Tricky's mother killed herself when he was 4 and an uncle spent time in jail for cutting off somebody's ear. Ahead of his Auckland show next week Tim Adams talks to the trip-hop innovator about his relationship with the dark side
When we meet, at his record company's office in London, the first thing Tricky tells me is that he hasn't smoked a joint in three weeks. He's intrigued by his willpower. It is the longest period of abstinence he has managed, he says, since he was 15. The original trip-hopper is now 42.
Sitting on the edge of his seat, with a cup of tea, next to his latest singer-muse, a young Irishwoman called Franky Riley, he gives the impression that the world is looking unusually sharp-edged. As a result, his fighter's face, under its dreadlocked mohican, seems invigorated and slightly puzzled.
Is he thinking of giving up for good?
"I don't really want to smoke," he says. "Or maybe just one in the evening.
Since I was a kid, from when I wake up in the morning I smoke until I go to bed and I'm never, you know, present. I'm always not there. So I just thought: it needs to stop."
This desire for clarity is part of the ongoing quest for self-knowledge that began for Tricky when he was 7 years old, still called Adrian Thaws, and trying to make some sense of the insanity that had attended his life to that point. His father had left home before he was born, his mother, Maxine Quaye, had killed herself when he was 4 and he had been brought up in "the white ghetto" of Knowle West in Bristol, mostly by his grandmother, who was happy for him to watch horror movies with her all night rather than going to school. When his gran was working she would drop him off at her mother's house, which was where Tricky started to write: "It was pretty hard-core at my great-grandmother's place: no TV, no books, not much furniture, concrete floors. I'd pick up a pencil and a piece of paper and just get out whatever was in my head."
What was in his head, even then, was a curious relationship with violence, seen at one remove, a tense mix of vulnerability and aggression. "I had seen my uncle stab my other uncle in the house when I was about 6, 7.
"For a child, it's not so much scary, it's surreal; there was a lot of fighting in my great-grandmother's house; you'd go there and then someone would meet up and there'd be a fight; I've seen my uncles fight in the street, I've seen my grandmother fight in the street, it becomes normal."
He began "writing properly", he says, at about the time he started smoking dope - as "self-medication" - and going clubbing in Bristol, often in a dress, and getting into fights of his own. At the time, he suggests, smiling at the idea, "I thought I was a rapper." Tricky was never that, quite. Always more of a whisperer or a ranter or a rasper, master of not one voice but many. Those voices in his head first became public when he collaborated with Massive Attack on their 1991 debut album, Blue Lines.
Four years later, it found its full, paranoid, mesmerising expression on the universally acclaimed Maxinquaye, his "voodoo" homage to the mother he never knew, ventriloquised in the honeyed voice of his ex-lover (and mother of his daughter) Martina Topley-Bird and cut with his trademark dreamy undercurrent of angst, menace and seduction.
It's been more than 15 years since that album and in that time he's released eight more studio albums and lived in New York, a small-town in New Jersey (where he got scared of the dark woods and lack of streetlighting), Los Angeles, and now Paris, partly to be nearer to his daughter, Maisey, who is now 15 and lives with her mother in London.
His latest, eclectic and compulsive album is Mixed Race, a reference to what he sees as the single biggest influence on his life: the fact that when he sat around the dining table at home, there was every colour of skin under the sun, "and I never noticed". This mix showed itself most keenly in the music he absorbed. "When I was 12 and my cousins Mark and Miles, from the first line-up of Massive Attack, would be getting ready to go out, they would be playing everything from Parliament to T-Rex. My Uncle Ken who helped to bring me up is a white guy who got me into black music - he used to play Al Green, Sam Cooke. I've been blessed because no one can put my music in a box - it's not black, it's not white, it's not female, it's not male."
Tricky's music is always open to accidental liaisons. The new album features not only Riley - who responded to his ad for a singer in a paper - but also a hardcore Jamaican singer, Terry Lynn, he discovered on YouTube, a haunting solo track from an Algerian guitarist, Hakim, who had turned up at his studio, a saxophone intervention from a busker he heard in the Marais, and a nice meditation on the price of fame, written with Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream.
The final track, Bristol to London - a reflection on gangster life - is a collaboration with his 24-year-old half-brother Marlon Thaws, who has spent time on the street and in prison.
The collaboration helped to remind Tricky what he has sometimes forgotten over the last decade: that he is first and foremost a songwriter. "Once I get the first two words," he says, "it's easy. I've never had writer's block, because it's not me who's really controlling it. I feel like I'm an aerial or it's like meditation."
Tricky has a deeply ambiguous relationship with the violent posturing of hip-hop. On Mixed Race, he typically puts the most threatening lyrics in the lilting vocal of Riley, feminising it. Why write about violence at all?
"It's always been around me," he says. "My cousin got murdered in East Ham a few years ago; he got shot in his head. I've had one uncle murdered in Bristol. A friend of the family got shot in his head and they chopped off his arms, his legs. You know, I'm a musician but I still hear a lot. If I wanted to do a gangsta rap album, I've more right to do it than most people, but it's just not me."
He keeps his own aggression at arm's length these days, in the boxing gym. In the past, he has studied jujitsu and t'ai chi. Martial arts have been his education, he suggests ("school was nothing for me"), but since then, "I've found myself really needing some wisdom."
His desire to be a better man, he says, is rooted in his desire to be, in his own way, a better father. "If I was 42 and didn't have a child," he says, "I think I'd be feeling my age, but as it is, you start to see it's their turn."
The previous week, his daughter had gone to a festival and he'd half-wondered if he might go along with her. She told him: "No way!" When they meet, he says, with a proud grin, she tends to give him the wisdom of teenage girls. Which is to say she laughs at his hair and what he is wearing. Does she have an interest in his music? "I think she has 6000 songs on her iPod," he says. "Only one of them is mine."
Tricky says he is happier as a performer these days. "I always thought you went out and entertained people and got nothing back in return. But in the last year, I've realised that what the crowd gives you is so amazing, that sometimes I just stand on-stage and cry."
LOWDOWN
Who: Tricky
Where and when: Powerstation, Tuesday
Latest album: Mixed Race, out now
Essential albums: Maxinquaye (1995); Nearly God (1996); Pre-Millennium Tension (1996); Knowle West Boy (2008)
- Observer
