Hell Is Round the Corner

by Tricky

  This was something else. This was nerve-wracking. Ten minutes before my slot, I realise: oh shit!

  I go on, and it’s like I just walked inside a giant TV set. This isn’t a show in front of a live crowd. The whole stage is a TV screen. Smoke everywhere, dancers, bright lights. Bright as fuck! TOO MUCH!

  I instantly feel very out of place. Rabbit in the headlights. Overwhelmed, I freeze. I grab the mic, but my mouth isn’t working. The backing track plays on, with a huge gaping silence where my voice should be.

  I dare not look up, where 200,000 pairs of eyes are gawping at me, waiting for my contribution. Nothing will come out of my mouth. Beyoncé knows what’s going on, that I’m fucking up, and she tries to cover for me. She comes over and dances close to me, professional, vibing with me, trying to make it better. But that’s making it worse.

  I look at her. It’s fucking Beyoncé, dancing beside me. I look down into the pit, and there’s Jay-Z gazing up at us. My verse has passed. Too late. The song is over.

  Confused cheers, as I go.

  Oh God.

  As soon as the show was over, people were asking me in interviews backstage, ‘Like, what happened?’ I said my microphone wasn’t working because I wasn’t gonna admit at that stage that I just froze. It was a lie. I was speechless. It was that no words would come out of my mouth. Nothing! I just got on, saw all the lights, grabbed the mic, and it was almost like everything was happening like it was supposed to, but then my mouth wouldn’t let me say anything.

  I only had one verse to do – I could easily have freestyled that. I could have made up something off the top of my head. I could do that onstage, fucking no problem. But I froze.

  Anything that happens to me, people think, ‘Oh, he was stoned or he was fucked up!’ People are ignorant. I was totally sober, and it was too much for me. It was nothing to do with Beyoncé; just, that kind of show really wasn’t me. I’m a fish-and-chip guy, very simple. I’m a ‘stroll onstage’ kind of person. Beyoncé is professional, one of the best performers around, when you’re talking about a big showbiz production like that. It was too professional for me.

  Afterwards, she was as cool as fuck, and Jay-Z as well. No one said much. It was funny being backstage with them. You think, ‘Beyoncé, biggest artist in the world,’ and she’s got a dressing room like everybody else’s dressing room – one shitty portacabin with that horrible hospital strip-lighting, nothing going on at all, just a bit of music, boring as fuck. You remember how I was telling you about Elvis? Well, she’d just been in front of 200,000 people, and then she’s backstage, no vibe, back to reality. It’s like that even for the biggest stars of all.

  I was quite shocked by how down to earth she was. I thought, ‘How can you be so grounded when you’re that famous?’ Onstage, she’s so immaculate, but backstage so normal. I couldn’t work it out. She could be here now, and you would forget she’s Beyoncé. You see artists where the fame gets to them and you can tell that they’re not mentally stable, but she just manages to be herself. She hasn’t lost herself. She is not needy. That’s very unusual.

  I was just looking at her, and I actually said to her, ‘You know you’re the biggest artist in the world, right?’ And she kind of looked at me and shrugged.

  I don’t know her, but from what I saw, she seemed like a normal grounded person. People would be running around after her if that was what she wanted. I was there when she was around her dancers, and it wasn’t all about her. I’ve seen her in her dressing room – the same. She doesn’t have to dominate the room; she doesn’t need the attention. And she worked really hard. I saw her rehearsing and she worked – work, work, work, work. I was really impressed. Maybe some people are built for it.

  Jay-Z was a good guy, too. I’d met him once before, and he was very polite. I would say that if you’ve got that much money, you must be a powerful guy. He was nice to me, though, very humble.

  At Glastonbury, a girl came over to me, and goes, ‘Do you want to meet Jay?’ I said, ‘No, I’m good, let him do his thing.’ I just stood where I was, and she came over again, and she goes, ‘Come and meet Jay!’ I’m like, ‘No, I’m alright, I don’t need to meet him.’ That’s never going to happen, I don’t care who you are! If you wanna meet me, I’m cool – you come and say hello – but I don’t care how big a star you are, it’s never happening that you could send someone to me to come and say hello to you. I don’t know if it was that, or he might have been shy. I’m thinking he’s probably got enough people who want to meet him backstage in Glastonbury. But then, finally, he came over to me, and he was just really nice.

  And do you know who’s really nice as well? That guy from Coldplay – Chris Martin! It’s funny – the ones you wouldn’t expect … You know, there’s artists out there who think they are really cool and credible, and they are not, their music is shit pop music. But they think they’re credible – they ain’t worth talking to. Save your breath. The days of credible pop ended with Marc Bolan.

  Then you’ve got huge pop artists like Chris Martin, who is actually a good, good guy. I met him at Glastonbury. It took me aback, because first of all I didn’t want to talk to him. I just thought, ‘Coldplay singer, hello, goodbye.’ I had totally judged him before meeting him. He is someone I really respect in that industry now. It’s hard being nice, when all eyes are on you. I wished I’d said certain things to him. Like, ‘You’re a good fucking guy, mate!’ But I was so overwhelmed at how nice he was, I came over a bit speechless again. He caught me off guard. It totally threw me. He was with his wife at the time, Gwyneth Paltrow, and then they hurried off before I could say anything.

  So, these were great people, who I felt fortunate to meet. Glastonbury itself I was not impressed with. The food backstage was ham, egg and chips! The food they do for you backstage at a French festival, say, is fucking ridiculous – proper food. At Glastonbury, it was shit, with all the money they’re making off television rights. Crazy, right?

  There’s another thing:

  ‘Why is the fee so low?’

  ‘Oh, because it’s Glastonbury!’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, it’s because bands want to play here.’

  What is that about? I’ll never do Glastonbury again unless they pay me properly. I won’t do it ‘just because it’s Glastonbury’. Fuck Glastonbury! It’s not even Glastonbury anymore, like it was when me and Whitley used to go there. Imagine trying to get side of stage for Beyoncé like Anthony did, with his face painted and a spliff on the go? It wouldn’t happen nowadays.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE TAXMAN

  Money-wise, I’ve lived a ridiculous life. All through my years of making music, there was so much cash around, I never thought of saving, or minor details like tax. I could spend 200 grand on a car service, or hiring a private jet that I never ended up using, and make it back in a few days. I had cheques coming in from all the different labels I’d been signed to. Little did I know, I would spend money even when I hadn’t got it. I had no concept of not having money. Why worry?

  What I earned went on my daughter’s school, and a couple of houses – I bought Mazy’s mum a house in London, so they had security, and the place in New Jersey, and I don’t even know what happened to that one. I remember living there for a few years, then all of a sudden, I was in LA. Really, whatever happened to that house?

  Maybe I should’ve kept a closer eye on stuff like that, because all of a sudden in the early 2010s, I found out that I was flat broke. I owed 500 grand in unpaid taxes on both sides of the Atlantic, with interest rapidly accumulating, and I was getting sued by my manager because I hadn’t paid him either. With all my moving around, and changing managers and accountants and advisers, nobody had ever looked at the big picture of my finances, and the whole thing had got deeply fucked up.

  My attitude at that stage was, ‘Fuck it, I’ll move back to Bristol and live with one of my family! I’ll quit music, I don’t give a fuck!’ That’s where I was at, when my new manag
er approached Horst Weidenmüller, the boss of a German label called !K7, to do a new record. As soon as I did the deal, the advance went to that manager, with all those taxes still outstanding.

  I was in a very, very bad place, but over the next four or five years, Horst put my career back together. He became my manager, and set me up with publishing and my own label at !K7, called False Idols, so I could eventually have a fresh income. This wasn’t like a major record-company deal. This was a long-term commitment, where he was sorting out my problems, and setting me up for the future. He didn’t make any money for himself for three years or so: it was all investment from his side.

  For the first couple of years, he funded me to live, not just to make music. He rented me an apartment, gave me money every month to live on, put in money monthly to pay off my debts, and eventually got me to the point where I no longer had any debts to pay, where I had repaid him and could start rebuilding my financial affairs.

  He looked into everything in my business dealing. Was there anything I owed? Was there anything people owed me? He’d say, ‘You produced this, this, this and this – let’s see if there’s any money out there for you.’ He’d try to see what contracts I’d signed at different stages. It wasn’t just difficult, it was a puzzle, because no single person knew the past of what I signed, and what I had done. Once you stop working with someone – an accountant, say, and you aren’t paying them anymore – they aren’t rushing back to give you info. Or an old lawyer – they don’t give a toss.

  Horst went through it all from top to bottom, and without him I don’t know what I would have done. It was more than just a leap of faith on his part, he helped me survive. He is a different type of guy – not your typical industry person. It’s been hard for me to have trust after I’ve been fucked over so many times, but this man, I trust.

  HORST WEIDENMÜLLER: I started !K7 in 1985 as a media production company. I did a lot of documentaries, and live videos with people like Nick Cave. I created the DJ-Kicks compilation series; through that came Kruder & Dorfmeister, and from there I developed a label group.

  In 2010/11 we started a management company, and it was about a year after that that we got approached by Tricky’s management, asking if we would be interested in releasing his upcoming album. We suggested it would make more sense to do a label service deal, whereby we’d facilitate the release, and Tricky would remain the full rights holder. As we were setting that up, Tricky decided to leave that management company. That’s how we started to manage him, too.

  At the start, I just tried to understand what had happened. Tricky had made so many records, I imagined there must be a really healthy flow of money coming in from many sources, including the live side. When he was living in America, he had the convenience of having the income of all his past music, which is why his productivity had stopped by the time he lived in LA.

  I soon realised there was no longer any income from the history of Tricky: when the tax bills had first landed, he was advised to sell all his claims and shares in his own publishing to another company, so he could pay them off.

  It took me a while to understand, because Tricky would say, ‘Yes, there was a deal, I sold something,’ but there was never any paperwork, and he didn’t remember the details. I was finally able to find that agreement, and also to look into his former accounting: Tricky used to make a healthy six-digit figure, before tax – nothing through the roof, not popstar living, but appropriate for an artist with his heritage. When you then deduct cuts for all the people you need, like managers and tax advisers and lawyers, that figure would be reduced by half.

  Then, to pay his tax bill, he was advised to sell his publishing share, for a multiple of 2.3. That means, for less than two and a half years’ worth of that income. Of course it’s attractive to make such a deal, because it’s a large lump sum on the table, and it was recommended that he take that money to pay off the taxman – two and a half years’ worth – but then never to receive any back-catalogue publishing again, and that lump sum was subject to management commission, and fees for lawyers and tax consultants.

  After that Tricky’s manager, a guy called Matt Willis, started to sue him and he ended their agreement mid-contract. A court case then developed, and it went on a long time, so there were various teams working on it. For some reason, it got to a stage where there was a hearing at which Tricky was not represented, and in this court hearing, there was a ruling against him, that he had to pay that money, plus interest.

  He had a lawyer, a new manager and an accountant, and all of them were involved in the case, but for some reason there was another court hearing where nobody disputed the ruling, and it was an irrevocable ruling against Tricky, and the money owing to Willis’s company was a substantial six-figure sum.

  That is when I got involved. I looked into the accounting, and there really was no more income from the past; the only place where it could come from was for Tricky to play live, and to release his first album with us, False Idols, in 2013.

  What then happened was, every time he toured, the legal team who had the court ruling against him seized the money. That meant that if he was playing at a festival, suddenly he would get a call from the agent, Ben Winchester, saying, ‘I’m sorry, they just seized the deposit.’ Even after that, you still have to go and play at the festival – you are under contract, and you go there not even sure if you will get the back end of your fee, or if that has also been seized directly from the promoter. So, you actually get deeper in the hole, owing your band and crew their wages.

  It got very tense for a couple of years. Tricky said to me, ‘I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’m going on tour and I’m coming back with even more debt than I had before I left, and I can’t pay my band.’ There were so many uncertainties – the opposite of what an artist needs when he goes on tour.

  His debts were substantial, and if we hadn’t settled the management suit quickly, it would’ve gone on forever, and even if I’d wanted to build a new business for Tricky, I would never have been able to, because it would’ve been constantly attacked in an ongoing war of hide-and-seek and revenge. The end result would’ve been Tricky living under a bridge. He was like, ‘I don’t care, I can live under a bridge!’ But we had to end it, so I put my own money in, and settled with the management people for something around £200,000. It was actually on my fiftieth birthday, in 2014, and the following day I wired over the money. Then at least we could say, ‘No more war!’

  I had just cleared that payment, when we found out about Tricky’s storages. ‘What the fuck are these?’ When Tricky left New York, he put all the furniture and contents from his house in New Jersey into a storage facility, and every month the storage had to be paid for. The same happened for LA: Tricky probably said, ‘I look only into the future, not into the past – put it in storage!’ We had no money, so we decided to let LA go – without looking in there, we just told them to delete it, destroy it, sell it, whatever.

  We decided to focus on the New York storage, and we had all these DATs and discs. By now, there was no catalogue business for Tricky, but with this wealth of unreleased material we were able to create a digital archive, and give it to Tricky, like, ‘One day, in case you ever get bored and want to look back, here’s a load of stuff you did with Neneh Cherry and Björk, amongst others – uncleared, but unreleased!’ There’s also a demo recording of just Bob Marley singing with an acoustic guitar, which Chris Blackwell gave him at some point – the only copy! Probably he has never looked into the archive so far, but the good thing is that it’s there.

  At this stage, in 2014, Tricky wasn’t enthusiastic. He said to me, ‘Hey, you’re my manager – where’s my money? Can you make me a deal? I need money!’ With good reason, he felt threatened.

  I realised that what he really needed was an independence from that syndrome where the next cheque is needed to pay his latest bills – because if you are dependent on them, they get smaller; they only get bigger if you don’t depend on t
hem. I said to him, ‘We have to build a catalogue for you again, because you don’t have a catalogue that you own and get income from anymore – the only thing you own is what you produce now. I suggest that you create your own label and publishing, and therefore have a monthly income from those. That monthly income will hopefully, in the future, if everything goes right, give you a financial freedom again because you own the rights, and you will make the lion’s share.’

  I told him I was happy to bridge that for him, and I did, but it was a difficult time, of maybe two or three years, from 2014 to 2017, where we were building up that catalogue. Sometimes Tricky was saying, ‘What the fuck are you doing, Horst? I trusted you, but I have no money in my account!’ At times, I was also questioning myself, and I had my financial people saying, ‘Horst, what the fuck are you doing?’ I was just passionate about it, like, ‘This is such a fucked-up situation, and I’m going to fix it.’

  I said, ‘Look, we’ll turn it around. It just doesn’t make sense right now for you to spend all the money that’s coming in, because it’s needed elsewhere. Just for these couple of years, you’ll get an auto-payment every month to live on, and I will manage all the rest.’ In one year under that new system we’d paid off half of the debt. That was the first ray of sunshine coming – the turning point where Tricky started to trust me. I don’t think he necessarily understood what I was doing for him in detail, but he realised that something was changing.

  It was getting better all the time, because the albums he was creating with us were making money. We also had to scale down his live band, so that touring turned a profit. He loved me for that one! It was risky because we were selling it as a Tricky show, but there were just three people – Tricky, a guitarist, and a drummer, with no female singer – and the drummer was the tour manager! There were no projections, not even a lighting person – just Tricky and his voice. If the show hadn’t turned out well, it could’ve been damaging, but luckily he pulled it off. He really bit the bullet and gave an amazing performance, and every day it was easing the financial situation.