The poster for Herbal Mafia’s 20th Birthday: Part 2, featuring Goldie
GOLDIE, groundbreaking breakbeat jungle superstar, producer, DJ, graffiti artist, model and actor, will top Herbal Mafia’s 20th Birthday: Part 2 celebrations at The Crescent, York, on April 3.
Tickets for the 8pm to 3am party will go on sale at 6pm this evening at £20 at https://www.seetickets.com/event/herbal-mafia-20th-birthday-part-2-goldie/the-crescent/3603262.
Announcing “one HUGE new show” with a “Just wow” exclamation, The Crescent website describes Walsall-born Clifford Joseph Price MBE, alias Goldie, aged 60, as “an artist synonymous with drum’n’bass; an OG [as in OriginalGangster/Original Generation] pioneer who has pushed the boundaries of underground electronic music, receiving mainstream critical acclaim.
“He has helped create and inspire the whole scene from the streets, to the record industry, to the television; and has gone above, and far beyond, to represent the subculture we know and love.”
The Crescent enthuses: “Twenty years ago it would have been unimaginable for us to be hosting one of the most well-known and respected DJs on the planet; we are blessed and honoured to be welcoming the one and only Goldie to The Crescent!
“This will probably be one of the most intimate settings that you will ever see this force of nature in action. We have a very limited capacity so we can guarantee that this will sell out and be one for the history books too!”
Support slots will go to local legends and residents, while Room 2 will play host to hip-hop, funk, soul, reggae, dancehall and dub, powered by Herbal Mafia Hi-Fi.
Goldie: back story
THE first superstar produced by the breakbeat jungle movement, Goldie popularised drum’n’bass as a form of musical expression, just as relevant for living-room contemplation as techno had become by the early 1990s.
He emerged as one of the first personalities in British dance music, his gold teeth & b-boy attitude placing him leagues away from the faceless bedroom boffins who had become the norm.
For the first time, England had a beat maestro and tough-guy head who could match the scores of larger-than-life hip-hop stars produced by the USA, and the high profile of drum’n’bass as the first indigenously UK dance music made Goldie a figure of prime importance.
After spending several years working on his production skills at Reinforced Records (the home of 4hero), he founded Metalheadz Records to release seminal dark yet intelligent singles by some of the greatest producers in the scene.
In 1995, Goldie released Timeless, one of jungle’s first and best full-length works of art. The album put him squarely at the top of the drum’n’bass heap – at least in the minds of critics and mainstream listeners – although his follow-up, 1998’s SaturnzReturn, displayed an ambitious, personal side of Goldie hardly in keeping with the usual jungle’s producer mentality.
A native of Walsall, in the Midlands, Goldie was born to a Scottish-Jamaican couple and put up for adoption. He bounced around child-care homes and several sets of foster parents during his childhood years.
He became fascinated with the rise of hip-hop, breakdancing and graffiti art. By 1986, he was involved with breakdancing crews around his home of Wolverhampton. After making several trips to London for all-day breakdancing events (and to see hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa), Goldie appeared in Bombin’, Dick Fontaine’s 1987 documentary for Channel 4 on British graffiti art and hip-hop culture.
He also spent time in New York and Miami, working on a market stall selling customised gold teeth, but returned to England by 1988. For a time, Goldie worked at the Try 1 shop in Walsall, also selling gold teeth, then moved to London.
He began hanging out with two fellow heads from the British hip-hop scene, Nellee Hooper and 3-D (later of Massive Attack), and by 1991 he had been introduced to the breakbeat culture that birthed jungle.
At the seminal club night Rage, DJs Grooverider and Fabio pitched ancient breakbeats up to 45 rpm, blending their creations with the popular rave music of the time. Goldie was hooked on the sound of raw breakbeat techno, and gradually he switched his allegiance to jungle from the British hip-hop scene that later generated trip-hop.
Through his girlfriend DJ Kemistry (later to make her name with the mixing duo Kemistry & Storm), Goldie hooked up with Dego and Mark Mac, two of the most influential figures in the emerging drum’n’bass scene. The duo’s Reinforced Records and recordings as 4hero were fostering an increasingly artistic attitude to the music, and Goldie learned much about breakbeat production and engineering at their studios.
He recorded his first single as Ajax Project, then debuted on Reinforced as Metalheadz with two 1992 singles, Killermuffin and Menace. 1993 single Terminator broke him into the jungle scene, besides pioneering the crucial jungle concept of “timestretching” (basically extending a sample without altering its pitch). The single marked the growing separation between the uplifting rave scene and its emerging dark side, reliant on breakbeats and restless vibes.
The name was later taken for his influential Metalheadz Records, which released material from a legion of crucial jungle artists: Photek, Doc Scott, Dillinja, Source Direct, Peshay, J Majik, Alex Reece, Lemon D and Optical, among others. Later singles such as Angel and remixes for 4hero’s Reinforced label spread Goldie’s fame, and in 1995 he signed a contract with London Records.
His first major-label single was Timeless, and his debut album of the same name followed in August 1995. He gained further fame in early 1996, when an American tour supporting Björk sparked a relationship between the two and led to a brief engagement before they called off the wedding.
Goldie resurfaced in 1998 with a high-profile follow-up, SaturnzReturn, an epic two-disc set, including one track, Mother, that broke the 70-minute barrier. The album tanked with critics and fans, however, leading to a return to the underground later that year with the Ring Of Saturn EP.
The beginning of the millennium ushered in a new era for Goldie’s musical production, when Say You Love Me, Malice In Wonderland and Breakin Glass were instrumental in the development of his own style. Metalheadz, meanwhile, amassed just shy of 60 releases throughout the decade, nurturing Alix Perez, Noisia and S.P.Y, to name but a few.
At the turn of the decade, Goldie received two honorary academic achievements, courtesy of Brunel University, in Social Sciences, and the University of Wolverhampton, where he became an honorary Doctor of Design.
He was made a Member of the British Empire (MBE) not long after, for services to music and young people, becoming one of few electronic musicians to achieve such an award.
During this period, he produced official remixes of Ed Sheeran’s Lego House (2017) and Jessie Ware’s Midnight (2018); released his third studio album, 2017’s The Journey Man; collaborated with UK rap act Skepta on Upstart (2018) and formed Subjective, a collaborative project with fellow drum’n’bass producer Submotive, eliciting their first album on Sony Music in 2020.
Goldie began a seven-week residency at long-running London nightclub XOYO, selling out the venue multiple times. He performed at global festival stages, including Glastonbury, Tomorrowland in Belgium and Primavera Sound in Spain, and ventured into the classical music realm, hosting and performing full orchestral shows at two of London’s premier concert halls, the Royal Albert Hall and Southbank Centre.
In June 2021, Goldie entered into the modelling world, making his catwalk debut for luxury fashion house Louis Vuitton in the SS22 menswear collection, Amen Break. The late Virgil Abloh chose him for the role, directing him in the collection’s cinematic fashion film, in a testament to how Goldie is recognised and admired across several creative industries.