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Hell Is Round the Corner by Tricky review – indomitable spirit

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/22/hell-is-round-the-corner-tricky-review

The rapper’s troubled Bristol childhood is at the heart of this ultimately uplifting memoir charting his progression from petty criminal to trip-hop pioneer

It’s nearly 25 years since Tricky stopped pop music in its tracks with Maxinquaye, a debut album of stunning originality and claustrophobic intensity named after his dead mother, Maxine. Her presence hovers over this autobiography from first to last, beginning with Tricky’s earliest memory as a bewildered four-year-old staring into her coffin – she had killed herself – and, in a ghastly echo, ending with an afterword acknowledging the death of his 24-year-old daughter, Mazy.

Between those two events, family is never far away. Most pop memoirs hurry past childhood to the glory years, but Hell Is Round the Corner puts Tricky’s extended clan stage centre; a patchwork of great grandparents, half-siblings, second cousins and scary uncles centred on Knowle West, a 1930s Bristol council estate known for criminality and violence. Tricky describes it as “a white ghetto”, though his own family contained every shade of skin. The young Tricky – plain Adrian Thaws until celebrity arrived – found himself shuttled between relatives, beaten by his step-grandfather and mentored by gangster uncles. One uncle, blaming his sister’s suicide on her husband, was only prevented from “getting” Tricky’s father by the seven-year stretch he was serving in Dartmoor.

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