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It's 1991 and a bona fide B-boy by the name of Goldie finds
himself caught up in the heaving mass of London's Rage Club
at Heaven on a Thursday night.
DJ's Fabio and Grooverider take to the decks once again captivating
the crowd with their frenzied assault on the senses. A relative
newcomer to the scene, Goldie pesters the duo for names of
tracks and becomes an immediate convert to the hardcore breakbeat
aesthetic. That many an outsider is choosing to pronounce
the hardcore scene dead seems slightly ironic - a breakbeat
specialist of the highest order has only just been born.
Today there are few more influential and charismatic figures
on the hardcore / jungle scene than Goldie. Schooled like
so many of his peers on hip-hops B-boy ethos of the early
1980's. Goldie's influences on the breakbeat culture of hardcore
can go with the B-boy flavour. He explains "but you can
go even further. Messing around with sound real bad".
Goldie would initially make his mark as a graffiti writer
in his Midlands hometown of Walsall. Spraying walls quickly
got serious as the commissions started to flood in. "I'd
paint my estate because I couldn't be a thief", he recalls.
"At night I'd go out to blues, but in the morning I'd
come home in the morning and change straight into my painting
clothes. Then it took off. I'd be doing paintings for the
community, for the council. I'd be asked to appear on TV shows
like Pebble Mill where I could say whatever I wanted."
Alongside the likes of 3D from Bristol's Wild Bunch Crew,
Goldie emerged as one of Britain's leading graffers. He began
moving back and forth from New York, living the hip-hop lifestyle
for real. In 1986 he'd star alongside Afrika Bambaata in the
seminal graffiti art movie "Bombing" - filmed partly
in Bristol and most notably in New York's South Bronx, where
for a time Goldie would choose to reside.
Early 1998, Goldie returns to London from a spell in Miami.
Jazzie B asks him to help out on Soul II Soul's artwork. Still
painting and still getting commissions, Goldie finally gets
tied down. For a couple of years he's a player on the West
End club scene. But then the inspiration dries up. "Hip-Hop
wasn't happening for me over here anymore because I'd been
away living it", recalls Goldie. "It was like I
just had to do something".
1991 and London's hardcore scene proves to be Goldie's salvation.
Initially, he just listens and learns from the sidelines,
helping out on the artwork for the hugely influential label
Reinforced. But slow and surely, the face of hardcore begins
to change. Where once the domineering sound had been termed
"Happy" - a mix of Pinky & Perky sounding vocal
madcap oscillator riffs - by late 1992 a new darker edge creeps
into the music. It was here that Goldie came into his own.
His first entrance into the world of recording artists had
been "Kellermuffin" - a semi successful ep for Reinforced
that contained an early sample of ragga artist "Cutty
Ranks" - later to figure so predominantly on many a jungle
release. But most significantly, early in 1993 under the pseudonym
of "Metalheadz", Goldie would release "Terminator"
on the Synthetic label, a track that would have a dramatic
impact on every hardcore release that followed.
With its eerie metallic breakbeats, "Terminator"
pioneered the use of a process known as time-stretching in
hardcore. It was now possible to stretch a vocal sample over
any pitch range without altering the B.P.M. Although classic
"dark tunes" like Terminator and Terminator II had
pioneered the emergence of what became widely termed jungle.
Goldie is somewhat disparaging of this legacy.
"Dark to me was just a representation of the way people
were feeling at the time", he says, "there was a
recession, winter and the country was in decline. Dark was
like the blues music". And as subsequent release were
to prove, Goldie was set to stay one step ahead of the rash
imitators who arrived to cash in on the growing popularity
of jungle. By late 1993 "Angel", again released
on the synthetic label, fused Urban Cookie Collective Dianne
Charlemagne's jazzy vocal with eerie sythn. Elsewhere on a
series of remix projects for Reinforced's Enforcers series
- on the 4 track ep "Internal Affairs" - on "Fury"
for the Moving Shadow label - and on a remix of the massive
Helicopter Tune (to name but a few). Goldie showed just how
far he's mastered his art.
"Timeless", Goldie's (AKA Metalheadz) first release
for London Records no doubt shocked and suprised once more
upon it's release on November 1994. Twenty-Two minutes long,
it plays on the very concept of time, dealing with the inner
city struggle for survival. While also fooling the listener
into believing the track is much shorter than its actual running
length.
Again, the soaring vocal of Diane Charlemagne captures the
very essence - "Timeless" survivalist spirit, as
the haunting strings and fearsome breakbeats dig deep into
the listeners mind. I don't even know if I'd call what I record
jungle anymore", reasons Goldie, fully aware that at
its narrowest definition jungle has become little more than
a reggae sample overlaid on a breakbeat. "I'd prefer
to call this inner-city ghetto music, because I'm not just
going to come up with what most people would envisage to be
jungle. I make my music to have integrity and if you can still
play it at 6' O'clock in the morning in a club, then its bona
fide".
With almost no national radio airplay at all the double album
shot straight into the national charts at no.7, which reflected
a huge groundswell of record buyers that up until now were
supposedly non-existent.
Demand for Goldies drum & bass was such that a live tour
took his eight-piece band to Europe and the U.S.A supporting
Bjork. Upon returning to the U.K Goldie headlined his own
sell-out tour. Whenever time allowed, Goldie would return
to London to run his Metalheadz club every Sunday at London's
Blue Note.
The UK leg of the tour was an event never heard before. Peshay,
Doc Scott, Kemistry & Storm, Fabio, Grooverider, Randall
and MC extroadinaire Clevelnad Watkiss played sets that testified
a new consciousness on dance culture everywhere, due no doubt
to Goldie's efforts to hoist jungle from the underground to
the mainstream.
His efforts were rewarded throughout 96 & 97 when he
won an array of awards for his debut album, his DJing, the
Metalheadz label and his label's compilation album "Platinum
Breakz". It's 1997 and Goldie spends his time running
not only his Sunday nights at the Blue Note but also the Metalheadz
night at London's Hanover Grand on the first Friday of every
month, as well as working on his follow up album to "Timeless"
entitled "Saturnz Return".
His energy is almost limitless. "I sleep three hours
a night, I just have this abyss of energy" he explained
to a journalist recently, which partly explains the albums
title "Saturnz Return" is taken from the notation
of the seven year astrological cycle where the starts are
now in his favour. "I'm a Virgo, the way my planets are
lined up to the time I was born, I'm set man". And set
he is indeed.
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