Tricky says black American music is rubbish and even his own creation, trip-hop, is like ‘McDonald’s’. But he’s still baffled by his reputation for being difficult John Aizlewood
‘Listen: I know without doubt that I am the best artist in the world and have been for the last seven years. Not because my music is the best, but because there’s never been any compromise. The only artists who’ve done that are old school: Bob Dylan, James Brown, Public Enemy and Gary Numan.”
It is 11am in deepest Chiswick, west London, and 36-year-old Tricky, possibly Britain’s most confrontational musician, warms to his theme. We are in a back room of the sprawling offices occupied by his nervous publicists. Here, Tricky can chain- smoke joints with impunity. Gone, it seems, are the days of late-shows and no-shows. Today Tricky arrived early and willing.
“And another thing: there are no new artists with their own music, everybody is part of something. I’m actually the only artist around now.”
When his laser eyes lock and he wistfully declares that “I can’t afford to take advice”, Tricky is merely reinforcing his own particular world. There is hubris (“I don’t give a fuck because I’ve got a selfish attitude”); there is caring (“When I’m not on tour, my band have to do pantomime. I want to do big gigs to earn them money”); and, as befits a man who has not had a serious relationship for two years, there is isolation (“Sometimes I could do with a shoulder to cry on, someone to come home and talk to”).
They, whoever “they” may be, say that Tricky is trouble; a mountain of unpleasantness packed into a scrawny urchin’s body. He is surly, he is prone to violence, he is dangerously unpredictable and paranoid. Today, however, he is unceasingly polite, vividly articulate and he gurgles like a drain when amused. In short, he is rum company and it would be a hard heart that did not warm to his unfettered Bristol accent, his untied shoes and his scattergun – albeit contradictory – opinions on anything and everything.
Yet Tricky has baggage. There is his music; decidedly dark, although aficionados always detect an uplifting streak. He is hip-hop, he is trip-hop, he is garage, he is a singer-songwriter and he is pop; and he is not quite any of those things.
Then there is his attitude. “Anyone here into trip-hop?” he asked the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in 1995. When the crowd responded positively, Tricky, the unwilling inventor of trip-hop, replied: “Well, fuck off home then.” Similarly, midway through last year’s extraordinarily tense London Astoria show, a little light briefly broke through on to a set played almost entirely in darkness. Tricky stopped midsong and made his only speech of the evening: “Turn the fucking light off, cunt!”, before continuing in pitch blackness.
“I’m on a different planet on stage. I’m smoking a lot of weed, I shake my head and the little lights start blurring, so I’m having trips and dreams. It’s almost speaking in tongues. When something brings me out of that, as the lighting did that night, I immediately get angry.”
Tricky, they also say, is impossible to deal with. As he acknowledges, his former record company, Island, gave him complete artistic freedom. He responded by building up a mountain of debt and a bolshiness that chiefly took the form of refusing to make music that radio stations might be interested in – and refusing to promote the music he did make.
“People shy away from me because I’ve got such a bad reputation,” he says. “What’s crazy is that I don’t know where it comes from, but it’s not just press, it’s Joe Public too.”
Initially, he says, his relationship with Island was close. Tricky would while away whole days in the office of Julian Palmer, his artistic and repertoire man, smoking industrial quantities of weed, gossiping about other acts, falling asleep on the couch and playing music at deafening volume. Palmer departed, cautioning Tricky against becoming Island’s second Tom Waits: a critically acclaimed artist with negligible sales. The romance began to turn sour.
On leaving Island, the label V2, home of Stereophonics, sniffed around. “People at Island had told V2 that I was too difficult to deal with, although V2 were nicey-nicey at the time. Mad, isn’t it? I thought I had a good relationship with everybody at Island. Apparently I didn’t.”
Eventually Tricky signed to Epitaph (Waits’s new home, ironically) in Europe and the Disney-owned Hollywood (“so cool you wouldn’t believe”) in the United States. He left PolyGram, Island’s new masters, with two gifts: that massive debt recouped, he claims, by catalogue sales and, secondly, a song called Divine Comedy, which has resurfaced on his new Mission Accomplished EP.
Mission Accomplished has four separate tracks, making it ineligible for the charts (“It don’t need to chart, it’s just a hello, but for the first time, I want to get my music on the radio”). Divine Comedy’s recurring, airplay-unfriendly motif – “PolyGram: fucking niggers” – suggests hatchets being sharpened rather than buried.
Divine Comedy was inspired by a “really stupid” comment from American PolyGram executive Eric Kronfeld, whom Tricky has never met. Kronfeld said that if the music industry refused to employ blacks with criminal records, the music industry would employ no blacks at all. Yet Tricky is aiming for another target. “Listen, [Kronfeld] didn’t piss me off. America’s supposed to be so black. Everyone’s into this Spike Lee black-power shit, yet no black acts said anything about what Kronfeld said because they were scared. Over there you’ve got black divisions of labels, but music is just music. DJ Spooky is shit, but he’s black and he has dreads, so people don’t want to say it. Same with Maxwell: shit.”
The former Adrian Thaws grew up in Knowle West, bandit country primarily inhabited by Bristol’s white underclass. “Racism doesn’t exist to me. I know too many different kinds of people. Where I grew up, my white friends would get arrested as many times as me. I’ve seen policemen beat up my white friends while I’ve never been touched. Poverty’s the link.”
His “half-white, half-African” mother died when he was four, either a suicide or following epilepsy complications; he doesn’t actually know. His father left soon after and he was raised alongside a sister and four half-brothers by his extended family.
He drifted into petty crime – dealing weed and breaking-and-entering interspersed with the occasional violent episode. When he was 15, he was sentenced to youth custody for buying forged oe50 notes. When he was released a few days later, fuelled by his adoration for the first Specials album, he joined the Wild Bunch, a Bristol musical agglomeration whose alumni formed the basis of the city’s mid-1990s musical boom.
In 1995, his debut album, Maxinquaye (named after his mother, Maxine Quaye), reached number three. Alongside Portishead’s Dummy and Protection by Tricky’s former Wild Bunch colleagues Massive Attack, it formed a Bristol-based coffee-table triumvirate. “I used to feel real contempt for the audience,” he says. “I felt like a real Muppet. Maxinquaye was just one side to my personality, but I went to the cinema to watch True Romance and all the adverts sounded like it. That was the end for me. My music had become McDonald’s and I had to run away from it. I could never make another album like Maxinquaye.”
He’s been running ever since, making music designed to reach a more select audience with each passing album. He even turned to acting in 1997, appearing in Luc Besson’s science fiction opus The Fifth Element.
“Look, where I come from you don’t get the opportunity to do a Hollywood movie, but I didn’t like it when people came up and said, ‘You’re that kid in the film.’ It still happens. What’s funny is that they not only think I’m an actor, but an out-of- work actor.
“Anyway, every Tom, Dick and Harry is acting and I ain’t no Tom, Dick or Harry. When All Saints are doing it, you know it’s time to say no.”
Despite his aversion to advice, Tricky is still highly sensitive. Take his former muse, ex-public schoolgirl Martina Topley- Bird, mother of their daughter Maisy and the light-voiced singer to some of his darkest soundscapes. Their relationship was always roller-coaster. An interviewer asked Tricky why she didn’t write her own lyrics – was he jealous of her and thus holding her back?
“Then he tried to make me look like Ike Turner,” he sighs. “At that very point I knew I could not work with Martina again. To be honest with you, I’ve made Martina what she is. I’ve given her phrases to sing and her look. I’ve got visual concepts, I know what she should and shouldn’t be singing. I knew how to make her one of the most credible singers in the UK. Then, for him to say what he said … it hurt, I was devastated. She’s still wondering why we ain’t working together.”
As good as his word, Tricky is not on her forthcoming solo album and she is not on his.
But he remains the cognoscenti’s collaborator of choice. He has worked with Bj”rk, PJ Harvey and Elvis Costello among others. He could have produced U2’s misfiring Pop album of 1997. Bono played him the demos. “I told him it was the best thing he’d done for years, but I couldn’t do anything with it, it was fine as it was. I could have got myself on a good thing. He got Howie B in. I just wanted to say, ‘Look, you’ve got a beautiful voice, a great band, you’ve been around a long time and your talent touches many souls. You’re U2, the biggest band in the world. Don’t worry about being now people!'”
In 1996, Tricky moved to Greenwich Village. He still dips into New York, often to be courted by the super-famous (“Met Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston the other night – very, very nice people”), but Manhattan eventually bored him, so he bought a couple of acres in West Orange, New Jersey, where he can be surrounded by greenery when his daughter visits.
Since his Las Vegas marriage to an actor ended, there have been no further applicants for the demanding post of Mrs Tricky.
“I’m hard to have a relationship with. I smoke too much weed and I can veg out for days. Yet when I do go out to clubs, I don’t want it to be with a girl I’m seeing. I don’t want to be responsible for someone, so I go with my mates. Anyway, all I got in my head is my music and my kid. That’s a problem.”
Prospective partners should also take note of Tricky’s stern sleeping arrangements. “If I go on holiday with my daughter and a girlfriend, the girlfriend will not sleep in the same bed as me. When my kid’s at my house, my girlfriend will not be in bed with me because at 7am my kid gets out of her bed and gets into mine. And I don’t want my kid getting a bond with someone who won’t be around for long.”
And with that, it is time for Tricky to meet the German press. He cheerily suspects that they still regard him as a transvestite after seeing photographs of him dressed as a woman in Maxinquaye’s CD booklet. With all this pleasantness and morality, it’s as if he likes himself.
“I could be a better person, definitely,” he says. “But I don’t shoot people or kill anybody and I ain’t selling crack, so I’m quite good. I could be a lot worse, you know.”