It's not often that you get to interview a real legend of the game. Perhaps you know him from his days of pioneering drum and bass in the UK rave scene, perhaps you know him for heading up Metalheadz, one of the most culturally significant record labels of the last three decades, or maybe you recognise him from one of the best episodes of Come Dine With Me to ever grace the medium of television. 

No matter how you look at it, Goldie is woven into the UK's cultural oeuvre, right alongside David Bowie, The Queen, and The Freddo Index, so when the opportunity to do a phone interview floats past, you snatch it out of the air, Mr. Miyagi-style.

Goldie's latest project The Journey Man is his most complete work to date. Working from the 'blueprint' of his aptly named 1995 debut Timeless, Goldie's newest record draws upon everything that he has learnt over a staggering thirty career in the music industry. 

You can catch Goldie at Brighton Dome on Nov 22, touring his new album with The Heritage Orchestra Ensemble. Until then, read our interview with the man himself, a man to whom UK dance music owes an impossible debt:

The phone rings...

Hello, Goldie's phone.

Hello, is that Goldie?

It is indeed Goldie, who's calling please?

It's Kieran from Native, we're doing your interview today.

Ah, Kieran! Yes... um. Dammit, uh. All good, right, uh. I'm just making the best fucking bacon and egg sandwich in the world right now.

Do you want me to call you back?

It would be great 'cos I just wanna eat this sandwich right now.

That's fine, how long-

By the way, this is the best bacon and egg sandwich in the world.

Really...

I'm a fuckin'... I'm a bit of a bacon head right? There's a farm down the road. About five years ago I made this really funny documentary called The Big British Breakfast right, searching for the best British breakfast. All around the country, everywhere. Anyway, I settled on this place and I wasn't really happy.

And then I moved to Tring, which is in Hertfordshire, and it's down the road from this farm called Dunsley Farm. Dunsley Farm. I go there, just on the bounce and the guy says you've gotta try the bacon. I did a whole documentary about this shit and then I came here, you idiot. What a mug! Great, great, great bacon.

Anyway, let me eat this, and then I'll give you my full attention. Gimme like 20 minutes and then I'm all yours.

[20 minutes later]

Was it good?

It was good mate, never disappoints. You can take the boy out of Wolverhampton but you can't take the Wolverhampton out the boy. Alright mate yeah, fire away son.

Okay great, just quickly, how long have we got you for today?

Well, hmm. Just don't push your luck. Depends what you ask me.

So something that I'm gonna ask straight up because this took me by surprise - you live in Thailand now? How did that happen?

Uh, it happened. Things happen, shit happens. My wife is from Canada, she was working in Shanghai. We went there and visited one of her friends who worked at the company and we ended up going there every year and five years ago we decided that, I just wanted to be there. There's a lot of paintings in Asia, so it's of a lot of interest to me as a hub, you know? It really works for me.

So we decided to build a house. I built my own studio, a recording studio, and we call it The Tree House and we're very happy there and we've got a little one who's at a mixed school with Thai and English and Spanish kids and all sorts. She gets to do maths lessons while she's climbing trees. 

It's a great life. It's just good for me as well because I've been in cities for all my life more or less and I just felt that, at 52, especially with the last eight years of yoga, I've always gravitated to Asia, more than the Carribean for some reason. You know my dad's Jamaican, my family are all Jamaican but it just never really connected for me, you know what I mean? Asia's always been the thing. It's just a great vibration for me.

To be somewhere where no-one knows you apart from some ex-pat on the cheese counter at an international supermarket where you buy HP beans for fuckin' £6.45. You know what I mean? That's the only person who recognises me and goes "Oh my god!", you know?

I think the thing is, in this world where we live in this kind of frustration, when people get to this stage, I like the idea of "semi-fame". So I can catch a fuckin' train, I can go to yoga, the white van man always stops me and gives me a fist bump but you know what I mean? It's not...

It's not a hassle?

Exactly, I've never had that. Being in Asia, just reinventing yourself by actually just making people laugh. You know what I mean? Just making someone laugh. I got stopped on the train the other day by a woman who goes "oh my god, is that you?!" and I go "yeah..." and she says "where you going?" "I'm going to yoga" "oh my god, really? Why are you doing that?" and I say... "Why not?"

"I expected you to be with a car and a... chauffeur. I grew up on your music" and all of this. And I'm like, she was having a really shitty day and I said "look, breathing is everything sometimes love". Made her laugh, got off the train, and she told me she had a great day.

Sometimes, growing older for me is realising I know very fucking little. Especially going back to the point of the question, rhetorically, is being in Asia, just making someone laugh who doesn't know you. They all cool me "Fạn Thxng" [Pronounced Fan Tong].

What does that mean?

Mr. Gold. Mr. Gold Tooth. It's just great because that's what it is and I like that idea of getting away... because I've grown up in the establishment and I resisted the establishment. The irony is, that very establishment gave me an MBE. So I've got these letters after my name that I never use because I don't really know how to spell my name that fuckin' well. It matters to me that I've got it but I'm not gonna brandish it around. So what's the point that I'm making? The point that I'm making is that it's really nice to have 8 pints of blood and piss and shit just like everyone else.

I liked the idea of emmigrating because I couldn't handle... I mean I just about got through the nineties you know what I mean? It was fucking mental you know? I guess that height of fame, it was, you know, it was just enough to deal with. It was quite crazy, but now it's really beautiful because recording that album from that house, that was the biggest redemption I could've ever pulled off.

My friend James is a school teacher to my kids, he calls up and he says two words: "Tai Chi" and I'm like "three minutes" and I get up and I get on my motorbike, we go to the sea. We jump in the sea, we talk some shit, we talk about the night before, we talk about velocity, we get back on the fuckin' motorbike, we go to the schoolyard, where my kids were being taught right that day, get in the middle of the schoolyard and so some Qigong, (which is what I call Tai Chi). 

So we did some Chi, then I get back to the house, got some fuckin' croissants on, get some bacon on and then I take my daughter to the same school and meet him at the gate like nothin' happened.

It's the fuckin' life mate. I'm livin' the fuckin' dream.

So you mentioned you built a recording studio in your house - is that where you recorded your new album The Journey Man?

I recorded Journey Man entirely in the heart of the house, downstairs, and it was all done remotely. Every vocal was sang into my iPhone, along with all of the piano movements, all of the string movements, were sent into the iPhone. I mean all of them.

So basically, as a body of work, I'm really proud of the album. Because I know for me, as the artist, it exceeds anything else I've done, including Timeless, everything I've done. I know this an artist, but I also understand that there's a very selfish indulgence of it. But you have to understand for some people, certain records are rose-tinted and they grew up with them and they're genre-defining. And all three of those things are true [of Timeless], but there's a fourth thing. This album, there's a blueprint, that was set by Timeless, this album has everything and more. There's a wider breadth, it's got more flair, it's got more songwriting, it has such a growth.

People forget that when Timeless came out it was berated by so many. It was only an inner circle, a clique almost, that got it. It was very niche but it was like, all of a sudden, because you were genre-defining, I was post-punk. We hadn't had a shake up since Soul II Soul, the British movement hadn't had a shake up. 

And of course that shake up is now Grime. We've had Broken Beat, Dubstep, Garage, Drum and Bass, that was the whole thing, I think about genres of music, it's really weird, when I think about lovers rock as a Jamaican, as an English Jamaican, Lovers Rock was almost a counterpart to Jamaican Reggae if you think about it. I feel like Garage was the Lovers Rock of Grime, if you like. You know what I mean? The soul side of it.

But going back to the point, doing this album remotely was an amazing process. It kind of proves to me that good engineering, having good engineers that I've flown in, that I work with... I flew in this beautiful guy called James Davison to engineer this album, he's on Metalheadz with a guy called Greg Hepworth, there's an amazing pianist called John Dixon who's from Detroit, part of a group called Timelines, he was schooled by my good friend Mad Mike from Underground Resistance. [Mad Mike] said to me four, five years ago he said, "You gotta work with this guy man, you gotta do it man, John Dixon." 

And I told him look I've got these ideas for Journey Man, and we worked on Tomorrow's Not Today, Horizons, and the piano for Run, Run, Run. You know and the process has been amazing. Run, Run, Run was originally a 54 minute piano improv by John Dixon and I just photographed all these different parts of it as a composition, snatched it all out of the air and went "that's gonna go there, that's gonna be repeated there" and it was shaped up. I then sent it back to him and went "can you replay these like this?" and he went "I can't. I can't play it." And he tried and he couldn't do it so I just worked some alchemy and magic.

It just goes to prove a very validating point. I think that's why I love getting into album mode and working with different musicians. I like the fact that I don't engineer because it keeps my head out of the fuckin' computer - it puts my head on a canvas. I don't think I'd be able to have the vision if I was engineering, and lo and behold it came out like that and it's a phenomenal piece. 

You know, we built a house on hill. We go up that hill, we run up that hill every day. Something that I believe you'll understand, because I can read people pretty well, and you're asking all the right questions, is that when Tyler, when I first designed the vocals for Tyler I said to him "look, you gotta write this down, it's up that hill... what kind of man am I? The man the hill made" so I sang all these different parts to him and he said "I don't know where it all goes" I said "Don't worry where it goes, just learn the lines I'm giving you, it's direction, like film". 

So while I was processing over a month, I then did one take, one master take. One evening I woke up at four in the morning, sat on the balcony looking at the jungle and just did it, and I sent him it in an email which to this day he still keeps, and the email says "WOW, WOW, WOW" and he phoned me up and he said "oh my god, I get it now. It's theatre!" Because you can listen to the entire album, it's widespread, it's epic, and when you get to the end of that projecta and you listen to Run, Run, Run, it's like a theatre piece. You can hear a pin drop in the fucking room.

But the cherry on top, he does the chorus and he does the line and he says "what does that say?" and it says "up that hill and then down again... Katie said" and he goes "Katie said? What does that mean?" He says "is it a trick?" I say, "no, no, think about it".

Kate Bush!

There you go! There he is. So within the tapestry of the album, I wanted it to be like that, there's lines within vocals that connect to different songs. You know, one of them connects to a record on another album that I did, and the words are exactly backwards. On the CD there's a track no-one's fuckin' found yet, which I'm amazed by. 

It just shows you what a digital age we're living in, you know what I mean? You can't hide a track on Spotify. So, you know, I just caught it right at the right time between CDs and moving to the future. So the design of it and recording it, I have a great kind of passive-aggressive relationship with details about every single fuckin' thing. It has to be the way it has to be. Vocally, it can only be sang in the way I want it to be sang, and it works for me, it doesn't work for other people but that's just part of what I do as an artist.

I hope that's answered your fucking question! 

That was great, probably the best answer I've ever had, thank you! 

You mentioned Grime earlier - another project you've got coming out is one with Skepta. Is that someone you wanted to work with for a long time?

Well I did it last year. I did a very secret project which is coming out next year, which is ridiculous. Another album. Me and James Davison, the engineer. And we've done another project which is just fucking phenomenal and in between, you know this kid stops me at the airport, this kid. He says "yo uncle, you still making beats?" and I'm like "yeah, if it's right. If it's right, I'll do something".

Skepta stopped you at the airport?

Yeah, yeah. He was going to Finland, I was going to Germany or somewhere. I was in the airport, he rolled up, I'd met him once before that in Liverpool at a festival. I went and reached him out, gave him a little touch and said "You're doing really well. I like what you're doing". First time I met him, it was like two minutes, that was it. It was V Festival.

And then I see him at the airport and he says "are you still making beats, uncle?" It's nice and endearing that these old boys still call me uncle. I like that. They all call me uncle. So that's kinda cool.

So I said to James let's roll this fuckin' out. The thing about that is that it's gotta be outside the fuckin' box. It's gotta be fuckin' different. Outstandingly different. So I thought: Wu Tang meets Beck? So we got Adam Bets and Jonny Fleece [sic] to roll our the beats, with my drums.

We smashed up the drums technically, did some fuckin' alchemy on the drums, and lo and behold if you've heard the track, I think it was record of the week on Charlie Sloth's show last week, and you know it just shows the old boy can roll it out with the boys when I wanna roll it out and I loved it. But to be fair, it's a double A-side - the other side is a different fuckin' beast. 

The reason why, which I like, going back to the point of alchemy, Skepta got the point as to why I did the track. I rolled the vocal, most of the vocal, I sang it into a mic, in Thailand, I sent him the video and said "add to this". The original vocal is very kind of 80s punk. So I recorded it and I said "Add to it. Put your fuckin' twist on this. I'm gonna send you the lyrics, I'm gonna send you what I've written. Fuck around with it, smash it up." and it was a perfect collaboration because he then came back with some beautiful verses on it which were kind of like "wow that's a really clever idea" and obviously in his delivery it came out really well.

I think that it works because he really is confident but he said to me and he goes "what's upstart mean?" and I went "Wow..." It just shows how old I am. Anyway I came back to England and we just got on really well we had a mad thing, and I think the reason why, unbeknown to him, but known to me is that when I got back and I said "I'm going to New York for my birthday" and he goes "my birthday's in September as well, when's yours?" and I said September 19th and he fell on the floor basically.

We were born on the same day! He's a very young version of me. I also think he's an artist that stands alone, even though he's in a crowd of people he will always be alone. In that sense. He's got a lot of layers, and I think we still haven't seen the best of what he's got.

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