Hell Is Round the Corner

by Tricky

  I’d gone through life from the age of nineteen or twenty knowing she was my kid, but not knowing she was my kid, if you know what I mean – it was one of those. One time I was with her cousin in Totterdown, and her mum went past with her – she must’ve been about three or four years of age, and this guy Leon said, ‘That is definitely your kid – she looks just like you!’ After things like that, you kind of know, but you can’t be a hundred per cent.

  In the 2000s, on my intro tape, which I used to go onstage to, was a song called ‘Lost and Looking’ by Sam Cooke. I used to cry whenever I heard it, and I couldn’t really understand why. Like, alright, you just love the song! The lyrics go, ‘I’m lost and I’m looking for my baby, Lord knows my baby ain’t around’, and I’d read that Sam Cooke wrote that about his kid that died in a swimming pool. He had a very tragic life.

  One night, I’m just about to go onstage, and my phone rings, and it’s my sister, who I’ve rarely spoken to over most of my life. She goes, ‘Hey, you know Marie’s your kid, right?’ She’d seen the mum, and the mum admitted it to her. Then I went onstage to ‘Lost and Looking’, and I realised that’s what I’d been crying about – I’d been looking for Marie.

  The funny thing is, I always knew deep down that it wasn’t about my mum. It was a totally different vibe to how I feel about my mum. I know when something is about my mum, because I’ve lived with it all my life. This was just different. Lost and looking … I didn’t understand what this was about, but that night it all became clear to me.

  Still, her mum needed another few months to sort it out in her head: imagine having to tell a girl of twenty-two or twenty-three, ‘Look, the man you thought was your biological dad is not your dad – this is your dad.’ Eventually she told her, then, to make sure, we did the DNA tests and they came back 99.9 per cent certain that she’s my kid. That’s a match right there, isn’t it? Now she’s got three dads: me, the guy she previously thought was her biological father, and her stepdad who brought her up from the age of seven, with her mum.

  Being well known is weird for me, let alone for her by belated family association. Right from the start she said she doesn’t want to live off me, and I’ve always taught both of my kids that. Having famous parents doesn’t help you. Marie is thirty-three now, and she’s been through university to get qualified as a social worker – which is kind of weird, because I could have done with some social work myself!

  MARIE: I’d just come back from Notting Hill Carnival in summer 2009. I was about to go to my third and final year at university in Cardiff, and my mum was like, ‘I need to tell you something.’ I thought she was gonna say she was dying or something. She said, ‘Your dad ain’t your biological dad.’ I knew of Tricky, because I went to a school where everyone hyped up Massive Attack. I knew my mum was friends with them back in the day, but I never really thought anything more of it.

  After I found out, to be honest I think I was a bit shocked. I’d grown up with a different dad until I was twenty-two or twenty-three, and I was spun out about it. I had to go back to my final year at uni, and to start with we just spoke on the phone for a good few months. Then, in August, we met in London. He was staying in a hotel there, so I went to meet him with my friend.

  It was weird first of all, but he was very relaxed about it. He phoned me up after the DNA test, and went, ‘Oh, I am your dad!’ I was just going to work, as I remember.

  It was easy for him to get involved in my life, but it was very strange for me. Gradually, I started making contact with my biological family. I got his cousin Michelle’s number off him and found out that her daughter Tasha lived literally five minutes around the corner from me – we’d even worked in the same office. I got her address and went to meet her, and with her it was really easy. We’ve been like sisters ever since, and we’re really similar considering we weren’t raised together.

  I started going over to Paris to see Adrian a year or two later, and then I went and tracked down grandad – Adrian’s dad, Roy. I just started looking people up, because Bristol’s black community isn’t that big, so you can phone someone who knows someone, and say, ‘Where does this person live?’ Grandad was really cool, immediately just like a proper grandad, and I started going there every Sunday for dinner. He is so chilled out – he just goes to church and does gardening.

  When people find out about it, they are always like, ‘Oh my God,’ so yes, it was pretty odd, but after that it’s just like extra family, isn’t it? Suddenly, Father’s Day is a bit more expensive, but I don’t listen to Adrian’s music. You don’t listen to your dad sing or rap or whatever – that would be weird.

  Having a dad who’s well known can be a bit annoying, especially because I live in Bristol. To begin with, I would be quite open about it, but now I tend not to tell people because people can get really intrusive. They ask stuff they wouldn’t ask someone else, so I turn it on them and ask them to tell me shit about their dad, and they go, ‘Oh, yeah, it is a bit fucking weird, innit?’ I think when someone is famous, people don’t look at them like they’re human. It’s like they’re property, and people just want to know everything.

  Some people start behaving differently, but to be fair, most of my close mates who I’ve known since I was five years old, they couldn’t give a shit who he is. They just talk to him like he was anyone, and that’s why they are my close friends.

  What I don’t like is the assumption that I’ve come from money, or that I’ve got everything. I’ve just lived a normal life. Dad says I met him at the wrong time – when he was broke! When he was a millionaire, I never had a clue, so I got fuck all, ha-ha.

  I think if I’d I found out when I was a teenager, it would have fucked me up definitely, it would have been too much of a head-fuck. When you’re a teenager, you’re figuring out your identity anyway, and you are just a dick in the way that you manage things. I probably would’ve gone off the rails or something.

  One of the weirdest things is: I grew up in an all-black family. There were no white people in my family, then all of a sudden I’ve got a white auntie, mixed-race cousins and a mixed-race dad – so that will fuck with my head!

  When I was doing my training to become a social worker, you had to do your own family tree, to analyse your family – so how do you put three dads on your family tree? That was complicated, and it was a lot of explanation in the middle of a lecture. I think I was pretty non-judgemental anyway, but this experience has probably reinforced that. You don’t know anyone’s background – you don’t know what they’ve been through, and what their family set-up is.

  I now know that I’m not totally black, but it hasn’t really changed my outlook, because I’ve grown up in Bristol which is quite multicultural anyway. I went to Cotham School, which was predominantly white middle-class, so I’m used to being in a mix anyway. I suppose it was just a shock, because you grow up thinking you are one ethnicity and then you find out you’ve got other bits in you. I don’t think it’s changed me otherwise. It’s hard to know what life would have been like if I hadn’t found out. How would you quantify it? I’m not sure.

  TRICKY: Marie reckons I would have been a crackhead, if I hadn’t found music.

  MARIE: Yeah, because you’ve had a horrible life, and I think you’ve got awful coping mechanisms.

  TRICKY: I don’t think I’ve had a hard life.

  MARIE: You’ve had a horrendous life!

  TRICKY: But I had fun! I could go out at fourteen or fifteen and go to a blues …

  MARIE: That’s not normal.

  TRICKY: I could not go to school if I wanted. I could go rabbiting, I’ve been around guns, when I was a kid. I’ve seen fights and stuff, and my uncles were well known. It was exciting – but you think I was neglected.

  MARIE: It was neglect. Auntie Marlow looked after you well, but apart from that, if I’d been your social worker, you would’ve been on a child protection plan.

  TRICKY: Are you serious?

  MARIE: Neglect!

&nb
sp; TRICKY: Being in Paris, I was able to see a lot more of my family than I had while I was living on the other side of the Atlantic. Various family members would come to visit me, and I was often back in Bristol myself. Now I had a record deal, however, there was a whole lot more incentive to hit the road, and tour to support my latest album.

  To be honest, I was bored of playing in England. I have many great fans in the UK, but fashions change so quickly there that you never know what you’re flying into. I was more excited about playing all the other different countries in Europe, where they welcome you with more warmth, and less preconception, and it’s just about appreciating good music.

  I was also branching out more into the ‘emerging markets’, as far as Western popular music is concerned, making regular visits to places like China, South Korea and Russia. I’m pretty sure I was one of the first Western artists to play in China beyond Beijing and Shanghai: I went to places like Chinese Outer Mongolia and Inner Mongolia, which were weird, but much more rewarding – just weird places where I thought, ‘Why the fuck am I going here?’ which was reason enough in itself.

  I toured numerous times in South America, visiting every territory there, including Venezuela. I have a really strong following in Mexico: there’s a Mexican gangster guy I’ve been in contact with who used to do crimes to my music. He posted a picture of my album on Instagram, saying, ‘It reminds me of my gangbanging days.’ He’d listen to my music in his car, and probably shoot people, for all I know. I have a big Mexican following in LA, too.

  I never thought I would be doing tours all over the world. I never envisaged myself going to China. If you’d told me that years ago, I would have said, ‘China?!’ I thought I would just be doing little shows around England. The only places I haven’t been, that I can think of, are Africa and Vietnam. The travelling part of my job, I love. If you can be in different cultures and be okay, it’s good for you. You can’t be ignorant if you go to other people’s countries. When you’re travelling all over, you’ve got to fit in, and I think it takes the ignorance out of you.

  It’s brilliant seeing other people’s cultures. People tend to go to the obvious places, working or on holiday, but I love going to places where no one else goes. Like, I’ve spent a lot of time in Russia, and I’ve just been to Chelyabinsk – find me a person who has been there! There’s no reason to go there unless it was on business, which would be very rare. When I go to Russia, I go to places that Russians go, not tourist places. I’ve played shows in places like Perm, Krasnodar, Nizhny Novgorod and Yekaterinburg, and the crowds are good all over – very passionate.

  If I’d known beforehand how dangerous Russia is, I probably would never have gone. The first time I went, I had a guy with guns looking after me. I had a guy sat next to me at the bar with a newspaper with a fucking machine-gun underneath. As soon as you get off the train or plane, security take you to the hotel, and when you come down from the room, they’re sat there, waiting. I had a guy follow me to clubs, everywhere.

  I kept hearing that Russia is racist, but I’ve never experienced any racism there. I’ve been all over Russia, and I’ve never seen a black person there – cities where there are no black people, guaranteed, and I’ve never had a problem. There’s nowhere I haven’t gone – no club, no restaurant, nothing I haven’t done, and I’ve never experienced any racism, apart from the occasional customs guy. I get more actual racism when I fly into London than I do flying into Russia. Travelling and experiencing places for yourself makes you realise that a lot of this stuff is propaganda.

  I loved it there from the off, and I’ve always had a strong listenership there. They have always been with me, the Russians. It’s not just that I keep going there, it’s the music. Hard times make hard people, right? They love the struggle in my music. They can feel what I’ve been through. That’s why they connect with me. My music is struggling music – it’s blues, and they recognise it. The most Tricky fan tattoos anywhere is in Russia.

  In the early 2000s, when I first went there, I was doing a show, and backstage this promoter showed me a letter from a kid called Alex, saying, ‘I learnt English from your music, you are like a father to me.’ A really nice letter. Before the show, I was getting bored, so I went down into the audience, and I was hanging around. The promoter said anxiously, ‘Hey, come on, we’ll go back upstairs because people will start recognising you.’ I was like, ‘It’s okay, relax!’ Then I saw a kid with my T-shirt on and I thought, ‘How the fuck did he get that?’ because I wasn’t selling it on the tour. I asked him, and it turned out that he was the boy who had sent me the letter. He was only eighteen at that point, and he’d driven sixteen hours on his own to be there. Totally, it was fate meeting him.

  We exchanged numbers and started calling each other, and when I came back to Russia, we met again. It all happened so naturally, and we have never left each other since. He has been to Paris, and one time he came to Istanbul to surprise me. Once, he took me to the mountains out there.

  He is from this place Chelyabinsk, which is in west central Russia, close to the Ural Mountains. It’s the most polluted city in Russia. It’s seriously fucked up, not a pretty city, but he’s lived there all his life. I find it depressing there, but I doubt he would consider it hard at all. He is almost like a son to me. I don’t know if he thinks that, but I feel like he is. Now he’s older, and has a wife and kids, he might be more like a little brother. But we are close.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t really have a good time on Domino. I did another record with them called Mixed Race, which again was themed around making sense of my upbringing, and my family, and how that had made me the person I’d grown into as an adult. Domino were nice people, and I think they cared about the music, but there were certain ways they wanted me to work that didn’t suit my style.

  Their plan was that I’d record demos for them, then they could pick the songs they thought I should record. Once I’d recorded them to their satisfaction, I would go to a meeting, to then be told I was allowed to go ahead and mix them. I’m afraid I just didn’t understand that way of doing things.

  It was like you or me telling a professional boxer how to train, or what to do in the ring. Like saying, ‘Hey, listen, you’re ready to fight now!’

  The team there knew about their label, and their business, maybe how to get on the radio, but how do they know when I’m ready to mix? I just found it weird.

  I do an album in about four or five weeks, recording, mixing, everything. When you think there’s only ten tracks on an album, then I mix at home nowadays, I don’t have to go into a studio anywhere – four or five weeks does it. If I’m finishing an album, I don’t wanna take four weeks off, thinking about mixing. And if I do, then it’ll be my choice.

  It just didn’t work out. I know Laurence thinks I slag him off, and maybe I’ve said a couple of negative things about him. I understand now that I was bad on him, but I’d become comfortable with my own methods of creating. Chris Blackwell, of all the label owners, has had the best artist roster ever, and he never came into the studio and told me what to do. Me and Chris never even had conversations about my music. If I wanted to go and record in Jamaica and he didn’t hear from me for two months, then I came back and said, ‘Here’s the record!’ He’d say, ‘Ooh, great!’ So maybe I was spoilt.

  Are these labels only into radio today, or are they thinking of tomorrow? Someone saying to me, ‘I need to give you permission before you can mix,’ or ‘You should work with this guy,’ I think they’re not forward thinking, because what you might initially think is a mistake might become a classic album ten years later. It was like this conversation I had with Marc Marot at Island, when I was frustrated at the beginning.

  ‘Marc’, I said, ‘sometimes I feel like my music just don’t fit in.’

  ‘Tricky, don’t worry,’ he replied with an encouraging smile. ‘One day people will catch up with you!’

  GLASTONBURY

  You might be getting the impression that I’m
never to be persuaded to capitalise on a no-brainer career opportunity. Well, that isn’t true at all. The most obvious example is when I agreed to join Beyoncé onstage during her headline set at Glastonbury 2011, for the song ‘Baby Boy’. It was apparently her choreographer who suggested me to her because they were a fan of mine, and it was my manager at the time who persuaded me to do it.

  ‘Look,’ they pleaded, ‘you have to do this, it’s Beyoncé!’

  ‘Nah!’ Not because I didn’t want to work with Beyoncé, but because that ain’t my scene.

  ‘Tricky, come on, you have to! There is no one on earth who would say no to going onstage with the biggest pop artist in the world!’

  ‘Oh, fuck it – alright!’

  Big mistake.

  We met up a day or two before the actual show. She was staying in this country house near Glastonbury, which belonged to some executive, who must’ve been a very wealthy guy – that place was serious! Obviously, her being Beyoncé, it wasn’t going to be easy getting in and out of the festival. She had to have a police escort.

  Meeting her that day, she didn’t at all have a superstar vibe about her. It was like meeting a normal girl, just very simple and down to earth, which I was really surprised by – not the person you would see in a video. She was rehearsing the dance routines with her dancers, but we didn’t do much of a rehearsal for the music. It was just to say hi.

  In the daytime, before the actual show on the Sunday evening, I was visiting my nanny Violet, who was about to pass away. When visiting time was over, I drove straight down from Bristol to the festival site.

  Walking onstage as a guest is the worst thing anyway: you have all the build-up, all the waiting around – and it’s Glastonbury, where everybody else is partying hard – and then you get your three or four minutes.