Goldie at the Proms

BBC Proms 2009: Goldie prepares for Prom night

The maestro of alchemy, Goldie, has written a seven-minute orchestral piece to be performed at the Royal Albert Hall.

By Peter Culshaw

Goldie welcomes me into his Hertfordshire house, where he lives in semi-rural bliss with his girlfriend, two large huskies, and his collection of over 2,000 trainers. Not to mention his giant Boa constrictor, which is coiled up asleep in the corner of the room. “He lives on rats – and journalists,” says Goldie, flashing me a grin with those famous gold teeth.

He’s on a fast that consists of 10 days of surviving on a horrible-tasting concoction of lemon juice and cayenne “and a few cigarettes” - the fast is, he says, making him “speedy” and he talks a mile a minute.

He bought his house 10 years ago when he decided he had to escape the world of nightclubs and drugs in London. “I’m clean now, but back in the day I used to start the day with a snort of cocaine. I could toot for England,” he confesses, cheerfully. Goldie’s CV is, to say the least, an eclectic one. His own description, “B Boy, wannabe gangbanger, graffiti artist, Miami Funk Dredd, producer, superstar DJ, actor and celebrity”, just about covers it, although an unlikely new career seems to be opening up for him in classical music.

Despite not being able to read music or play an instrument, he came second in last year’s Maestro television show where celebrities attempted to become conductors, showing natural talent, charisma and sheer brass neck in front of an orchestra, learning pieces of music such as sections of Orff’s Carmina Burana by heart. But as David Bowie said of him: “Goldie could make a go of almost anything he turns his hand to. He has got so much talent in a million different areas.” Conducting, says Goldie, is similar in a way to being a DJ; he recently played a stadium gig in Moscow to over 20,000 people.

Now comes a new project, which has raised even more eyebrows in certain musical circles - a Proms commission for a new seven-minute orchestral piece to be performed at the Royal Albert Hall, called Sine Tempore – Without Time (also the title of an autobiographical film Goldie has been developing for the last nine years) that also makes good use of the mighty Albert Hall organ. Helping him on his musical path will be his Maestro mentor, Ivor Setterfeld, and composer Anna Meredith. A two-part BBC Two film Classic Goldie, follows him as he copes with this new challenge.

For Goldie, while admitting that with the Proms commission he is “completely outside my comfort zone”, he says it’s not entirely unlike his usual electronic composing and producing. Some of the terminology was new to him “but once they explained glissando to me, I thought it’s quite like the time-stretching I do in the studio”. Goldie also points out that some of his earlier work, such as the hour-long piece Mother on his second album Saturnzreturn from 1998, was semi-orchestral in nature and was partly inspired by Björk, his girlfriend at the time “turning me on to Górecki’s Symphony Of Sorrowful Songs – we listened to it watching the sea in Iceland”.

His main musical claim to fame is as co-inventor of drum and bass, a genuinely new genre of frenetic dance music that he took into the charts with his 1995 album Timeless, a distinctive sound that “has splintered around the world now. From Tokyo to Sao Paulo. After his second album failed to sell, he became an almost full-time celebrity, had his worst drug period, became pals with the likes of Noel Gallagher and went out with a series of famous girlfriends including Björk and Naomi Campbell. He took up acting, popping up as villains in a Bond film, in Guy Ritchie’s Snatch and in EastEnders, and being on reality shows like Celebrity Big Brother.

A riveting ghostwritten autobiography Nine Lives was published in 2002.

Biography

He was born Clifford Price in 1965 after a short-lived relationship between a Scottish pub singer and a Jamaican-born factory worker, who soon disappeared. His mother put him into care when he was three, where he remained for 15 years, living in foster homes and institutions. He only reunited with his mother and brother, who has had several stints in jail, when he was 17.

Goldie escaped firstly by becoming a roller skater, playing roller hockey for the England B team, and break dancing. Then he took up graffiti painting and was taken to New York, meeting famous artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, and discovering hip hop. He found his father in Miami, who “acted as if he saw me yesterday”. He was shocked to discover his father had another son with exactly the same name, Clifford, “in case one of you died”. The experience “made me feel abandoned all over again”.

Goldie says that he used to be incredibly angry, all the time. “But now I just think my mother made a mistake and now, finally, I have a great relationship with her.” A famous womaniser in the past, he says he is settled now, living with his long-term girlfriend and happy to carry on “doing what I do. Which I realise is a very modern version of the dark, ancient art of alchemy, turning lead into gold.” He says he may have been here before, possibly as a pharaoh. “This time, they decided to send me back, and they thought 'Let’s make him abandoned, love music, not be able to play a musical instrument, and see if he finds his way’.”

• 'Classic Goldie’ airs on BBC Two (transmission times tbc)

• 'Sine Tempore’, will be performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra and conductor Charles Hazlewood, Aug 1

Reviewers, in the main, were pleasantly surprised. Elisa Bray in The Independent wrote:

Goldie's drum 'n' bass could be characterised by its tendency to start off slowly and burst into high-energy sound. Sine Tempore, by comparison, was full of dynamics, and focused above all on rhythm and timbre.

and

You couldn't have expected Bach's counter-point and the composition, lacking harmony, benefited from its short length. However, it was remarkable how comfortably the piece sat alongside the other 20th and 21st century compositions showcased that day.

She gave Prom 21 four out of five stars.

Neil Fisher, in The Times, also awarded four out of five stars:

...solemn cellos give a voiceless chant, and a chorus (in this case the London Philharmonic Choir) emerges with a hazily declamatory response. Rattling percussion - deftly handled, though perhaps not as inventively as one might have predicted - underpins the progress to a sonorous climax.

and

The regret, perhaps because Goldie has had to rely on mentors to orchestrate and notate the piece, is that the remaining orchestral detail seems rather vague, and occasionally swamped by the choral and percussive climaxes.