ADRIAN "Tricky" Thaws is almost as well known for
his violent, explosive temper and intolerance of
criticism as he is for his edgy, amorphous, innovative
music. This, after all, is the man who once
threatened to put a journalist in the boot of his car
and shoot him; who told another, "You wouldn't say
that if I stuck two pencils in your eyes"; whose uncle
stabbed someone 15 times and removed his lung;
who told a Channel 4 documentary: "Schizophrenia
runs in the family."
So when Tricky looks me in the eye and says, "If
you're gonna f*ck with me, I'm gonna f*ck with you.
I'll wait 10 years if I have to", I suppose I should be
feeling distinctly nervous. But the strange thing is,
I'm not. In fact I've decided by then that Tricky is
actually one of the most engaging stars I've ever
interviewed: funny, clever, mercurial, natural and
deliciously surprising.
Who would have guessed, for example, that the
king of dark, underground hip-hop was secretly a big
fan of the Spice Girls and REM? Or that the black
ex-criminal (passing counterfeit notes) from one of
the rougher Bristol council estates was hell-bent on
sending his four-year-old daughter to public school?
That he's heavily into knitting, and t'ai chi? Clearly
the Tricky I'm seeing here has little in common with
the snarling beast of popular legend. Perhaps I've
just caught him on a good day.
Or perhaps, as Tricky maintains when we meet in his
hotel suite, it's all down to candidiasis. This is the
yeast-like fungal infection from which he's been
suffering for the last two years. Apparently it has
been giving him symptoms not dissimilar to
schizophrenia - "fatigue, depression, looniness and
spaced-outness," as he describes them. It reached
a nadir while he was making his new album, Angels
With Dirty Faces: "I wasn't thinking of melody at all.
All I could think about was darkness." He would
often fly into violent rages, putting on boxing gloves
so that he could beat up his hapless studio
engineer.
Until recently, he was convinced he was heading for
a nervous breakdown. But now that the disease has
been diagnosed and cured by a New York doctor, he
has suddenly found himself fitter and happier then
he can remember.
Not that he looks, to my untrained eye, in the pink of
health: his eyes are bloodshot, his heavy features
drawn, and he talks in an extraordinarily croaky
voice which, allied with his heavy Bristol burr, makes
him sound like a cross between Pam Ayres and a
Dalek. But maybe that's partly the effect of the
extra-strength hydroponic skunk reefer he's puffing,
a brain-numbing 14 of which he smokes each day.
I did wonder whether the weed might also be to
blame for his recent albums. Since his acclaimed and
relatively catchy 1995 debut Maxinquaye, they have
grown successively darker, moodier and less
accessible - more stoned, indeed. Tricky, however,
insists that this was his artistic intention. In his New
York home he has many albums' worth of songs just
like the ones on Maxinquaye. But if he released
them, he reckons, it would be the death of his
career. "I can't just be thinking about what people
like. I'm learning. I have to carry on learning."
This might sound like wilful self-delusion. Certainly
quite a few reviewers have suggested that Angels
With Dirty Faces is dreary, uninspired and indicative
of a spent creative force. But, talking to Tricky, you
do rather see his point. He doesn't want to be
doomed, like his Bristol contemporaries Portishead
and Massive Attack, to make more or less the same
record over again. "I feel for them a lot. People put
you into a category and if you don't fight it you're
stuck there for the rest of your life."
The category people tried to impose on Tricky was
"trip-hop", the eerie hybrid of hip-hop, ambient and
cocktail noir which he helped create on Maxinquaye.
"Trip-hop?" he now splutters. "That's never existed
and they say I invented it. Trip-hop is just hip-hop
with a girl singing on top."
Tricky's loathing of such glib labels extends to the
music industry in general. "Remember we used to sit
in the Brits / Never won any awards / That's not
what we used to look towards," he rasps on one of
his new tracks, Money Greedy. Perhaps it's sour
grapes, perhaps it's a dig at the Brit-Award-winning
Finlay Quaye, who infuriated him by claiming -
erroneously - that he was Tricky's uncle, but Tricky
appears genuinely proud of his refusal to take the
easy commercial route.
Still, he is not doing that badly financially. Besides
his album sales (Angels With Dirty Faces has
already sold more advance copies in the US than all
his other records combined), he makes a small
fortune remixing tracks by admirers like Stevie
Wonder and Yoko Ono. "Three hours it took me to
do that [Yoko] mix," he says. "I think she paid me
£40,000. Crazy, isn't it?"
He's also available for hire as a DJ, for £200,000 a
time. That, at least, was the price he demanded
when asked to DJ at a Paris fashion show. The
show's organisers changed their mind, which was
just as well, since Tricky admits he can't mix records
to save his life. "People think that because I'm from
a hip-hop thing I must be a DJ. But they're stupid. If
I DJ you'll hear rock music, you'll hear Elvis Costello
and all kinds of stuff. You won't just be hearing
trendy music."
Unlike the majority of his image-obsessed
contemporaries, Tricky genuinely appears not to give
a damn about notions of cool or uncool. He hates
the "pretentious" All Saints, for example, and loves
the Spice Girls: "Their image is a lot more honest
than Blur or Oasis, say. I like the way you can hear
all their accents through their voices still." And he
adores REM's slushy crowd-pleaser Everybody
Hurts. "People think that because I try to push the
boundaries, I don't take any notice of that stuff. But
a good songwriter will get more respect from me
than any 'attitude'."
Only when I happen to mention the car-boot death
threat does the conversation take a mildly worrying
turn. Tricky rants to the effect that it wasn't a real
threat - "just words, words" - because it was only
expressed in the lyrics of a song. And anyway, Tricky
thinks, the guy deserved it for having dared suggest
he wasn't a good father to Maisey, his daughter by
sometime muse and collaborator, Martina
Topley-Bird.
So let's make it clear once and for all that Tricky is a
very good father. "My daughter will go to the best
private school," he says. "I ain't got no problem with
that. I want her to be well-educated and
well-spoken. When I walk into hotels, even though
I'm famous, I'm still uncomfortable. But when my
daughter does that, it won't be a big deal."" |