i-D No. 154, 6/96
..LOVE BITES
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BJÖRKInterview by Tony MarcusJournalist beating, celebrity dating, award winning, tabloid bating, image changing. Can Björk's year get any better? Björk's hair is tangerine, her cologne is cucumber. Her shoes are madly clacking green sandals she's skanked from a stylist. She's wearing hipsters in a shiny reflective fabric: Karen Millen, right? "Uh uh," corrects Björk and walks right up close, standing nose to nose, pressing one of her legs inbetween mine to make flesh-contact. "Someone else but similar and very fucking nice, hey?" When we first meet, she makes this provocative gesture and comes closer than you'd expect or even want. Maybe she thinks this will make her appear more real, but it's the kind of full-on action that only a pop star who senses the extent of her power could get away with. "I don't analyse it much," Björk contends. "Then I start worrying about it and I'll go mad and they'll have to lock me in an asylum. It's a lot to do with the fact that I'm a singer and the fact that I'm a girl. I never set out to be famous. I look at the mission I'm on in the sort of range of Aphex Twin or Black Dog rather than the other front-cover people." Björk runs with the techno terrorists, the first brand-name globally-recognised pop star to parallel herself with her commercially unviable opposites. When Björk stares into the mirror of her music, her million-selling and industry award-winning career, she doesn't understand why she's alone. "I don't get it. Why don't people get into it? I was born in 1965, and if you were born around that time and listening to all these noises in your life, you get into electronic music because there's the most freedom there and it's the most experimental. It's nourishing, it's where the risks are being taken, it's happy, it's life, it's fucking living. I just think it's gorgeous." Why does Björk sell more records than Black Dog? It's a stupid question. It's one Vivienne Westwood answered years ago when she was judging pop videos on a TV programme and saw Björk for the first time in a Sugarcubes promo. "Who the fuck is that girl?" she shrieked. "I'd love to have her in one of my shows!" Björk looks and sings like she was born to be famous, to create a larger-than-life version of herself and set it loose on the planet like a cartoon character. But when she talks about fame, she describes it as if it's an unwanted by-product of her music. Fandom, star-worship and the self-transforming energy of large-scale success make her feel sick. "I think it's crap. I never had an idol. I respect people completely and I'm so happy that they exist and they're making all these great things for us, but I never felt like that. It's like a sado-maso thing, innit? You wanna like humiliate yourself and that's the aspect of it when people come to me, like fans and stuff that I don't like. It's not that I'm too arrogant, more the fact that people are humiliating themselves in front of me and that is embarrassing. I feel like talking to them like my kid; like stop it, stand up. You have to believe in some sort of human-ness, everybody's fucking equal. Let's communicate on that level, please." But even as she speaks, she's one half of a celebrity romance that grows larger than life daily, seemingly under its own momentum. That is, the Björk and Goldie link-up which the tabloids drool over like a Charles and Di re-run with better beats. She's made no attempt to hide their relationship. "I don't talk about it but I'm not going out of my way to keep it private. I'd rather keep it to us because it's precious and it's all we've got. You know what love is like, you've got your own lingo, your own little world, so you don't want to share it. That's the nature of a relationship, there's a privacy there, but I'm also not going to make mine and his life a living hell because we're too protective. I'm not going to rent secret hotel rooms to meet him. It has to be natural." This balance between Björk and Björk The Pop Star snapped last year when she attacked a journalist who tried to interview her son as they arrived at Bangkok airport. She won't admit that she's glad she made this stand, but essentially she was fighting to control just how much of Björk and Björk's life the world can have. And she won't have the cameras turned on her kid. "He has to be recognised for what he is," she says. "I think it's terrible if he's recognised for what I am. That's not fair on him and he will be unhappy if he starts depending on that. I want him to be himself and be recognised for what he does. It's tricky like this Bangkok thing where I attacked this lady, I completely lost my temper. I'm not proud of it, I'll be ashamed of it for the rest of my life, but I was protecting him from my demons, from the silly things that have to do with my job." This incident crystallised what a lot of people like about Björk: her blood, energy and fire. The same lack of compromise runs through her idea of music; rainbow-patterned, extreme colours seeping together to make songs that feel like time machines ready to depart for the future. Her favourite band is Black Dog, she loves the record Beaumont Hannant made with Lida Husik, she recently toured with former Black Dog and now Plaid artists Ed and Andy in her band. And she's passionate about Stockhausen, Messaien and Jeff Mills. "What I like about the three of them and what I think they've got in common is that they're innocent enough and open enough to tune into what was going on in the world when they were making their music." Stockhausen re-shaped the language of classical music with electronic and industrial noise, Messaien with bird song and early synthesisers. "Jeff Mills," she explains, "is celebrating all the machines that we're living with and being brave enough to find them pretty and not slagging them off all the time. It's like all these people who say cars are so ugly, pollution's so terrible - it's true, but if you don't want to live here then move into the forest. And if you are gonna live here, you might as well accept it and make the most out of it." Björk's two solo LPs, Debut and Post, couldn't have existed without Aphex Twin, Black Dog, A Guy Called Gerald, LFO and all the other producers who reshaped the language of music since 1988. Like them, she generates unknown sound, weird shapes and unexplored atmospheres. She even sings about this new music on Post in a track called Headphones; an ambient love song not for a lover but to a set of sounds, "abstract wordless moments" that seem to awaken new cells inside her body, send her to sleep, wake her up and save her life. "I've got a studio in my house and I make things in my house. I like honest noises and if I hear a synth noise I'm terribly critical. I can analyse it to pieces and for me it's just emotion, complete emotion. Every noise is different - it's warm, it's cold, it's shy, it's delicate, it's rude, it's pranksterish, whatever - just a synth noise, one note." This is the language of the '90s: techno, drum'n'bass, ambient and David Toop's Ocean of Sound. She works closely with her collaborators, sharing 12-hour studio shifts with producers and engineers like Nellee Hooper, Howie B and Graham Massey. She tours without a guitarist and writes string-arrangements on her laptop. She seems the opposite of a band like Oasis who discuss songwriting in the context of the past: Bacharach, Lennon-McCartney and tunes the postman can whistle. "I've got no problems with things you can whistle," Björk contends. "I love simplicity, it's gorgeous. A song that a two-year old and a granny can sing, that's the tops. That's the ultimate. If you make the most experimental song in the world but it will still be pop, completely simple; that's the ultimate target which I still think I haven't reached. But Oasis just presents stagnation to me. I just don't get it. It's like I think it's very important if you want to enjoy life to have excitement about it, curiosity and appetite for it, and for me to write songs that have already been written... I don't know, it just feels sad." After leaving indie art-punks The Sugarcubes, Björk's first record used house music, ambient techno and a dissonant brass band as well as sounds from a nightclub toilet and even buses and voices from the city at night. "I don't have to say this, but if I wanted to be famous I would make completely different music. When I brought my demos of Icelandic brass players doing The Anchor Song to my record company, the boss said it was only going to sell a third of The Sugarcubes. It sounds naff to say these things, but it's just a happy accident that people liked it. Debut was meant to be very low-budget, it's just kind of me being selfish really." The picture of Björk on Debut's cover showed her as a girl with messy hair in a soft jumper, hands clasped with Hindu humility, eyes crying glitter tears. It was a photograph designed to show feeling, pain, intensity. With a couple of exceptions, Debut's songs fell into two types: those where Björk addressed the listener as someone in pain and told them fireworks would light their nights and all would be well. And songs where she sang about her own pain. Listening to Debut was like having a new best friend, it was give and take. "I'm obsessed with communication and my friends say I'm greedy with life. I've got quite a big appetite, I take a lot but I give. I'm very much about that and that's what keeps me going. I need that like a junkie almost with my friends and people I work with." Some people use the word junkie casually, others know that it implies addiction, desperation and harmful need. When Björk played last year's Reading Festival, her stage set like Alice in Wonderland in ultraviolet, the song Violently Happy hit that cold night like a firestorm. She sang it like she meant it, so happy that it was scary, knife-edge and desperate. "Violently Happy is about when you're a junkie on exchanging emotion, not at one but at the level 200. That thing. And then the person goes away and you really miss someone. When you're with that person you're really peaceful because you get what you need back and you both give everything you need to give. And that person goes away and all that exchange is not there so you get your kicks elsewhere, you end up running on rooftops in blizzards, drinking 97 tequilas just to feel. You know what I mean. So it starts off really happy then the longer the person's away from you, it starts getting self-destructive." This same psychology feeds the drama in songs from her Post LP; tracks like Hyperballad where thinking about suicide by throwing herself off a mountain helps Björk or whoever she's singing about truly appreciate being loved. This might be her best song yet; her light-bearing voice surfing high windless waves of sound, turbulent lyrics, a fractal halo of complications that might go on forever. Can anyone really live this intensely? "I wish sometimes," she replies, after a long silence and a couple of false-starts. "I wish I could do things more calmly. I feel naked sometimes, you see... I like when you ask me about the music," she suddenly bursts. "Usually people ask me crap questions about the music but I like your questions. I like it when people talk about the music, it's common sense, it's like bread and butter. You can't live without it. Usually I hate music questions, I change the subject and become the scruffy alien people want me to be." Björk just came close to saying too much. Sometimes she prefers to let others say it instead by performing cover versions of 1950's show tunes like It's Oh So Quiet. "I still don't know how to write that kind of song and I want to. To write with that kind of lust for life about now, 1996, completely full-on life, saying on the scale of one to ten I'm gonna live life at 17. They've got the joy for it, that fierce love for it, and also the pain." Those old songs, she insists, are just so intense. Back on that word again. "I'm all hyper now," she grins. "Tell me to calm down, I haven't slept in the last three days." In the last few days, Björk has been in the studio with Howie B. Writing new songs and sleeping a little, running around and living, intensely. Today's been a long day: hours being photographed and a few more drinking red wine and doing this interview. It seems fair to take it easy, unravel her musical history again to ask how she abandoned the past to write 21st Century love-songs on the electronics that Acid House unravelled. "I actually remember the moment. It was Mixmaster Morris and it must've been like 1989 in this really dodgy party somewhere in suburban London where the sweat is dripping from the ceiling and falling into your eyes. You're completely out of it and in the morning he started doing this set, live mixing, throwing synths and stuff, and it was so alive and so creative, having the courage to face the reality you live in and making it pretty. You know what I mean? Making you love it. Making you love today." Pop is supposed to keep absorbing influences, to evolve and deal with reality if it's not going to become a stale and cynical formula to generate cash. Björk's pop screams - just like her vocals - with as much of what she recognises as now as she can squeeze into it. She doesn't, like many, write songs about being a pop star; she writes about being in love, wanting to be in love, being bored at parties, what music does to her and other intense, unfathomable things. And she writes as Björk, a single mother, pagan rather than Christian, techno-lover (in the broadest sense of the word, from ambient to jungle and trip hop) and all-round singular, unique creation. "We're living in the 20th Century where individuality is like the biggest thing. You can hear it in everything. You can hear it in a pop song on Radio 1 where the bassline is individual, the drum-beats are individual and the melody is individual. We're obsessed with individuals and everyone has to be their own solar system, not because of arrogance or egomania but because that's the theme of the later half of the century. The single parent is the same thing, the fact that you've got the mum and she is how she is, the child is who he is and the dad is who he is. And it doesn't necessarily suit you to live under the same roof or have the same lovers and it's scary as fuck, but that's what we want and we won't sacrifice that individuality for security." The Björk's mobile phone rings. "Hello, how are you? I'm very funny, I'm a bit slightly tipsy, I'm doing an interview. Yeah, I'm on my way. Nothing really, just pretending I know it all when I don't sort of thing. The grand old dilemma."
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GOLDIEInterview by Bethan ColeGoldie is jungle's first fully-fledged celebrity. You know this by now. He dates Björk. His debut album has sold quarter of a million copies. If his life before was intense, it was nothing like the last eighteen months. Now there's a new TV series, a film and another record. Can he continue to keep it real? Gold teeth flashing, glinting copper eyes fixed in concentration, compact muscular frame locked in perpetual kinetic activity; Goldie exudes an aura of energetic celebrity that seems like second nature. He paces around. He gesticulates emphatically. He morphs conversation into a vivid multi-directional segue of street philosophy, wild theory, anecdotal observation and incisive wisdom with a passion and charisma and wit that's hypnotic, intriguing and totally, utterly unique. When he nods sagely and says, "I've always had a feeling that I'm different", it doesn't sound like some self-aggrandising hackneyed celeb cliche; it sounds like the truth. And when he rolls out his stories, his theories and obsessions (in an accent that still resounds with the nasal intonations of his native Wolverhampton), you can't help but listen, totally transfixed. So here's the deal. Goldie, this hyperintense larger-than-life 30-year-old, is sitting opposite me on a metal record box sporting baseball cap, big navy polo shirt, jeans and trainers. He is jungle's first bona fide pop star. You know this by now. He dates Björk. He plays live. His debut album, Timeless, has sold 230,000 copies worldwide. And more than any other figure on the scene, he's spearheaded drum'n'bass's relentless assault on the mainstream and taken his attitude, his anarchy and his underground aesthetics right out there to the festivals, the crowds and the concert halls, without a modicum of compromise. Eighteen months ago, when i-D wrote the first full-length feature on Goldie, he was the first jungle artist to land a major album deal. Since then, the floodgates have opened. In his wake, DJ Crystl, Roni Size, 4 Hero, Alex Reece, Photek, Bukem, Rap and Peshay have all followed suit. And his adoptive 'family' of DJs like Fabio, Grooverider, Kemistry, Storm and Doc Scott fill clubs all over Britain, the States, Europe and Japan. In the past 18 months, jungle has shaken off its untouchable caste status in dance music to become the nation's groove of choice. Accordingly, Goldie has rocketed into a whole new universe. If his life previously was intense, perhaps nothing could have prepared him for the last year and a half. Chances are you'll have heard or bought Timeless by now. It stands not only as a benchmark against which all future drum'n'bass albums will be measured but as an intense, emotive testament to the action-packed trajectory of one man's quite extraordinary existence. What made Timeless quite so important wasn't just its hyperspace drum formations, its tearing down and deft reassembly of breaks into time zones and dimensions previously thought impossible, but its sense of personal history, of a life lived on the destabilised edges and the ruptured fringes and at the centrifugal vortex. A record which swung with pendulum-like force from the dark and the chaos, the paranoia and dread of tracks like This Is A Bad to the balmy, velveteen swoon of State of Mind in the blink of an eye. Almost like a microcosm of the jungle scene itself in fact, with its swings from dark to light, hardstep to softcore, vogues for ragga, hip hop, jazz and ambient. Goldie understands this only too well as we muse upon the current ascent of the moodier, incendiary Reese b-lines and tearing drum formations favoured by producers and DJs like Grooverider, Doc Scott and Ed Rush. "Jungle pulls from a lot of extremes - from ambient, from jazz, from whatever - and the one thing that makes the scene work is the diversity within it," he reasons with the authority of a true veteran. "People outside have got to understand that. It comes in seasons, in waves. Some people are only here for one season, they'll go to this club because it's ambient or whatever, but if you're around for more than one season you'll see that it's a cycle and yeah, it does have fits and starts." Timeless, then, can be read as both sensitive barometer of jungle's elemental extremes and technicolour adaptation of Goldie's melodramatic life story. And though it's been told many times, it's perhaps worth a quick resume of the latter. Born in the West Midlands to an English mother and a Jamaican father, Goldie spent most of his childhood in care and foster homes. "People never spent time with me and I never had any attention when I was younger," he concludes without self-pity. "I was moved around and fucked around." When hip hop blew up in the early '80s, he found an instant affinity with the culture; not just the whole crew mentality, which makes up for his lack of family stability, but in the breaking and graffiti side as he'd always been talented at art. By the mid '80s, he was a renowned graffiti artist and held workshops in his flat in Walsall. But it wasn't enough. Driven to seek out his father, he moved to Miami. And got caught up with gangs, guns and dodgy deals. He hit rock bottom. "Ten years ago when I was in America, I thought about killing myself. I was doing so much drugs I just thought 'fuck it'. You get to the point where you get so weak in your exterior that you retreat to the interior and the interior is the only thing that can give you a sense of security." His voice drops for a second. "But you do get over it, you move on and you realise how fate works and the tables turn and that it is worth carrying on in life." Something else happened to him in the States: someone predicted that he was going to be very, very successful. "I was told a lot of things were gonna happen to me when I was in Miami. I was told a lot things. I don't wanna say by whom. A lot of things that I've seen happen. It's very, very scary." Not long after moving back to England, to London this time, rave blew up and Goldie got taken to the club Rage at Heaven by then-girlfriend Kemi. The rest, well, the rest is history. Inspired by listening to Fabio and Grooverider's intense techno house and breakbeat fusions there, he began producing with the Reinforced crew (Mark and Dego of 4 Hero). And his tracks which rocked the rave scene to its very foundations, tracks like Terminator and Angel, eventually paved the way for what we now know as jungle. In the autumn of 1994, he signed to London Records. Since then Goldie's life has fast-forwarded into an even more intense frame than he was living before: full-on celebrity. "It's strange, I went out to Ireland and France with Kemistry and Storm and we were getting mobbed. I suppose you get into that thing where people see you differently. And it does bug me because some people just wanna know you because of who you are... some of them don't even know the music." He stresses that it's his 'family' on the drum'n'bass scene who provide him with the stability and security to carry on. And knowing that he's travelled a long way since his B-boy days in Wolverhampton. "I got a phone call from Doc Scott's best friend the other week, and he says 'Guess what, your fucking brother's in the cell next to me.' My other brother Joe, he gets out in July and he calls me with a phonecard from prison and I'll just be going into a photo shoot or something... it does keep you real." Back in the heightened world of celebrity though, Goldie's relationship with Björk has attracted him more speculation than ever. And the question on everyone's lips: are they married? "You can't ask me that!" He shakes his head and looks weary. "Am I married? No, I'm not married." He's adamant he won't be drawn. "Yes, we do go out. She's an amazing woman, she's totally unique, she does what she believes in, she makes music from her heart and she does it well. We could cover the whole spectrum of the world with the music we make. Which is quite mad." They don't live together, although he does get on well with her son. But then Goldie's no stranger to fatherhood. He's got two children of his own, although it's not often discussed. Both are in Wolverhampton. "Daniel's nine and I love him to bits, I try to see him as much as I can. I like being a dad, I wanna be there for my kids. Where my dad stepped off, I wanna continue." He looks down. "I've never seen the first one. His mum's probably never even told him. He'll find out who his dad is soon enough. I know he will come looking for me. I went looking for my dad and found out the truth, and it does come out. Time is the master." Despite the tabloid inches accorded to his personal life and despite the record company lump sum, the Mercedes and the gold album on the wall, Goldie hasn't mellowed, hasn't lost his edge, the drive, the anger that put him there in the first place. "I'm a moody fucker, yeah," he grins. "I'm a very passionate person, especially when it comes to my music. And yeah, I can be violent, because I've got a soul that is pretty much... rampant." The evidence has been well documented: run-ins with bouncers at Speed ("I darked him out"), rumours of a gangsta past and, most recently, his disagreement with Alex Reece. "There hasn't been a physical contretemps," insists Goldie. "If there had been a physical contretemps it would have been game over." The disagreement is over Reece's Pulp Fiction, one of the biggest drum'n'bass records of '95 and originally released on Goldie's Metalheadz imprint. According to Goldie, Reece agreed to do a remix of Pulp Fiction for Metalheadz. It never materialised. Instead, he received letters from Reece's lawyers demanding the rights to Pulp Fiction so that it could be included on his debut album for Island. "Why are lawyers sweating me for Pulp Fiction?" shrugs Goldie, his voice becoming emphatic. "Because it's the only thing he's fucking got. I had respect for that track, not to let just anyone remix it, not to put it on every compilation. I didn't wanna fuck 'em up the arse. But that's OK, now I'll licence it to someone for five pence. Alex's priorities are obviously about this now," he says, rubbing his fingers together indicating cash, "rather than love for the music and love for the people that put him there. It's like me turning around to Groove and saying 'fuck you, Groove'." One thing's for sure. Goldie may be a pop star but he's never going to enter the shallow backslapping realms of pseudo 'mateyness' that dominates the music industry and much of the increasingly corporate dance industry. He's real. And it might not be convention, but he speaks his mind. And in many ways it makes him a far more inspiring icon than the legions of faceless, emotionless, characterless, anonymous DJs and bands in the dance music arena. It's not just Alex Reece who he wants to get 'dark' on right now, either. "That geezer James Barton... he's a wanker," spits Goldie, referring to the dance forum in March's i-D where James Barton of Cream commented on his album and modelling exploits. "What really pissed me off was when he said he'd heard a lot of records better than Inner City Life. People like that, they wait for things to surface and then they criticise it because it's safe. And now he's jumping on the bandwagon by getting Bukem to play at Cream. Secondly, what makes my character unacceptable to model clothes? Is he saying because I come from the hood I can't get good clothes? Is he trying to say no good looking people come out of the ghetto? Tell him to take my Issey Miyake and stuff it up his ass. He'd look daft in my Oswald Boateng suit anyway. I don't want a bunch of white middle class males telling me who I am or what I can do like a guinea pig." Goldie doesn't invite a lot of journalists up to his flat these days, he mumbles in agreement about some of the patronising coverage he's received ("They can't help it, I suppose") and ponders over why there haven't been more music paper covers. "I'm really trying to work that one out myself. I mean, I've sold 150,000 LPs with a double album - I think the last thing that did that was Grease!" Then he fiddles with his Denon hi-fi system and the room fills with a quite extraordinarily beautiful sequence of string chords, led by the mournful resonance of a live cello, which carves up the space in the airy eighteenth floor flat and serves as a poignant soundtrack for the cinematic expanse of London stretching outside far below the window. It's from his next album, Saturn's Return. "There's a track called I Cry Therefore I Am and it's so dark... I wanna dig into people so deep." The album, he explains, is about the seven year astrological cycles we all experience in our lives (of course, not irrelevantly, Saturn was also the planet that Sun Ra claimed to hail from). "At 30, I've just had a Saturn's Return, one of the biggest Saturn's Returns in actual fact, which means my planets are all in line and everything. It's probably one of the most intense times in my life." He reckons he's coped with it pretty well. "Saturn's Return is a bit like having a baby, I crashed months ago and I'm still trying to pick up the wreckage. I had to address everything. I'm not weak enough to have a nervous breakdown, but I am strong enough to realise where I'm at." For the last past six months he's only slept four hours a night and has acupuncture to help him relax. Saturn's Return is scheduled for release in October. In the meantime, there's his forthcoming C4 TV series, Fereala: "Just me doing my own thing really, with all Metalheadz music." The pilot - slick, amusing, fast-moving and totally Goldie - has him going to LA in search of his street-style guru Shawn Stussy, running around the Stussy warehouse like a maniac with a shopping trolley full of limited edition and vintage gear, interviewing Shawn on a beach, going swimming and generally hanging out. And thus Goldie's dizzying ascent continues apace. He's instated his fierce technology and his 21st Century urban blues right at the centre of dance culture's sprawl and now he's destined for multimedia, no-holds-barred, Stussy-style world domination. But wherever he's going, he's adamant the crew are going with him. He raves about the up-and-coming talent on Metalheadz. "If it wasn't for the label I don't know what I'd do. The boys come out with creative things all the time." People like Dillinga ("ever hungry to get his sound right"), Photek, J Majik ("persistently trying to find where he's at") and Doc Scott ("I know he's got an album in him"). Goldie's also making a film with his flatmate Gus. Called Timeless, it's
about a 10-year-old boy who becomes Father Time and explores issues of
class, race and personal development.
"It's deep, totally fucked up as well
and very dark. That's where my heart really lies, making film and music. I
want to do all these things, to do them before I get creatively null. I
want to pass information onto the next generation... I want to do all these
things and the pressure's on. And no matter what point I'm at, I'm only
halfway there."
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