Life lessons from Goldie

Under the cover of his Rufige Kru alias, Goldie is back making music, with scorching new album Alpha Omega. Under the cover of darkness, 10Foot has become the (literally) biggest name in graffiti writing, his recent London exhibition Long Dark Tunnel taking his underground craft briefly overground.

Who better, then, than 10Foot – his giant lettering ubiquitous on the surfaces of the capital’s most inaccessible spaces – to interview the original graffiti don and drum’n’bass pioneer?

The pair go pan-generational deep, and also go dark. As Goldie, animatedly Zooming in from his home in Thailand, says to a shadowy nightcrawler who claims he can’t get his video working: ​“You can hop along a fucking steel pole in the middle of the night but you can’t get your camera on!”

10Foot: You’ve a long history with THE FACE, appearing in the magazine several times back in the day – but never on the cover. And you’ve got the face to end all faces, with your gold teeth glinting. Even the logo for Metalheadz [the drum’n’bass label founded by Goldie and Kemistry & Storm in 1994] is a face. Personally, I prefer to be a silhouette. I’m wondering how you cope with having such a big profile?

Goldie: The infamy of what we do… We alienate ourselves purely because of the art form. And the purest form, for me, has always been the music. The celebrity that followed was 99 per cent because I was a face of it – in an era when the underground itself felt very uncomfortable with Goldie being this face, launched into this main arena.

Drum’n’bass, to me, is an important subculture in that it was a proper race and class leveller. It is much more than just music, like graffiti, I suppose. Did having a public face feel like martyrdom for spreading an idea or were you happy to do it?

It wasn’t even a question of sacrifice for me. It was the fact that I can open these doors and go into an office and say: ​“Fuck you.” One of the greatest examples was Timeless sounding like it was 20 minutes long at a time when we had just come off the back of Stock Aitken Waterman and all of this other stuff.

It wasn’t that I wanted to become a fucking pop star. I believe in popular music, but pop music goes pop [Goldie sticks a finger in his mouth and pops his cheek]. It does exactly that. Bubbles that rise from the bottom, they rise and they can’t return. The jellyfish mentality that I’ve always had meant that I could rise to the top and I could just be transparent, tell it like it is – this is our fucking music and it is as strong as punk. It will be as revered as punk.

It’s like Mayor Koch [mayor of New York City from 1978 to 1989] spending $21 million trying to erase graffiti using taxpayers’ money… The stories I’ve heard [about the pursuit of revered graffiti writers] would make your blood boil. [The feeling was], look, man, this is not going to stop. These guys want to paint trains legally [but, either way] it’s going to continue.

We can try and put a rein on this and control [it, but] this stuff is happening. But let’s not paint graffiti in the way [it was done before]. And that’s what I like about what you’ve done, 10Foot.

Well, thanks, I appreciate that. I could only ever come at it from my own angle but I recognise that angle, sharpen it, and use it to put a hole in Colonel Blimp. But it all goes circular: the corporates have noticed me, I now have dirty doors opening in front of me – but I won’t step through any of them. I know you’ve negotiated this, so what’s your advice?

From my old friend Laurence Fishburne: what pill do you want to take, guys? Or do you want to just create your own empire? The idea that Metalheadz is still independent is huge. It’s always been a massive alliance with what we’ve done and the sound of what you grew up on… It took me a long, long time to realise that when you’re in the heat of the fire, it becomes so white hot that it doesn’t burn anymore. And I believe that now. Fast approaching 60, I’m looking back on it thinking: ​“Fuck, that truthful idea has really lasted in the honesty of time.”

Talking of all that, your era are our cultural progenitors. Our era of graffiti was a cocktail of good drum’n’bass, bad skunk and ugly state harassment; we are the ASBO generation. And, in turn, you lot were birthed by all that ​’80s New York b‑boy stuff.

I’ve slightly overlooked that part of it. I like how culturally important we are to you, 10Foot, and how your generation has really gone out raving. The idea that the energy of this music, socially, has all of the soundscape. Which is so UK.

That’s what graffiti was like for me: a coming together of classes and of races and of every- one. It was a fucking problem for the system. The way I saw graffiti, the way I grew up on it, it’s standard to do arrows and squiggles and stars and shit. And as I get older, I feel like what’s essential is purifying your own vision of what you’re doing. I’ve pared it back now. A lot of people don’t see this, but there’s a lot of thinking in the simplicity. For you, I wondered if there was a process of trying to unlearn the Americanisation that culturalised you?

There is and I’ll tell you what it is. I’ve always been hip-hop through and through. I’ve always been a b‑boy. However, when hip-hop started becoming really commercialised, I realised that within my own culture I must thrive [alongside] these different people [and UK independent labels] who were coming through.

I realised that I would have to then stop painting physically… And that the only way that I could survive this, was to be able to do this within the music. We are the wildstyle of this music. We are the sonic terrorists, if you like.

Isn’t it strange that the scientists have now worked out how to make fucking fuel out of waste products? Well, that’s exactly what we’ve had to do, from a mental point of view, a very, very long time ago: make something from nothing. It’s like DJing, for me. When I go and play music now, it’s like I’m going to a library that’s quite extensive, and I’m going to shuffle through all these great books, and I’m going to lay them down in a conversation with each other. And for you, 10Foot, you’re now [similarly] learning the art of simple complexity.

Yeah, man. You have to steal a plan of the prison, find a teaspoon, then spend a long time digging for freedom. What motivates you to keep on being a provocateur, a radical?

There is much to do. Let’s get to the point: are we going to change anything? Do we need to change the government’s ways and views? I think the back-pocket- ing that they’re taking right now, it’s become this banking system. My personal beef is, the minute that you took the school from the middle of my community where I lived, and you ripped out the primary school, and you threw it away with government [cuts] and the estate imploded, then my son became a murderer. [In 2010, Goldie’s son Jamie, then 23, was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a minimum of 21 years after he was convicted of stabbing to death a rival gang member in Wolverhampton.] His cousins and all of his relatives became the same. And I couldn’t save him. All the fathering in the world couldn’t save him.

The one thing that I can’t take away is being a product of being in care all my life. And I’ll say this open-heartedly: ​“Thank fuck, mum, you put me away. Thank God you put me into care.” Because I spent years learning what this name, Clifford Price, meant; what it meant to have it sewn into my clothes every day. [It meant] I wanted to create a character named Goldie because I wanted to become a superhero. I wanted to become something different than everything you’ve ever labelled me for. And breaking that down by saying to them: ​“Fuck you!” Because I’ve made this on my own. I paid my fucking taxes. I paid my fucking dues.

You’re talking about your boy being fed from that austerity to school to prison pipeline, as they call it. Which is more of a reality than most people realise. And this is a bit of a looping way to ask you but: I feel like in the ​’80s, people were talking a lot about politics in their music. And I wondered: what are your opinions on being a cultural leader and having an input in politics? Especially a couple of weeks after Kneecap said their thing about Palestine at Coachella.

I’ve never wanted to have the conversation. You know why? It’s not through ignorance at all. I have an awful lot of Palestinian friends. I have an awful lot of Israeli friends. My fight in my war has always been the idea that the manipulation behind all of this is so extensive… And I find that all of this is down to money and greed. That’s what this is. It’s become so distasteful that it makes me feel physically sick.

THE FACE: Goldie, as a radical artist: how do you feel about what seems to be a concerted effort to de-platform Kneecap for expressing their opinions?

Freedom of speech in music – they should be allowed to say whatever they want to say. That’s their point of view. It’s the same with Sinéad O’Connor [who, during a 1992 appearance on Saturday Night Live, tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II in protest against the Catholic Church, significantly damaging her career in America in particular], with any artist that has wanted to use their music as a platform. They’re entitled to that. It’s their freedom as artists to do whatever they want to do.

Will it eradicate their airplay? Will it stop them getting booked in the US? Probably. But they’ve done what they wanted to do. And at the end of the day, when we’re all shouting from the houses, fair play to them. You should say whatever you want and do whatever you need to do. Because you’re voicing it for your music.

If you don’t talk directly from a moral stand-point about the moment of humanity that you’re in, you’re going to be forgotten by the wider movement. The authorities’ intent is a very, very concerted effort to silence [Kneecap]. But that’s what will ultimately beat the authority. I think the core duty of an artist is to remind humans of their humanity.

This is the thing about idiocy and absurdity. If it’s OK for U2 do Sunday Bloody Sunday [the band’s 1983 song about the killing of 14 unarmed civilians by British soldiers in Derry in 1972]… People in music [have been doing this] from the beginning of time… We call it the blues for a reason. We do it to vent, and it’s to get it off our chest, whatever we may be feeling.

You saying that the blues is called blues for a reason; I felt that with drum’n’bass it was the same. The clue’s in the name: people made it for a sound system.

My music has always had its blues moments. David Bowie, my dear friend [Bowie appeared on the track Truth on Goldie’s 1998 album Saturnz Return, and the pair starred in 1999 British gangster flick Everybody Loves Sunshine], had Low. Some of the greatest work that Brian Eno and Bowie did was Low. That was [his] Saturnz Return. It was a completely dark [record], this whole thing about blues. This music has always been that.

I swear on my life, I will never pay a penny of my money to Spotify, Netflix or any of these newfangled methods. What I do is, I’ll listen to an artist all the time and if I see them in the street I’ll give them £50 cash. Ask DJ Zinc – when he bought something off me I had to give him a mad discount ​’cause of how many bits of his I pirated back in the day.

You owe me a few quid, then! You never know, the irony is, I might end up selling 10Foot T‑shirts at a market! But this is where I beg to differ. I had one of my artists make a request to ​“take all my music off Spotify”. I’m like, mate, it brings in a revenue stream to run an independent label. The idea of Spotify not paying its artists [well] is terrible. I get it. But I’m not going to dismantle [sic] an independent label [away from] whatever revenue stream we can get. Because we’re trying our best to facilitate everything and pull into all of these different things.

The very people that moan about all this shit are the same people that stopped buying the vinyl, stopped going to the record shops to support us in the beginning. But I do believe that there is an anti-Christ to all of this coming. The generation that are just under this next one aren’t as stupid as you think they are. I believe that they’re gonna make massive changes. And if we’re still here… The kids don’t listen to the parents, but they sometimes listen to grandma and grandpa!

We’re doing these live shows, and we just played Norwich. There’s these kids there with their granddads and fathers, raving out to this music, live. I was thinking: ​“Just enough people have to see this to understand this isn’t that commercial shit you’ve been fed on, this McDonald’s [music], for so long.” If you keep feeding these kids these cheap meals, they’ll become cheap.

THE FACE: 10Foot, can you reflect on what Goldie has meant to you in your art and to you as an insurrectionist?

10Foot: A large part of my cultural diet was looking at the Metalheadz logo spinning around on the decks while I was stoned out of my nut. It really spiralled deep into my psyche – until hotrocks burnt a crater in the best part of the tune! That face meant that you could be black, white, you could wear a balaclava over the top and stand behind the speaker in the rave. Anonymity as identity was really important and I think in the era of mass surveillance and internet-fuelled identitarianism that idea is maybe more important now than when you lot established it.

The other thing is being a public face and forming a solid cultural ladder. Because I think that’s what you’ve been able to do, Goldie, through the progressions that you’ve made. Being a ladder, or a rung on the ladder, of culture is really important.

Graffiti has always been underground, so me, Tox, and Fume calling our first major show Long Dark Tunnel is not only referencing a classic drum and bass tune [Origin Unknown’s 1997 classic Valley of the Shadows] but saying that it still lives underground – it’s in a tunnel. It’s not Beyond the Streets [the title of Saatchi Gallery’s 2023 graffiti exhibition]. I want to do something that looks outwards but stays in the dark. So to look at people who’ve trodden that path before is helpful.

You’ve just got to understand the culture’s longevity. And if you are going to remain in this culture, you have to be [clever]. Be the cat burglar. Be the idea that you can go in and out – which you’ve done very successfully. You’ve been able to be that cat on a hot tin roof.

Alpha Omega comes out next month, probably the most underground fucking d’n’b album you can get. Because I can still do it. I remain jellyfish. And you, 10Foot, you remain doing this and continue to do so. And just make sure you box clever. Remember one thing: it ain’t fucking Kung Fu, it’s fucking Wing Chun.

I don’t have a desire to be a public face or be a celebrity. What I want to do is have something interesting. And if I don’t have something I fully believe in to sell, then I’ll go and do something that’s much easier and makes much more money!

You stay right there, sunshine. You’re doing alright for me. That’s all that matters. When people pull into that station platform, [your art] puts a smile on their faces. I sat on the most random train the other day – I’m not in London that often – to go to yoga. And this kid looks around – and I had a mask on – and he came up to me and showed me his iPhone. He was playing Innercitylife (Baby Boys Edit) remixed by Photek. He just hugged me and I felt to myself: That’s all that matters. I’m not here for the cunts. I’m here to lay my music down and to keep on laying this music down… until I’m in the fucking ground.

Well, I’m sure you will. I’m just pissed off that time has run out, ​’cause we could talk ​’til five in the morning for the next 500 days. Big respect to you, Uncle G.

Yes! Stay jellyfish for me! You move and slide, move and go, disappear into the darkness and come back, man. And don’t drop hash on the new record, mate! It’s too nice. Love you, 10Foot.

GROOMER Rachel Lee at MA+ SET DESIGNER Phoebe Shakespeare PRODUCTION Drive Represents ON-SET PRODUCER Anna Riazanova LIGHTING ASSISTANT Ricardo Munoz Carter SET DESIGN ASSISTANT Lucas Taberna THANKS TO The Yoga Quarter