Tricky [Spin, December 1996] (original) (raw)

"All right They're waiting for you," a goateed guy says from the darkness. The lone hepcat is hanging curbside on a Manhattan street, about a half-block down from the crowded entrance to the disco palace the Roxy.
Tricky stands blinking in the glow of the streetlight. Tonight, he's turned out in a white collarless shirt, black collarless jacket, thick-heeled shows, and a long, white, ankle-length kind of, flowing sort of a... well, dress. He cocks his head, squints, shifts his Budweiser to the other hand, and finally, cordially, says, "Wha?"
True, Tricky's hardly invisible, but it's hard to imagine who could be waiting for him. We've only come to tonight's fab new-music showcase to catch a set by Tricky's new buddy Jeru the Damaja, a hardcore Brooklyn MC who's on an otherwise techno-slanted bill with Goldie and Orbital. Tricky hirnself, reluctant "king of trip hop", might easily headline such an evening. With caesar cuts and nappy heads, a mod sort of cyber-ghetto manifests in the queue out front. Then, as we're whisked into the flashing, pounding entryway, it dawns on him. "I just realized," Tricky says. "I bet that geezer thought I was Goldie."
When It turns out Jeru canceled - apparently, management was spooked by the security issues posed by an actual rapping American - Tricky and I clamber upstairs to the VIP area and proceed to get drunk. Though a charming drinking buddy, Tricky quickly lives up to his narne, masterfully vanishing every five minutes. He'll chat up some cutie In dancehall gear, then disappear with her into the thick crowd. He'll reappear, discuss the wonders of Rakim's rapping technique and then - poof - he's gone for another ten minutes.
After one of his absences stretches into 15, I start to push through the crowd looking for him. Asking around, I hear that an event soon to appear in London's tabloids has transpired under my nose.
Tricky ran into Goldie, whom he's known since they were both teenagers, and, greeted the jungle star as he was hanging out with his fiancee, Bj�rk. Some words were exchanged, followed by a brief shoving match that British newspapers will morph into a full-scale, World

Wrestling Federatlon-style brawl - with knives appearing and Bj�rk jumping on Tricky's back.
Perhaps it was a case of cherchez Ia Icelandic femme: Previously Bj�rk was romantically linked with Tricky. Perhaps it's an MC battle gone physical: In the recent single "Tricky kid", Tricky busts "As long as you're humble / We'll let you be the king of jungle," which Goldie might not have found amusing. (He was unavailable for comment.) Or perhaps, as Tricky will later tell it, it was all a misunderstanding. "Someone asked to take our picture. And I said, 'If I wanted to make a scene I'd make it at a Rakim or Nirvana show with the big paparazzi. And then he went into his Robert De Niro and started pushing me around. Mad, innit?"

Tricky, 28. Five-eight and wiry, vaguely elfin, vaguely reptilian - definitely, as they say, on some other shit. Nearly two years ago, Tricky produced the brooding masterpiece_Maxinquaye,_a hallucinogenic tapestry of dub echo, industrial clang, hip-hop beat, and somnambulant verse that bespoke a chilly pop revolution. Mixing death rattles and gamelan chimes into dystopic, Hieronymus Bosch-worthy dream scapes,_Maxinquaye_revealed a musical mind quite unlike any other-intuitive, abstract, and well past any genre definitions.
As a pop figure, Tricky is almost as unprecedented. In a sense he's every bit the African- folkloric trickster his name would suggest, but transmogrified into a skinny asthmatic with a punk's lurid, Elizabethan sensibility. _Maxinquaye's_lyricism was part punk-twisted rap-isms ("She's my freak I I guess I'm weak") part paranoid, profane nursery rhymes. "I can't hardly breathe," is a fave leitmotif, projecting a malevolence not of gangsta power but of compelling sickness, of a fucked-up, freakish Other - a Caliban. "I'm a mongrel," he tells me, referring to his half-Welsh, half-African mom and Jamaican dad. "But they always say the mongrel is the cleverest animal in the litter."
Born Adrian Thaws, Tricky got his nickname from the local hoodlums he ran with growing up in Bristol, a former slave port on the West England coast. Tricky's mother died when he was four, leaving him to be raised by his grandmother in a lower-class white area that bordered a ghetto. He