Hell Is Round the Corner

by Tricky

  Other times, we’d drive into town on a Friday or Saturday night, then I’d leave the club completely forgetting the driver was outside somewhere, party for a couple of days, only to be reminded of my existing car-service booking when I called them to drive me home again on Sunday or Monday. How we wasted money, pre-mobile phones!

  Once you start relying on a car service, your bill can mount up. By the time I moved from New Jersey, I was spending $200,000 a year on it.

  That probably sounds outrageous in today’s world, but in the mid-90s, there was so much money around, it didn’t seem to matter. Back then, I could get paid fifty grand just to do a remix. On my 28th birthday, I did two remixes on the same day, one for Stevie Wonder and the other for Yoko Ono. I can’t remember which way round it was, but I got forty grand for one of them and fifty grand for the other. It was my birthday, and my cousin Mark was in town, so I didn’t want to hang around: I took some of Stevie Wonder’s music and put it under Yoko’s voice, and put some of Yoko’s music under Stevie Wonder – a few hours’ work, job done! Then we went clubbing in the West End and got fucked up on the proceeds.

  Ninety grand in one day – you really could make that kind of cash. I was earning so much money. In that period, I must’ve been through five million, easy. On one of the American tours, I got the flu, and by the time we got to New York, we were staying in this really top hotel, the Four Seasons, and I couldn’t go on. I called Julian Palmer back in England and said, ‘I’m sick, I can’t move!’ He just said, ‘Stay in the hotel then!’ I was there for a couple of weeks, and at their prices it ended up costing $20,000. Twenty grand because I had the flu!

  Julian Palmer must have spent a lot of industry money, and so must I! If I was in a hotel and it ended up costing twenty grand, it wouldn’t even enter my mind to consider who was paying the bill. It just would get sorted somehow.

  I spent a lot of my own money, too. I would spend thirty grand in a club, no problem. I’d drop twenty grand here, twenty grand there. I would charter planes to go from New York to Miami and back again, then oversleep and not go, so twenty-five grand went for nothing. I could spend 200 grand, and literally make it back in a weekend. Oops, I spent 200 grand on a car service – never mind!

  There was so much money around, and everybody spent it. In the music business, nobody thought twice about it. There was no saving or financial strategy going on whatsoever. It wasn’t because you didn’t have good people around you; it was just there was so much money, people didn’t think like that. Nobody thought it would ever end. It wasn’t like I didn’t have good advisers. I had good managers, good accountants. There was so much money, it was like nobody needed to advise you.

  Many people have said, then and now, that my live shows got more and more challenging in the late ’90s. It would be dark onstage, and we definitely weren’t ‘playing the hits’. I’ve toured with bands where they do the same songs every night, and it’s the most boring fucking thing. I think live is where you can experiment. It turns into something else, and you’ve got to follow your instincts.

  Sometimes I feel uncomfortable onstage, but it’s either feel uncomfortable, or do what everybody expects and be safe and bored as fuck – because then it’s a routine: come out, do this, do that, boring. I don’t want to be doing the same fucking show every night, with people clapping at the right parts.

  When people see my show, especially back then, they say, ‘It’s crazy energy – what is that? Is it anger?’ My answer is, it’s anger, because I’m so shy. I want to give a hundred per cent, but I can’t sing and I can’t dance. People don’t think artists are shy, they would never consider a musician or an actor to be shy, but I’m really a shy person.

  When someone comes to see your show – not a critic thing, I’m talking when someone will spend their time and money to come and see you – you owe them a hundred per cent of your soul, and I feel like I can’t do that, because I’m shy, and because I can’t sing. So that is a rage people are seeing – me trying to give everything.

  After several years on the road, the show was getting more and more intense, and so was life behind the scenes, especially with Martina. It was a long time since we’d been a couple – we would travel as mum and dad, always with Mazy, but we weren’t together anymore. She was my singer and the mother of my kid, but we still used to argue about stuff, even though we weren’t together.

  From the beginning, I knew that Mazy definitely was special. Being on the road so young made her who she was. Now I think about it, London to Australia was a long way to go with a baby on a plane, but she had her mum, her dad and her grandmother with her all the way, and she was no problem. She never had any issue with travelling whatsoever. When me and Martina were onstage, she would be in bed on the tour bus with CC, or asleep in the dressing room, or back at the hotel.

  When she was about three or four, there was an extraordinary moment during an average humdrum soundcheck at a festival somewhere in Europe. Mazy walked onstage, grabbed the mic from her mum, went to the front of the stage and started speaking in tongues to the empty field in front of her. Martina was petrified, but you knew that this kid was somebody – even back then.

  Mazy couldn’t even talk at that point. She had made noises before obviously, but here she was talking, only not in real words, and to a crowd that wasn’t there – there was no one there out front, but it was like she was having a conversation with someone.

  One time at another festival, she hung out and played with Kylie Minogue! When I wasn’t touring, I would take her into Island Records, and she would be climbing all over me while I was doing interviews. The first time she ever walked was backstage at an English TV show. Unfortunately, Martina missed it because she was in another room, but Mazy walked from her nan CC over to me.

  I think the music life gave her a fun childhood. I’m glad it happened, because that’s what made her what she was. She was a born musician. Like Floyd Mayweather is a born boxer, one of the best boxers who ever lived, because he was going into a gym with his dad at two or three years of age, because his dad was a boxer. Mazy was a born musician – the real deal.

  As a parent, I think it’s more stressful if you’ve got to get up and be at work at nine o’clock in the morning, worrying that you’ve got a kid and have to arrange childcare. I would wake up on the tour bus, or in a hotel room, and Mazy would be there too. We didn’t have that pressure of money, either. We didn’t have to worry about borrowing clothes for the kid and all that. Nothing mattered. I think we had it easier than most parents.

  With Martina and I separated but together as parents and performers, I can see now that it was a very strange situation, but at the time it was just normal. It just about worked, but looking back, it was weird. Now, I wouldn’t want to do that – it sounds like a nightmare! – but at the time it was totally natural, even though Martina and I still used to fight loads.

  BEN WINCHESTER: Tricky was on the road pretty much solidly for four years, from 1995 to 1998. Though he didn’t play his first full headline UK tour until November 1996, he had been around the world – loads of European dates in autumn/winter 1995, then Australia in January 1996, and maybe three tours of America. There was a lot going on.

  As it went on into ’97 and beyond, the show changed significantly. It progressively became more intense and confrontational and atmospheric. It was much more traditional and theatrical to start with, then it got darker and louder as it went on.

  The Pete Briquette band lasted for the first two years, then there was a very competent band of younger session musicians centred on a drummer called Perry Melius. By then Martina had left the crew, so it was just him at the front, and that is when it got really dark. It was much more than either a live show or a club show. It was a very intense and absorbing evening.

  Tricky had a knack of attracting very interesting and unusual people wherever he played. At that first Shepherd’s Bush Empire show, I walked in the dressing room, and Kylie Minogue and David Bowie wer
e in there before me – and he already seemed to know both of them – and Nicole Kidman was there with Kylie as well. But then the next night, you would meet somebody back there who had been on the run from the French Foreign Legion for three years, or the Mayor of Paris. It was very varied, the people who were attracted to him, and that he hung out with – from all walks of life.

  PETE BRIQUETTE: Tricky and Martina were always in a state of chaos on the road. It used to drive me mad. Lobby call in the morning would be for 11am and there would be no Tricky and no Martina. You’d go upstairs, and the rooms would be like a bomb had hit them, and they would just be getting up.

  The only time I got pissed off was back here in the UK. We had a TV show in Europe somewhere. We had our itinerary to go to Heathrow at 11am, and at 9am I get a call from management saying Tricky’s in bed and he’s refusing to move – could I go and persuade him to get up? I went around to his flat, and he’d obviously been partying non-stop for two days. He just wouldn’t budge. That was the only time he reneged on his responsibilities. I think by then he was just exhausted, burnt out.

  I did quite a few tours with Tricky and Martina, but then the two of them fell out irreparably, and Alison Goldfrapp, who had sung on ‘Pumpkin’ on Maxinquaye, came in to replace her in the middle of a tour. She had a great voice which really suited Tricky’s music.

  The shows were definitely getting darker, and as Tricky learnt how to do the gig, he relied on me less and I kind of naturally left once he didn’t need me anymore. I’d gradually put together a new band line-up for him, but then I got a call from him, ‘Please come back!’ He hated the bass player, so I came in halfway through the tour. I was the only white guy on the bus, and they’d be playing NWA all day at full blast. That would kind of wear me down. Aged forty-odd, I was probably a little too long in the tooth. They treated me great, but I was outside the loop. When people are cracking jokes that you don’t get, your time has come to move on.

  I was involved in the beginning of the next record, though, when we went down to Kingsway studio in New Orleans, a homely place in the French Quarter belonging to Daniel Lanois, where U2, REM and Bob Dylan had all recorded. It should’ve been fabulous, but technically it was quite stressful. Then I had family issues myself at that point, so I bailed about two thirds of the way through.

  TRICKY: When I got to New Orleans I had my leg in a cast because I’d broken my foot in a fight in a club in New York. I moved into this old church with a recording studio in it to recoup, and to record stuff with this full marching band I’d seen out on the street. I also had Trombone Shorty in there, before anybody knew who he was. That must’ve been some pretty great music, but none of it made it onto Angels with Dirty Faces, or ever got released.

  I loved New Orleans. It’s a great place, with great restaurants, great food and great music. Back then, it really felt like New Orleans, but it’s become too touristy now. At Daniel Lanois’ place, we had a black drummer called Gloria McElrath, a really cool girl, but I don’t think too much stuff worked out there either.

  Everybody always asks whether the city I record in is important, but nowhere really has an impact on my music. It doesn’t happen like that with me. Where I live is just a place to record, and it doesn’t really affect the music I’m going to make.

  In the end, most of Angels with Dirty Faces was done in New York, with members of my live band, and a few guests, like this guitarist Marc Ribot, who plays with Tom Waits.

  There’s a track on there called ‘Peyote Sings’, and I was actually taking peyote all through the New York sessions. It’s this hallucinogenic cactus that mostly grows in Mexico, but you can get anything in New York, can’t you? It’s like a lighter form of acid – acid can be quite tough, but this is more natural, and not as aggressive. What’s mad is, I was taking peyote, and the guy who mastered it was a big-time cokehead. Mastering is just tweaking sounds, not mixing, and you can hear in the mastering that he was a cokehead. You’ve got the edgy, trippy thing that I was bringing to it, and then you’ve got the high-treble tweaky thing from the guy with his coke binges.

  I was just on a mission at that point. I was fucked, and I think that is when mental health issues started to develop with me. A lot of the lyrics are pretty nightmarish and on-the-edge. An English writer once said about me that I’m an aerial – an aerial to what’s going on, picking up the frequencies – and I guess at that time I was receiving some pretty dark messages. On ‘Tear Out My Eyes’, there’s this line, ‘I wanna blow my head off in Seattle’, referring to Kurt Cobain’s suicide a couple of years earlier.

  On another song, ‘Record Companies’, it goes, ‘Corporate companies love when them kill themselves, it boost up the record sales’. It was talking about rap, and how record companies love all that beef shit, with people like Biggie and Tupac getting shot, because it seems so obvious to me that the only people who benefit from rappers having those beefs are the record companies.

  In summer ’97, I did Lollapalooza, and at the LA show there were a couple of big hip-hop artists on the bill, and when I came offstage there was a bit of an atmosphere, apparently about that lyric. All the wives and girlfriends were looking at me, as if to say, ‘Yeah, too right, mate …’

  I suppose I was noticing the exploitation in the entertainment industry I was now a part of. Around that time, I did an interview for a black culture magazine in America, and I was talking about how black music had turned into minstrels again. It must’ve registered, because Spike Lee basically made a movie called Bamboozled out of that idea.

  The album title, Angels with Dirty Faces, was from the James Cagney movie – I grew up on that stuff with my nan. The funny thing is, this pop band called Sugababes called their album that a few years later. A lot of critics at the time said my album was too difficult, like a wrong move, but again nowadays it’s seen as a classic album in my catalogue by a lot of my fans.

  Martina was on a few tracks, but it wasn’t like I felt I had to replace her, and certainly Island never asked me to do that. It was just time to go on. I’m not the sort of person who is going to do the things that people want.

  I did ‘Broken Homes’ with PJ Harvey, and what people don’t realise is that I wrote that song – the lyrics and the melody – for her, so it was just doing different things with different people. We did that song together on Late Show with David Letterman in New York. I had my band with us, and a gospel choir from Harlem or the Bronx. I’ve always had freedom like that.

  Chris Blackwell and whoever was at Island always egged me on. Even though sometimes they didn’t agree, they understood me and let me do what I wanted. Like, ‘U2 can make the money for Island, so I don’t have to so much.’

  MARC MAROT: It was on Angels … that I got much more involved day-to-day. Chris and Tricky really trusted each other, whereas I was like the straight colonel.

  I don’t recall Angels … being difficult or unpleasant, I just wish it had been more rewarding. I thought it was a really good record, but it was difficult to make. We had allowed Tricky to become himself so deeply that he was quite entrenched, and actually getting him to listen to advice was really difficult. It was his way or the highway. I’m not saying he was more difficult than anyone else, but by this stage he may not have listened to constructive criticism.

  He was getting further away from commercial potential, which I did flag up to him. The way record companies work is, it’s all reflected in the bottom line. With someone like Tricky, what happened was a very silent erosion of budgets. Angels … was well marketed, and we had some good videos, but we were not spending the kind of money that he would have wanted by then.

  We always had an eye on breaking America with him, but his move there was also about opening his musical vistas, and thereafter Tricky’s interests started to lean very heavily towards hip-hop.

  Towards the end of that album, there were concerns about his weed consumption and his mental health. He was getting lost in it. It was becoming too big an influence, a
nd paranoia was beginning to creep in that was uncomfortable to work around. That paranoia actually becomes a corrosive erosion of trust, and I think that’s what began to happen with Tricky.

  I don’t want it to seem like the Island–Tricky relationship ended with me as the schoolmaster expelling him, because that is not what happened. The record didn’t sell very well, and at that stage in the contract, carrying on would have been very expensive, because typically recording contracts in those days only got bigger in terms of the advance pay-out, not smaller. Also, around that time, Island, MCA and Universal were merging into a giant organisation. Chris Blackwell was gone, so I’m sure Tricky began to feel abandoned.

  During that contractual limbo period of the reorganisation of the label, Tricky got very excited by this idea of doing a spoken-word record with well-known criminals telling their stories of violence and dodgy dealings. Through his uncle Tony’s contacts, he got some of the most badass criminals in the country to assemble in a pub back-room in London – the people with scars right across their faces; we’re talking armed robbery not just selling a bit of dope – along with Darcus Beese, who was an Island A&R at the time, but who went on to become the president of Island America. Darcus was the only black guy in the room other than Tricky, and then Tricky fucked off and left him there, in a room full of thoroughly malevolent people! Some tracks were completed, but we didn’t end up releasing that one.

  TRICKY: Weed was a big part of the creative process for me, and I’ve always had a tendency to think too much. Sitting around at home, I’d smoke a spliff and, instead of just listening to music like the average person, I’d get obsessive. Martina used to say this, when we lived together: I would play the same song over and over, like twenty or thirty times. In my mind, the weed would help me to chill. It might not have seemed that way from the outside.

  In the late ’90s, the weed changed. From about 1996 to 1998, skunk was all you could get, and it was a big change. It wasn’t around when we were growing up. When me and Whitley started smoking, you had sensimilla, which was really strong but a different kind of strong – it wasn’t chemicals. The shit they do to make skunk, it’s just ridiculous.