Artist of the Month: Goldie

Finding a way to encapsulate the sheer scale of influence that Goldie and his Metalheadz label have had across the contemporary musical spectrum is no mean feat. From his earliest experiments with breaks and beats, Goldie’s wildly creative mind has pushed the limits of sound and possibility. Across his discography, innovative sounds, intensity, and raw energy sit side by side with beauty, vulnerability, and serenity. Core components of the complex experience we call being human. And it’s this unflinchingly real humanity that underpins Goldie’s own life story, as well as his extensive body of work. The interview took place two days before his 60th birthday, a milestone that will no doubt bamboozle many of his older fans (“Goldie is SIXTY?!”), and one that had the man himself in reflective mode. 

“Getting to this age, realising I’ve got more years behind me than in front of me. What do I want to leave behind?” he says. “The legacy is intact: the music, the catalogue, all of it. I’m pleased with where we’re at. It’s weird, because in the last 10 years the label’s been firing again. There’s a big new wave of kids into it, people supporting, small drops, white labels. It’s a very village mentality.”

That legacy was established, and cemented, three decades ago, when Goldie was approaching his thirties. The launch of his iconic label Metalheadz, and the associated club night at Blue Note in Hoxton, east London, heralded the dawn of a new era, cultivating its own tribe and village around boundary-breaking music. Not only were those legendary Sunday sessions a crucible for a whole new wave of artists and sounds, but they became a template for others to follow. 

That period of time marked a shift - jungle music had exploded between 1994 and 1995 – but, as jungle peaked, so came the major labels trying to milk it. It got sucked into the mainstream, commercialised and rinsed. This led to the steady decline of a once rich, vibrant and, most importantly, underground culture. As it gained popularity, trouble broke out in clubs, “bad drugs” filtered in and the purity of its soul was being tarnished by the money making machine.

“The main reason I created that club was the same reason as now - saturation. We were drowning in it. Everyone was jumping on the fucking jungle bandwagon. Every man wanted to do jungle, wanted to cash in,” he explains. “Thursday, Friday, Saturday, we were DJing non-stop. There were wolves at the door, all of us getting record deals thrown at us. Timeless was about to be signed, Adam F got an album, Roni Size came a year later, everyone was being offered deals.”

Using the analogy of a tree, Goldie explains how the insidious nature of commercial interests stunted the growth of the music. “I felt that we were in danger of not growing downward, as opposed to just growing upward. I know the tree will grow because it’s hit the light, it’s hit the surface. When it moves overground, it’s just going to bolt toward the sun,” he says. “But the roots of the tree that are in darkness can remain rooted. And that is really something I’ve never said in that way, but it’s a very good explanation of how “what grows up also grows down”. The longer those roots are, and the more the mushroom grows sideways, the membrane that creates us and holds us all together.”

Drum & bass today has a commercial side that includes film and advertising syncs, TV soundtracks and chart-friendly productions. Like many genres that emerged from the underground, a synthetic, more palatable incarnation has developed. Naturally, the allure of corporate cash has led some artists to produce D&B purely for commercial gain, bypassing the roots to bolt straight for the sun, to use Goldie’s analogy. “What it comes down to is, what’s your intent? Are you just here to make money? Or are you here to make a mark that lasts? I get the commercialism, but if all you’re giving is surface? If you’re not feeding the roots? That’s empty,” he says.

At Blue Note the music was anything but commercial. With a discerning door policy, a who’s who of innovators and pioneers on the bill and the less-popular Sunday scheduling, the Headz nights became the stuff of legend in a short space of time. Interestingly, its enigmatic status was assured in real time, not just through retrospect. Those who managed to make it through the doors and experience the intensity of Blue Note’s atmosphere immediately knew it was something special and word spread fast. 

“Blue Note was important. Think of the amount of drum and bass releases Metalheadz has had since then. And think about the packs of cards those DJs were shuffling. The tunes they had to present, and present them week in week out in a different way, so that you would forward* from the back of the room, you would get the tune reloaded because of what the artist did with the mix,” he says. “So the art of what we were doing created this forward motion for us all. And that has helped everyone eat today and created this super structure where everyone's making money.” 

“Surely the industry should be looking back then and thinking, “Well, why was it present?”, he adds. “Because it was in a club. It was week in, week out. Culture doesn't grow in festivals. Culture doesn't grow online.”

Like the record label, Blue Note was an incubator, a space where Goldie’s proclivity for social, creative and cultural alchemy could be fully realised. Through his fierce energy and unrelenting passion for the music, a process of alchemy manifests in Goldie’s work. Early releases like the groundbreaking Terminator exemplify his untethered, B-Boy-inspired wild style. This also came through in the collective of artists he assembled around the label. Artists like Kemistry & Storm, Loxy, Dillinja, Lemon D, Optical, Peshay, Adam F, Photek, Digital, Grooverider and a whole host of other similarly visionary players formed the tribe of diehards around the Headz nucleus.

(*adopted from dancehall culture, a “forward” is the physical act of a crowd moving towards the front of the dancehall/rave in response to a particularly good song or moment, showing their approval)

Some of the inspiration for this tribalism, Goldie says, came from his first trip to New York. Growing up in Wolverhampton, in the UK, like many of his peers he was exposed to a polished image of America. As a young graffiti artist he painted the walls of his own bedroom, creating a vista of New York (cited as the birthplace of modern-day graffiti) including the Statue Of Liberty. But going to the Big Apple on a pilgrimage in the eighties shattered the glistening image he had of the city. 

“My son said, 'You created this model for all of us that hadn't existed before, as a tribal aspect.' Well, that comes from B-Boyism,” he explains. “That comes from when I followed the dream and went to New York, and I thought it was all about the mural in my bedroom with the Statue of Liberty. When I went to the fucking Bronx, I realised how much of a lie it all been. Seeing blocks of the Bronx that were leveled after the fires that happened in the '70s and early '80s, when so many buildings were set on fire because of the insurance jobs.”

Goldie’s adolescence revolved around graffiti and B-Boyism, a direct link to New York’s street culture, formalised through hip hop (graffiti culture already existed before hip hop, but it became one of the culture’s “Four Pillars” in the '80s). When the culture was imported into the UK, through books like Subway Art - Goldie was featured in the follow-up Spraycan Art - and films like Wild Style and Style Wars, many towns and cities across the country sprouted their own graffiti crews, B-Boys and B-Girls, DJs and MCs. His hometown was no different and Goldie was part of a crew of breakers, and graffiti artists. In 1988 he appeared in the infamous graffiti documentary Bombin’, which solidified his prominence within both the UK and the US graffiti scenes. By the early '90s, though, he was immersing himself in London’s rave culture. 

For Goldie, the inception of Metalheadz evoked the energy of B-Boyism through more of a UK-inspired channel. “The UK couldn’t just imitate America forever. We needed our own voice. Rap wasn’t going to be enough. Something had to evolve,” he says. “That’s what I knew when I started the club… that it had to be different, and it had to strip away the commerce. Sunday nights became church. It wasn’t about a promoter flogging tickets or cheapening the sound. It was about who we let in, who we invited into the circle.” 30 years on, the frequencies that were emitted in that church continue to reverberate through younger drum & bass affiliates, as well as DJs, producers and ravers across many forms of electronic music. 

A couple of days off 60 and Goldie feels as though he’s in the best shape of his life. At one point explaining that he recently took a few people for a hike up a local mountain, where he’s based in Phuket, Thailand, and that he outran all of them on the way back down – despite some of them being more than half his age. He’s successfully navigated drug addiction, three suicide attempts and the rigours of life as a successful musician and celebrity. Supported by a foundational yoga practice and Transcendental Meditation, he’s achieved a level of physical and mental fitness that many 60 year olds would envy. 

“I'm getting to a point mentally where the label is in the best shape it can be. If I'm good, the label’s good,” he explains. “The spirit’s in the driving seat for me right now and however long I've got left… My dad lived to 96, my mother was 73. My dad was an animal. My granddad lived to 102. My family genes from Jamaica are fucking strong.”

On the same tip, he also says his best musical years are still ahead of him. It’s the kind of bold claim that you’d probably expect most artists to make - the difference with Goldie is that he believes it wholeheartedly, and he’s probably right. He exudes fearsome passion and enthusiasm for creating, collaborating and catalysing the mystical alchemy that arises in the studio - or on stage. He transmutes past trauma into the kind of magic that occurs when all the necessary elements align and the untamed spirit of creation can run free. He calls it “Kubrickism”, after the legendary director Stanley Kubrick (“I don’t want to be a producer, I want to be a director,” he states). It was there in the production of Terminator, Timeless and 2025 album Alpha Omega, it’s the thread that runs through his entire output - and it’s there on stage when he performs with his band. This same energy has also been present in the making of his forthcoming album - to be titled The Art of Simple Complexity. 

Artists like Mica Paris, Ed Sheeran, Neneh Cherry, Noel Gallagher and Steve Spacek are among the tribe assembled for this new album. At present, 23 tracks have been recorded as part of the album project, but they’ll be whittled down to 12. As always with Goldie’s output, there are echoes of his past, the Reinforced era/4Hero era, Headz (always), Chicago and gospel. At the end of the interview, he plays a few cuts from the LP, brimming with excitement and glee as he does. 

Also in his future vision are a TV show and a full-on operatic production of his one-hour-long epic, Mother. You can sense he still has so much more to do. It’s never over, driven by the limitless possibilities of creativity and his enduring love for self-expression, there is always more. “The work I've done is minuscule compared to my heroes, and I'm ferocious… fierce about doing so many beautiful things,” he says, revealing that a documentary on his alias Rufige Cru has just wrapped. “I've done this documentary. It's 56 minutes long. It's fucking beautiful. Shot in Thailand, up in the jungle,” he continues. “What is Rufige? What is alter ego? What is the meaning of what is behind it? It's a brilliant explanation, because it's me explaining it. I don't have to have some critic, after I'm dead, looking at a painting going, ‘I believe the artist was coming from this place’. You don't know me. You don’t know where I'm coming from.”

“You know what comes with me, the baggage of people going, ‘You know, he's kind of like the Wiley of D&B. He’s crazy, and he's mad and he's…’ I'm not any of those things. I'm just fucking fierce, and in my younger days, yeah, a little bit fucking mad but you know what, I was fierce in defending what something I love,” he adds. 

With his big birthday just a couple of days away, he touches on his simple plans for the day. “I'm going away with my family to the other side of the island. No big parties. Just going to be humble,” he reveals. “I'm going to practice. I practice every birthday. I do my yoga in the evening. I'm just going to give thanks to where I'm at.” 

Turning 60 takes Goldie into the latter stages of his life. It’s a time for pondering one’s mortality, reflecting, planning and giving thanks for making it this far. His foundational practices of meditation and yoga facilitate inner peace, while Goldie’s chaotic breakbeats and philosophical tangents provide a counterbalance. It’s the complex human condition that we all experience, laid bare and expressed vividly through his music and other creative projects. When you look at a piece of his graffiti, or listen to his musical output, it’s there - alchemised boldly and powerfully. 

“I want to make my greatest work before I'm gone, because it's important to me. That's how fucking important this music is. It really is,” he says. It's something I have no control over, it’s in my blood. Whatever level it's in you, just honour it.”

Check out Goldie's 'Artist of the Month' chart below: