Tricky and the making of Maxinquaye
A Tricky Meeting
I pushed the buzzer for the 2nd floor flat in Kensal Rise, a not particularly charming area in London. just north of Notting Hill, and waited.
This would be my third attempt to meet Tricky and I was already realising that maybe there’s something in his name that implies trouble. The first two failed meetings were at Island Records and so Tricky’s A&R man, Dave Gilmour (no…not that one!), had suggested I go to Tricky’s flat this time instead. So, here I was at his door.
I’d previously listened to the two existing Tricky tracks that Island had given me, Aftermath and Ponderosa and I was fascinated to find out why this guy, Tricky, wanted to work with me. This was not the kind of music I’d ever worked on in the past or would particularly listen to voluntarily - but the fact that Tricky was part of the Massive Attack crew was enough of a draw to make me want to at least meet him…..if it ever happened.
Soon enough though, the door opened and there was Tricky. He was shirtless and looked tough, more like a scrappy street fighter than a new artist signed to a record label. To complete his look, his shaved head was covered in a thick white cream. He looked uptight. I introduced myself and he immediately broke into a big smile, shook my hand and told me, in his thick and unique Bristolian accent, that he was a big Cure fan - and then, pointing to his head, he said ‘oh don’t worry about this, oy got fucking eczema’.
Upstairs in the flat he offered me a cup of tea. I soon wished I hadn’t accepted because Tricky was now rinsing out a cup that moments before had held the mouldy remnants of a long dead brew mixed with a load of old spliff butts. I was very surprised by his energy though. After hearing Aftermath and Ponderosa, I was expecting someone a great deal more chilled out. But when I’d worked with Tricky for a while I learned that when he was in the zone, the spliffs barely took the edge off. He could be on full speed for about three hours or so and then be so exhausted and would need to go home to sleep.
Our meeting that day obviously went well enough though because a week or so later, I was back in Tricky’s flat to start work on new tracks for Maxinquaye.
Day One
In the little flat’s small dining room was the very low budget ‘studio’. There was an Atari ST computer running Cubase, an Akai S1000 sampler, a record deck, some kind of keyboard, an Adat digital 8 track tape machine, a 16 channel Mackie desk, a low budget AKG 3000 mic, a cheap Behringer compressor and a pair of Yamaha NS10 speakers. Pretty basic stuff that Island had provided him with.
The floor was littered with vinyl - and I mean littered, it was hard not to tread on vinyl when walking around Tricky’s flat. In what seemed a pretty random choice, he picked up a couple of records and announced ‘I wanna sample one track from this one and one track from this one’. ‘Ok’ I said, and then there was a pause where I expected him to leap into action and show me what a wizard he was with all this gear. Tricky read my look though and, gesturing to all the gear, said with a laugh ’oh….I don’t know how any of this stuff works - the label thinks I do though! Ha ha ha, cackle cackle cackle’. I said ‘Oh…ok…’, realising right then that this was not exactly going to be purely an engineering gig.
I put each album on the record deck and played a bit of each song that Tricky picked to sample and said ‘I’m not sure this is going to work - these songs are in different keys and different tempos….they won’t fit together’. Bare in mind that these days technology is far better equipped to handle situations like these but back then what Tricky was asking for was not so easily done. Tricky said ‘oy want to hear it though’. So, reluctantly I sampled both bits of the tracks that Tricky had chosen, loaded them onto two keys of the keyboard and pressed play on both keys and then looped them in Cubase. The result was like being at a festival when you walk between stages and hear two bands playing at the same time - what the Yanks would call a ‘train wreck’.
I said ‘See I told you…’ but was cut off by Tricky’s raised up, spliff hand. Tricky was nodding to a beat that didn’t exist in either sample, he was apparently on a different plane. Meanwhile I was pacing up and down behind him thinking…’my God, this guy is completely mad’. When I couldn’t take the cacophony any more I stopped the sequencer. Tricky looked at me and said ‘That’s wicked that is!’. I said ‘I honestly don’t think so Tricky’. I then desperately started fiddling with the samples in what I thought was a pretty futile attempt to make these two bits of music work together. I tried detuning one sample against the other, I tried stretching the other to match the tempo of the first sample etc. And blow me down after about 15 minutes of fiddling, the two samples suddenly gelled - in a completely unpredictable way. I was pretty blown away by this. Tricky said with a straight face ‘oy told you it was wicked didn’t I!’. ‘Christ’ I thought, ‘I don’t think he can actually tell the difference’.
This was definitely not my normal territory. I was used to working with bands like The Cure who could play real instruments and write normal songs - or bands like Erasure where Vince was a genius programmer and could coax amazing sounds out of the 50+ synthesisers in his studio and also wrote great songs.
Tricky and I went on that day to create the first track from our sessions together, ’Strugglin’. It was a really dark, creepy track with these weird low detuned samples - but it worked and sounded great. Tricky’s lyrics - which I think he came up with on the spot were brilliant….
‘In hell I'll be lost in the layers of weakness
All around the surface brainwashed with the cheapest
Strugglin', strugglin', strugglin'
Brainwashed with the
Hallucinagenics in my system
Like, I'm trippin'
Many switch in
Switch on, switch off’
To enhance the creepiness I added the samples of floorboards creaking, the sound of pistols being cocked and water dripping samples. For some reason, maybe secondary inhalation, I imagined that this was all taking part on an old creaky wooden ship.
Martina and Tricky were an item at the time and lived together in the Kensal flat. Martina was 19 at the time - Tricky 26. Martina was very quiet and shuffled around the flat while we worked on the track. She didn’t say much at all. She seemed quite low energy. For a long time during the album recording I thought there maybe something not quite right with her but one day Tricky asked me if I could give her a lift somewhere and I agreed. Once in the car, she was a totally different person. She came alive and was chatting away to me about the fact that if she wasn’t making this record, she would have been studying oceanography in California. I realised then that living with someone as intense as Tricky was obviously not easy.
When we finished the track, Tricky wrote some words out for Martina to sing, called her over and said ‘’ere Martina, go and sing this’. I was expecting her to mull over the lyrics, want to listen to the track a few times while she figured out some melodies for the words etc. But no, she shuffled off into the kitchen where the mic and headphones were set up. I pressed play and record on the Adat and what happened next was a hair-standing-up-on-the-back-of-the-neck moment. Despite the cheap mic and compressor, Martina’s voice sounded gorgeous - she had such warmth and character in her voice, such believable vulnerability. The haunting melodies that came out of her were beautiful…they fitted the mood of the track perfectly. There was no warming up for her, she nailed it in one take. Purely instinctive stuff. We recorded another take just for the heck of it and I ended up using it as a ghostly vocal in the background. She was probably the quietest singer I’d ever recorded - not much louder than a whisper. One day Martina coughed whilst on the mic and it nearly blew my head off! It was obvious though that this girl had something incredibly special going on.
Tricky’s rap sounded amazing too. The quality of his voice was so weird and dark. Somebody once said to me years later ‘Hey I just watched the ‘5th Element’ movie [in which Tricky had a part] and they used the same effect on his voice that you did on Maxinquaye!’. I had to tell him….’No man…believe it or not, that’s the way he sounds in real life’.
At one point while we were blasting the track, there was a knock on the door. It was the guy who lived downstairs. He said ‘I don’t like to complain but I’m trying to eat my dinner and the bass is making my dinner plate move around the table, I have to hold onto the plate while I’m eating’. He was amazingly chilled about this not significant inconvenience and we tried, not always successfully, to keep it down a bit from then on.
In the evening when we’d finished Strugglin, Dave Gilmour, the Island A&R man, stopped by to see how our first day had gone. Tricky rolled him a big spliff and told him to go into the ’studio’ and listen with the lights off. Tricky, Martina and I waited outside. When he emerged his hair was sticking straight up and he was visibly spooked out by the experience - but he thought it was brilliant!
We didn’t have a DAT player at that point to record a rough mix for posterity - we only had a cassette player. When it came to master the record, it was the cassette version that went on the record. We tried to mix it ‘properly’ to DAT but Tricky and I decided that the vibe on the cassette from day one was ‘the one’.
I went home that night and rang my manager and said…’hey, I’m doing way more than just engineering this record, Tricky isn’t the programmer/producer guy that Island think he is’. ‘Leave it with me’ she said. She called the next day before I went back to Tricky’s flat and told me ‘Don’t worry, I’ve spoken to Dave Gilmour and he’s agreed to give you a co-production credit and points (royalties)’. Great I thought. However, in true record label style, when the album was done and dusted about three months later - and despite the label guys, Dave Gilmour and Julian Palmer telling me what a great job I’d done - Island’s business department called my manager and told her that they weren’t going to honour the deal she’d agreed with Dave because ‘Dave wasn’t senior enough in the company to approve such a deal’. So charming that they’d wait at least three months to tell us that. I did get what I deserved in the end though because my manager also managed the most respected mixer in the UK at the time called Mark ’Spike’ Stent who’s worked with top artists like Madonna, Depeche Mode, U2, and Oasis. He told her to tell Island that if they didn’t do the right thing by me, then he wouldn’t work for Island ever again. Bingo! Thanks Spike!
The Routine
And so Tricky, Martina and I continued to work in the Kensal Rise flat for while before moving the operation to my own studio which was not very far away in Canalot Production Studios on Kensal Road. This was an old chocolate factory divided up into many units of which most had music biz related companies in them. It was a great place to work with a cool bar and restaurant where music celebs could regularly been seen hanging out. Jamiroquai’s management company were in the building so they were regulars - I used to like seeing Jay’s cool vintage cars parked outside.
As you’d expect from a guy called Tricky, he was notoriously unreliable when it came to showing up for sessions. He had no watch or clock in his flat - nothing to read the time on. My daily routine would be to call Tricky at about 3pm at his house. He’d pick up the phone, yawning and I’d say ‘Hey Tricky, it’s Mark, you were supposed to be at the studio at 12 today remember?. To which he’d sleepily reply ‘What time is it now then?’. I’d say ‘3 o’clock’. And he’d inevitably say ’Nooo…..Martina, can you believe it, it’s 3 o’clock!. Then I’d hear her say ‘nooo…..really?!’. ‘I’ll be right there’ Tricky would say. And then anywhere between 5pm and 8pm he’d show up! He’d then be in the zone for about three hours. We’d make a track, Tricky would record his vocal, then call Martina to come down and sing and by 11pm he’d be saying ‘I’m fucking tired, oy have to go ‘ome to bed’.
One day I called his manager and said ‘I can’t get hold of Tricky, he was supposed to be here ages ago’. ‘Ah…’ she said ‘he just called me from NY, he just decided to get a flight last night….sorry…not sure when he’s planning to come back’.
This routine wasn’t so bad for me though, because, being a pop head, I was always trying to make the tracks more radio friendly and I figured out pretty early on that if I tried to add a keyboard line or guitar part, it was unlikely to break accepted by Tricky if he saw me do it - but if I did it when he wasn’t around and he heard it the next day he was more likely to keep it. Tricky was generally happy with one loop going through a track with not much else going on and no stops and starts - he wasn’t interested in light and shade. So, I was always sneaking in musical changes, dropping out loops for a bar or two and generally trying to make it as interesting as possible and adding ear candy.
Highlights
There are a couple of tracks worth talking about in detail. My favourite being Black Steel. This was definitely a stand out track for me on the album.
Tricky was still in touch with an ex-girlfriend’s Indian mother and she would send cassettes of Indian music to him. One day Tricky played me a bit of a one of these tapes and wanted me to sample the drums on the intro. The cassette was obviously a cassette to cassette copy and was as hissy as anything - but Tricky didn’t care about that of course. So I looped the sample and then we added some backward guitar bits and other weirdness.
Tricky told me that he wanted this to be a cover of the Public Enemy song ‘Black Steel’. So he started to write out the lyrics for Martina to sing. He didn’t write them all out , after a while he said to Martina ’oh…that’ll be enough, just repeat these’. Dutifully, Martina went behind the mic and I hit record. As usual, what you hear on the song is the first stuff that came out of her mouth. It sounded brilliant and she created a cool melody even though there was no real music to sing to in the track, just the Indian drum loop with a low tabla. When she finished, Tricky said ‘that’s it, this one’s done then!’ I didn’t exactly agree - it didn’t sound that interesting to me, just a vocal, drum loop and a bit of weirdness but I didn’t say anything because by that time I’d come to realise it was best to give Tricky time if I wanted to persuade him about going in another direction on anything.
Some time after this, Martina’s brother was playing a gig in his band and we all decided to go to support him. Tricky, as he often did, said ‘I’m not going to drink tonight. Last time oy went out oy got shit faced’. So when we got to the gig, when I asked him what he wanted to drink he said ‘double brandy mate’!. There was a support band on but we spent most of the time in the bar and I didn’t remember anything about them. And Tricky got shit faced.
The following day, back in the studio, Tricky’s manager called and said ‘I’ve just had a call from a band in Manchester (might not have been Manchester but it was somewhere up north) who say that Tricky’s invited them to come and play on the record.’ I turned to Tricky and said ‘did you ask the support band last night to come and play on the record?’ He said ’me?…no…..did oy?……oh, Christ, oy might have done, come to think about it!’. I asked ‘Were they any good? What kind of band were they?’. ‘No idea’ Tricky said. Anyway, Tricky decided that they should come and play and so a date was fixed for a couple of weeks later.
A couple of days before that date, we remembered that the band was coming down to the studio across the street from mine that we’d booked for this live session (my studio wasn’t big enough) and Tricky said ‘what are we going to get them to play on?’. I thought about it and said ‘what about Black Steel?….it’s the only track we have without much on it. Tricky surprisingly agreed.
On the day, the very excited band showed up at the studio punctually and eager to get going. Tricky, however, was far less excited about the whole idea and wasn’t exactly trying to hide it. He hardly spoke to the band and stayed in the control room while I was setting the band up in the live room and figuring out what kind of band they were and trying and keep them entertained and distracted from the fact that Tricky, the guy that they drove a long way to collaborate with, was not showing any interest in them.
It turned out that they played techno style music but with live instruments. I wasn’t expecting that - well to be honest I didn’t have a clue what to expect. And thinking back on it, why hadn’t we asked for them to send a tape of their stuff to us prior to them showing up?!
Back in the control room Tricky looked sulky and he had his black hoody up while he puffed on his spliff. I asked the drummer to hit the toms so I could check the drum mics, Tricky suddenly perked up. ’That sounds wicked that does! Quick, record it!’ he said. I dutifully put the DAT player in record. Bear in mind now, that the drummer wasn’t playing a cool funky beat or anything, he was simply hitting a couple of beats on each tom - bong bong — bum bum —tum tum. I could sense where this was going in Tricky’s mind….we we’re going to to do this whole session and the only thing that Tricky was going to want to use were these random drum hits that I’ve just recorded on DAT!
When the band were up and running, I asked them to play one of their songs to get warmed up. They were good. They were tight, especially the drummer who played like a drum machine. The singer was good. ‘But how’s the singer going to work on Black Steel?’ I thought to myself. I knew I was going to have to gently let him know that he was not going to be involved in this recording. He took this surprisingly well and seemed just happy that the band might get some exposure by being involved with an artist who had a proper record deal.
I played what we had laid down so far for Black Steel and asked them if they just wanted to play along with it to see what they came up with. I realised then what a tall order that was, because for one thing, Martina had sung a vocal without any music and might be nowhere near ‘concert’ pitch but, impressively so, she was. The band played along and although it sounded too tight and stiff to me, they were actually playing some chords and melodies that were working well with the track. I asked Tricky, who had shrunk back into his hoody again, what he thought and he said ‘oy ain’t gonna use any of this shit’. ‘Great’ I thought, ‘this is going well’.
I had the thought that Public Enemy were like the punk rockers of the rap world so I asked the drummer to abandon his tight, machine-like drumming and asked him to try a punk rock/Sex Pistols drummer approach - more loose and loads of crash cymbals. He took to it like a duck to water and really got into it. Suddenly the track was coming alive. I was really excited where this was going. I looked at Tricky who was pretty comatose at this point and clearly not interested.
The band played a few passes of the track and I said ‘that’s brilliant, I have loads of stuff to work with’ and thanked them profusely for driving such a long way to do this etc - again trying to distract their attention from Tricky who’d barely uttered a word to them.
As I was packing up to go the owner/engineer of that studio, who’d witnessed the whole session, said to me, ‘you must have the patience of a saint!’ nodding towards Tricky.
Back in the studio the next day, while waiting for Tricky to show up as usual, I started going through what the band had played and tried to roughly figure out a structure using their best bits. It was sounding really good to me and I put a rough mix down to play Tricky thinking ‘there’s no point in finessing it if Tricky hates it’. I also realised that it would be best to wait a while before playing it to him. As it was, when Tricky showed up that day he didn’t even mention the session from the day before. I think he’d completely forgotten about it. We just got on with a new track.
About a week or so later, when I knew Tricky was going to be walking in the studio any minute I put the Black Steel rough mix on. ‘What’s that?! he said when he walked in, ‘It sounds wicked!’. I told him it was what the band had recorded on Black Steel. He got very excited and said, ‘quick, get the mic working!’ He dashed in behind the mic and recorded his ‘many switch in, switch on, switch off’ part (totally ripping himself off from Strugglin!). And that was that….song finished. He was happy, no finessing required. I did mean to get around to using new software which could remove noises like cassette hiss from recordings - I wanted to clean up the hissy drum loop…..but never got around it.
Another highlight was when Alison Goldfrapp came into to sing on the song Pumpkin. I’d never heard of her at that point, but she came in, was very nice and, after listening to the track a couple of times, went into the kitchen in front of the mic Tricky didn’t give her any lyrics - he wanted to let her do her thing. What you hear on the record is her very first and only take. She was brilliant. She basically did what a lot of good writers do, she sang like she really meant it but singing whatever sounds/words that came into head at the time. Sometimes a writer will do this a few times and often find that a few words might stick and the lyric of the song is built up around these. But Tricky wanted to keep her first take as it was. So that was that!
For some reason, when Alison first starting singing her take, Tricky started giggling. This set me off too. and we ended up basically laughing through the whole take and had to try and get our shit together in order to press the talkback button to talk to Alison when the track finished and tell her that it was brilliant. Fortunately we were separated by a solid wall so Alison couldn’t see us.
Label Guys
One of the major perks of being in a record label’s A&R department is getting to eat out in crazily expensive restaurants - inviting bands to lavish deal signing celebrations dinner - along with some of the marketing department, the art department and any other slightly justifiable department that can get in on it. The lucky band are then bombarded with praise and told how they will be the top priority of the label and they are going to make it to the top under their expert guidance. If only someone from the label’s accounts department were there too, she or he would be able to tell the band exactly how many hundreds of records they are going to need to sell to pay for that meal they are just enjoying if the sign up for the joy ride!
Everything that the A&R department pay for is billed to a band. A newly signed band won’t have any revenue stream yet, so in that case the deal signing meal might be billed to another major artist on the label who is selling loads of records and won’t notice that he’s paying for a meal he never attended - for 15 people in one of London’s most expensive restaurants!
Another A&R perk is flying business class to visit artist and bands when they are on tour using an excuse like ‘I needed you guys to sign these papers’…..this is more likely to happen the night the band happens to be playing in an exotic location like LA, Las Vegas, London, Paris etc, rather than say Buffalo NY of course! I was backstage at a gig in NY once and in walked the band’s A&R man from LA saying, ‘Hey guys. I just wanted to surprise you! How’s it going?’……that nice little surprise probably cost the band over $5000 in flights meals, an expensive hotel and possibly a hooker. If you really want to know what an A&R department was really like in the heyday of selling records, read John Niven’s book ‘Kill Your Friends’. John is an ex A&R man at London Records and Independiente and although his book is a novel, it is clearly based on real events and real people - apart from a murder in it. It is truly brilliant. There is a film version too which is not bad but there’s a lot more good stuff in the book.
One night Tricky and I got invited to dinner with Tricky’s A&R man from Island Records, Dave Gilmour, and Dave’s senior, Julian Palmer. ‘Anywhere you want’, Dave had said to Tricky, when Tricky asked where we were going and give him a list of top restaurants in West London. Later on the as we were tucking in, I enjoyed watching that Tricky intimidated both Dave and Julian a bit. It wasn’t the usual label/artist relationship I’d seen before….they were not so sure of themselves around him.
At one point Dave casually asked Tricky how it was to be working with Martina and also being in a relationship with her too. Tricky stiffened - ‘What did you just say Dave?’. Dave flinched and repeated the question. ‘Dave, what exactly are you trying to say? said Tricky. Dave looked totally flustered….’um….well, you are a couple aren’t you?’. ‘What?!’ said Tricky looking more agitated….’Oy don’t know what you’re getting at Dave?’. Julian was now looking at Dave, giving him a ‘Oh Christ Dave, don’t go pissing off the artist!’ look.
I was confused too. Tricky was definitely living with Martina, so I didn’t know what was going on in Tricky’s head. The awkward moment continued with Tricky giving every impression that he definitely did not have a relationship with Martina and poor Dave looking absolutely baffled - he knew that Tricky and Martina were an item but now he was having major doubts about his sanity. The subject changed eventually but Dave looked beaten down by this exchange for the rest of the meal. You could see him running it through his head over and over again.. When we left, I said to Tricky ‘What was that whole, you and Martina/relationship thing about?’. Tricky cackled and said ‘oh….oy was just fucking with his head!’.
Street Fighting Tips
During the making of the record Tricky gave me quite a few tips on how to take people down in a brawl, where to punch them in the neck to make their knees buckle so that you could bring you knee up into their face as they dropped. All very practical stuff which, thankfully, I’ve never had to put to the test. One day though Tricky came into the studio looking very hyped up and was clearly not listening to anything I was saying. So while he was pacing up and down I said ‘what’s up?’. ‘I’ve just had a fight’ he replied. ‘What?! Where?’ I asked. ‘Just outside’ he said. ‘Oy was just getting out of the cab, and oy took a sip of coke and it went up me nose - oy heard the bloke waiting for the cab laughing. So oy said ‘what the fuck are you laughing at you c**t?! - and punched him in the face’.
Mixing
It never really felt to me that we actually mixed Maxinquaye properly. It seemed that once we finished a track, Tricky wasn’t interested in mucking about with it any more - it was kind of written in stone for him. At one point, Island were talking about sending off tracks to be remixed by various people but I give Tricky great credit for standing up to them and saying ‘No way! Fuck off! Why would you change anything about the tracks they’re brilliant as they are!’ Tricky was definitely confident in his work. As we tracked the songs, after each one, Tricky would call his manager very excitedly to tell her ‘ere, you must come the studio right now to listen to what we just done…it’s wicked! It’s the first single!’ He said that about nearly every track we did. ‘Its better than the last one!!’ he’d say.
After we worked on ‘Hell Is Round The Corner’ the manager came down and dutifully listened to the latest track. When it stopped, she said ‘What the fuck are you doing Tricky?!’ Tricky said ‘What do you mean…what are you talking about?!’ The manager said ‘You know very well what I’m talking about Tricky! I can’t believe you’ve done this!’
I said to her ’What are you talking about….what has Tricky done?. At this point Tricky started cackling and had a sparkle in his eyes. The manager said ‘He’s used the same Isaac Hayes sample (Ike’s Rap II) that Portishead have used on one of their songs. Tricky’s manager also managed Portishead - and Portishead’s first album wasn’t finished yet at this point. But I’d seen a cassette on Tricky’s mantelpiece that was labelled ‘Portishead Head ‘Dummy’ rough mixes’. So, I’m not sure if Tricky really consciously ripped off Portishead’s idea to use that Hayes sample - or wether he’d listened to the Portishead rough mixes tape when he was really stoned one night and then the next day, without really knowing where the idea came from, had the sudden urge to sample ‘Ike’s Rap II’. Anyway, he vehemently denied it to the manager but she wasn’t buying it - and after Tricky couldn’t stop cackling under questioning, I was with her on that one.
There was a great moment at the Mercury Awards in 1995 at which both Tricky and Portishead were nominated for their first albums. In the bar after the show, I heard raised angry voices coming from a group of people. As I got closer, I could hear stuff like ‘yes you did!!….’no oy didn’t’….’we sampled it first’…..’no you didn’t you c**t’. Yep….Tricky and Geoff Barrow were going at it - verbally! Fortunately, probably for Geoff, it didn’t come to blows.
In my memory it was months after we finished recording that I got a call from a mastering engineer asking me if I had ’better sounding mixes’ because what he’d been given by Island, according to him didn’t sound very good. I told him that I had no idea we were at the mastering stage yet.
I was still waiting for feedback from the label about what I considered to be pretty good rough mixes and thinking we might get to mix the album in a better equipped mixing studio than my little studio with a Soundcraft desk. He said ‘well I’m being paid to master the record today’. I told him that in that case ‘no, there weren’t any better sounding mixes’ and so that was it, the album mastered and finished!
When it was done, I wasn’t sure that what Tricky and I had made was any good or not. I think I was tainted by the lack of musicality that I had to go through to get to where we ended up. Credit to Dave Gilmour though because he said to me, when the album was finished, ‘You know, you’ve made an album that’s going to be critically acclaimed’, and I remember thinking ‘yeah right!’. But Dave was spot on, Maxinquaye did get great press - and then loads of stars wanted to be associated with Tricky, like David Bowie, Bjork, Grace Jones, and Neneh Cherry. I was backstage at one of Tricky’s first gigs and his manager handed him a phone and said ‘someone wants to talk to you’. When he hung up, Tricky said ‘That’s completely mad that is!! You’ll never guess who that was……Denzel fuckin’ Washington!!!’. Denzel was apparently a big fan and put ‘Abbaon Fat Tracks’ on the soundtrack for his 1995 ’Virtuosity’ movie.
Talking of ‘Abbaon Fat Tracks’. The backing track for that song was recorded in Spain when Tricky and I were working with Neneh Cherry in the summer of ’94 - after Maxinquaye was finished. It was a track that we ended up not using for her. Back in London Tricky and Martina added their parts to it after Neneh’s manager had pulled the plug on Tricky and I finishing the tracks we had done with Neneh. Tricky was really mad and he asked his manager to book him another room in the studio we were in. The lyrics were totally inspired by Cameron McVey, Neneh manager and boyfriend. ‘Ill fuck you up the arse just for a laugh, with my quick speed I’ll make your nose bleed’. I had know idea that it ended up on Maxinquaye until I read a review of the album in a magazine. I thought ‘uh oh, if I don’t knows that this is on the album….how can I be sure I’m going to get credited for co-writing and producing it?’. My manager called the label and sure enough, Tricky had told the label it was all his work ‘just me and Martina’ he’d said. I did however get my slice of the publishing and production on the song but it was too late to change the credits on the album sleeve. And on that note….
Tricky’s Book
If you’ve read Tricky’s book ‘Hell Is Round The Corner’ you’ll know that Tricky’s recall of the making of the album is quite a lot different from what you’ve just read!
According to Tricky I just came in at the end to mix the record and surprisingly - or maybe not - Julian Palmer, head of A&R at Island, says pretty much the same thing - despite my credit on the record being co-producer!. Julian writes that I did not have any creative input, that the record was put together by Tricky in his flat with a turntable and a sampler. If that’s the case then I just made all this stuff up!
I had an early glimpse into Tricky’s future selective memory loss not long after the album was finished - when ‘Overcome’ was going to be released as a single. Tricky’s manager called me to tell me she was sending over a Musician’s Union form to fill out in order for the video to be on a tv show. The form required the names of anyone who’s played on the record. When I got the form, Tricky had already put himself down as drum programmer and keyboard player - which. let’s face it, was a bit of a stretch. The drums I’d put together, mostly from a percussion sample cd by a guy called Armando Borg. Tricky’s keyboard contribution was saying ‘ere Mark gimme a sound on the keyboard’ and then, while I paced up and down behind him trying to stay sane, Tricky played the keyboard like a toddler would - a barrage of notes which neither fitted melodically or followed the tempo of the track. After he left that night I stripped away 90 percent of the notes and then moved around what was left into what became the pan flute sound that comes in and out during the song.
I added my name to it the MU form and put myself down as another keyboard player and let the drum programmer bit slide. A couple of hours later my phone rang and it was Tricky….’ere Mark, oy don’t remember you playing keyboards on this track?!’ ‘Oh really?’ I said, ‘how about that fast sequencer part that first comes in just before halfway through the song?’. ‘Oh….yeh right’ he said.
One thing that disturbed me in the early days of the album was that Tricky was talking to his manger one day in front of me about working out a private deal with Martina where she would get her slice of the publishing money but give up her right to have her name as co-writer on the record. I didn’t understand why Tricky didn’t want her name on the writing credits - and they were living together too! It seemed totally wrong to me considering her beautifully haunting melodies that are such a huge part of the record. Plus, having a deal that relied on Tricky personally paying out half the publishing royalties to Martina, when the money started rolling in, seemed highly likely to go horribly wrong - and I believe it did.
I find it upsetting that Martina doesn’t get a lot of credit in the book for her amazing input. Tricky at one point talks about how he directed her vocals - as if he was influencing her melodically. I have no memory of either of us needing to do that.
Despite what you might read in Tricky’s book ‘Hell Is Round The Corner’, Tricky and I got on well most of the time. There were many hilarious times, partly because Tricky has the most infectious laugh - more of a devilish cackle - and if he starts, then you can’t help but join in. This was very effectively used if I got mad at him about something….he’d just laugh. He honestly couldn’t give a crap about any kind of responsibility to others. And I don’t mean that in a nasty way….it was really hard to be mad at him because that was just the way he was. My theory was confirmed later on when I met Tricky’s tour manager after a long tour and he told me great stories about how hard it was to get Tricky anywhere on time. He would walk out of a hotel with Tricky right next to him, they’d walk up to a waiting car to take them to the airport, the manager would speak briefly to the driver, turn round to get Tricky in the car - and Tricky would have simply vanished……just walked off to look at something, gone shopping…..anything but thinking about what they had to do or where they had to be.
We would take a break sometimes and go out to some fairly fancy restaurants in Notting Hill which was always fun because he would totally intimidate other patrons with his boxer look, the ring through his nose and his weird voice with the thick Bristol accent. Men checked their wallets’s whereabouts and ladies would look to see where their handbags were. I think Tricky enjoyed this quite a bit. He was also blissfully unaware about what he was talking about in public though and how loud he was saying it. Sometimes he’d come out of a toilet at the far end of a restaurant and start talking to me whilst walking along doing his flies up - as if if there was no one else in the room. Conversations would stop whilst the other diners turned and stared at Tricky and wondered if he was saying ‘this is a hold up….everyone on the floor!’.
Talking of ‘everyone on the floor’, Tricky’s tour manager said that once in NY, they had a night off and Tricky said to the him, ‘look, you’ve been working too hard, I’m going to take you out tonight and we’re going to have some fun!’. The tour manager told me that he was totally exhausted and after babysitting Tricky night after night, the last thing he actually wanted to do on his day off was go out with Tricky to ‘have some fun’. But he did - and they ended up in a bar or club somewhere in Brooklyn where there was an actual, genuine armed hold up. Two guys with Uzi machine guns burst in and told everyone to get down under the tables. Tricky, being stoned as usual, thought this was bloody hilarious, and apparently he kept trying to get up from under the table, with the tour manager grabbing hold of him and trying to keep him down - and alive. So much for the tour manager’s relaxing night off!
Tricky told me great stories about his childhood and growing up in Bristol. My favourite story was about him breaking into a house when he was quite young with a mate and a grownup. The house owner came home whilst they were inside and started unlocking the front door. All three perpetrators started running for the same window to get out but the adult yelled ’stop!’. Tricky and the other youngster stopped dead while the adult kept going and jumped out of the window first. They all escaped but that was an important life lesson for Tricky!
Tricky and I went out clubbing a couple of times too. There’d be a big line outside a club and Tricky would just walk up to the front of it and the bouncer would say ‘Hey Tricky, come on in mate!’. Everyone seemed to know Tricky. One night we were walking along Oxford St in the early ours of the morning and I noticed Tricky had started walking very oddly….I then realised that he was peeing as he was walking along, it was quite an art - and Oxford St wasn’t exactly deserted either. I was desperate too so I shot down a side street and started peeing and a police car came along in mid flow and of course I’m the one that got yelled at. I thought ’typical, you have to be Tricky to get away with stuff like this!’
As a measure of how well we got on, one week after finishing Maxinquaye, Tricky and I were on a flight to Spain to meet Neneh Cherry about collaborating on a new album for her. We ended up working with Neneh in Spain for three months. But that, my friends, is a whole other story!! Ok then….I’ll you give one snippet! See further below.
One thing that Tricky get’s totally wrong in his book was the timing of the birth of his daughter, Mazy, who sadly passed away in 2019. In Tricky’s book he talks about the influence that Mazy’s birth had on the making of Maxinquaye. But Mazy was conceived in Spain when Tricky and I were working with Neneh, weeks after Maxinquaye was finished.
After we’’d been out in Spain for a good few weeks, Tricky told me that he wanted Martina to come out to Spain. I was silently willing her to say no. I think at that point they’d split up, which I thought was a lot healthier for Martina. I liked her a lot and I didn’t like the power that Tricky seemed to have over her - it didn’t seem healthy to me.
Once during the making of Maxinquaye, Martina was going to go off on a coach with some mates to somewhere like Belgium or Holland to see the Foo Fighters at a festival. She was very excited about this. Tricky told me this when he came to the studio and it was immediately apparent that it was eating away at him. He obviously didn’t want her to go. He kept using my studio phone to call her. She was trying to get ready to go and Tricky kept telling her that he was fine about her going but then kept asking her ridiculous questions to keep her on the phone - it was painful to hear. I kept willing her to hang up and not pick up the bloody phone again - ‘get on the damn coach’ I thought. But in the end I heard Tricky say ‘Oh….it’s too late? You’ve missed the coach!’ - he then proceeded to make out that he was so sorry that she’d missed it. I felt like telling him to get out of the studio and going round to pick Martina up myself and drive her to the ferry at Dover to meet the coach.
Anyway, back to the Spanish conception…..I know exactly when it was because Martina only came over to visit Tricky for about three days and then went back to London. A few weeks later Tricky told me ‘Martina just called me and guess what…..she’s fucking pregnant - that’s mad init!’. He seemed pretty chuffed with himself.
Post Maxinquaye
This became a very interesting time for me. After Maxiquaye’s release and acclaim, my manager got a lot of calls from A&R men saying things like ‘Mark will love this new signing - it’s just like Tricky’. But I never really wanted to work on another Trip Hop record. I struggled through Tricky’s album, always desperately trying to inject some pop sensibility into it. And, if anything, I think I did manage to make Maxinquaye more accessible to a greater number of people. I’m pretty sure that if Howie B had continued to make the album it would have been a much cooler but more underground record. Incidentally, when I first met Tricky, he told me that he’d fallen out with Howie because Howie wanted production points and credit for Aftermath and Ponderosa. I’d soon find out on my first day of working with Tricky in his Kensal Rise flat that Howie obviously had every right to ask for that too!
I did produce one track called Nothing Else for a band called Archive which was pretty Tricky-like. I think it stills sounds good today but that was it for my Trip Hop career.
A lot of people asked if I wanted to work on another Tricky album and I always answered ‘no’. I thought it would never be the same ‘magic’. For one thing, the first time I saw Tricky live, when I heard Martina sing, I realised that she’d probably never have that same vulnerability again. She was singing much louder because it was a live situation and she just had to.
Maxinquaye was a great combo of Martina’s fragile voice (which I believe was a result of her and Tricky’s relationship dynamic) plus Tricky’s technical inabilities to personally get what he heard in his head to tape - and me being totally like a fish out of water, trying to make some musical sense out of it all. I’ve likened making Maxinquaye to trying to build a car out of remnants of various makes and models of beaten up car wrecks in a scrap yard. You might be able to make a car that would be extremely odd looking and quirky - it might actually be driveable in some splutteringly clunky fashion - but on the other hand quite a lot of people might look at it and think - ‘wow, look at that…that’s a really cool and freaky car!’.
My work with Tricky did get me some bizarre meetings and work though - with the most unlikely people. I ended up working on an album with Cyndi Lauper (don’t get me started!) because she loved the Tricky record. Cathy Dennis who went on to write amazing melodies and lyrics on massive hit records for the likes of Katy Perry (I Kissed Girl), Britney Spears (Toxic), Kylie Minogue (Can’t Get You Out Of My Head) - wanted to work with me because of Maxinquaye…..so we ended up doing an album together. Blimey, I nearly forgot…and David Byrne who I worked with a few times in NY…..an amazing man.
The most strange meeting I had though was with Andy McCluskey from Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark. We met at Virgin’s offices in Notting Hill. I was sitting waiting for him and thinking to myself that I couldn’t remember what the heck he looked like, when this tall guy in a smart business suit and black briefcase walked in. I thought that he’d realise that this wasn’t the accounts department and make a swift exit but instead he introduced himself to me as Andy McCluskey. That totally threw me for a loop. He sat down and placed his executive black brief case on the coffee table. As he clicked it open I could see its perfectly neat contents with a copy of The Economist and a Time magazine sat on top of some paperwork. He pulled out some notes and a fancy pen and proceeded to tell me why he wanted to work with me. He started with ‘ You see Mark, I need to make a record that comes from the streets - like Maxinquaye’. ‘Err what?’ I thought, which streets would they be - the streets of Mayfair….Bond Street maybe? I had the desperate urge to put a swift end to this meeting. After 5 minutes I put my hand up and said ’I going to have to stop you there - I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong guy. I’m not the one who can make that kind of record…..you need Tricky (knowing full well that Tricky would never have made a record with this guy). I explained that I loved pop music and I was the one who made Maxinquaye a less street and a bit more radio friendly. I told him that I really didn’t want to waste his time. He seemed a little miffed as I left - he was a nice enough bloke, but there was something about the combination of the suit, the briefcase and The Economist and the words ‘from the streets’ that sent a ton of alarm bells going off in my head. Bizarrely, having never met the guy before, the very next night, I was walking down a corridor at The Albert Hall after seeing Alison Moyet perform (I was working with her at the time) and I bumped shoulders with a tall guy going the other way. I turned to apologise and it was, yep… Andy McCluskey - he just glared at me and carried on.
Alhuarin el Grande, Spain. 1994
‘Get out of the car and put your hands up….NOW!’
Hearing the above is not normally the thing that sets one off into a giggling fit - but that is exactly what’s happened to Tricky. It’s our second night in Spain. We are here to work with Neneh Cherry. Tricky, myself, and a guy called Eric are just driving back in my Range Rover to our sleepy little hotel, Finca la Mota, on the outskirts of the equally sleepy town of Alhaurin el Grande having finished dinner in the town. It’s about 11pm.
Eric is a lovely Jamaican guy and a gentle giant who works for Cameron McVey (Neneh’s manager/husband, or maybe still boyfriend at that point, I can’t remember). Eric’s main job was to try and keep Cameron out of trouble. Cameron could get pretty mouthy with people, especially when he was coked up - which was, let’s be generous and say ‘fairly frequent’. Eric would then step in and apologise on behalf of Cameron and whisk him away. He’d also have to rescue Cameron when he’d driven his car into a ditch on his way back from town which was more than a just a one off occasion. Eric is nervous right now - he’s been living in Spain for quite a while and he knows the guys with guns are not to be messed with.
A minute before, we’d turned off the road from Alhaurin onto an unlit dirt track and then a moment later, as we pulled into the hotel driveway, we were instantly blinded by three sets of headlights on full beam being switched on simultaneously and blocking our path. As our eyes adjusted, we started to make out the silhouetted figures of about 6 people standing in a row in front of the headlights. Then, as our eyes adjust further, we see guns …rifles or machine guns, I forget which and before we have time to say…’what the….?’. The cops are closing in on us, guns raised and yelling at us in Spanish to get out of the car and get our hands up. Eric translates for Tricky and I - although it’s not particularly necessary as we kind of get the gist - or at least I do. This is the point where Tricky gets the giggles. Eric says….’stay cool Tricky these guys are serious…just stay cool and do what they say. Let me do the talking. They’ll be looking for drugs.’ ‘Fabulous’ I think, Tricky is stoned and obviously carrying weed.
On closer inspection the cops look like hardened criminals who just escaped prison after killing some guards and taking their weapons and uniforms. They nearly all have gold chains around their necks and matching teeth They are sweating in the crazy Spanish heat and are highly adrenalised. The two vicious looking dogs immediately lung towards Tricky and shove their noses deep into his trouser pockets. This makes Tricky cackle even louder. A cop closes in on Tricky, shoving a flashlight close to his face. The word ‘Drogas?!’ is being yelled in his face. Tricky yells back in his best thick Bristolian….’what?, oy don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about mate - SPEAK ENGLISH!!’. “Tricky - cool it!!’ hisses Eric, ‘you are going to get us shot!’.
Tricky is then persuaded to empty his pockets, and out pours all the paraphernalia of a dope smoker…..everything except the dope. I’m thinking ‘Oh Christ no, he’s probably stashed it in the car!’ It’ll be me going to Spanish prison!’. After a couple more times of Tricky yelling at them to speak English and still cackling, the cops turn their attention to the car - they don’t even bother searching Eric or myself…the dogs have already given us the all clear. ‘Here we go!’ I think.
In the boot, I have a lot of bubblewrap and the cops get very excited when they see it. But this is what I’ve used to protect some of the music equipment that I’d driven down from London with. So, then having searched the car for what felt like an eternity - and not found what they want - they are now even more aggressive. They turn their attention back to Tricky….the dogs seem to be saying ‘Yes! It’s definitely him….he’s got it!!’
Eventually though the cops reluctantly run out of steam and give up, they can’t find a damn thing. We finally get to put our hands down as they cops withdraw to their cars and drive off. Eric and I look at Tricky and he sees that what we are thinking ‘so Tricky, what did you do with it?’ There’s no way you didn’t have anything on him. Grinning and looking very proud of himself, he showed us his left hand and there was a decent size ball of dope in it! When he’d emptied his pockets for the cops he’d tucked the ball under his bent little finger and then handed all the other contents to the cops and raised his hands again. In the dark, their flashlights had been concentrated on faces, particularly Tricky’s and none of them had noticed the whole time that Tricky’s little finger on his left hand was bent over. What a pro! The score….Bristol Street Smarts 1 : Spanish Police and sniffer dogs 0.
Tricky in Spain 1994…..excuse the ratty pop shield….not sure who donated the tights.