• The Guardian
  4 Friday 30 August 2019

Epic fail

I n John Niven’s scabrous

2008 novel Kill Your Friends ,
there is a scene that dramatises
the moment in 1997 when Goldie
unveiled his second album, Saturnz
Return – specifi cally, its hour-long
opening track, Mother – to his
expectant record company. Goldie
is lightly disguised as a character
called Rage. Like Goldie, he has
survived an appalling childhood
of abandonment, neglect and
abuse to become the biggest star
in Britain’s burgeoning drum’n’bass
scene. Like Goldie, he has a
penchant for gold jewellery and
grills and, like Goldie, there is a
great weight of music-industry
expectation around his forthcoming
album: expectation that goes up in
smoke the minute he presses play.
“People cross and recross their
legs, sip their wine and pray for it to
end,” off ers the novel’s horrendous
narrator, Steve Stelfox. “But it
doesn’t. As the track approaches
the one-hour mark and nothing has
emerged that vaguely resembles a
hook, or a chorus, or a recognisable
melody, it collectively dawns
on us that we’re listening to the
sonic representation of someone’s

mind coming apart. On a positive

note, I’m thinking that I must

get the number of Rage’s dealer,

because the chang he’s on is clearly

fucking phenomenal.”

“Rather a good book,” smiles

Goldie, when the subject of Niven’s

depiction of Mother’s premiere

comes up. Back in the UK from his

home in Thailand and seated in a bar

in King’s Cross, central London, he

is talking, as is his wont, in lengthy,

breathless bursts of puns, anecdotes

and malaproprisms. His answers zig-

zag unpredictably between topics,

occasionally contradicting something

he said earlier, frequently ending

up somewhere that has nothing to

do with the initial question. He is

fantastic company, but I fi nd myself

thinking that I am talking to Goldie

2.0 – clean and relatively serene, an

adherent of yoga, meditation and the

intensive brand of psychotherapy

known as the Hoff man Process –

and boggling at what he must have

been like when he was taking vast

quantities of “chang”.

He is in Britain partly because

Saturnz Return is receiving the kind

of 21st anniversary deluxe reissue

treatment aff orded classic albums,

complete with much talk of its brave

experimentation and the vindication

of Goldie’s unique vision, a turn of

events he seems bemused by. As he

points out, no one was talking about

the bravery of his unique vision in

199 8, when the general consensus

seemed to be that Saturnz Return

off ered conclusive proof Goldie

had lost his marbles. “I don’t know

whether it’s the company trying to

recoup the money they lost on it in

the fi rst place, or if they genuinely

believe in Saturnz Return as an

album,” he says. He tried to tell them

no, but the label insisted. “They

said : ‘No, we genuinely think people

should hear it now.’ Oh, whatever

then. It’s ... bittersweet.”

He says the album’s premiere

was pretty much as Kill Your Friends

described it. He wouldn’t let the

label hear the album while he was

making it. Given his stories about the

sessions, that was probably for the

best. In Goldie’s retelling, the making

of Saturnz Return was a chaotic saga

of technical meltdowns, rows with

uncomprehending collaborators and

druggy hedonism. At one juncture,

Goldie found himself haunted by his

refl ection in a mirror, which declined

to move when he did, a state of

aff airs that may have had something

to do with the cocktail of cocaine

and LSD he had recently ingested.

Still, the fact that Goldie could

lock his label out of the studio

while making an album on their

substantial dime tells you a lot

about how famous he was. He

seemed to catapult from respected

underground drum’n’bass producer

to mainstream celebrity overnight,

after the music industry decided

the former Cliff ord Price was the

guy built to bring the sound to the

masses. You could see why they came

to that conclusion: drum’n’bass was

futuristic, original, experimental,

thrilling music, but the people who

made it and played it tended to be

low-key, anonymous fi gures.

Goldie, on the other hand, was

charismatic. The jewellery and self-

designed grills gave him a striking

image. He had an extraordinary back

story, too: put in care aged three by

his mother while his half-brothers

remained at home, he shuttled

miserably between children’s

homes and unsuccessful attempts

at fostering, enduring physical and

sexual abuse, before running away

aged 16 and becoming a successful

graffi ti artist , then experiencing a

Damascene conversion to dance

music after hearing the DJs Fabio

and Grooverider playing in a London

club. “They thought I was a rock

star, because I did a lot of drugs and

I was a bit crazy,” he says. “Record

companies love that ; they want to

fi nd another Iggy. There wasn’t any

other poster boy for drum’n’bass,

let’s face it.”

As he points out, he swiftly

became more famous than his music.

His debut album, Timeless, went

gold and spawned a hit single in the

brilliant Inner City Life , but judging

by his media profi le you would have

thought he had just released the

biggest-selling album in history.

He was everywhere: modelling,

acting, designing clothes, hanging

around with rock aristocracy and

supermodels. He dated Naomi

Campbell, then he was engaged to

Björk. David Bowie started turning

up at Metalheadz, the Sunday-night

club Goldie ran in pre-gentrifi cation

Hoxton , east London, “sitting on

the steps, rolling cigarettes – people

left him alone”. Madonna wanted

him to produce her new album ; he

declined. “It might have been great,

but I’d have ended up banging her,

probably, or some shit like that,” he

says. “And I would have ended up

doing copious amounts of probably

harder drugs, trying to search for

something that wasn’t there.”

You could see why his record label

thought the follow-up to Timeless

might capitalise commercially on

its author’s fame, but this was a

drastic misreading of the situation.

Goldie certainly looked like a man

thoroughly enjoying himself, but

things were not as they seemed.

His celebrity, he says, “troubled

me incessantly”. Not everyone

in drum’n’bass was overjoyed at

his new position as the genre’s

fi gurehead. He sighs: “The amount

of fl ak I got from people, going:

‘Yeah, man, you’ve sold out.’” By his

own admission, he had terrible anger

issues (“I’d get really horrible, use

my fi sts like clubs, regret it later”),

not much helped by a gargantuan

cocaine habit that regularly

necessitated “looking for dealers to

get more gear at six in the morning”.

But the real problem, he says, was

his childhood. “There was always

this sense of schizophrenia, a sense

of this voice, which was me as a boy,

this whole exchange about how all

this stuff is not going to hide the fact

that you’re still lamenting for your

mother, is it? I had all the money, but

...” He shakes his head. “This really

weird thing happened. When I was

a kid, there was a day when I was

playing with a ball, bouncing it down

the road, and it rolled off and went

underneath this car on a driveway,

a [Reliant] Scimitar ; beautiful thing.

I went to get it, looked up at this

house and the curtains were drawn.

I thought : ‘It’s a sunny day – if I had

that car, I’d be out driving it.’ And

then, years later, I’m at home, off my

head, there’s the Ferrari, the Porsche,

the Cosworth on my driveway, and

I look out the window and there’s

this kid getting his ball that’s rolled PORTRAIT BY DAVID LEVENE/THE GUARDIAN

I don’t think

I needed to air

my laundry to

a world that was

never going to

understand it

Two decades after

its disastrous

launch, Goldie’s

second LP is being

reissued. He tells

Alexis Petridis

about his path from

coked-up raver to

national treasure –

and reconciling

with his mum

‘Bowie told me:

“Stick to what

you believe

in’ ... Goldie

in London

last month

DJing in

London

in 2001

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