Goldie: 'I had five cars on my drive — a Porsche, a Bentley. It was just ego'

In the third series of The White Lotus, Jason Isaac’s shifty Timothy Ratliff says that people move to Thailand either because they’re looking for something or running from something. Goldie, who in the past 30 years has become something of an alt National Treasure here in the UK, moved to Thailand 15 years ago, and he did it for a very particular reason, initially to retire.

“I came here to do nothing as I’d had enough,” he says. “It’s sunny here, it’s beautiful, and I’d had enough of the music games, I’d had a messy divorce, and it was time for a change. I wasn’t in favour, so I wanted to get away. So I went to get some vitamin D.

“The culture’s really lovely, the primal stuff as much as anything else. But it’s exploding more than ever now. I hike, I’ve got into yoga. My missus is from Canada, and she loves it here.”

The man who was brought up in Walsall, in the Midlands, lives in Kamala, a Muslim village on Phuket (he loves the vibrations of morning prayers), with his wife, Mika, young daughter Koko and new baby Yuki.

“I’d been everywhere, from New York and LA to Japan 10 times over, but Thailand really resonated with me. And Kamala is a bit like Tring, I guess, as people only pass through it. But it’s good for discipline, good for health”. Here, Goldie is known as phan tong, “Gold tooth man.”

Another reason he came here is David Bowie, to whom Goldie was close in the 1990s (their brilliant collaboration, Truth, is vindication of Bowie’s investment in drum ’n’ bass).

“He was the king of reinvention, man, and he always told me to move forward. He said he’d done everything, and nobody could tell him anything, so he didn’t care what he did. He told me to own my music, so I did. If it wasn’t for him I would never have written a ballad!”

See also: Goldie’s guide to London

Now Goldie’s doing it again. Having been instrumental in the launch and dissemination of drum ’n’ bass and having pushed the genre to more than its acceptable limits, he’s come back again for a bit more. He’s returning to the marketplace in the guise of his alter ego, Rufige Kru, in what he calls, in typically hyperbolic terms, “a mind-blowing trip into hyperdimensional beats, sub-oceanic bass and innovation so inspired it should be illegal.”

In layman’s terms this is an unadulterated drum ’n’ bass album, called Alpha Omega, produced with his long-time collaborator SubMotive.

“It’s a reinvention,” says Goldie. “We’ve gone back to the source and extrapolated from there.

“I wanted to create something that absolutely represents what this music is all about... and where it’s going next.” Never one to be perturbed by contradictions, he also says, “I’ve gone back to my roots. That’s a beautiful thing for me. I’ve spent a lot of time honing my craft, developing these concepts, assembling all these moments. But that sense of possibility — what kept me going in the early days — is still there. I’m still as excited by this music and where it can go as I was all those years ago. The only limit is my imagination.”

Talking to Goldie is a bit like listening to his music, as he shoots off at tangents, and seems incapable of sticking to his own script. He talks as though he’s making jazz, and in fact jazz currently appears to be his biggest inspiration, taking an orthodoxy and improvising.

Listening to him talk is a bit like what I imagine happens if you drop a machine gun down a well. “I stopped giving a f*** about music generally, in the commercial sense. Being older, I’m only interested in music that makes me feel good. I hate formula. Music should make you want to rebel. My new music isn’t a departure, it’s more of a revisit. This is going back to year zero, to how this music made me feel at the beginning. Music has to have cutting edge, and this is me exploring whether you can still be cutting edge in a commercial world. And I think you can. I’m using a sound palette containing all this music I’ve made along the way. I’m reconsidering playing with sound, making sonic experiments for no other reason than to see what happens.

“If I want to be expansive with music, I’m expansive for a reason. You can’t be properly abstract by just throwing paint on a canvas, unless you’ve gone through art school, and you understand the history. You’ve got to understand the regimented discipline in order to understand the chaos.”

He also wanted to celebrate all the drummers who have been sampled over the years, paying homage to the players who have driven his beat for the past 30 years. “Instead of sampling drums, which we’ve done inherently, forever, without any recompense for the drummers, I thought, wouldn’t it be a good idea to play with drummers rather than samples. Breaks became a sub-culture, and in hip-hop and everything that came afterwards, the drums became as important as the song, and they haven’t been recognised enough for creating that.”

Goldie is not what anyone would call wrinkle-proof. Now almost 60 (the semi-momentous event is in September), the made-in-the-1990s hyphenate — he’ll admit to being a DJ, music producer, actor, entrepreneur and provocateur but is so much more than this — looks his age.

But then, he has done so much. He’s made jungle and drum ’n’ bass records (in 1994 he set up his own record label, Metalheadz, and his first studio album, Timeless, entered the UK album charts at number seven a year later). He’s gone orchestral (his second album, the madcap and occasionally brilliant Saturnz Return, in 1998, contained an hour-long experimental orchestral drum ’n’ bass piece, and while the album featured appearances by Bowie, Noel Gallagher and KRS-One, one critic called it “ambitious but monotonous and overlong – Pink Floyd with a gold tooth”). He’s also turned his hand to acting (appearing in Guy Ritchie’s Snatch, the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough, and Everybody Loves Sunshine alongside Bowie), done reality TV (Celebrity Big Brother, Celebrity Mastermind, Celebrity Come Dine With Me and the BBC’s Maestro), exhibited his art and written a couple of books. He’s your basic modern age Renaissance man.

He has also experienced terrible tragedy: in 2010, his 23-year-old son Jamie Price was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a minimum sentence of 21 years, for murder. He was convicted of stabbing a rival gang member to death in Wolverhampton two years earlier. It’s probably not insignificant that this is also when Goldie moved to Thailand. “Politically, we are in a more negative space than we were in the 1990s. Gentrification is inevitable, we know that, but in certain environments we need genuine social cohesion,” he says.

“Take away the youth club, the local petri dish, or you close the school, or the community spirit, and you get disruption. That’s what happened when I was young. Speed bump money doesn’t get fed back into the community. I was there for my kid growing up.

“But when you remove schools, and kids have nowhere to go growing up, they start getting into knives and carving each other up. Anyone who knew Jamie said what a lovely young man he was until he got involved with the wrong people. But there are a lot of very angry young men out there.

“My kid has still got eight years of his sentence left to do. If the community centre had still been there, I don’t think he would have turned out that way. I know. I lived in the care system, and I knew what it was like, in different foster homes, living in places you know you’re not going to stay, where you don’t unpack your suitcase… You never felt like you belonged anywhere.

“With me, I was lucky because when I discovered music, I discovered somewhere where I could unpack my mental suitcase. Not everyone gets that. The Government still has no idea how to manage those communities.

“They don’t know how to deal with anger. It’s no wonder people are making drill music, because there’s nothing for them to do and no one for them to look up to.”

While Goldie is obviously engaged with the way in which his own world abuts the British music scene, he has no idea what might be No.1 (does anyone?) and didn’t know who the Prime Minister was until a few weeks ago. This isolationism seems at odds with the cultural and political certainty of his 1990S heyday, when his work dovetailed so nicely with the Zeitgeist, but again he appears to be using the Bowie playbook.

“How have my ambitions changed? Well, I remember when I still lived in England, I looked out my window and there were five cars on my drive, you know, a Bentley, a Porsche, a Cosworth, and thinking, you knobhead. This is just ego — you can only drive one car at a time so why have more?

“I confused wealth with richness. I didn’t join up to keep up, I got involved in music because I wanted to create. It has to be about a wealth of ideas. The reward has to be in what you make.

“Whenever I tried to get into a deep conversation with Bowie he’d just come out with something outrageously funny. He taught me not to take things too seriously. He knew he’d tried too hard to do what other people wanted him to and knew he had to get back to what he wanted to, and eventually he did. He’d taken things too seriously. He always talked about the idiocy and the absurdity of it all. He thought it was funny that he’d gone to Berlin with Iggy Pop and got completely off their tits, and then wrote a load of words on a piece of paper, cut them to bits, and made some songs… It was the absurdity of the business that appealed to him, not the structure. He used to say that nobody could tell him anything as he’d done everything – in a leotard! I’d taken enough drugs over the years to get out of touch with myself, and spurred on by Bowie, Thailand made me want to get in touch with myself. You’ve got to face yourself. Face yourself and take care of your art.”

With that, he’s off, to play with his baby, get back on the yoga mat and worry about turning 60. Phan tong, the man with the golden tooth, with one leg in Southeast Asia, and the other firmly, still, on the neck of UK culture.

Goldie presents: Rufige Kru: Alpha Omega is out May 16 (London Records). He plays Ronnie Scott’s on April 22 and 23