Hell Is Round the Corner by Tricky

Author:Tricky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blink Publishing
Published: 2019-11-08T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

DURBAN POISON

My auntie Marlow says that my strongest asset is not my music-making or my lyric-writing; it’s that I can move somewhere by myself and not know anybody there. I can just get up one day and decide I’m going to live in a foreign city and move there, and I don’t care about being by myself. Marlow says that I can up sticks and go, with no friends or family there, and no plans, and that not a lot of people can do that by themselves.

Personally, I think I just don’t like familiar – I like strange. I wouldn’t describe myself as a confident guy, but I’ve always let life lead me wherever it goes.

In 1995/96, everything was moving very fast for me. Everyone’s life goes fast anyway, you realise, but as a musician your life goes faster than average. It certainly all speeds up when you’ve got a record deal, with studio bookings, tour itineraries and promo schedules forcing you to plan months ahead. It feels like you’re always ahead of yourself, wishing your life away, then you’re off somewhere, and before you know it, all those months have actually gone by.

In amongst all of that, one minute I was living on Kensington High Street, the next minute I was living in New York City. London had been very different for a Bristol kid, but New York was like, ‘Holy fuck!’ and I think I definitely thrive on that strangeness.

I knew I was going to live there, right from the first time I touched down at JFK with Massive Attack, when I felt the energy rush from my feet up to my head. I moved there because of that energy, and because of the music. As well as The Specials, I’d grown up on American music, the sound of it, everything. When you were influenced by hip-hop in those days, New York was your Mecca, so it was almost like you’ve got to live in New York at one point in your life. That’s your dream.

For a few weeks after I arrived there, I lived in an apartment on 34th Street in Manhattan, on the border of what used to be called Hell’s Kitchen. Once, it was the old Irish gangster neighbourhood, but it wasn’t like that when I lived there in 1996. It was as busy as fuck. I was about three or four flights up in this glass building, all glass outside, and it had glass ceilings so you could have a spliff and lie down on the sofa and see helicopters flying overhead. Mad!

One morning, I came out onto the street, and there was this little kid trundling along on a tiny three-wheel tricycle – he must have been only three or four years of age – and it just looked so weird, this little nipper surrounded by huge high-rise buildings. Just mind-blowing. It really was a different world. Another day, there was a taxi strike on, and it was crazy to see how quiet the streets were without the taxis working.

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