 It’s 1987. A young British man, Walsall-born, bred in the West
Midlands, is being interviewed for one of the seminal documentary
films of the graffiti era - Dick Fontaine’s Bombin’. The
film charts the story of two different personalities - Brim Fuentes,
New York graffiti legend, been there, painted it, seen it all, and
the man we now know as Goldie, a young British pretender to the
graffiti throne, mixing it in New York for the first time with the
true originals. Looking back, it’s worth remembering the young
man’s last words to camera: ‘I just gotta get out here
and do this thing man,’ he asserts, ‘‘Cos nobody
else is ever gonna listen to what I say.’
Fast forward to the late 90s. That same graffer is now notorious
worldwide. In fact, since his album Timeless took the music world
by storm in ‘95, Goldie has never been far from the headlines,
the veritable it-man of dance music. Firstly, there was Timeless
itself. While drum and bass had already produced a clutch of essential
albums - 4 Hero’s Parallel Universe, Omni Trio’s The Deepest
Cut and A Guy Called Gerald’s Black Secret Technology (on which
Goldie himself guested) - Timeless was something completely new,
shockingly radical in length, scope and intent, ranging across a
whole new musical landscape. Then, there was Goldie’s engagement
to Björk and the break-up from Björk, the bust-up with
Tricky, the lucrative sponsorship deal with Stüssy, the war
of words with Keith from The Prodigy, the tabloid rumours of supermodel
affairs. There were a string of collaborations with star guests
- KRS-ONE, Oasis’s Noel Gallagher, David Bowie on record and
on film. And then there was the sidestep into the movie world for
a role as a Bond villain henchman in The World Is Not Enough.
Rewind! Rewind! Rewind! Let’s take it back, back to the very
beginning, back way before Goldie was dashing down the railtracks
bombin’ on Bombin’. Let’s take it back to a young
child in care, looking for a way out of a difficult and confused
existence. Let’s take it back to this kid making the England
B-Team for roller hockey (!), discovering hip hop, breaking in a
crew called (but of course) the B-Boys, and developing his spraycan
art on Wolverhampton’s Heathtown estate. Let’s rewind
through the years trying to make a new life for himself in Miami,
growing a mane of blonde dreadlocks, building his now famous set
of gold teeth and beringed fingers, trying to make a living by selling
engraved gold teeth on a market stall. It’s all pretty confused,
this rewinding business - it makes the narrative pretty hard to
decipher. But there’s a sense to it. A logic. An appeal.
The dream of a new life in the States didn’t work out and
Goldie reluctantly rewound his own life back to the other side of
the pond, prompted by the news that his stepfather had contracted
cancer. At the time he viewed the UK as a culturally dead scene,
a sad province miles distant from the gravitational centre of hip
hop.
The only thing alive and kicking in the UK music scene was the
rave movement, especially the homegrown strand of breakbeat house,
or hardcore: in essence, the UK’s own version of what hip hop
was as a cultural force in the US. It wasn’t long before Goldie
was part of it, putting his skills as an artist to good use, designing
for both Soul II Soul and the Reinforced label. In fact, the ‘R’
of the Reinforced logo to this day is his design. Through the scene
he met DJ Kemistry, who introduced him to seminal club night Rage,
where DJs Fabio and Grooverider held court. In fact, Goldie was
first featured in a magazine on DJs and their partners, as Kemistry’s
boyfriend.
Being on the dancefloor of Rage was something akin to a conversion
experience for Goldie. He became obsessed by that new breakbeat
sound, and what he saw as its militancy against the four-to-the-floor
direction in which European house music was heading. Soon he was
pestering Fabio and Grooverider for the names of the freshest tunes,
dancing like a madman, and hatching plans to forge his very own
vision of this radical new music.
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