The dark genius of trip-hop grew up on mean streets. Most of his friends are still trawling them. Tricky revisits his roots with Kamal Ahmed
They call me Tricky for
particular reason
They say I’m loud
Why should I hide?
The clouds that linger above Knowle West are not quite grey. If a paint company was encouraging the middle classes to cover their lounges in the same colour of emulsion they would call it Extra Grey. Or Working-Class Grey. It is as if God has given them an extra coat of dullness, just to make a point about the prospects of the people who live there.
Knowle West is a suburb of Bristol, England. The sort of place that in social shorthand would be known as rough, tough and disadvantaged.
Adrian Thaws grew up on these estates, where shop owners pull down metal shutters to stop their windows from getting smashed. Adrian Thaws used to hang around on street corners, get involved in petty crime, then not-so- petty crime, before a short spell in a young offenders institute for dealing in forged 50 notes. Adrian Thaws used to bunk off school and fight with his classmates. Adrian Thaws’s environment had a nice big sign on it, giving him a little direction in life. Down only. Do not pass go. Get out or suffocate.
So he got out. Leaving behind Peter Selby, who was good at football. And the teachers who would still be there, a bit older and fatter, when he returned more than 10 years later. And his family, some of whom were known as the local hard nuts, not to be messed with.
The Village Voice in New York didn’t describe Adrian Thaws as a man who could happily be mentioned in the same breath as Duke Ellington. It didn’t describe Adrian Thaws as the man with the artistic brilliance of Jimi Hendrix. It was referring to Tricky – the nickname Adrian Thaws had as a kid and has been using since he left the streets of Knowle West and became famous as a musical genius.
“He’s a rock’n’roller,” the magazine said. “Nervous, neurotic, self- obsessed and paranoid. Thank God, because not enough black males in music feel entitled to splatter their angst on the rest of us. Gall and nakedness plus ganja make Tricky the mutant off-spring of Chuck Berry, Lee Scratch Perry and Richard Hell – a dub-wise, black punk rocker.”
Now he is back. To see the streets and the clouds which are a little greyer than ever. To see his family, his uncle who once stabbed a man, his grandmother who taught him how to fight and steal, and see the pictures of his mother, found dead of an overdose when he was four years old.
He is back to see his old music teacher and a colleague with a beard who patiently tries to explain to Tricky, a 29-year-old who can enthuse a whole class with a few words, that artistry is as much about following examples as expressing yourself.
No it isn’t, says Tricky, after seeing a music lesson where the kids follow the cack-handed rhythms of their polo- jumpered teacher, who has no hint of joy around his lips. “Who’s making the music? Him or the kids? It’s not their music. He’s not letting them write, he’s writing his music really. That upsets me.”
Following him, at a discreet distance, is Mark Kidel with a digital camera, filming Naked and Famous, a documentary about Tricky.
Be cool, stay sensitive, keep calm, Tricky assures Kidel. People will watch it.
If only to see a man battered by circumstances who found through the group Massive Attack and the 1991 album Blue Lines that he had a voice people loved. If only to see his thin, racked body swaying in a trance before the microphone in a dark club in Paris, screaming “I ain’t the devil” and “Worse than a nightmare”. He shouts and shouts until he is on the brink of bringing up his guts. If only to see Tricky, whose first solo album, Maxinquaye (named after his mother), had the reviewers proclaiming the new rap messiah.
My defences
Become fences
Now I’m stumbling
I’ve changed my face
And if you think I’m a faker
When you’re out
I take off my make-up.
`I grew up in a family where you never see one race of people.” Tricky, who is of mixed race, is talking – as ever seemingly only a few minutes away from lighting up his next spliff. “You see white people, you see people who ain’t quite black, you see people who are very white, you see people who are very yellow. You know what I mean. We’re mongrels, right? But you know when you take a litter of puppies, the mongrel is the most intelligent. A mutant. A mutant race, you know what I mean?”
He looks at pictures of himself as a young child. Surrounded in a white city by white children. On his journey through the classrooms and the memories of school, he is still surrounded by white people.
They try. “We need to get as many people from the school who are now very successful,” one teacher says. “Because now, you’re seen as a god. You’re up there, with the greatest.”
And Tricky tries. He shakes hands, he sways in time to the rhythms the children are producing. He talks about music. “Music’s got its own life anyway. Like, say you’ve got a drum sound, you listen to it long enough and you smoke enough weed, and it changes anyway. Then it starts talking to you. And it’ll tell you a part, a musical part, it’ll have a melody.”
He pauses and smiles at the teenagers whose cocky confidence has been lost before a superstar. They just nod and do their best to keep up. “I don’t worry about bars and all that stuff. I think if you’re getting music lessons and they tell you you’ve got to beat on the one bar, don’t take any notice of that. It’s all rubbish.” He grins approvingly as a young boy messes up a sequence. “See, you’re like me. I like that. Chaos.”
Tricky, whose new album, Angels with Dirty Faces, is just out, has his own recording label, Durban Poison, which he runs from the United States. He has given a hand up to several of his contemporaries from Knowle West, some of whom make up the band, the Baby Namboos. But walking around the streets of Bristol, being followed by excitable children and a couple of friends, he knows he could give a hand up to a hundred willing youngsters and still hardly make a ripple.
“Trouble is,” one of the friends says, “things don’t change, do they?”
They meet Selby, who walks around the same streets with a woolly hat pulled tight over his head.
“He was a brilliant footballer wasn’t he?” Tricky said.
“Oh he was fantastic,” the friend replies. “He could have been, um. He seriously could have been, like Man United material.”
“How about Chrissy Morgan and that, are they still about?”
“Chris is inside at the moment. He’s due for parole in August.”
And so it goes. One man rises, another 20 sink. It all adds to Tricky’s lyrics, which he says come from the things he has seen and the things he has experienced. Maxinquaye was followed by Pre-Millennium Tension, Nearly God and Tricky Presents Grassroots. His new album, Angels with Dirty Faces, is perhaps his darkest and moodiest yet, juxtaposing his moaned and muttered musings with murky samples and edgy jungle beats.
He has worked with Bjrk, Neneh Cherry, Elvis Costello and Terry Hall. Famously, he threatened to kill Andrew Smith in the song Silver Bullet. Smith, a journalist, had written what Tricky considered a disrespectful article.
“I think I write good songs and that’s due to having experience of where I live and where I grew up,” says Tricky. “See, kids from here write much better lyrics than someone from Oxford, say, because they’ve got more experiences, they’ve got more to say. There’s a little bit more pain there, and that’s what the music is.”
Feels like wasted time
Feels like I must be blind
How do you like yourself?