Hell Is Round the Corner by Tricky review – indomitable spirit

It’s nearly 25 years since Tricky stopped pop music in its tracks with Maxinquaye, a debut album of stunning originality and claustrophobic intensity named after his dead mother, Maxine. Her presence hovers over this autobiography from first to last, beginning with Tricky’s earliest memory as a bewildered four-year-old staring into her coffin – she had killed herself – and, in a ghastly echo, ending with an afterword acknowledging the death of his 24-year-old daughter, Mazy.

Between those two events, family is never far away. Most pop memoirs hurry past childhood to the glory years, but Hell Is Round the Corner puts Tricky’s extended clan stage centre; a patchwork of great grandparents, half-siblings, second cousins and scary uncles centred on Knowle West, a 1930s Bristol council estate known for criminality and violence. Tricky describes it as “a white ghetto”, though his own family contained every shade of skin. The young Tricky – plain Adrian Thaws until celebrity arrived – found himself shuttled between relatives, beaten by his step-grandfather and mentored by gangster uncles. One uncle, blaming his sister’s suicide on her husband, was only prevented from “getting” Tricky’s father by the seven-year stretch he was serving in Dartmoor.

In Knowle West, prison was “where deep down you knew you were going to end up”, but a two-month sentence at 17, for passing forged banknotes, proved an effective deterrent to Tricky getting caught, if not to petty crime. His teenage years alongside his best friend, Whitley, have a picaresque, Dickensian quality as the pair steal, deal and dodge their way through pub, club and “blues dance”, eventually escaping to find “total freedom” among the squats of 1980s London. Musically, Tricky is a child of 2 Tone and sound systems. The Specials became an anchor (“I realised I could be a musician, because they were like me”), while the “talk-over” MCs of the sound system provided another template.

Again, unlike most pop memoirs, Hell… is no ghostwritten gloss. Mostly, it’s Tricky talking, but there’s a large supporting cast likewise interviewed by music journalist Andrew Perry to add whatever’s been lost among the endless clouds of ganja smoke. Vagary and physical absence have always been part of his armoury. “Where’s Tricky?” became a mantra among the vibrant Bristol music scene of the late 80s, where avant rock, art school and reggae collided and Tricky became a part-time member of Massive Attack, who were poised to deliver their game-changing 1991 debut, Blue Lines. Daydreaming, the album’s first single, was a Tricky creation, but faced with success, he bolted; showing up on time for a show or a recording session was simply “too much like a proper job”.

Tricky’s moment in the sun arrived with Maxinquaye, by which time he had absorbed hip-hop into his musical lexicon, but where hip-hop’s rappers bragged and strutted, Tricky stayed in the shadows, setting his dark patter against the soaring voice of Martina Topley-Bird, a romantic as well as creative partner. The arrival of their daughter, Mazy, handed Tricky a new role, that of devoted father, which he embraced even after he’d split with Topley-Bird and moved to New York. (More recently he discovered he has another daughter, Marie, with whom he is in contact.)

Visceral and innovative, assembled principally on Tricky’s Akai S1000 sampler, Maxinquaye made Tricky an international celebrity (Bowie was a particular fan) and alongside Massive’s Protection and Portishead’s Dummy spawned talk of “the Bristol sound” and trip-hop, terms Tricky predictably scorns. He was even more disdainful of Britpop, then in its pomp, which he summed up on Maxinquaye as Brand New You’re Retro. A spiky cameo from the 1996 Brit awards finds Tricky and Shaun Ryder watching the gongs being handed to the wrong people. Where were theirs? The problem was, they realised, “we were a mess… our demons showed”.

Tricky has always worn his demons on his sleeve – quite literally since he acquired an arm full of yakuza (Japanese gangster) tattoos – and they have kept him busy across 13 albums and numerous tours, his performances customarily delivered in near or total darkness. Along the way, there has been a whirlwind affair with Björk, fistfuls of money earned and wasted – he recounts earning $90,000 in a day from remixes for Yoko Ono and Stevie Wonder – ending, inevitably, in a massive debt that’s only recently been paid off. “Because I didn’t come from money I didn’t know to manage it,” he says. There have also been a couple of near-death experiences triggered by severe asthma attacks and unspecified mental health issues that he attributes to candida rather than to his prolific weed intake, though he also blames the hydroponic skunk that has displaced the Jamaican sinsemilla he grew up with.

Although it is bookended by tragedy, and shot through with the violence and abuse of his early life, Hell Is Round the Corner proves an ultimately uplifting read, the testament of a fierce, funny and seemingly indomitable spirit.

This review is from the Observer

• Hell Is Round the Corner by Tricky is published by Blink (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99