I see electronic music as loads of monkeys pushing buttons and me being one of them. But I think my album Timeless stands the test of time. If in 1995, when it was released, Timeless was a blueprint written on a steel cylinder, now it’s a chrome ball reflecting what’s happened in the last 20 years of electronic music.
When I was growing up in the 1980s in the Midlands, I felt abandoned and misunderstood. Then I chose drum ’n’ bass and graffiti as my subcultures – which didn’t really help.
I was raised in the care system, but when I went to New York aged 18 to do graffiti in the Bronx, I thought “What the fuck am I moaning about?” This was before New York’s clean up and I saw real poverty. Those kids had nothing. When I see rioters here wearing £200 trainers in front of tenement buildings that have been recently cleaned, I think: “Are you kidding me?”
I’ve always felt mixed race. Or as my music teacher said during a lesson: “You are a mulatto.” I always felt there were white people, black, and then people like me in the middle.
Anyone who asks if graffiti is really art should be cast out into a field, because they’re Neanderthals.
Sometimes I look at life and it’s as cumbersome as a Motorola phone from the 90s. You’re carrying round this massive box with a battery looking like an absolute dickhead. Only yoga makes me feel streamlined, like a modern phone.
With the drugs, I had to look at the ugly truth. I was horrible, man, I was disgusting. Yoga helped me change. The meditation, the breathing, the physicality is so powerful. It helped me get over 30 years of addiction. Yoga should be on the school curriculum, along with parkour.
The worst thing anyone’s ever said to me was when Mr Vallance, my maths teacher, told me: “You’ll never make it. You’ll wither away and you won’t become anything.” I hope he reads the Observer.
The question I am asked most is: “What’s it like being in a James Bond film?” People are still at the airport holding Bond pictures. All my friends took it out of me when I played Bullion in The World is Not Enough. “Hey Gold,” they said. “There’s no mixed race people in Russia.”
I’m in my golden period right now. I wake up and see my daughter’s face and realise this moment is heaven. The badness has passed, the hell is not being able to remember anything.
Laurence Fishburne gave me some good advice: “Don’t wish too hard because it might come true.” He told me that after he’d recited prison poetry to me for an hour at a Versace party. I also have a postcard I carry around with me that says: “I’ve learnt so much from my mistakes that I’m thinking about making a few more.”
The best thing about being Goldie is that when people ask “Why the fuck did you do that?” I say: “Because I can.”
Goldie performs his album Timeless live with the Heritage Orchestra, 22-23 July, at the Royal Festival Hall (southbankcentre.co.uk). He is also performing in Bristol at the Harbourside Amphitheatre from 6pm on Saturday 25 July (colstonhall.org/shows/goldie-and-the-heritage-orchestra/)
The show is at the
