Greetings from L.A.

Musicians, if you want to ingratiate yourselves to journalists in Arctic Dublin, don’t tell them the sun’s splitting the fucking rocks where you are!

“Sorry mate, it’s just that it’s really hot here today,” cackles Tricky down the transatlantic blower from Los Angeles. “The reasons I’m living here are, one, the weather, which is amazing, and two, ’cause there’s more going on here musically than there is at home. I don’t know about Ireland but there’s nothing in the UK that even remotely excites me at the moment.”

Tricky’s two years in LA have taken their toll on his accent which is now equal parts West Indian street urchin, “I do be a cider drinker, me” yokel and South Central playa. How does he find living in the Hip-hop Capital of the World?

“They won’t like you in New York for saying that,” he laughs again. “No, it’s wicked. You can go to South Central on a Sunday and see the cars, the low riders, bouncing up and down, but on an average night it just looks like the East End of London. The only difference is that when you see kids hanging out on the streets, you know they’re gang bangers. You can walk round the corner and there’ll be ten Mexicans just waiting for some fucking action.

“They’ve got things over here called ‘pee wees’,” he continues, “which is young kids who start doing dirt at 9 or 10 so they can get into one of the gangs.”

Pardon my white middle-class ignorance, but what does this “dirt” entail?

“Shooting people and shit. It’s kind of hectic over here sometimes.”

If that kind of carry-on’s “hectic”, I’d hate to hear Tricky’s definition of “mental”. One thing you can definitely say about The Artist Formerly Known As Adrian Thaws is that he doesn’t blend in. How does your average blood or crip react when they see a limey ex-boxer with tattoos and a yellow mohawk walking towards them?

“That’s what keeps me left alone,” he resumes. “The kids round where I live know I’ve no history or beef with them. There’s one who tried to sell me shit the other day who I’m going to get round my house soon to do a vocal.”

Tricky has also become a favoured customer in the neighbourhood barbershop.

“I’d be there getting the sides of my head shaved and the ghetto kids would be going, ‘Who the fuck’s that weird-looking guy?’ One day I walked in and said, ‘Listen, I want to shoot a video in here. Is that cool?’ And they were like, ‘Okay, wicked!’ Being a mystery keeps you safe.”

You can see some of Tricky’s new chums on the DVD that accompanies his new album, Vulnerable. The best thing he’s done since his classic 1995 debut, Maxinquaye, it finds him hooking up in the studio with previously unknown Italian chanteuse, Costanza.

“She’d been a fan for a while and came to all my shows,” he explains. “I’d never met her, but one time she left a CD for my drummer to pass on to me. I heard it the next day and rang her: ‘I’ve got you a ticket to London.’ That’s how impressed I was. We played each other these songs we’d written and realised there’s a chemistry there that translates brilliantly on to the record.”

As somebody who’s been through almost as many seismic shifts as San Francisco up the coast, how would Tricky describe his current musical ethos?

“The exact opposite of Madonna’s. She’ll work with the latest producer at the latest time because she wants to be a ‘now person’. It mightn’t suit her music but she’ll do it ‘cause she’s desperate to be seen as cutting-edge. Which on that new album of hers she most definitely isn’t. Even great artists like Bjork fall into that trap. She doesn’t have to follow trends with the amazing voice she’s got, but now and again she does.

“I’m not trying to be a ‘now person’,” he insists. “I’d rather make something what no one’s ever heard before. If that costs me a million sales, so be it.”

Assisting him in this endeavour is that well-known creative tool: weed. How does he rate the local produce?

“Okay but I could get better in Bristol,” Tricky rues. “They’ve got some new shit there now… oh my good gracious! It should be a Class A drug. I tell you what’ll fuck British skunk and that’s the stuff in British Colombia. It’s the only weed in the world I still get the giggles off.”

Sunshine. Killer skunk. What are we doing here?

Tricky’s Vulnerable album is out now on Anti and gets a live airing at the Witnness Festival on July 12 and 13