking about stuff I had experienced.
When Terry Hall sang, he was a white guy in a band with black guys, so it was almost like the reverse of my upbringing in Knowle West, but still he spoke to that little black Knowle Wester. Then you had Neville Staple in there. The only time I’d ever heard Jamaican being spoken in music was on reggae tunes that were actually made in Jamaica, but here was a British bloke dropping proper Jamaican patois on an English record.
The Specials became a huge part of my life, and it was the same for thousands of kids growing up in our multi-racial generation across England. They arrived just at the perfect time for me, as music in general was quickly becoming more and more important to me. After hearing Billie Holiday with Nana Violet, Marvin Gaye at Ken Porter’s, and reggae on the streets around my dad’s, I’d got into Marc Bolan, and then I’d gone into a little electronic phase, listening to Gary Numan of all people.
When I was fifteen, I got into skinhead music, which is weird seeing as some of those Oi! bands, like the 4-Skins, were supposed to be racist. I was into it for the music, not the look so much, but you end up getting into the fashions – Dr Martens, Crombies, Fred Perry’s, Sta-Prest trousers and all that. I wouldn’t have called myself a skinhead, and I wasn’t actually a skinhead with a shaved head, but I definitely dressed like a skinhead. Shiny boots, braces – it was all part of the culture. I used to polish my boots every night before going out. We’d go to skinhead clubs, where they played Prince Buster and stuff like that, and all your mates would be there with their Dr Martens on.
From there, I made the natural progression into rude boy, with the brogues and the slacks, and I was just ripe for discovering The Specials and Two-Tone. I could so relate to them, in a way that I couldn’t with anything else. Like, when I was in my teens, I remember seeing Prince on TV with my cousin Michelle, and thinking, ‘God, what the fuck is this? Who’s this in high heels doing this strange music?’ I realised that he was an incredible artist, but I couldn’t identify with him at all.
Seeing Terry Hall, it was, ‘Okay, I could do that one day.’ With Prince, even if I wanted to be a musician, it was like, ‘Well, I can’t do that – I don’t wear high heels, I can’t play every instrument, and I can’t dance like he does,’ but when I’d seen The Specials, I was like, ‘Fuck, I could be a musician, because they are all like me.’
Terry Hall made me want to be in a band, because he wasn’t a natural singer. He was self-taught, and he had his own thing going on. I used to lie in bed listening to the album and pretend I was singing the songs onstage in The Specials. I’m sure some of the other big rock bands who were around at the time were from council estates, too, or at least from humble backgrounds, but with The Specials, it wasn’t like they were from council flats and now they were swanning around behaving like roc
k stars. When they got famous, it seemed like they’d stayed exactly the same as they were before.
My excitement about music as a way of life was my own little discovery. Although there were certain sounds I’d been exposed to through various family members, music didn’t have that kind of place in their lives. My great-uncle Martin wasn’t into dancing – he stabbed and glassed people. If any of my uncles went to a club, it was to take it over, or to burn it down or to hurt someone who’d disrespected them. They weren’t in the club for the music, that’s for sure.
Although, actually, Martin once informed me that he was a creative type. When he’d carved ‘RAT’ on that guy’s chest, he did it again on his forehead in smaller letters. I asked him, ‘Why did you do the little one?’ and he goes, ‘Because I’m artistic,’ so I guess he must’ve been. Someone told me Martin may be able to play piano a little, but he’s never confirmed that.
In the houses I grew up in, nobody was painting or writing or playing music, and there were certainly never any concerts in Knowle West. Nothing ever happens up there. The only music event I’ve ever heard about took place after I’d moved away: Tim Westwood came and DJ’d, and apparently he got robbed – some people broke into his bus and turned it over. There was only ever the one boozer, the Venture Inn, a red-brick estate pub in Melvin Square: that place was famous for violence, which is probably why it eventually got closed down.
When my nan moved to Totterdown and I went to live with her there, it was, as I’ve said, a step up for both of us. It was a better area, more expensive. It’s closer to town, right near Temple Meads, with shops and pubs and decent schools nearby. It’s more multicultural, too. Living there was literally the first time I met Indians and Pakistanis, so I guess you’d say my horizons were broadening. It was a nice community, very small, very family, but still a bit ghetto – it certainly wasn’t a posh neighbourhood like Clifton.
