![]() Goldie was also a gifted visual artist, who turned to graffiti during stays in Miami and the Bronx in the early 1980s. Wiley … ‘Making music is my therapy.’ Photograph: Joseph Okpako/WireImage The pain, the isolation, the frustration.” In 1998 Goldie released “Mother”, “a 60-minute piece whose underlying message was basically ‘Argh!’ I can understand why it’s a headfuck for people but I wanted to explore my abandonment issues, which are always with me.” There is a horrible scene in Goldie: When Saturn Returns, the documentary directed by John Akomfrah, when the musician asks his now elderly foster mother, “Where did I go wrong?” She answers, “You hated women.” “Eski, igloo, ice, cold – that all comes from my childhood. ![]() “Making music is my therapy,” declares Wiley who, especially in his early days, used Arctic metaphors in his song titles. That darkness is channelled, transmuted and fought against in the work of both. I know what milk tokens are.” Once he was on air when some Stratford kids rang to say they’d kidnapped his sister. “It wasn’t a war zone, but it was a bad place. Wiley’s uncle was stabbed to death and he himself only just survived a couple of stabbings. He tells of being moved between foster homes, and subjected to long-term sexual abuse aged nine and became a minor league criminal who carried a sawn-off shotgun in his coat (“like I was in the fucking Sweeney or something”). Goldie’s white mother came from the Glasgow Gorbals, was the daughter of an alcoholic and let her son be taken into care when he was four. “Back then I was spitting bars, but I was into jungle.”īoth memoirs are bloodied and bruised. “And not just the fact that we’re both a bit nuts.” “Not a lot of people know this, but I started off DJing,” Wiley recalls. “Me and Wiley have got a lot in common,” Goldie writes. ![]() Wiley, born Richard Cowie Jnr and often hailed as the godfather of grime, helped define that genre’s synthesis of juddering bass and thrillingly bleak rhythms. Goldie – born Clifford Price – co-founded Metalheadz, one of the most propulsive (and still running) drum’n’bass labels of the 1990s, and created such landmark tracks as “Angel” and “Inner City Life”. It’s pleasing then to read these memoirs by two pivotal drivers of UK “bass culture”. Publishing houses have been slower to celebrate or give a platform to key figures from black underground scenes. Shelves are filled with tomes about the Velvet Underground and the Smiths, and these days even fairly minor US college radio faves and New Zealand drone-pop combos seem to merit a biography. ![]()
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