by Tricky
I went back to Paris but we stayed in touch. He called me: ‘Yo, Mai, I want to see all the photos you did,’ so he made me come to London, and he loved the picture of him on all fours looking under the door. He said, ‘Wow, that is so deep – it’s going to be the cover of my next album.’ We talked to the record company and they said, ‘We need more pictures for the CD booklet,’ so we did a proper shoot on that idea, and that became the artwork for Nearly God.
We spent time together in New York, but then I lost touch with him while I got married and had kids in Paris. For five years I didn’t see him at all, then one day he called me soon after he’d moved to Paris.
At that time, I’d had a chance to work at this new museum, 104. Their people called me, saying, ‘We loved your exhibitions about New York ghetto street life, and we would like you to do the same thing in this neighbourhood.’ I’d never worked in that way in Paris before, only in fashion. I was working with 104 for two years taking those pictures, while the building was being renovated.
After Tricky got in touch, I introduced him to the two bosses of 104, theatre directors Robert Cantarella and Frédéric Fisbach. They’d loved Tricky since the beginning, and so the opening concert was arranged. The 19th arrondissement is a very bad neighbourhood, with a lot of people crammed into high-rises, and a lot of guns in those buildings. There’s a lot of violence, a lot of drugs, and a lot of poverty. Relations with the cops are always tense – Tricky was actually arrested in this neighbourhood, and the cops put a gun in his face as they took him in. That never happens in Paris anywhere else.
Tricky’s plan was to record an album with the people we met in the neighbourhood. Sometimes it would be an Arab guy from the café next door, other times some kids we met on the street – the rappers of the neighbourhood. For three months Tricky created his own world there, which I soon realised was all about working in total chaos. He thrives on chaos, whereas I struggled to cope!
Tricky made this beautiful album, and we made some videos of the music, but then none of it ever came out because he took it to various record companies and they just didn’t get it. That’s the problem with both of us: we have vision, and a way of seeing interesting things, but sometimes the commercial world doesn’t understand.
Sometimes he was more attracted by a nobody that he met on the street than by working with some well-educated creatives who respect him for who he is – but if he doesn’t feel it in that moment, he won’t do it.
We also have thirty-six hours of documentary footage that I never found the money to release, but what was magical was the time itself. Tricky made a connection straight away to people on the street, from the ghetto, and we took them into 104. Everybody was scared, but there was no reason to be scared. Tricky was the person who broke the stupid rules.
After that, he made the space like a playground for the kids of the neighbourhood. They would come in, play football in the studio, screaming, smoking, and Tricky didn’t care. He was recording stuff, and at the same time buying them food, drinks. Total chaos, and he loved it! Tricky was never mad at them. Amazing tolerance!
In the French media, there was a lot of attention, because this well-known English star was mixing with kids who were drug dealers. After we finished, we learnt that some of the guys we knew were arrested because they’d kidnapped people and burnt them in their house. But when they came to our place, we just had fun, talking about their parents. It was a place of release, and acceptance.
The sad thing from that time was the story of Jin. Tricky had moved to the 4th arrondissement, and he’d befriended this Korean girl, a videomaker who was so beautiful and special. She was like Nina Hagen but Korean – an amazing artist, and the things she made were very close to Tricky’s imagination. She had a special style of her own, very quiet, very smart – the kind of girl who doesn’t say much but is really in tune with everyone’s feelings.
When we did the 104 installation, she came with us and participated in a video we wanted to do, and she kind of peaced everybody out. She was part of our friend circle when we went out to clubs and parties, but one day we heard she’d been found dead in the river. I went to her funeral. It seems she was on her way home after a party on a boat, and she slipped and fell – a stupid sad accident.
Jin was like an angel who came into our lives, and she disappeared just as quickly as she arrived. After she died, Tricky made a tattoo of Jin on his hand. So that was the big sadness and pain in the story of 104.
One of the many positives was that it was also when we met Charles. He arrived on the first day with his story of being in the French Foreign Legion and listening to Tricky’s music on his many postings around the world. He was a photographer, too, and he began to join us there every day.
TRICKY: Charles is a white Parisian who was a Legionnaire for fourteen years, and who comes from a Foreign Legion family. I’ve since learnt a lot about it: that it’s not what everyone thinks, where once you join, you can’t get out. It’s the opposite: they look after you all your life – not like the British Army. People don’t run away from the Foreign Legion – people run into the Foreign Legion. What used to happen was, if you were on a murder charge in England, you could run away and join the Foreign Legion, and you couldn’t be arrested. The Foreign Legion is its own territory.
When Charles came down on my first day at 104, we started talking and soon realised there were some unexpected parallels between our two lives. His mum had epilepsy, like mine did. Before he met me, they were fans of my music and she would play songs off Maxinquaye on the piano.
Stranger still, he was in the Foreign Legion with a guy from Manchester who knows my uncle Tony. This guy was Charles’s sergeant, and his brother was the famous boxer, John Conteh. Charles said to me, ‘I was in with a Liverpool guy,’ but he never knew that the guy’s brother was once the world light-heavyweight boxing champion! It sounded like, for Charles’s sergeant, it was either boxing, or the Foreign Legion, or get into trouble.
Another thing Charles said that interested me was how they don’t see race in there. Once you join up, you are no longer Japanese, black, white, nothing – you are Foreign Legion. One day someone will make African food, the next Japanese, and there’s no race or colour division whatsoever. Charles said that when he first came out, it was difficult for him to adjust back to normality in Paris, because in ‘real life’, people were rude and prejudiced. Even going to buy something from the corner store, someone would be horrible, whereas in the Legion everybody respects each other.
Charles was a part of how I became settled in Paris, because the two of us went to boxing training three times a week, which brought a regularity and regimen to my life after all my late-night antics in LA. Once I’d got back into it, I went into an amateur boxing competition there – club against club.
By nature, Charles is very much a no-trouble guy. If you met him, you’d never believe that he beat up two policemen! There was a protest in Paris, and this one policeman was beating a girl. He said to the policeman, ‘Stop!’ but the policeman didn’t stop, so Charles beat him up, and another one who was heavy-handed, trying to intervene. He had to go to court afterwards, but the charges were dropped.
Charles has become almost like my brother. He’s been back to Bristol for Christmas with me a couple of times, and he talks to my cousin Michelle sometimes more than me. He could go to Bristol tomorrow and stay at her house or my auntie’s, and I wouldn’t even have to know about it.
He cooks good, but he eats very simple. Sometimes, he will eat literally only mashed potato, and that’s it.
‘How can you eat that on its own?’ I’ll ask.
‘It’s fine for me!’
We’ll go out to a restaurant, and he’ll order a plate of mashed potato! That’s not very French, is it?
CHARLES DE LINIERES: I met Tricky at 104, not long after I left the French Foreign Legion after fourteen years. I guess we bonded because we have some similar things in our background: both our mothers are dead,
and they were both epileptic. My mother’s epilepsy started when she was two years old. Tricky’s mother died when he was four, so he never saw his mother suffering with it. I say to him, it was much better not to see that.
For both of us, it was our grandmothers who took us in and brought us up, because my father died when I was fourteen years old – from a bee sting, within thirty minutes of being stung, because he was allergic to the venom.
We have a lot of soldiers in my family, but I’m the only one in my generation who was in the French Foreign Legion. I did it because I wanted to be stronger in my life, and I thought the army would help me to achieve that. I’m not particularly a fan of the army, only the concept of the French Foreign Legion. There are 150 different nationalities accepted into it, so there’s no racism, no history of religion, no history of politics or family. They don’t care about your past. You enter into it as a new family, and it’s amazing!
I stayed with it for fourteen years because it was super-interesting, and cool, although the discipline was difficult. Initially I was stationed in the south of France, in a cavalry regiment at Orange. After that, I travelled all the time, serving six months minimum in a different country every year. The first two years were the most difficult, as I got posted to Yugoslavia in 1992, to work alongside the United Nations. Everything I did after that was easier, because I started with the most difficult thing.
I would sleep in a room with a Russian, a Swede, a Brazilian and an African, and there was never any problem. We shared everything: cigarettes, socks, T-shirts … Every day something funny would happen, because everyone brought his own culture with him into the group.
When you come back to normal society afterwards, you’re alone. You’ve forgotten all the things from normal life, like waiting for your pay and paying rent and bills, but mostly I missed the mentality that we would help each other. Normal society is hard – no one wants to help you if you have a problem in the street. It took at least a year for me to turn it around and start another chapter in my life.
It was the death of my mother that helped me to leave, because after fourteen years I wanted to have a normal life. When I left the Legion, I became a photographer for the press army back in Paris, and it was then that I met Tricky. I knew his music from the beginning, with Massive Attack, and I followed his progress right the way through.
I saw the 104 concert and took some photos. Afterwards I had them blown up really big. I went to see him at his installation and gave him all the photos. We arranged to see each other the day after, and for the next three months I went every day after work, just to see him and have fun with all the people there. It was a massive place, with ceilings twenty metres high, and somehow Tricky made a different vibe every day – like a party, with all these children.
Normally at places like this, you might open the door once a month just to show people the work you’re doing. But Tricky opened the door every day. Loads of boys and girls, after they finished school, all wanted to go straight to see Tricky – not their parents! He would buy sweets, cakes and Cokes for them, and all the children loved him. Not for his music, or because he was famous, just because he was super-cool with them. Many of the parents invited him to dinner to say thank you.
Before 104, my morale was not good, but with Tricky my smile came back, and all my sadness went away. In some ways he directly changed my life, and after that, because we had a good vibe together, we decided to keep seeing each other.
That was hard for me to imagine, because I’m not a musician or in the music business; I’m just a photographer and a soldier. How many singers or successful people do that? I was shocked by his character, his openness. During nearly six years we were together all the time.
He knows Paris like the back of his hand, because he walked everywhere while he was here. Not many Parisians do that. He probably knows more about Paris than many Parisians, because he moved around so much. We liked to take coffee together – to stay in a café and watch people, and have fun.
Early on, he asked me to find an English boxing club, and I found a really cool one, so we did the beginners course together. I was shit at it. I had no technique, but he helped me with every lesson. We went sometimes three times a week, just him and me and a teacher.
He’s a very good boxer, and he can teach it too. Like his uncle Tony, he can knock someone out with one punch. He did a competition with the club, and he knocked a guy out in two minutes flat. He’s very quick and has great technique. He follows a lot of boxers, follows the culture, and can speak about the big names. Personally, I don’t have that culture, so he was my introduction, and since then, I have never stopped boxing. I love it.
For me, Tricky is an anti-superstar. He’s really open with people, but if you treat him like a celebrity, he will close up or throw you out. He uses his instinct all the time, and he’s super-honest. Many people think he’s dark, but he is totally the opposite – super-funny, and very positive. If you give him a bad thing, he will do something good with it. It’s a rare quality.
I couldn’t possibly have had a relationship like that with another singer. I don’t think many people can open the door like Tricky opened the door to me. I’m a simple person, but we have a cool vibe. And he never forgets me. He is loyal.
TRICKY: During the move between LA and Paris, I’d got myself a new label deal with Domino in London. I liked their vibe: they were an independent company with a lot of young people working there, and they’d just had some serious success with Franz Ferdinand and Arctic Monkeys. They were nice and enthusiastic, but honestly, after a while, I didn’t get what they were trying to do with me.
The first record I did for them was Knowle West Boy, which was made in London in ’08. The owner of the label, Laurence Bell, wanted me to work with Bernard Butler, who had been the guitarist in Suede. It was Laurence’s label, so I kind of had to agree to it. I went into the studio with this Bernard and, in the end, I took the tapes, but I didn’t really want to use anything we’d done.
Laurence talked to him and said, ‘Sorry, you’re not really on the album now,’ but the thing was, I’d done a deal with him, so I had to give him a production credit, even though he didn’t do all that much on the finished record. Now, no offence to Laurence, who is a really good guy, but I wouldn’t have made that mistake because I would never have worked with Bernard Butler in the beginning, because I knew I didn’t need to.
Calling the album Knowle West Boy was important to me. I’ve always been proud of coming from Knowle West. I always thought it made me who I am. Knowle Westers are individuals, and the place has many fond memories for me – things like Guy Fawkes’ Night. I can still smell the bonfires. We always used to be out on our bikes till late at night, all the kids. Everybody knew each other in the area, so whoever I hung out with, my nan usually knew their family. You didn’t hear about a paedophile running around the streets. It was a tight community. It was the days when you could borrow sugar off your next-door neighbour, and the back doors were always left open. I could go from my nan’s house to my great-grandmother’s house, and just walk straight in. Good days, fond memories.
The further I went away to live – from London, to New York and LA, then back to Paris – Knowle West has had more and more pull for me. When my uncle Tony was on the road with me, sometimes we would drive back to Bristol, just to go past 13 Padstow Road, because that’s where his best memories are as well. One time, we saw a proper Rastafarian on the street – not just a Knowle West mixed-race kid with locks, an actual Rasta! We were like, ‘What the fuck!’ Things have changed a little, but not much.
On the album’s back cover, and in the picture section of this book, there’s an old picture of my great-uncles Martin and Arthur, my great-auntie Olive, and my great-grandad, taken in the house in Padstow Road, when they were all dressed up to go out. Back then, they all used to dress like the Rat Pack. They look like gangsters as well, don’t they? It makes you wonder, what were they going to do that night? What h
appened after that picture? If you look, you can see that I’ve got the same eyes as my great-grandad.
It’s funny: after that album came out, you suddenly had people who talked about Knowle West. That never happened before. Me and Whitley know a couple of DJs from there, and they would have never mentioned it before. Now when they do interviews, they are like, ‘Yeah, I’m from Knowle West!’ It was as if this album made it cool to be from Knowle West.
Over in Paris, I did a video for the song ‘Council Estate’, in a real ghetto neighbourhood there. It was actually a lot worse than Knowle West, that place – next level! A dangerous fucking area! We had to have permission to film there, because it was totally controlled – I think the director knew someone. We were there for a couple of days and we didn’t see any police the whole time. The people controlled the area.
Another song on the album, called ‘School Gates’, had a huge and unforeseen impact on my life. It was how I ended up finding out for sure that I had another daughter, Marie, who was born when I was seventeen. I never knew about her, and she never knew about me, until her mum heard the song, and was like, ‘Okay, it’s time to tell her.’ She went to Marie and said, ‘I think this is your dad.’
I don’t know if I could say that the song was me trying to find her. The lyrics are about me hanging around outside her mum’s school waiting to see her when we were kids. But the song is what found her. My whole life revolves around the music.
Both my kids look like me, and nothing like their mothers, but Marie, who was eight or ten years older than Mazy, is the image of my mother, Maxine, who would’ve been her grandmother.
Her mum went to Merrywood Girls’ School, while I went to Merrywood Boys’, but she lived in more of a black area than I did, and her family is all Jamaican, so Marie has very Jamaican roots, and she knows them well. Her grandparents are Jamaicans, and she grew up with Jamaican food. She listens to the same music me and Whitley listened to when we were kids, and she even used to go to the same places where me and her mum went, so she is very much involved in Jamaican culture.
