His gold teeth, 10ft python and fleet of sports cars suggest a man with
something to prove. But the artist known as Goldie is a shapeshifter
acclaimed for his multiple talents. None stranger, perhaps, than those which
enable him to compose a work for this year’s Proms despite not being able to
read a note of music.
Goldie, whose real name is Clifford Price, is an iconic drum’n’bass star of
Jamaican and Scottish heritage who started out as a graffiti artist and has
been romantically linked with Icelandic singer Björk and the models Stella
Tennant and Naomi Campbell. The 43-year-old, who spent most of his childhood
in foster homes, has also carved out a career as a screen villain. David
Bowie once said of him: “Goldie could make a go of almost anything he turns
his hand to.”
His name comes from the fact that he used to have long blond hair and was
nicknamed Goldilocks. Now bald, he displays gold only on his rings and 14
tooth implants costing £100,000, which may be a smart move in a recession.
He has four children by different mothers and in 2007 divorced his wife of
four years, the model Sonjia Ashby.
However, he is probably best known as the disc jockey from the West Midlands
who came close to winning Maestro, the BBC2 talent show which pitted
celebrities against each other to find the best conductor. The orchestra was
astonished when he turned up without any sheet music, only to give him a
round of applause at the end of his first piece.
The trick, he explained, was seeing notes as “colours”: “I absorb a piece of
music and print the notes in my head. Once I had the first 16 bars, I could
remember the rest of it.” In the final, he lost out to Sue Perkins, the
comedian, who had studied flute and piano.
For his Proms debut, he will not be on the conductor’s podium (“thank God”)
while his “Darwin-themed” composition is played. Although parts of it will
be contemporary and “dirty”, he admitted, “I’m not going to frighten viewers
with something full-on and hard core. It is going to be uplifting.”
Inevitably, there have been complaints that the Proms need no more gimmicks
– such as David Tennant hosting a Doctor Who prom for children last year,
and an evening of songs from the musicals by Michael Ball the year before.
David Lister, The Independent’s arts editor, last week demanded to know why
the BBC had shown such reluctance to trumpet the glories of classical music
at the world’s biggest classical music festival: “It doesn’t actually need
Goldie to make it world-beating, or even newsworthy.”
Although Goldie has capitalised on his tough-guy image, playing baddies in the
James Bond film The World Is Not Enough, Guy Ritchie’s film Snatch, and
BBC1’s EastEnders, visitors to his rambling Hertfordshire country house have
encountered a warm-hearted and exuberant host. “I’m here to make people
laugh,” he is apt to declare. The household includes his 10-year-old
daughter, Chance, his twin husky dogs, Bowie and Dylan, and his pet snake.
Free of the two-year cocaine addiction that brought him low in the 1990s – “As
the song says, ‘The drugs don’t work’ ” – these days he settles for straight
vodka, cigarettes and four hours’ sleep a night. He used to hate swimming in
his indoor pool until he discovered waterproof headphones.
Twenty-five years ago, Goldie was arrested for spray-painting the walls of
council estates in Wolverhampton. Since then, his graffiti art has gained
wider recognition. Paintings from his current retrospective, The Kids Are
All Riot, which depicts social decay and youth culture, have been bought by
the likes of Kevin Spacey, artistic director of the Old Vic, and Jason
Statham, who also starred in Snatch.
Goldie’s biggest contribution to popular culture has been his introduction of
an underground British sound into the mainstream, and his promotion of
jungle and drum’n’bass genres around the world. Unlike house music – a
continuation of disco music, based on four solid beats – both jungle and
drum’n’bass feature more innovative beats, or breakbeats.
As a DJ and record producer, Goldie added his own dash to this concoction, and
the success of his albums prompted other DJs to follow suit while he
travelled the world as ambassador for the new sound. However, the music
scene moved on, leaving Goldie rich but somewhat marooned.
“Goldie hasn’t done anything remotely good since 1995 and he has no impact
now,” said a rock critic. “It’s fairly common when success is based on a new
technology: if electronic artists have no new ideas, there’s nowhere else to
go. Jungle still has its fans, but for most people it was a passing novelty.”
Goldie’s father was a Jamaican factory worker who ran off shortly after he was
born on September 19, 1965, in Walsall. His mother, a Scottish pub singer,
was unable to cope on her own and put him into care when he was three, but
kept his younger brother, Melvin. For 15 years he was shunted between foster
homes, unruly and struggling to come to terms with his rejection.
At the age of 17 he was reunited with his mother and brother, but she had
become a heavy drinker and his stepfather was abusive. “It’s really sad,” he
told an interviewer. “I respect my mum, and I was never with her enough to
love her the way I was supposed to love her.” In his late twenties he had a
brief but unhappy reunion with his father.
He became a child of the streets, where his admitted crimes included
shoplifting and selling drugs as part of a crime syndicate. At school he was
hopeless: he realised the only subject he enjoyed was art, and received
after-school tuition from his art teacher.
Faced with the choice of prosecuting Goldie or commissioning him as a graffiti
artist, his local council opted for the latter, enabling him to have his
first exhibition at 18. His artwork from around Birmingham and Wolverhampton
was featured in Bombing, the Channel 4 film documentary made in the
mid-1980s.
Graffiti, he contended, was an education in itself: “It’s like going to the
finest university in the world.” Empathising with other children abandoned
to the streets, he began passing on his knowledge: “I would teach kids
across estates the hidden code of graffiti, to give them good composition.”
For a while he was a member of Westside, a breakdance crew based in
Wolverhampton, and later joined another crew called the Bboys. Punk lit his
musical fuse – he was a fan of GBH and the Sex Pistols – but in Britain he
felt “incarcerated”. He moved to Miami, where he set up in a booth to design
jewellery, airbrush T-shirts and decorate trucks. The man with whom he
shared the booth made gold teeth, prompting another sideline that became
Goldie’s trademark.
Returning to Britain in 1988, he became fascinated by the British breakbeat
scene. Rave had emerged from acid house and was building its own identity,
with DJs mixing cutting-edge sounds with vintage funk and reggae, which they
played at 45rpm instead of 33rpm. Through his girlfriend, Kemistry, a
leading drum’n’bass DJ, Goldie met two pioneering producers of jungle music
and in exchange for his artwork and logo designs he was given the run of
their studio at Reinforced Records.
His track Terminator was a hit with jungle fans in 1992. Three years later,
his album Timeless, released under his own record label, Metal-headz, sold
250,000 copies. The label enjoyed great success, releasing some of the most
important tunes of the era. Goldie collaborated with Noel Gallagher, Bowie,
Neneh Cherry, James Lavelle and Björk – who became his girlfriend.
It was Björk who, before they split up in 1996, introduced Goldie to classical
music through the work of Henryk Gorecki. He recalled: “We were in Iceland
together one Christmas Eve, looking out of a window at boats in the harbour.
She put on Gorecki and it was just brilliant, beautiful, touching. When I
got to know more about him – that he was Polish, that his family were in
Auschwitz – I knew what it was that had touched me. This was music that
summed up real life.”
Inspired by Gorecki, Goldie composed a one-hour, 30-piece orchestral track
called Mother, which dealt with his feelings for his mother. “It killed me,
that track,” he said. “Afterwards I was crying for two days.”
So were the critics: Mother was the opening track of his 1998 album Saturnz
Return, which they damned.
Humbled, the king of jungle became a fixture of London’s celebrity scene,
dating glamorous women, partying hard and pursuing an acting career. “I
couldn’t carry on straight after doing Mother, it was really hard. Getting
my anger out was a catharsis, but it was also selfish and indulgent.”
His bad-tempered persona won him few fans: he was the first to be evicted from
Celebrity Big Brother in 2002. Last year, though, he bounced back with Sine
Tempus, a long-delayed album of melodies that was meant to be the soundtrack
for a screenplay he has been working on for nine years.
So his next incarnation could be as a film director. Like his python, Goldie
has no difficulty shedding his old skin.
