GOLDIE
i-D Magazine, No. 154, July 1996

Interview by Bethan Cole

**Goldie is jungle's first fully-fledged celebrity.  You know this by now.
He dates Bjork.  His debut album has sold quarter of a million copies.  If
his life before was intense, it was nothing like the last eighteen months.
Now there's a new TV series, a film and another record.  Can he continue to
keep it real?**

Gold teeth flashing, glinting copper eyes fixed in concentration, compact
muscular frame locked in perpetual kinetic activity; Goldie exudes an aura
of energetic celebrity that seems like second nature.  He paces around.  He
gesticulates emphatically.  He morphs conversation into a vivid
multi-directional segue of street philosophy, wild theory, anecdotal
observation and incisive wisdom with a passion and charisma and wit that's
hypnotic, intriguing and totally, utterly unique.  When he nods sagely and
says, "I've always had a feeling that I'm different", it doesn't sound like
some self-aggrandising hackneyed celeb cliché; it sounds like the truth.
And when he rolls out his stories, his theories and obsessions (in an accent
that still resounds with the nasal intonations of his native Wolverhampton),
you can't help but listen, totally transfixed.

So here's the deal.  Goldie, this hyperintense larger-than-life 30-year-old,
is sitting opposite me on a metal record box sporting baseball cap, big navy
polo shirt, jeans and trainers.  He is jungle's first bona fide pop star.
You know this by now.  He dates Bjork.  He plays live.  His debut album,
Timeless, has sold 230,000 copies worldwide.  And more than any other figure
on the scene, he's spearheaded drum'n'bass's relentless assault on the
mainstream and taken his attitude, his anarchy and his underground
aesthetics right out there to the festivals, the crowds and the concert
halls, without a modicum of compromise.

Eighteen months ago, when i-D wrote the first full-length feature on Goldie,
he was the first jungle artist to land a major album deal.  Since then, the
floodgates have opened.  In his wake, DJ Crystl, Roni Size, 4 Hero, Alex
Reece, Photek, Bukem, Rap and Peshay have all followed suit.  And his
adoptive 'family' of DJs like Fabio, Grooverider, Kemistry, Storm and Doc
Scott fill clubs all over Britain, the States, Europe and Japan.  In the
past 18 months, jungle has shaken off its untouchable caste status in dance
music to become the nation's groove of choice.  Accordingly, Goldie has
rocketed into a whole new universe.  If his life previously was intense,
perhaps nothing could have prepared him for the last year and a half.

Chances are you'll have heard or bought Timeless by now.  It stands not only
as a benchmark against which all future drum'n'bass albums will be measured
but as an intense, emotive testament to the action-packed trajectory of one
man's quite extraordinary existence.  What made Timeless quite so important
wasn't just its hyperspace drum formations, its tearing down and deft
reassembly of breaks into time zones and dimensions previously thought
impossible, but its sense of personal history, of a life lived on the
destabilised edges and the ruptured fringes and at the centrifugal vortex.
A record which swung with pendulum-like force from the dark and the chaos,
the paranoia and dread of tracks like This Is A Bad to the balmy, velveteen
swoon of State of Mind in the blink of an eye.  Almost like a microcosm of
the jungle scene itself in fact, with its swings from dark to light,
hardstep to softcore, vogues for ragga, hip hop, jazz and ambient.

Goldie understands this only too well as we muse upon the current ascent of
the moodier, incendiary Reese b-lines and tearing drum formations favoured
by producers and DJs like Grooverider, Doc Scott and Ed Rush.  "Jungle pulls
from a lot of extremes - from ambient, from jazz, from whatever - and the
one thing that makes the scene work is the diversity within it," he reasons
with the authority of a true veteran.  "People outside have got to
understand that.  It comes in seasons, in waves.  Some people are only here
for one season, they'll go to this club because it's ambient or whatever,
but if you're around for more than one season you'll see that it's a cycle
and yeah, it does have fits and starts."

Timeless, then, can be read as both sensitive barometer of jungle's
elemental extremes and technicolour adaptation of Goldie's melodramatic life
story.  And though it's been told many times, it's perhaps worth a quick
resumé of the latter.  Born in the West Midlands to an English mother and a
Jamaican father, Goldie spent most of his childhood in care and foster
homes.  "People never spent time with me and I never had any attention when
I was younger," he concludes without self-pity.  "I was moved around and
fucked around."  When hip hop blew up in the early '80s, he found an instant
affinity with the culture; not just the whole crew mentality, which makes up
for his lack of family stability, but in the breaking and graffiti side as
he'd always been talented at art.  By the mid '80s, he was a renowned
graffiti artist and held workshops in his flat in Walsall.

But it wasn't enough.  Driven to seek out his father, he moved to Miami.
And got caught up with gangs, guns and dodgy deals.  He hit rock bottom.
"Ten years ago when I was in America, I thought about killing myself.  I was
doing so much drugs I just thought 'fuck it'.  You get to the point where
you get so weak in your exterior that you retreat to the interior and the
interior is the only thing that can give you a sense of security."  His
voice drops for a second.  "But you do get over it, you move on and you
realise how fate works and the tables turn and that it is worth carrying on
in life."  Something else happened to him in the States: someone predicted
that he was going to be very, very successful.  "I was told a lot of things
were gonna happen to me when I was in Miami.  I was told a lot things.  I
don't wanna say by whom.  A lot of things that I've seen happen.  It's very,
very scary."

Not long after moving back to England, to London this time, rave blew up and
Goldie got taken to the club Rage at Heaven by then-girlfriend Kemi.  The
rest, well, the rest is history.  Inspired by listening to Fabio and
Grooverider's intense techno house and breakbeat fusions there, he began
producing with the Reinforced crew (Mark and Dego of 4 Hero).  And his
tracks which rocked the rave scene to its very foundations, tracks like
Terminator and Angel, eventually paved the way for what we now know as jungle.

In the autumn of 1994, he signed to London Records.  Since then Goldie's
life has fast-forwarded into an even more intense frame than he was living
before: full-on celebrity.  "It's strange, I went out to Ireland and France
with Kemistry and Storm and we were getting mobbed.  I suppose you get into
that thing where people see you differently.  And it does bug me because
some people just wanna know you because of who you are... some of them don't
even know the music."

He stresses that it's his 'family' on the drum'n'bass scene who provide him
with the stability and security to carry on.  And knowing that he's
travelled a long way since his B-boy days in Wolverhampton.  "I got a phone
call from Doc Scott's best friend the other week, and he says 'Guess what,
your fucking brother's in the cell next to me.'  My other brother Joe, he
gets out in July and he calls me with a phonecard from prison and I'll just
be going into a photo shoot or something... it does keep you real."

Back in the heightened world of celebrity though, Goldie's relationship with
Bjork has attracted him more speculation than ever.  And the question on
everyone's lips: are they married?  "You can't ask me that!"  He shakes his
head and looks weary.  "Am I married?  No, I'm not married."  He's adamant
he won't be drawn.  "Yes, we do go out.  She's an amazing woman, she's
totally unique, she does what she believes in, she makes music from her
heart and she does it well.  We could cover the whole spectrum of the world
with the music we make.  Which is quite mad."

They don't live together, although he does get on well with her son.  But
then Goldie's no stranger to fatherhood.  He's got two children of his own,
although it's not often discussed.  Both are in Wolverhampton.  "Daniel's
nine and I love him to bits, I try to see him as much as I can.  I like
being a dad, I wanna be there for my kids.  Where my dad stepped off, I
wanna continue."  He looks down. "I've never seen the first one.  His mum's
probably never even told him.  He'll find out who his dad is soon enough.  I
know he will come looking for me.  I went looking for my dad and found out
the truth, and it does come out.  Time is the master."

Despite the tabloid inches accorded to his personal life and despite the
record company lump sum, the Mercedes and the gold album on the wall, Goldie
hasn't mellowed, hasn't lost his edge, the drive, the anger that put him
there in the first place.  "I'm a moody fucker, yeah," he grins.  "I'm a
very passionate person, especially when it comes to my music.  And yeah, I
can be violent, because I've got a soul that is pretty much... rampant."
The evidence has been well documented: run-ins with bouncers at Speed ("I
darked him out"), rumours of a gangsta past and, most recently, his
disagreement with Alex Reece.  "There hasn't been a physical contretemps,"
insists Goldie.  "If there had been a physical contretemps it would have
been game over."

The disagreement is over Reece's Pulp Fiction, one of the biggest
drum'n'bass records of '95 and originally released on Goldie's Metalheadz
imprint.  According to Goldie, Reece agreed to do a remix of Pulp Fiction
for Metalheadz. It never materialised.  Instead, he received letters from
Reece's lawyers demanding the rights to Pulp Fiction so that it could be
included on his debut album for Island.  "Why are lawyers sweating me for
Pulp Fiction?" shrugs Goldie, his voice becoming emphatic.  "Because it's
the only thing he's fucking got.  I had respect for that track, not to let
just anyone remix it, not to put it on every compilation.  I didn't wanna
fuck 'em up the arse.  But that's OK, now I'll licence it to someone for
five pence.  Alex's priorities are obviously about this now," he says,
rubbing his fingers together indicating cash, "rather than love for the
music and love for the people that put him there.  It's like me turning
around to Groove and saying 'fuck you, Groove'."

One thing's for sure.  Goldie may be a pop star but he's never going to
enter the shallow backslapping realms of pseudo 'mateyness' that dominates
the music industry and much of the increasingly corporate dance industry.
He's real.  And it might not be convention, but he speaks his mind.  And in
many ways it makes him a far more inspiring icon than the legions of
faceless, emotionless, characterless, anonymous DJs and bands in the dance
music arena.

It's not just Alex Reece who he wants to get 'dark' on right now, either.
"That geezer James Barton... he's a wanker," spits Goldie, referring to the
dance forum in March's i-D where James Barton of Cream commented on his
album and modelling exploits.  "What really pissed me off was when he said
he'd heard a lot of records better than Inner City Life.  People like that,
they wait for things to surface and then they criticise it because it's
safe.  And now he's jumping on the bandwagon by getting Bukem to play at
Cream.  Secondly, what makes my character unacceptable to model clothes?  Is
he saying because I come from the hood I can't get good clothes?  Is he
trying to say no good looking people come out of the ghetto?  Tell him to
take my Issey Miyake and stuff it up his ass.  He'd look daft in my Oswald
Boateng suit anyway.  I don't want a bunch of white middle class males
telling me who I am or what I can do like a guinea pig."

Goldie doesn't invite a lot of journalists up to his flat these days, he
mumbles in agreement about some of the patronising coverage he's received
("They can't help it, I suppose") and ponders over why there haven't been
more music paper covers.  "I'm really trying to work that one out myself.  I
mean, I've sold 150,000 LPs with a double album - I think the last thing
that did that was Grease!"

Then he fiddles with his Denon hi-fi system and the room fills with a quite
extraordinarily beautiful sequence of string chords, led by the mournful
resonance of a live cello, which carves up the space in the airy eighteenth
floor flat and serves as a poignant soundtrack for the cinematic expanse of
London stretching outside far below the window.  It's from his next album,
Saturn's Return.  "There's a track called I Cry Therefore I Am and it's so
dark... I wanna dig into people so deep."

The album, he explains, is about the seven year astrological cycles we all
experience in our lives (of course, not irrelevantly, Saturn was also the
planet that Sun Ra claimed to hail from).  "At 30, I've just had a Saturn's
Return, one of the biggest Saturn's Returns in actual fact, which means my
planets are all in line and everything.  It's probably one of the most
intense times in my life."  He reckons he's coped with it pretty well.
"Saturn's Return is a bit like having a baby, I crashed months ago and I'm
still trying to pick up the wreckage.  I had to address everything.  I'm not
weak enough to have a nervous breakdown, but I am strong enough to realise
where I'm at."  For the last past six months he's only slept four hours a
night and has acupuncture to help him relax.

Saturn's Return is scheduled for release in October.  In the meantime,
there's his forthcoming C4 TV series, Fereala: "Just me doing my own thing
really, with all Metalheadz music."  The pilot - slick, amusing, fast-moving
and totally Goldie - has him going to LA in search of his street-style guru
Shawn Stussy, running around the Stussy warehouse like a maniac with a
shopping trolley full of limited edition and vintage gear, interviewing
Shawn on a beach, going swimming and generally hanging out.

And thus Goldie's dizzying ascent continues apace.  He's instated his fierce
technology and his 21st Century urban blues right at the centre of dance
culture's sprawl and now he's destined for multimedia, no-holds-barred,
Stussy-style world domination.  But wherever he's going, he's adamant the
crew are going with him.  He raves about the up-and-coming talent on
Metalheadz.  "If it wasn't for the label I don't know what I'd do.  The boys
come out with creative things all the time."  People like Dillinga ("ever
hungry to get his sound right"), Photek, J Majik ("persistently trying to
find where he's at") and Doc Scott ("I know he's got an album in him").

Goldie's also making a film with his flatmate Gus.  Called Timeless, it's
about a 10-year-old boy who becomes Father Time and explores issues of
class, race and personal development.  "It's deep, totally fucked up as well
and very dark.  That's where my heart really lies, making film and music.  I
want to do all these things, to do them before I get creatively null.  I
want to pass information onto the next generation... I want to do all these
things and the pressure's on.  And no matter what point I'm at, I'm only
halfway there."

**Goldie headlines the Phoenix Festival on July 20.  A Metalheadz
compilation album is released on London in July.**
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