Whether with Massive Attack or on his own albums, Tricky’s raw and rasping voice helped define trip-hop in the ‘90s. Now up to his ninth long-player, 2010’s Mixed Race, the man otherwise known as Adrian Thaws has still got plenty to say.

This month, the Bristol legend is bringing his visceral live show back to Australia. With Tricky proving an elusive character to track down for a one-on-one, inthemix decided to take matters into our own hands and present a rough guide to the enigma that is Tricky, from the music to the movies.

Tricky the vocalist

That gravelly vocal style of Tricky’s is known as ‘sprechgesang’. The German term translates as ‘spoken-song’, referring to “an expressionist vocal technique between singing and speaking”. We’re pretty sure Tricky himself wouldn’t refer to it as that.

Tricky the green-thumb

Tricky and weed go way back. An avid toker since he was 15, his first forays into writing music happened in a shroud of smoke. The hazy, blunted production and vein of paranoia on debut album Maxinquaye left little doubt of his favourite pastime. Lighting up almost got him kicked off stage at V Festival in the UK, but you imagine the show wouldn’t go on without it.

In September 2010, though, Tricky told The Guardian that he hadn’t smoked a joint in three weeks – his longest-ever dry spell. “I don’t really want to smoke,” he said. “Or maybe just one in the evening. Since I was a kid, from when I wake up in the morning I smoke until I go to bed and I’m never, you know, present. I’m always not there. So I just thought: it needs to stop.”

It seems for the most part he’s sticking to his guns, telling the San Francisco Examiner last December, “I’m just kind of on and off now; not as much as I did.” Who knows, maybe he’ll find a new muse in his adopted home of Paris.

Tricky the loose cannon

Tricky has channelled plenty of darkness into nine albums, but sometimes his demons catch up with him. When Thaws was four years old, his mother committed suicide. His father was mostly absent throughout his childhood. “I’ve got nothing against my father, but he’s like a little child,” he told The Guardian.

While he never fit the tough guy mould, Tricky served prison time when he was 17 for buying forged money from a friend. Before appearing on Massive Attack’s seminal Blue Lines in 1991, he’d get his kicks going to clubs in Bristol wearing a dress. No prizes for guessing he got in his fair share of fights.

Then there’s the story he told The Guardian of keeping an Uzi (!) under his bed when he lived in LA, only for his cleaner’s kid to find it and fire a round into the apartment wall.

Now, at 43, he’s less of a liability. He has lived in Paris since 2008 and his daughter Mazy (who he had with ex-partner Martina-Topley Bird, who was last seen in these parts on the Massive Attack tour) is 15.

Tricky’s most recent album Mixed Race draws on the ghosts of his past. “This is the closest I can get to a gangsta album,” he said on its release. “It’s very ‘gully’, as Jamaicans call it…very dark. Tense, street and urban. It’s like a movie, almost.”