Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A lot of young people have not a clue what being famous entails. When you lose your anonymity you can't walk down the street without people looking at you.
Surviving in music is the same as surviving in a place like Knowle West - sometimes you need to be low-key, but sometimes you need to make your presence felt.
My manager told me that a kid who was in a coma woke up after ten days when they played him one of my songs. That now means more to me than winning any award.
I've always loved rock music. I've always loved stuff like the Specials and the Breeders and things like that. But it was hip-hop that really got me into music.
I was never part of the Bristol scene. My sound was a Knowle West sound. Massive Attack wouldn't come to my area because they know they'd have got beaten up there.
Oh, I still like dresses. I've still got plenty of them. It's just that I don't put them on specially for photo-shoots anymore. It's just part of my everyday life.
My music life is great. It's in the real world, that's where I have the problem, sometimes relating to people. I can be angry, you know, still really dark in my mind.
I spend 70% of my time laughing. I don't walk around all dark. I might take my photos like that because I'm not a clown. But I'm a really soft, feminine, gentle, normal guy.
I've had my differences with Massive Attack, but you can't deny what they've done. They've changed the face of music. They should make up an award for them even if there ain't one.
A guy threw a stone at my head when I was eight. I told my nan, and she said, 'Get a bigger stone.' That's what I got programmed into me. And sometimes I find it a struggle to get it out of me.
If I had made another 'Maxinquaye,' I'd have had ten times as much success. I ain't going down that path, because that way you're totally controlled by people around you. I don't want to be controlled.
I have my routine. In the evenings I watch 'Seinfeld' and 'Frasier.' That finishes about 11.30 and then I go to bed. I get up at eight o'clock every day, and I'm on the phone straight away, doing business.
I can remember arguing for two days with Mark Saunders about 'Strugglin'.' He said: 'This can't work. It's not musically correct.' And I said: 'If I can hear it in my brain you can't tell me it can't work.'
I'm forced away from what I would call my music. I can't do another thing like 'Maxinquaye.' But if people didn't go out and copy it, I might have done another three or four 'Maxinquayes.' Which is terrible.
I always thought you went out and entertained people and got nothing back in return. But in the last year, I've realised that what the crowd gives you is so amazing, that sometimes I just stand onstage and cry.
Sometimes I walk down the street and hear people whisper 'that's Tricky' and I look back, and I see them looking back, then that affects everything I do - the way I walk the way I talk. It stops you being real.
The Internet is like walking into a room in your house you never knew was there and, like, it's full of thousands of people who have been listening to everything you've been doing and saying the whole time! Scary.
To be honest with you, it was almost like I could do no wrong after 'Maxinquaye.' And when I was putting together 'Nearly God,' I was thinking, 'Will you stay with me if I put out something that radio cannot play?'
I'll play about with different sounds in the studio with no concept of music at all. I'll just build up a song in layers and when it sounds all right and gives me a vibe, that's enough, and I'll add vocals and move on.
First off, I absolutely hate the term 'trip-hop.' It was a term that made it seemed like I was trying to turn the music into something else. I was always influenced by New York hip-hop, since forever, since I was a kid.
There's a certain type of success you can have where it means nothing. You're just becoming someone in Hello! magazine and no one knows what you actually do any more... the only way to escape that is to go back underground.
My head works a little faster than people around me sometimes and it can be quite painful. It was a problem for me in school because I couldn't sit down long enough. I couldn't concentrate. So I didn't go to classes very much.
My background was Rude Boys, Teddy Boys, rockabillys and skinheads. I was into reggae and Blondie and The Cure, and especially The Specials - these black and white guys getting it together. Extreme personalities. Extreme talent.
Bjork was so good to me. She's very independent and she doesn't suck your energy. She lets you be you. She's a free spirit so she knows how to be with a free spirit. That's the only sort of woman I could see myself staying with.
Being naive I think is how you construct new music. When you start thinking too much what is it you're doing? You're just making an album. You're not doing brain surgery. If you take it too seriously you start taking yourself too seriously.
If I'd lived in Bristol, I'd probably be doing building site stuff, plastering. Probably not the plastering. It would have been mixing. I could always get work from friends who did construction. But I wasn't into getting up at seven in the morning.
I can be anything I want when I do an album. I can be vulnerable, I can be weak, I can be nasty, I can be strong, I can be good, I can be bad. They're all in there - but in society you don't get to use all these personalities because you're trained.
Someone at Hollywood Records said, 'Are you into Alanis Morissette?' I said 'Yeah, she sells 26 million albums, of course. It would be perverse if she works with me, but I don't think you can get her.' A week later they say she's coming down the studio.
When I lived in Knowle West, I must have been the same person I am now. It wasn't like someone came and sprinkled superstar dust on me. So that means all the kids who come from that kind of background can do what I'm doing. They're superstars just waiting to happen.
This ain't bad-guy talk, cos I'm not a bad guy. But people don't realise what fear can do. I've had situations where I've been so scared, where I can't sleep, I can't eat, and it's gone on for weeks and it's ruining my life. It makes you sick, it makes you mentally ill.
When my mother died, we had the coffin at home. Like, old-school - you have the coffin at home so all the people can come and see the person. And her coffin was next to my room, so I used to go in and stand on a chair and look at her. You know, it's open coffin and stuff.
For a child, it's not so much scary, it's surreal; there was a lot of fighting in my great-grandmother's house; you'd go there and then someone would meet up and there'd be a fight; I've seen my uncles fight in the street, I've seen my grandmother fight in the street, it becomes normal.
Well, the truth is that we are all mystical and that there is something going on that can't be explained. Outside of the day-to-day stuff like getting up going to work, we all have something going on within us, and we all know that there is something going on - we're spiritual creatures and we are very powerful.
I grew up in a mixed-race family in Bristol. My cousin was this white guy who was interested in Parliament, Marc Bolan, Bowie. His friends were football thugs and while I was getting ready for bed, they'd be listening to all that music. When I was older, I'd go to a Jamaican sound system and there were no white people.
I was quite... feminine. Not in my actions, in my ways. If one of my uncles had trouble at school, they'd go to that person and thump him. It's all a man thing. They got sent off to boxing when they were kids. You live in a tough area, you get off to boxing. My auntie tried to do that to me. I lasted six minutes in boxing.
The Queen wanted me to do the music for the 2000 celebrations at the Dome. I went down to these offices at Buckingham Palace and had a meeting with these people, and I was like, 'Alright how much?' And they said, 'Well no, it's for the Queen.' They thought because it's such a huge thing, I'd do it for free! So I turned that down.
