MUSIC

After ten years in the USA, the ever-mercurial Tricky has fetched up in Paris with a new “hard and militant” album to his name. Stephen Dalton goes in search of the Knowle West boy.

Tracking down Bristol’s most elusive musical exile is, quite literally, a tricky business. They seek him here, they seek him there, but the artist formerly known as Adrian Thaws has melted like a shadow into the twisting side streets of Paris. Not even the polite but exasperated young men at his French record label can locate him. It takes a week of calling, stalling and last-minute stonewalling before that familiar Bristolian rasp finally thunders down the phone, full of hair-raising stories and lateral-thinking mischief.

Paris is Tricky’s current home, or at least the latest port of call in his restless global adventure and the birthplace of his new album, ‘Mixed Race’. A gnarly, bluesy, jazzy, gently infectious affair, it features an international gallery of guests including the Irish-Italian chanteuse Franky Riley, the Algerian rai crooner Hakim Hamadouche and Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream. Tricky calls it a “gangster album”, but more in the sense of gritty authenticity, not some pimped-up Hollywood fantasy.

“It’s hard and it’s militant,” he says. “It reminds me of when Public Enemy first came out. There’s no excuses, it’s not asking for any radio play. Some of it is quite urban, like Ghetto Stars. It’s what I would see as an urban gangster album without the glamourising.”

After more than a decade of exile in New York and Los Angeles, Tricky has returned to Europe seeking fresh stimulation and a closer connection to Maisey, his teenage daughter with singer and former collaborator Martina Topley-Bird. As usual, his movements and motives come swathed in shady explanations involving guns, drugs, and other dubious biographical tangents from the Trickypedia.

“I tried London for a bit, but I’ve got too many friends and family there,” he explains. “I like Paris because I get bored easily, but I don’t want to go to clubs all the time. I sit in cafes for three or four hours by myself here, just watching people. In LA, if I was bored, it was too easy for me to call someone up and make something happen. Here, I go for a walk, I don’t go round to someone’s house and start drinking vodka at two in the afternoon.”

The LA sunshine certainly seemed to sap Tricky’s creativity, resulting in a five-year sabbatical from music which ended in 2008 with his fitfully excellent comeback album, ‘Knowle West Boy’. He hopes to return to California one day, but only when he is “mature” enough to avoid trouble. “In LA you can either be very good or very bad,” he explains. “At one point I was the healthiest I’ve ever been, but at another point all I did was drink and smoke weed.”

The tipping point in Tricky’s American odyssey came when his cleaner brought her child to his Hollywood home. Discovering an Uzi submachine gun under the rapper’s bed, he fired it through the wall into next door’s apartment. Fortunately, nobody was hurt, but the police took a very keen interest. “Lucky it was on semi-automatic,” Tricky nods. “When you first have a gun you’re very safe with it, but then it becomes like a toy.”

This lurid anecdote may be another questionable factoid from the Trickypedia, but ‘Mixed Race’ is certainly riddled with guns-and-gangsters imagery. Tricky claims close blood ties to the gangland families who used to control Bristol, and has seen several of them killed or imprisoned. He even had a brief spell behind bars himself as a teenager, but insists he is not attracted to the criminal life. “It’s not that I’m drawn to it, I can understand some people who live that lifestyle,” he argues. “If I’ve got a friend whose doing certain things to survive, I’m not going to judge them.”

For all his love-hate fascination with violence, Tricky insists he is a lover, not a fighter. “I’ve never been a fighter,” he laughs. “Luckily, all my family and the people I used to hang out with at school could fight, so I never got bullied. But me, I could never fight. My sisters are tougher than me.”

Tricky does not do nostalgia. He dismisses the recent deluxe re-issue of his classic 1995 debut album ‘Maxinquaye’ as “just bollocks, to be honest with you. If a young kid finds ‘Maxinquaye’ now who’s never heard it before, that’s great. But that should happen naturally. We should just move on.”

So it comes as quite a surprise when Tricky confirms rumours that he is planning to work with his former Bristol brethren Massive Attack again, especially considering how prickly relations became since both parties last collaborated in 1994. Just two years ago, Tricky told Venue “3D’s never liked me, man”. Now his attitude appears to have shifted.

“Well, I met 3D and I was blown away by his honesty,” Tricky explains. “He said, ‘The fans keep asking when we’re going to work together again, I think it would be a good thing...’ When we broke up, I wasn’t very mature or honest, so for him to say that to me about the fans, I was just blown away. It really impressed me, how humble he was, so because of that I said yeah. I never did press about it, they are the ones who went and did press about it. Sometimes that might be just talk. But I’m totally ready to do it.”

At 42, Tricky has lived almost half his life away from Bristol. But ‘Mixed Race’, like its predecessor ‘Knowle West Boy’, is still peppered with local references. The closing track, ‘Bristol to London’, even features a guest rap by his brother Marlon Thaws, the youngest of his 13 siblings. This eternal exile still has close family ties to Bristol, but doubts he will ever live here again. “It’s a great place, and it’s got some really good vibes about it, but for me there are too many memories,” he says.

All the same, Tricky takes a little bit of Bristol with him wherever he goes. As long as he keeps on his restless global quest, there will always be a corner of some foreign field that is forever Knowle West. “At the V Festival I had my nephew and his friends,” he says. “Guys from Knowle West and Bedminster, younger guys who don’t know me, but I knew their families or I went to school with their dads. Which is really beautiful, it kind of makes sense now. They were telling me what’s going on, all the gossip. I’m just starting to have a good time again now. I think I’m starting to find my roots.”

‘MIXED RACE’ IS RELEASED BY DOMINO ON MON 27 SEPT.

Read Venue’s first-ever interview with Massive Attack – including the then unknown Tricky – pre-‘Blue Lines’ in December 1990, CLICK HERE.
 

Copyright Stephen Dalton 2010 

Tweet