The verdict on the Proms programme

He is the gold-toothed drum'n’bass DJ who helped turn a BBC series about the art of conducting into one of the surprise television hits of last year.

Now the corporation is turning to Goldie once again, this time to demystify the art of composition, by inviting him to create a new orchestral work for this year’s Proms.

Classic Goldie, a two-part documentary on BBC Two following his progress, will screen either side of the world premiere of the six-minute piece at the Royal Albert Hall on August 1.

Goldie’s composition, part of a Darwin-themed extravaganza for families, is one of 12 new works commissioned for the biggest Proms programme in the festival’s 114-year history.

The full lineup was announced yesterday. Altogether there will be 100 concerts including the first Bollywood Prom, all 11 Stravinsky ballets, a celebration of MGM Musicals, Stephen Hough performing Tchaikovsky’s four piano concerti, the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain tackling Beethoven, Wagner and the Sex Pistols, Proms for the minimalist composers Philip Glass and Michael Nyman and anniversary celebrations of Purcell, Handel, Hadyn and Mendelssohn.

Roger Wright, the director of the BBC Proms, said the season promised “two months of outstanding and inspiring music-making”, building up to the traditional finale, beamed live to five “Prom in the Park” venues around the country, including, for the first time, Hillsborough Castle in Northern Ireland.

This year, the Last Night of the Proms will see the old favourites - Rule Britannia, Jerusalem, Pomp and Circumstance March Number 1 - paired with Malcolm Arnold’s A Grand Grand Overture, “the only piece that I know which has parts for three vacuum cleaners, a floor polisher and three rifles.”

Goldie’s composition promises to be equally distinctive, and not just because he discovered classical music through his ex-girlfriend Bjork, keeps a pet python and has spent 20 years soaking in the sounds of hip-hop, rave and jungle.

Last year he was the beaten finalist on Maestro, the much talked-about BBC Two talent show which pitted celebrities against each other for the chance to conduct the BBC Concert Orchestra at the Proms in the Park. Although he does not read music and had no previous formal musical training, he succeeded by memorising the pieces he was asked to conduct.

Goldie lost out eventually to the comedian Sue Perkins (who had studied flute and piano to Grade Eight) but shrugged off the disappointment, claiming soon afterwards that “I didn’t fancy doing f****** Lesley Garrett in Hyde Park.”

Today, he put it rather more gently: “What I needed to learn from Maestro I had already got. I had an appreciation for classical music but I also knew that I didn’t really like the lighter side and that I preferred the really aggressive stuff like Beethoven and Elgar. Mozart might be more LTJ Bukem (a drum n’ bass DJ with a jazzier style).”

For his own Proms debut, the Wallsall-born Goldie will not be on the conductor’s podium (“thank God”), freeing him up to create a new musical sound akin to orchestral drum n’bass: high tempo, “dirty” and percussive.

“I’m not going to frighten viewers though with something full on and hard core. It is going to be uplifting and there is a groove in this thing.”

It is not entirely new territory - his landmark albums Timeless and Sine Tempus both had touches of orchestral lyricism in amongst the tough beats and he has taken 64 bars from one old track, Truez String, as a starting point for his new composition.

But it is a “pretty mental” challenge, particularly the process of learning to think in terms of individual instruments. As a DJ and music maker Goldie is used to working with layered electronic sounds: “I don’t hear a trumpet up against a string; to me it just sounds fat so I’m having to break all these sounds down and then rebuild them.” So far he has “about 3 1/2 minutes that I really like” and if the next two months continue to go well and the interest is there then Goldie could continue to take his music out of the clubs and into concert halls. “This could be a completely new direction for me,” he said.

Goldie’s commission is the reverse of dumbing down, Mr Wright said.

“We probably have a greater level of compositional talent in the UK than we have ever had at the moment. If some of the mystery of composition can be unlocked for a television audience then that’s a very good thing.”

All of the this year’s Proms will be broadcast live on Radio 3, and 25 will be shown on TV on either BBC Two or BBC Four.

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