Goldie - All Things Remembered

Goldie

with Ben Thompson

For Marcus Kaye
39

Plates

So why All Things Remembered? Because all these memories get put away into the deep, deep storage areas of the brain. Theyre not corrupt files; theyre in there somewhere, we just dont access them. Until something childlike or traumatic happens, or were brought together by loss, or laughter, or music and that brings them all flooding back.

Then you get this fucking mad dj vu. When that moment comes Im like, Fuck, this is part of my life, I actually remember it! Ive been here before. Shit, what do you call the feeling of that sudden glimpse? Is it Proustian? When something reminds me of the smell of my first cigarette, or my fucking first smell of pussy which tasted better by the way ...

I think the first memory I have is of being in the womb. Thats why what is called the rabbit position in yoga where you wrap yourself up in a ball, like a foetus is very difficult for me. Because the stress of that in utero situation was translated through my shoulders and my hips to such an extent that it still becomes physically apparent fifty-two years later. I one hundred per cent believe that my subconscious knew even then that me being born was going to be a problem because my mum had a difficult pregnancy, and she had these two black guys fighting over her all the time. It caused her a lot of antenatal misery. It turns out that my subconscious was right.

One of the ways Ive found of dealing with the chaos that followed is by getting in my time machine and fucking off. Not in real life Im not Dr Who but in my head, which is the same thing, really. Thats what my first album, Timeless, was all about. The secret of time travel is that time aligns vertically, not horizontally Sun Ra knew that, Philip K. Dick knew that, and I fucking know it so youve got to stop worrying about moving back or forward and learn to punch through up and down.

I wanted to make this book reflect that, which is why instead of a traditional linear timeline birth/school/work/death its a big stack of simultaneous past and present tenses, like the planes waiting to land at Heathrow, or a cross-section through an ants nest. Theres bound to be the odd crash, and a few poor fuckers are going to get eaten, but thats life, isnt it? No one said it was going to be easy.

When I began dredging up these memories I was halfway through making my album The Journey Man. At first I was very conscious of needing to keep the two things separate. After all, a book and an album are two very different things. Except as time went on I realised theyre kind of not both of them are ways of telling the story of my existence, and in the end whether the medium is recorded sound or words on a page doesnt really make much difference. Because my lifes a fucking album a really, really tumultuous long-player, with all those curves and that shimmering movement.

The vinyl edition of my difficult second album Saturnz Return came out across four discs sides AH and a record of my life would have to be at least a quadruple fucking LP, because so much shit has happened, so thats what this ones going to be, too. There are fifty-one chapters one for each completed year of my life with an afterword to cover the year thats still underway at the time of writing but will be done by the time anyones reading it. If youre a slow reader maybe cos youre dyslexic like I am you can read one chapter a week for a whole year and think of this as your Goldie almanac.

Either way, bringing together all the different narrative strands at the end was very like sequencing an album: youve got to get the right mix of ballads and bangers, happy and sad, long tracks and short ones. Hopefully Ive got the EQ pretty much spot on, but only the reader can be the judge of that. See you on the other side ...

When I was at the Lew Joseph childrens home on Stroud Avenue in Willenhall, in the West Midlands there was this couple who worked there who we called Uncle Chris and Auntie Steph. They were definitely at the more laidback, trendy end of the staff in that place. They were the ones who took us to Derbyshire camping, in a minibus.

Id been to Barmouth before, with the school, and Id been to (I think it was) Llandudno in Wales, once, but this was a great trip. It was only going to Derbyshire, but it was amazing, because on the way there Chris introduced us to The Beatles on his eight-track in the van A Hard Days Night, Revolver, all these albums, but Sergeant Peppers was the one that really stood out for me. It changed my life, really, that record. Even when I think about it now, its still a part of me When I get older, losing my hair. When Im sixty-four? Well, Im only fucking thirteen years off that now! Of course sixty-four then was like a million miles away it was like it was never going to come.

The memories I have from that trip are so beautiful to me. I just felt so good, driving through all these places in the country, and the smell of these wet fields and cow pats, and camping in a tent, with all these kids having these sleeping bags, and the morning dew, how cold it was on your face, and how warm your body was in its little pod, and coming out into this fresh country air. It was just an amazing, amazing thing. Beans for breakfast, and bacon that was cooked outside on a stove, it felt primal; it felt like I was a caveman of some sort, on this adventure finally living the Huckleberry Finn life; almost, I dont know. It was just a beautiful time, but what I find even more beautiful is the way the music I heard on that trip stayed with me on the journey that came after. Because of how its tied to the memory of a certain place, a certain time, itll always remind you of that, so you can always go back there in moments of madness.

One particular track on Sergeant Peppers, the last song, A Day in the Life, was just unbelievable. I suppose the bit where the orchestra goes mental was one of the moments where the love of strings came into my life. And Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was just so out there in this other world. Did I really know it was based on hallucinogens? I suppose Id heard different stories and things that were told to me, and Chris was a bit of a hippy, anyway. Hed always wear these ripped jeans Levis that had loads of holes with patches on them.

Weirdly enough, thats something thats always stuck with me even now, when I go into Diesel. Renzo Rosso the Italian guy who started that company, and still owns it outright hes a lovely man and a really good friend of mine. I met Renzo in Miami and I stayed at his place when me and Bjrk had our crazy break-up. We were going to get engaged, we were going to get this house, we were going to get married, but then some personal stuff happened and it just didnt work out. It wasnt the right time, and we split up. But it kind of devastated me a bit, to be honest.

Anyway, the whole thing that was funny with Renzo and his Diesel jeans was that Id always put holes in my jeans and have patches on them, just purely because of the memory of Chris and his jeans, how cool I thought they looked. Of course, looking back thirty-five or forty years after that event, you know that those jeans were only scrap jeans that youd throw away or try to keep alive by patching them up. But apparently, you can walk into a shop and buy them for five hundred quid now, just to be cool.