Tricky - Hell Is Round the Corner The Unique No-Holds Barred Autobiography

HELL IS ROUND THE CORNER

WITH ANDREW PERRY

Published by Blink Publishing
The Plaza,
535 Kings Road,
Chelsea Harbour,
London, SW10 0SZ

www.blinkpublishing.co.uk

facebook.com/blinkpublishing

twitter.com/blinkpublishing

Hardback 978-1-788702-22-5

Trade Paperback 978-1-788702-29-4

Ebook 978-1-788702-31-7

All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or circulated in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing of the publisher.

A CIP catalogue of this book is available from the British Library.

Designed and set by seagulls.net

Copyright Adrian Thaws

Adrian Thaws has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.

Blink Publishing is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK

www.bonnierbooks.co.uk

Weve got other people talking in this book apart from me, just because its better! Its unconventional for an autobiography, I know, but thats alright. Its just how I wanted it.

Some of what follows in these pages, people might not believe if I say it. Im sure when some people do autobiographies, they dramatise things. They exaggerate stuff, so some of the stories, if I told them, might sound like exaggeration. Like, Hes not serious, that didnt happen! Coming from someone else, maybe theyll believe them, because they are true.

There are family members talking about things that happened before I was born, or when I was too young to know what was really going on. And then there are friends who might remember things better than me I had years of smoking weed, all kinds of drugs. Know what I mean? Sometimes its more reliable someone else saying it.

MARTIN GODFREY Great-Uncle

TONY GUEST Uncle

MICHELLE PORTER Cousin

ROY THAWS Father

MARLOW PORTER Aunt

WHITLEY ALLEN Friend

RAY MIGHTY Smith & Mighty

ROB SMITH Smith & Mighty

MARC MAROT Island Records MD

JULIAN PALMER Island Records

TERRY HALL The Specials

SHAUN RYDER Happy Mondays, Black Grape

BEN WINCHESTER Booking Agent, Primary Talent

PETE BRIQUETTE Former Live Band Member

PERRY FARRELL Janes Addiction, Porno For Pyros

AMANI VANCE Friend

LEE JAFFE Photographer

CESAR ACEITUNO Friend

MAI LUCAS Photographer, Friend

CHARLES DE LINIERE Friend

HORST WEIDENMLLER !K7, Manager

MAYNARD JAMES KEENAN Tool, A Perfect Circle

MARIE Daughter

My first memory is seeing my mum in a coffin, when I was four years old. In those days, when somebody died, you had the coffin at home for a week or two, so all the family could come and say their goodbyes before they buried the person. When youre that young, you dont really understand whats going on. Obviously I could see a lot of people were sad family members coming into the house crying and stuff so I knew it wasnt good. Shed committed suicide, and I didnt understand that, either.

Theyd put the coffin in the room opposite mine, so I would go and stand on a chair and look inside when everyone was asleep. The coffin was kept open, and the body was right there. I didnt feel anything. I knew she was my mum, but I couldnt really get the concept. So thats my first memory: at four years old, going into that room.

I cant remember anything before that. I cant even remember my mum: thats my first memory of her, seeing her dead. Ive never looked at it as bad or horrible. Most peoples first memory is about school or home or whatever, but thats mine.

This was in my grandmothers house in Barnstaple Road, Knowle West a white ghetto area of Bristol, which was built in the 1930s to help clear the slums out of the city centre. It was my great-grandparents who first moved there, when they were young, into a council housing development that had just been constructed.

People probably know Im from a tough family, but no one knows the details. We were one of the first mixed-race families in England, going back three or four generations. My grandfather was an African serviceman briefly stationed in Knowle West. Theres a tribe in Ghana called Quaye but no one knows exactly where he came from. Theres bound to be some slave history in his bloodline.

He met a white woman named Violet, and they had a kid together. He eventually left England, so their daughter my mum, Maxine Quaye grew up with the white side of her family in Knowle West. Even though she was mixed-race, culturally she was very white and, given the area she grew up in, you wouldve thought shed have gone on to marry a white guy.

Instead, she got together with a Jamaican man called Roy Thaws, and had me. I dont know for sure how they met. Roy was in London first, before he moved to Bristol, and his dad had a sound system, one of the best-known sound systems in England, called Tarzan the High Priest. My dad didnt come here and become Anglicised. He was still very Jamaican, and kept up the Jamaican traditions with the food he ate, and he even ran a dominoes team that played around England.

The first Jamaican my mum probably got to know well was my dad. They used to go to the same clubs, like the Bamboo Club in St Pauls, the black ghetto of Bristol, which was a very popular place for music with all locals, not just black people, so I like to think they met there.

They never got married, but when I was born, on 27 January 1968, my mum got him to give me his last name. If Id taken my mums name, Id have been a Quaye, and if she had kept her mums name, I would have been Godfrey, but back then, people wanted you to take your dads name. It obviously wasnt something I chose: I was Adrian Nicholas Matthew Thaws, and that was that.

The rest of the family say I was very close to my mum, but I cant remember anything about being with her, apart from seeing her body in the coffin. One thing I found out later was that she wrote poetry. When Channel 4 in the UK made a documentary about me in the mid-90s called Tricky: Naked and Famous, one of my family mustve given them a poem shed written, because my auntie Marlow read out the whole thing in the programme. I didnt even know about it until I watched the finished documentary: by that point, Id made two or three albums, so it all began to make sense to me after that.

There was obviously no opportunity for her to go anywhere with her writing. She couldve written until her hand fell off, but there was no way she was going to be able to publish a book. She wrote for her own pleasure, and apparently she used to do it a lot. That poem is about individuality, being an individual, which also kind of makes sense.

On the day of her suicide, in 1972, she got dressed in her best clothes and went visiting all the family. In those days, youd really only get dressed up on a Sunday. So they were like, Where are you going? Why are you all dressed up? And she was like, Oh, nowhere! Then she went home, wrote a letter asking her auntie to look after me, and killed herself with tablets, probably sleeping pills. Ive always been told that none of the family saw it coming, because she didnt show any signs that she was about to do anything like that. There was no inkling. The only thing they thought was strange was, why was she all dressed up?