Goldie’s never lost for words, but legendary DJ’s talents can do the talking
As drum ’n’ bass pioneer returns to Hong Kong for another gig, Richard Lord finds there’s much more to the artist than a motormouth at full speed
It’s mandatory, when interviewing drum ’n’ bass legend Goldie, to note his quite ridiculous levels of conversational energy.
Speaking with him involves not so much asking questions as occasionally muttering agreement amid his motormouth stream of consciousness, and then going with the flow as he skips from one subject to the next, proffering opinions with a disarming honesty, a confrontational verve and a certain rhetorical flourish – one that features a lot of swearing.
Here he is on the pleasures of DJing, for example: “I go a bit mental. Rather than just pushing buttons, you need to try harder to be more diverse. When I play in Hong Kong I go alternative, from Wu Tang Clan to Blue Monday, and then for the last 45 minutes, if they deserve it, I play beautiful drum ’n’ bass. I like to reel people in. I have people say to me: ‘I don’t like dnb, but I like what you’re playing’.”
But then Goldie – who spins on November 4 at the W Hotel – has a lot to talk about. The man who revolutionised music when he more or less invented drum ’n’ bass, one of the most durable and influential electronic genres, is also an accomplished artist with a background in graffiti, a classical composer and arranger, TV presenter, label owner (he has run the Metalheadz label since early in his career) and actor (including appearances in 1999 Bond film The World is Not Enough, 2000’s Snatch and British mega-soap EastEnders in 2001 and 2002) – and at age 51 shows few signs of slowing down.
It was quite a journey to get here, though. Raised mostly in children’s homes and by foster parents in the UK’s West Midlands, Goldie (born Clifford Price) flourished first as a visual artist, becoming a well-known face on the graffiti scene across the UK during the 1980s. That led him to the world of music, with his Damascene moment coming when he was introduced by his then girlfriend, the late DJ Kemistry, to the emerging jungle scene, which spliced old-school rave sounds with reggae-influenced bass lines and high-speed sampled breakbeats.