How Tricky got clobbered

Published on Friday 13 February 2009 18:19

The godfather of trip-hop talks to Jonathan Trew about mellowing with age, making music again and using his childhood experiences to help the youth of today

TRICKY is a cool customer. So much so that he is not going to let a little detail like being mugged interrupt a conversation. I'm in Edinburgh on the phone to the musician christened Adrian Thaws. Tricky is in a rehearsal room in Paris where a couple of teenagers are heisting his clobber.

"Hang on," he says, two minutes into our interview. "These kids are robbing me for my Adidas here."

There is the sound of a brief scuffle and a faint cry of "You don't need to do that. I'll get you some, mate" followed by a more resigned "Never mind" and then Tricky is back on the line. "Adidas sent me some stuff and I left them sitting right in the middle of this place," he explains in his soft Bristol burr. "I should have hid them when these kids came in. They've ended up having them all."

Ten years ago, Tricky's bad boy reputation was such that you might have expected him to start uttering menaces against the teenagers and threatening a bloody revenge. After all, he is rumoured to have written an unreleased song about kidnapping and shooting a journalist who once displeased him. Pinching designer sportswear surely merits some payback? Actually no, according to an all new, easygoing, remarkably forgiving Tricky.

"If kids have got nothing to do then they are going to get into trouble," he says. "They want a bit of excitement or a bit of money, and before you know it someone is a criminal. But no one starts off that way. It's circumstances."

Such circumstances come under the microscope in Knowle West Boy, his eighth and most recent album release last year. Named after the Bristol council estate where he grew up, it's the first album in five years from Tricky and a forceful reminder of why he mattered in the first place. An offshoot of The Wild Bunch, the Bristol sound system that morphed into Massive Attack, Tricky helped define one of the dominant sounds of the late Nineties, not only by co-writing three of the nine tracks on Massive Attack's Blue Lines, but with his 1995 Mercury-nominated debut album Maxinquaye.

A haunting collection of disjointed dance floor rhythms, slow-moving melodies and dreamy, sometimes paranoid vocals, the album almost single-handedly kick-started trip-hop. It was a huge success. So much so that Tricky spent the next few years trying to escape from under its shadow. Live gigs performed in near darkness and a series of increasingly brooding, bleak-sounding albums seemed to point to a man unhappy with the attention he was receiving. In interviews at the time he spoke about how he was often depressed, angry and worried that he was having a nervous breakdown.

An often fractious relationship with the media didn't help. He blamed the newspapers for putting a lot of stress on his relationship with Martina Topley-Bird, his musical collaborator, former partner and mother of his child. A brief relationship with Bjrk, who was also linked to Goldie around the same time, led to more unwanted appearances in the tabloids. Matters came to a head in a much disputed incident backstage at Glastonbury in 1998 which ended with a journalist for The Face magazine being assaulted. Talking to him more than 10 years later, the volatile, confrontational persona is nowhere in evidence but he is still wary about the reception his music gets.

"I get more critiqued than most artists so I can't just bring an album out," he says. "As soon as I bring an album out, everybody expects it to be life-changing or music-changing. That used to be a pressure. That's why I did Nearly God (his disturbing second album]: to get away from the bloody success."

Now living back in Britain after eight years in the US, Tricky seems happier in his skin, and it shows on Knowle West Boy. Large swathes of the album are still unlikely to be mistaken for a ray of sunshine but nor does it sound like it was recorded in a smoke-filled coffin buried in the desert, an accusation that could be levelled at songs such as 'My Evil Is Strong' from his third album Pre-Millennium Tension. Knowle West Boy paints from a broader palette with blues, punk, pop and even, whisper it, country being put through the Tricky filter.

As always with Tricky, the album is strongly flavoured with vocal contributions from collaborators, some random, some less so. 'Bacative' is beefed up with reggae toasting courtesy of Rodigan, a friend Tricky used to hang out with in the Bronx. The biographical 'School Gates' and 'Past Mistake' feature his ex-girlfriend Lubna Mhaer while 'Joseph' is named after an otherwise anonymous busker whose sweet voice provides a contrast to Tricky's rasp.

Having just turned 41 at the end of January, Tricky is the first to acknowledge that age has soothed him, although he still needs to remind himself of the fact occasionally. He recounts how he recently started squaring up to someone in the street until the realisation dawned that he could simply walk away.

"I've mellowed," he says. "When I was young, I came from rap which was very competitive. It had attitude. As a rapper you want to be the best and I took that attitude into music. Now I feel that I've got nothing to prove. I sound like myself and the only thing I have to do is create something new."

While Tricky may have mellowed, his music still has teeth. 'Council Estate' was the first single from Knowle West Boy and it is a key track from the album. An angry, confrontational shout about the dead-end frustrations of living in a deprived area, it's the sound of Tricky reliving his difficult roots. He was brought up by his grandmother after his mother, Maxine Quaye, committed suicide when he was four. His father was never around. One of his earliest memories is of his grandmother and aunt fighting to see who should look after him. Granny won after breaking his aunt's arm in a door.

Another aunt got tired of her husband coming home drunk and smashing everything, so she waited at the front door until she heard his key fumbling around the lock, flung open the door, threw pepper in his eyes and then stabbed him in the stomach. Twice.

"I come from very tough ladies," says Tricky in a strong contender for understatement of the year. "I don't know any different. I don't know any weak women, to be honest, or at least not in my family. They have always ruled the roost because a lot of the men were in prison. 'Council Estate' is about stuff that happened when I was growing up. It's what all kids go through growing up on council estates.

"It goes back to bands like The Specials or The Selecter. Bands who, back in the day, would talk about their environment and complain about it. They were protesting about their surroundings, which are still the same now or worse even than they were. It feels like no one is saying anything like that now. Guitar bands aren't really saying much. You used to get guitar bands like The Jam. They were from council flats. A lot of it now is student rock."

Of course, there are few things as nauseating as successful, older recording artists bitching how the kids today don't know they are born when their last contact with anyone under 25 was when Thatcher was still Prime Minister. That's not Tricky. It transpires that he is calling from the Centquatre arts centre in Paris. One of its aims is to act as an outreach facility for the youth of the area, and Tricky is helping.

"It's somewhere for kids to hang out," he says. "It's where kids come and make music, they paint, write lyrics, make videos. There are some kids running around with boxing gloves, some are playing their music. It's funded by the French government. I'm basically the host."

Tricky doesn't speak French and the kids don't speak English but they rub along happily through music. "If they drop some lyrics then I might not be able to understand the words but you can feel what they are saying. As soon as someone comes off the mic, I stand up and start clapping them so they can see that somebody appreciates them. That way, people feel good about themselves. I've come across some serious talent here but record labels aren't going to come down here and sign anybody because they are scared to come here."

"I think I have found my niche," he says. "I don't think this is something you can just do once. I want to do it all over the place. London, Italy, everywhere. I know where they are coming from, but they are much tougher than I was. They are fearless and don't respect you just because you are older. When I was brought up, you respected your elders."

And presumably you didn't nick their Adidas.

Tricky plays the NME Awards Show, Arches, Glasgow, Thursday www.myspace.com/trickola