BOWIE’S FAN LETTER
Tricky’s new no-punches-pulled memoir includes an extraordinary fan letter from David Bowie. “All that love he showed me… I didn’t return it,” he rues today.
Back in August 1995, David wrote an admiring missive to Tricky, then riding trip-hop high on his debut Maxinquaye. See the letter, and Tricky’s philosophical take on it, 24 years on.
IN THE first half of 1995, Tricky was the hottest property in British music, the Bristolian rapper, former Massive Attack associate and explorer of sonic penumbra reeling from the success of his intense and emotional debut album, Maxinquaye. As his vivid new autobiography, Hell Is Round The Corner, makes clear, it was a mad journey from the rough landscapes of Bristol’s Knowle West, where the artist born Adrian Thaws was raised in the company of uncles with violent reputations and jail terms, his first memory the body of his mother – the album’s titular Maxine Quaye – in her coffin. Fame had thrust Tricky into a spotlight he couldn’t be ready for.
“I thought I was going to be an underground artist, making my own little weird music,” writes Tricky. “Because I was coming from hip-hop, it was cool to be underground. Then all of a sudden, I’m on the front of Time magazine, and on the front of The Face, and David Bowie’s writing fictional stories about me in Q magazine and sending me letters.”
A show at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire, attended by Bowie, Bob Geldof and a clutch-bag of supermodels, marked the height of the disorientation.
“Afterwards [Bowie] came and met me, and he seemed quite a shy guy. When we first came face-to-face, we kind of stared at each other, then he offered me a cigarette and we smiled at each other then we hung out. Kylie Minogue was there and Naomi Campbell and that actress Nicole Kidman. She didn’t say a lot, she just stood there. You’ve just come off-stage, and those situations are weird.”
It was not the end of the Bowie-Tricky love-in.
“Bowie then wrote me a really beautiful letter (see left), saying: ‘Iman and I loved the show the other night – I’ve loved the album for some time.’ Also in that package, he sent me a copy of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Notebooks, because he said I reminded him of Basquiat. I don’t know if Bowie had ever met him, but he told me it wasn’t the way I look, just a similar energy that I had.
“In the letter, he also warned me that he’d written a story about me for ‘Q’ magazine. It was actually a mad six-page story, imagining a meeting with me before we’d actually met. That story is genius. It’s like a stream-of-consciousness fantasy, where he sort of interviews me while we both climb up the side of a building.
“Bowie had obviously been around a lot longer than me, but the way he wrote to me, and about me, you’d almost think that I’d had the 30-year career before that, not him. In person, he was humble. He was a businessman, too. When we first met, he brought his own private photographer, but get past that and he was as humble as fuck.”
Nearly a quarter century later, Tricky admits to feeling amazed: “I can’t believe, that kid from Knowle West with not much future has grown up into a guy David Bowie writes a letter to.” But at the time, it was rather too much to process.
“You know when you’re younger, every- thing is moving fast, and right around that time, I was moving way too fast. Now I think, Why didn’t I call him? Why didn’t I send a letter back to him? All that love he showed me… I didn’t return it. I didn’t even say thank you. Which is a bit shit, really, because he’s dead now.
“It’s still weird, thinking that he is dead. I almost forget, almost like he would always be with us. But he went out like a soldier, didn’t he? He knew he was dying, he made his final album, Blackstar, did videos, made all the arrangements for it. He went out like a soldier. Fucking hell, what a brave man.”
Tricky’s memoir, Hell Is Round The Corner, is published on October 31 by Blink.
“Right around that time, I was moving
way too fast.” TRICKY