Goldie - 'Timeless'
No. 16 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
“My music is like a wolf in sheep’s clothing to be able to make people tap into things.” — Goldie, “Heavy Metal Soul,” Urb magazine, December 1995
Drum ‘n’ bass came from the hyper rhythms of house, techno, funk, reggae and hip hop whirling and twisting through circuits and microchips. It was the sound of time warping more than two decades before machines would distort global reality.
It’s amazing to think back on just how big the buzz about drum ‘n’ bass was in the mid 1990s as an art form that many predicted would utterly transform the future of music. There was plenty of hyperbole about the hyper-breaks-centric electronica. And much of that hype was thanks to the jungle scene’s first superstar, Goldie, a biracial orphan born with the name Clifford Joseph Price, now a member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. High and low, sharp, and deep — a sonic knight extraordinaire.
Goldie is himself the Art of the Impossible, an art-former of space and time. And his debut album, which was burdened with perhaps the biggest British press puffery of the 1990s, was itself shot through with a kind of streetwise pomposity: Timeless was a puzzle. On the one hand, a lot of critics didn’t want to be caught sounding uncool, or completely out of depth. In 1995, many underground journalists and even DJs didn’t quite now how to listen to the serpentine double onslaught of speeding drums, and rolling sub-bass. On the other hand, the title and the music itself was also a smart double entendre, since to virginal ears, drum ‘n’ bass was “time less,” or more like time’s explosion at the center of the Big Bang into fragments and dimensions.
Runnin’ with the wolves, it was the sound of survival. And beyond the hyper-intellectualism that started among some journalists trying to crack the code of Goldie’s music was less the outer form of drum ‘n’ bass — the contrasting speeds of its drums and its anaconda bass — but the deeper inherent impact of it, its banging and runnin’ groove — its soul — the liquid elasticity of music and time.
“There’s reggae tunes that are runnin’ and there’s people using reggae riffs that ain’t runnin’,” Goldie told Urb magazine in 1996, referring to the reggae roots and UK urban inspiration of the drum ‘n’ bass sound — by way of West Indian immigrants. “It’s how you digging in the crates and how you’re turning those things around … as in ‘that’s wicked,’ you know? It’s the way you perceive the loop, and how you do that. And at what level you do perceive the loop. It’s what level you want to get off at.”
Get off and get on. Because grasping the loop was about energy as much as skill.
Where were the ears supposed to home? Where was this slithering bombastic sound trying to make your body go? Where was the through-line between all the drums and bass lines that seemed to constantly deconstruct and reconstruct at the same time, like cobras charmed endlessly into fractal loops that hiss and hypnotize?
“It’s a miracle to hear how driven he is because it’s a miracle he got involved in the rave at all,” Tony Marcus observed for Mixmag on the eve of Timeless’s release. “Like The Orb’s Alex Paterson he was old before the scene even started. Before rave Goldie had been and seen so much that he should’ve been burned out by then. He’d been a breakdancer, a jeweler, a B-boy, a football hooligan, a graffiti artist. He’d moved from his native Walsall and chased hip hop culture across the world, living in London, New York and Miami. He had been involved in some heavy scenes.”
Like his hard gold teeth — the “grills” he made and sold in New York City — which he got capped in his graffiti days, creating an epic mural called “Future World Machines,” documented alongside the work of Massive Attack’s 3D AKA Robert Del Naja, he was tough. He was tested. All that wandering and traveling, between the breaks, between worlds, was part of his metal mental loop — a deprival.
“There’s no pulse!” was what some said. Like techno before it, hypocritically there were techno heads saying, “You can’t dance to this!” But they were wrong. In fact, it was the outcome of DJs and ravers pushing dancing to the abstract limits of musical discovery. The co-pilot to Timeless was none other than Rob Playford, whose Moving Shadow label was a major cornerstone of the drum ‘n’ bass movement — in parallel to Goldie’s own Metalheadz label, helping light up the careers of Photek, Peshay, Hidden Agenda, J. Majik, Lemon D, and Dillinja. Playford himself had been at the center of the British rave breakbeat sound with 2 Bad Mice, helping score the rave anthems ‘Bombscare,’ ‘Waremouse,’ ‘Hold It Down,’ and ‘Mass Confusion.’
The DJ duo of Grooverider and Fabio were the leaders of that revolution, playing faster and faster techno and house tracks, especially productions with breakbeat loops over 4/4 rhythms. It was as if they were sublimating hip hop into an acid rain that stripped away the metronome, leaving only a smoldering molten core bending and distending the air with its searing heats — hardcore. It’s as if the music went so fast that time slowed down the faster it went, introspection emerging from its hyper crosstown traffic, accelerations that zipped right past one’s grasp of the present.
“Goldie was a hyperactive character with an apocalyptic turn of phrase — another of those charismatic individuals who brought new dimensions to the dance scene — and whose life embodied the entwined histories and cultural miscegenation that birthed jungle,” wrote Matthew Collin in his essential book on the history of acid house and rave culture, Altered State. “He was mesmerized by Fabio and Grooverider,” Collin wrote, giving the hardcore duo their due, “and spent his nights dreaming of giving them a ‘forty-foot graffiti masterpiece,’ a dark side epic, assembled from beats morphed out of those he recalled from his breakdancing days.”
That dark graffiti epic was Goldie’s Terminator E.P. in 1992 under both the guise Rufige Kru and Metalheads. The title track ‘Terminator,’ with, as Collin wrote, “its shredded, snake-like drum loop that contorted and writhed around the speakers,“ was a sonic blast that almost single-handedly altered the audio landscape in an era when music was already rolling into the future with the tug of a relentless tidal wave. Goldie did not do it on his own. There was A Guy Called Gerald’s ‘28 Gun Bad Boy,’ Geneside II’s ‘Narra Mine,’ Future Sound of London’s ‘Papua New Guinea’ and Shut Up and Dance’s ‘Derek Went Mad’ — a fractured time-road that included Joey Beltram’s hoover-phonic ‘Miasma’ and Kevin Saunderson’s brooding ‘Just Want Another Chance.’ But the innovative explosion that ‘Terminator’ crystallized and then detonated was Goldie in pure sonic form as a new kind of England.
“We grew up in an era where youth culture was something imported from the US,” he told Mixmag in retrospect, “and everything from the music to the Adidas sneakers to whatever was imported. We had no identity from here. If we didn’t have America to look at we’d have been like every other fucking Eastern Bloc country….And prior to rave, barring punk, this was the only thing that was original UK shit. People should have been writing the stories about what was really going down; they should have spent more time looking at British breakbeat.”
It’s a historic turning point, that in one fell swoop, it was as if Goldie cut open the belly of the underground. You can hear that leap in real time with one of the record’s other cuts, ‘Knowledge,’ which includes the rave riffs of hardcore as well as its sped-up 4/4 beat marching through the crossfire of machine-gun breaks. “Urban Blues” is what Collin dubbed it. “Heavy Metal Soul” is how Raymond Leon Roker, the founder and head editor of Urb magazine way out west in California, once described it.
“His hands cut intricate shapes in the air as he accentuates stabs from the robotic snares, his fingers spreading open like fireworks as the music cascades into a sonic abyss,” wrote Roker in some of his most inspired prose, detailing Goldie’s animated and physical expressions of his musical philosophy. “I recoil from a shotgun of thoughts,” Roker continued, before breaking down Goldie’s intricate ideas.
Himself an astute observer of the racism and cultural divides running through popular music, Roker caught Goldie in all of his metal-spiked glory, translating the music that he exudes not just sonically, but hitting upon Goldie’s breakdancing and graffiti story: the breaks maestro who was a street artist before he became jungle’s superstar; who sojourned in the US in the 1980s, soaking in hip hop’s first golden age.
The fluid running psyche of Goldie shines forth, a multiplicity of percussive consciousness. He gets deep on the beauty and the breaks: “the attitude of the fucking loop and discovering that the loop was the loop and beyond the loop there was something else…” Timeless sounds just like that, an ever flowing spring of busy and stunning insights, consciousness broken and re-fused into something stronger. One of the album’s highlights, ‘A Sense of Rage (Sensual VIP Mix)’ is a dazzling and sensual masterwork of crisp high hats and cymbals, susurrating ecstasy, and wicked elastic bass pops — sampled in Darren Price’s breakbeat techno epic ‘Long Haul 747’ in 1997 to excellent effect. Goldie’s influence echoes ever outward.
Runnin’ is how Goldie describes music or art to Roker that is on point, in the zone, hitting you deep down in the soul. Timeless is chock-full of runnin’ tunes, not least the title track, a 20-minute plus overture and love letter to not just drum ‘n’ bass, but rave and its multitudes of electronic creations, from ambient to breaks to Detroit techno. Containing the soulful ‘Inner City Life’ within its expanse, the vocalist Diane Charlemagne lifts and weaves her longing through its winding wily edges.
“I look at canvases from the past, I look at tracks from the past that I’ve done and questioned them,” Goldie told Roker, reflecting on how his search for the perfect beat is instinctive and thus unpredictable. It was also driven by rage. “Because, if you’re an artist you do things spontaneously, you know you don’t necessarily know why you’re doing them in the beginning and that is what separates you from the rest. My life is completely like my music, completely like my art without a doubt.”
It was the sound of revival. And it expressed both his deprival and survival. As if a wolf tearing itself apart from the inside, shredding its sheep clothes as its drums and that search for the perfect beat tore into you, Timeless was both wild and wise. It contained and could not contain his childhood. Was he a lamb or a rabid wolfing? Impossible to know. And that’s the point, his turning, runnin’ point. Without the absence of sound, you can’t have a beat. You need nothing after something.
“I’m just a dark brother I guess,” Goldie told Mixmag with his golden smile. “I guess that’s me. I had a dark background and a dark upbringing and I come out a bit dark really. It’s a shame really. I guess a lot of people said I was fucked up growing up.” Was all that frenzy of percussion, protection, a kind of armor? Yes. Nonetheless, there was something profound inside, something undeniably human. Born to a Scottish mother and a Jamaican father, he went from foster care home to foster care home after his family fell apart. But his interracial heritage and his lighter skin made his childhood even harder and lonelier. There was it seemed no resting place for who he was.
“You always question yourself and try to find yourself,” he confided to Urb’s Roker. “There’d be a big question mark over you, where you’re coming from. And you know it was getting mentally fucked by the way people approached you and how you’re treated.” But, as Roker observed, that question mark also drove him and his art.
Because the canvas of his mixed identity opened a vista for immense creativity and self-discovery. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for how I was,” he reflected. And yet, he also was not one to lick his wounds or linger forever. He had places to go. “Yeah, you know, there’s five generations of music that created this whole thing and we are the fifth one in line with all of that,” he told Roker, alluding to the Afro-Caribbean “Windrush” generation from the deprivations of Jamaica and the Americas.
“Suppressed music has been the music that has survived over the years and is now being given the payback, you know, blues and jazz, backbeat,” he said. “Shantytown reggae music, amplified, no shoes, fucking motherfuckers, making music, Detroit inner-city ghetto music.” But he didn’t stop there, revealing a greater vision.
“It’s moved on and then there’s this music which has like,” he continued, “come from all those other musics and its suppressed inner-city UK music that’s come out of the ghettos of the UK. And it’s a class thing, it’s not a fucking white or black thing. It’s a class thing. I know poor White people and I know poor fucking Asian people…”
Goldie suffered greatly growing up as a mixed kid. Nowadays, being multiracial is much more common and accepted, though the planet and the web quake once again with the flames of intolerance. Timeless is riddled with these hopes and fears. ‘Saint Angel’ is a warrior song, a call to arms for those who know that the system was built on slavery and imperialism. Tear it down with the moves. Break free with its slashing, scissoring grooves. Meditate to the rumbling ‘This is a Bad,’ its soaring synths and chirping melodies flashing like stars in the heavens. Hover above the ‘Sea of Tears’ with its entrancing guitar strums and faintest dolphin cries, or dive down into the deepest churning cold waters of ‘Still Life.’
Did Timeless live up to the hype? Emphatically, yes. It still does. Partly in thanks to Goldie and Playford’s clever and versatile production. While it sounds very much of its time — it also sounds outside of time. The human voice helps give all of its synthetic fireworks a warmth that decades on, makes Timeless a far out cousin of say, Marvin Gaye and Billie Holiday. Charlemagne’s voice softens Goldie’s moody techno blues. ‘Angel’ and ‘Kemistry’ glide high to her soprano, sustaining over gutsy exorcisms. Around every corner is a séance of the machine, looking into the empty flats of abandoned tower blocks or stumbling into brawling convulsing androids.
Cleveland Watkiss gives the beat-less ambient cyber jazz of ‘Adrift’ a ghostly but gorgeous yearning for the sky and flight. On ‘State of Mind,’ Lorna Harris gives the album an early ballast, its downtempo stand-up bass grounding the mind before the onslaught of drums to come, from the submarine attack of ‘Jah of the Seventh Seal’ to the closing ‘You and Me,’ where her softer tones kiss the crunching snares, its piano leading us into electronic gusts and plaintive melodies, its last gasping calls evoking the torrential response of Goldie’s wolf-like bravado — assured and relentless.
“You only have to listen to his breakbeats,” wrote Marcus. “Sometimes the break covers the entire frequency of a track, from the deepest bass to the highest treble. And the break moves and lives, expands, contracts, explodes, somersaults. It seems to talk to you and travel across feelings, ideas and emotions.” It was within himself and yet outside himself, through technology and biology, that Goldie helped find something timeless: the human inside our messy techno-global evolution.
Tapping into his life, Timeless IS timeless. It was a risk to give any album such a name, but Goldie put his finger on something bigger. Accelerating faster, and faster, harder, and harder, the dawn of the 21st century gave way to unrest, violence and madness. His intricate shapes and abyssal bass predicted a world come undone; and with his hands, cutting a wolf apocalypse, masking that orphan soul, with such bittersweet sounds of a future hyper-real, the truth is unbound and always runnin’…
“You can take things apart so much,” he told Marcus, describing both the shattering of the past and the loop of the future. ”Before we used to drop a glass and it would drop into four pieces. Now when we drop it there’s a thousand pieces and … we can put all those pieces back together again.”
Track Listing - Double Album:
1. Timeless (I. Inner City Life, II. Jah, III. Pressure)
2. Saint Angel
3. State of Mind
4. This is a Bad
5. Sea of Tears
6. Jah the Seventh Seal
7. A Sense of Rage (Sensual V.I.P. Mix)
8. Still Life
9. Angel
10. Adrift
11. Kemistry
12. You and Me