Tricky Unedited

The Wire: Many of your songs sound dream-like. Do they actually come from dreams?

Tricky: I’m a dreamer, I don’t know what I’m doing. I can’t play anything but the stuff starts off on keyboard, and then I look at it and write one thing, then I press another, then I take a bit of rizla and put it on there to remember which one it was and then find another sound, those sounds I do one finger. It’s like meditation, speaking in tongues. My grandmother used to keep my at home because my step-grandfather used to be out working and she used to watch all these black and white horror movies, vampire movies and it was like growing up in a movie and she used to sit me in the middle of the floor, because she lost my mum, her daughter. She’d be playing Billie Holiday, smoking a cigarette and would say things like, you look like your mum, watching me, I was always my mum’s ghost. I grew up in a dreamlike state and my uncle was a well-known criminal like movie/gangster, I’ve seen my uncle in the local papers and stuff. One time I’ve seen a suicide off an NCP car park and the police took me down to see what I saw and the next day in the Evening Post there was my name in there. I woke up and it was on the fridge, my grandmother had put it on the fridge like I was famous.

The Wire: Then there was that Rosemary’s Baby thing...

Tricky: I saw that when I was a kid and I was watching it and it was like, “and he shall be called Adrian” and I was like fuck – I’m the devil. I always thought where does my name come from? Adrian. My name is Adrian Nicholas Matthews Thaws, there is no-one in my family named like I’m named so where the fuck does my mother get that name from?

The Wire: Did you use a group on the new record?

Tricky: I had two different bass players, just people who were around at the time. I never really arrange things, I’d be at my house recording and think, this song needs a bass, call a friend, this guy Poncho, can you come round in 20 minutes? It was all done through, not arrangements, friends. I know someone who can play bass, or sing, or play guitar, I’m not fussy cause I got a lot of melodies in my head so if you don’t gimmee what I want I’ll get it off of you. As long as you can play. Timing. If you are around and can play guitar, I don’t need a famous guitarist, just someone who can play to get the melodies out of my head. If you can play you can come on my records.

The Wire: “Bacative” really sounds like Roxy Music’s “The Bogus Man”. Was that deliberate?

Tricky: I do like Roxy music, but I’ve never been able to copy anything like that. I found out that I can for the first time this year but the trouble is when you rip something off, you sound generic. “Council Estate”, when I first did that you could have named the song from The Specials it come from – “Concrete Jungle”. I was like I like it, but it sounds like The Specials so I took it and redid it, kept the vocals and made it into me. The Roxy Music thing I never had a clue. I like it cause if I wanna sound like someone, Roxy music is good people.

I’m a punk rocker at heart, when I do an album its not so much whether people like it, I want it to be different and like nothing out there. Punk rock attitude wasn’t just about spitting on people in the crowd, it was about being different, being individual, not being part of the rat race.

The Wire: How is your label, Brown Punk, going?

Tricky: It’s going real good. We are just doing our distribution deals now. I had to do a movie, I directed a movie for the label, we found about 12 different artists, got their deals done, me and Chris Blackwell and this girl, Emily Taylor. So we are just starting to do the distribution, end of this year we should have a compilation out and a movie. Chris wanted me to do a documentary about Brown Punk and I chose 12 tracks of different artists and that was going to be our first release, a compilation album. Then I was listening to it in bed one day and I always think visually, when I listen to music I always get visuals, and then I said to Chris, for this money we could do a movie. So I took the lyrics of the songs and wrote a movie, took 12 songs and wrote the movie around the songs. I listened to them every night and wrote how it made my feel, made it into a synopsis, and we made the film in London, Manchester, Bristol, LA and Scotland.

The Wire: You’ve been living in LA for the past few years?

Tricky: I thought I was living in New York forever. It’s the only place I’ve ever been, where as soon as I’ve flown in, I think I’m home, I never felt that even in Bristol. I was in LA for four weeks with Jerry Bruckheimer. Four weeks turned into two months and then I was supposed to tour Europe and go back to New York, then 9/11 happened and I was stuck in a hotel. I couldn’t get hold of anyone on the phone for three days then someone told me that it’s fucked here, it’s not good. Two months later one of my friends said, stay in LA, it’s still fucked here, there are soldiers everywhere. Five months went by and my manager said, you’ve been in a hotel room for five months, get an apartment until you get back to New York. Three years had gone, I never went back to New York. I’m gonna move back to the UK – it’s time to move back now. I need to put some roots in and I don’t think I can do that in America. I’m not American. I want to live somewhere in Europe. It’s a good time to be European at the moment. It’s easy travelling. LA is hard. Six hours to New York and I’m still in America. It makes you lazy, you don’t wanna do a 12 hour flight, LA is isolated.