Hell Is Round the Corner

by Tricky

  When Pre-Millennium Tension came out, quite a lot of reviewers slated it for being too dark and claustrophobic, but now a lot of my fans prefer it to Maxinquaye. I’ve got kids who bring it to my shows, who weren’t born when it came out, saying that it saved their life: ‘I had depression, everything was going wrong, and that album got me through it!’ Maybe it was just ahead of its time.

  JULIAN PALMER: The only way to really shake the beast is to get in amongst it, so I thought it was a great idea for him to go to New York and become the cause célèbre there, that it would help the Americans understand who he was, but for him it was just an escape. London music gets very claustrophobic, and he needed to get away, a change of scenery. Tricky has always needed to move, from one tiny space to another, and never even contemplating making it feel like home by putting pictures up or whatever. He always lived a transient lifestyle.

  Pre-Millennium Tension was absolute genius. It didn’t matter where he was in the world – Jamaica, New York, wherever – it was him and his headphones in a little room. The music was always so deeply personal, and nothing really changed in that regard. He wasn’t making polished American records, and he wasn’t collaborating with Jamaican reggae artists – he was just Tricky.

  Pre-Millennium was the last thing I did with him, and the pressures to deliver hits weren’t there because he had sold a lot of records on Maxinquaye without having a hit single in the traditional sense. This time, ‘Christiansands’ was actually reasonably placed in the singles chart, but it wasn’t about that. It was there to announce that Tricky had another body of work out.

  ‘Tricky Kid’ was just the business, though, wasn’t it? I thought it was like an anthem; it was who he was. There was a little dig at Goldie in there, who was now dating Björk – ‘the king of jungle, used to be humble’. I never thought it was a radio record, just one that you think people will connect with. It’s the most basic and simplistic side of what he did, the hookiest side, but menacing!

  With Martina, it was heading to a place where it couldn’t survive – it had got too fractious, but then ‘Makes Me Wanna Die’ was so beautiful, and a large part of that was down to her, so the album had those moments, too.

  His whole life went into Maxinquaye, and everything that followed on the second record had to be the journey he went on after that one had been successful – all the parties and the drugs and the self-loathing. Even though it didn’t do as well in the UK, I thought it was the perfect follow-up. It might well have done a little bit better in America, with the US hip-hop samples, and of course it always takes two or three albums to get anywhere there.

  Through him being the darling of the indie alternative media in the UK, he was always gonna be the darling of New York, LA, Miami and Chicago as well. That is the one thing about America: you may not hit the Midwest ever, but you are certainly going to be the go-to gig when you turn up in those places, and that certainly came to pass. His life got very rock ’n’ roll.

  I personally enjoyed the celebrity he had acquired. We certainly weren’t doing it for him to become a celebrity of any sort, and he certainly wasn’t, but that’s what he had become, and all the right people wanted to know him, so we enjoyed ourselves a little bit too much. I certainly did – so much that I went off the rails and ended up in rehab, and left Island.

  I was let go, because Polygram’s corporate mindset was gradually taking over as Blackwell drifted out of the picture. Island was one of the last bastions of independence, but it couldn’t last forever. U2 was becoming too big a thing to progress further without the might of a corporation behind it globally. Politically I was too much Blackwell’s boy, and too mad, bad and dangerous to know. There was a night of the long knives, and I was one of the first people whom the accountants and lawyers muscled out.

  God knows what dark spaces Tricky ended up inhabiting, but the mid-90s were a bit like that anyway. It was like one non-stop party. I don’t regret any of it, I’m just glad that I experienced it. It almost felt as if we kind of had an obligation to go as far as we could in every single way.

  He was working on a lot of the ideas for the next album while we were still together, and I got a name-check on this track, ‘Demise’: ‘we’ll disarm ya, ask Julian Palmer’. I’d said to him, ‘Just keep the fuckers out, and don’t let anybody stand in your way!’ He had earned himself the right to have that autonomy as an artist, so that’s what that lyric was saying, but by then it was very much fingers-in-the-air time, and I was on my bike.

  TRICKY: Any time I was at home in New York, I’d be out at hip-hop clubs, living the way I’d always kind of dreamed of. Before Jay-Z was huge I used to see him in clubs. Even better, Puffy Combs was one of the first people over there to big up my name. We’re not friends or anything, but he was one of the first people who was like, ‘I want this guy to do a remix!’ You can see why he did well in music: he’s not a producer as such; he just had his ear to the ground.

  Ghetto guys in America don’t see Puffy as any kind of hip-hop bad boy. He is a powerful guy – so powerful that the FBI wanted to shut him down at one time. When you’ve got money, you can make things happen in America. So you could really say Puffy is just as gangsta as Suge Knight from Death Row Records – he just does his gangsta a bit different, because I know for a fact that Puffy could shut you down. He can blackball you. Puffy could say to certain radio stations, ‘Don’t play so-and-so,’ and you mysteriously won’t get played. Powerful guy.

  So Puffy had me doing a remix of The Notorious B.I.G.’s ‘Hypnotize’, when no one over there knew me. It was just after Biggie had died, and I was doing it in one of the well-known hip-hop studios. All these young hip-hop guys were looking through the door, because Biggie had just been killed and yet they were hearing his voice.

  Before I’d even moved to New York I’d done a few tracks for an EP with RZA, the producer behind the Wu-Tang Clan, along with this rap crew called Gravediggaz. Someone at Island had told me that he wasn’t too keen on working with me initially because he’d seen me wearing a dress on the cover of Maxinquaye. I suppose he thought that wasn’t right for a rapper, but then we did the EP together and he was totally cool. We did three or four tracks in one night, and there was no problem whatsoever.

  Amani Vance is someone who was with me through all my time in New York. We were together for a few years there, and even lived together for a while, and I still talk to her all the time. She often used to babysit for Mazy, and she knows Chris Blackwell really well. I first met her while she was working at Island’s New York office, where I used to go for meetings when I first went to the US to do promo and live shows. She is also the first person who got me weed in New York – she took me to Washington Park and we scored there.

  Amani’s dad, Jim Vance, was very famous as one of the first black newsreaders on prime-time TV in America. She grew up in Washington DC around a guy called Rayful Edmond, one of the biggest drug dealers in America, and his enforcer guy, Wayne Perry, who killed 500 people. But she’s got her own interesting story, coming from Washington DC.

  She’s black American, through and through. Black America was certainly never my biggest market, but she is a black American who knows and understands my music. The fact that she, from her part of the world, knows me, from Knowle West, strikes me as pretty insane. I don’t think there are many guys from Knowle West who would know somebody from Washington DC!

  AMANI VANCE: My dad was a big-time TV news journalist for NBC here in the States, based in DC, which, as the nation’s capital, is obviously the number-one news market. He wasn’t the very first black TV journalist ever, but he was definitely one of the first and one of the biggest. He was known for being very honest: In the ’80s, he had a really bad cocaine problem, and he announced it on air when he went into Betty Ford, which was a really big deal in the media. His ratings always surpassed CNN and all the others for his timeslot, and even though he revealed his own vulnerabilities, like his depression in later years, these things actually onl
y seemed to spice up his popularity and make people love him more.

  When he died a couple of years ago, he was the number-one trending story on Twitter for that day, and his obituary was on the front page of the Washington Post. His memorial service was held at the National Cathedral where Bush and McCain were recently buried – you have to be invited to have your memorial there. I can’t possibly say how many times I’ve had brothers come up to me and say, ‘Your dad showed me that you can fall down and get back up’ – how many people he influenced as a black role model.

  I grew up in the area of DC where Rayful Edmond was the big-time gangster. In the ’80s and early ’90s, DC was the murder capital of North America, and Rayful Edmond was the number-one gangster in town. Rayful had a lot of sides to him. He himself was not a killer. He was just a drug dealer, but there would be other dudes like Wayne ‘Silk’ Perry who did all the killing in DC. A lot of the characters in that TV series, The Wire, are based on real-life DC characters transposed to Baltimore, which is only an hour away from DC anyway.

  It was the crack era, and the coke era, all that shit coming up from Colombia. Everyone in America had been doing coke, and then crack became the cheaper way, so it became huge and blew up in the poor communities and the black communities, because it cost a hundred dollars to buy a gram of cocaine, but five dollars to buy a hit of crack. DC became a major hub, and my theory is that it was because DC was America’s only majority black city.

  Rayful Edmond came to my house a couple of times, and he was a really nice guy – cultured and smart. He just happened to grow up where his grandmother and his parents and everyone in his family were in the drugs business. If he had grown up in a family that was like the Murdoch family, he’d be running a Fortune 500 company right now, because he was just a brilliant dude, and there are all these studies now about how he accomplished what he accomplished at such a high level.

  Rayful was friends with my first ever boyfriend at high school, Matt, who was a white Italian-American dude who was always in the mix of things. He wasn’t a drug dealer himself, but he was really turned on by the life. He worked for his family’s construction business, but somehow worked his way into black city life. His family was generations-old DC too, but not rich DC. His family had moved to the suburbs in the ’70s, but he just managed somehow to become friends with these dudes. He didn’t do drugs, he didn’t sell drugs, but somehow he made his way into the world.

  Because my dad was a big deal in DC, Matt somehow mentioned to Rayful, like, ‘Oh, I’m dating Jim Vance’s daughter,’ and then Rayful really wanted to meet him, because he was a smart guy – not like a dumb street guy. They met a couple of times, and he was so cool – a really good guy.

  After high school, I came to New York to go to Parsons School of Design in Greenwich Village. It’s really funny how I got close to Island Records: in my last year at Parsons in ’93, this friendly weed dealer I knew called Max used to deliver to this woman Trish, who was high up at Island. I lived right down the street from Island, when the offices were on Lafayette, on this long block between West 4th and West 8th. I lived on 4th Avenue between 9th and 10th. One day this dealer guy was like, ‘Can you do me a favour and drop off this bundle to Trish at Island, because it’s near your house?’ Because I was getting something for myself, I was like, ‘Yeah, no problem.’

  I walked into the offices for the first time, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I want to work here.’ It was just so fly, with wooden walls, exposed brick, and palm trees everywhere – super-funky! Chris Blackwell’s wife, Mary, had designed it all, with African fabric all over, so it looked like Goldeneye, or one of his properties.

  From there, I talked myself into an internship with Trish, and because I’d gone to Parsons, a fashion school, Trish introduced me to Mary, Chris’s wife, who had her Island Trading Company. I interviewed with Mary and Chris and landed my first job out of college there, because I just hit it off with them both. After a while, though, I was not loving the fashion side, so then I talked to Chris and was like, ‘Is there any way I can move to the music side?’

  So, I was working quite low down in marketing at Island in New York when Tricky was first signed for Maxinquaye, and Island was releasing the album in the US. I wasn’t actually working the album, but by the time Tricky came to New York for promotion, Polygram/Def Jam had moved the label offices to this hideous corporate block at 825 8th Avenue, and the whole vibe had changed.

  I met Tricky briefly there, and to be very honest I totally went after him. I found out where he was staying, and called him there, like, ‘Do you want me to take you out around the city?’ He thought I had been assigned to take him out on the town on Island’s behalf. I got his hotel details through the people I worked with, so it was kind of true, but kind of not – maybe they didn’t know quite why I was so keen to do it!

  We immediately clicked. He got me right away, and vice versa, and we hung out the whole time for the week he was in New York. After he went back to London we stayed in touch, and then he moved here – right near Penn Station. It was a cool-ass apartment, like a duplex, but it’s a weird neighbourhood.

  He was kind of burnt by London, and he wanted to experience a new city. Back then New York really was an amazing place, especially if you’d grown up with New York hip-hop. You could drink up till 3am in regular clubs, but then after-hours clubs were everywhere. The all-nighter lifestyle and New York went hand-in-hand. Tricky probably even caught the tail-end of bottle service at tables, which was a big part of New York’s original flavour in clubs.

  He embraced New York like a duck to water – he went ape-shit wild. It was a lot of clubbing, always hip-hop. We just used to go out dancing. He loved to dance. He can really go and get lost in a club. If he wasn’t dancing, he would be leaning against the wall kind of ingesting the music, really in another world, listening to the beats.

  For a while, he was hanging out hard with Gang Starr, and they were tearing up the town, getting kicked out of places left and right. He and I lived together for a while at my place on 4th Avenue between 9th and 10th, a block from Astor Place, which is a great neighbourhood. Eventually Tricky moved out and got his own place in this building called the Archive, on Greenwich Avenue between Faro and Cristobel, but we were still very much in touch.

  After Pre-Millennium Tension came out, he got offered a deal to start his own label through DreamWorks, not for his own music, but to sign other artists. DreamWorks had just been formed by Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg (a Walt Disney exec), and this guy Michael Goldstone was one of the first principals they hired. He was a big-time A&R guy, who’d signed Rage Against the Machine and Pearl Jam. It was him who offered Tricky the label deal. Tricky accepted, called it Durban Poison, and asked me to be the head of it. By that point, Chris Blackwell had moved me to be in charge of Island’s world music division, so I had experience, and said yes.

  Goldstone was very much a rock guy, so that was probably the kind of music he was hoping for, but Tricky was really into his hip-hop at that moment, fresh in New York, so he started signing all these local rappers, plus his Bristol mate, DJ Milo. None of them really stuck, though. They were all talented, but maybe Tricky was just thinking about great music, not from a marketing perspective. I think that is always how he’s done his music, which is a big part of his success, but then also part of the thing that has stopped him from being even more successful, because he doesn’t make music for anyone but himself. He likes it, and that’s all that matters to him, and he doesn’t care about money, which I also really liked. But then, that’s also a double-edged sword: he probably should’ve cared more, and made more.

  DreamWorks got us incredible office space actually in the Brill Building in Midtown – this iconic building where people like Carole King, Phil Spector and Neil Diamond all worked as songwriters. They did really well by us, and they certainly paid me and Tricky well, but then they didn’t like any of the bands that he was signing, and then it became a bit
of a testing match between him and Michael Goldstone. He and Tricky were never gonna get along.

  When DreamWorks moved out of the Brill Building into offices downtown, in the interim Durban Poison worked out of Tricky’s apartment – this huge duplex in the Wall Street/Tribeca area where the elevator opened into the apartment, and we just made the offices on the second floor. When the DreamWorks deal went down, I decided to go to business school back in DC, but Durban Poison still went on in a different form.

  Tricky and I remained super-close, long after we weren’t dating or working together anymore.

  BRITISH AIRWAYS

  I didn’t experience what I consider real racism until I had money. You’d think I would’ve felt it growing up as a black kid in a white ghetto. Obviously I’ve had police in Bristol calling me a black bastard and chasing me around, but that’s just street stuff. That’s almost like football fans – just part of the street life – just normal.

  I can remember me and my uncle Tony getting followed around by police in a car, just because we were black. We would laugh about it, like, ‘Oh, come on, why are you pulling us over? You’re so obvious!’

  I had the same nonsense in London: I was running for a bus in Notting Hill, and an undercover police car screeched up.

  ‘Why are you running? Where do you live?’