2.
Goldie – Timeless
Just to skip on ahead, the same year I went to see Goldie. Both of them were in Cardiff University Students’ Union, I was growing up in Newport, and I saw them relatively close together – I think it was Leftfield first, and then Goldie a few months later in the same spot, and he had support from Doc Scott and Peshay. Those two experiences pretty much destroyed whatever crumbling interest I had left in guitar based music [laughs]. It was so funny, I can remember being at school – twelve, thirteen years old – thinking ‘all rave music sounds the same’, and then just flipping and thinking, ‘Jesus Christ, all guitar music sounds the fucking same’. I’ve never managed to reverse it back. Now, generic guitar music, I couldn’t tell the difference between Coldplay and Kings Of Leon, it’s just a blur to me, but you hear the intricacies in the electronic side of things.
I don’t know if you want to talk about them album by album, but for me, a lot of these albums are tied into that period. Portishead’s Dummy, for me and possibly a lot of other people as well, it had an element of this as well. It was almost like a lever that prised you away from more guitar based bands. It wasn’t dance music, but it was really interesting to listen to, and soulful and strange, and so mysterious. That really put a big fat wedge in that door – Leftfield and Goldie’s album, those two things as albums, that was it, I was away.
[When I first heard Timeless] I was too young to be involved with going out to proper nights, it just wasn’t even an option when you’re fourteen. I started going out when I was fifteen, sixteen, with a very dodgy fake ID, so it wasn’t too far on from then. But at the time I was pretty much confined to what I could get out of Hitman Music in Newport, which was a fairly limited selection when it came to jungle and so forth. But I had the Goldie Timeless album, and I also had this really random French dance music compilation called Lab 4 or something like that, and it had three or four jungle tunes on there, and a Reinforced CD with a Kemistry & Storm mix, it was before Kemistry passsed away. And I had loads of the old Rufige Kru – that 93, 94 proto-jungle darkside sound. Those were the core of my initial jungle and drum & bass [listening], but then it wasn’t long before you got piles of mixtapes, and the Dreamscape tape packs, ESP tape packs, and Hype, and all this sort of stuff.
[Jungle] was so different from anything else. Those breakbeats, sped up – I can’t listen to them slow now. It was something that took you into a slightly extreme alternate universe. But the energy – it was the energy, and it was the imagery that it triggers for you when you listen to it. It’s Terminator, it’s the mid 90s vision of the future, you know? [Also], the whole thing moved at such a pace. When I think about, say, dubstep as comparison – how much changed musically in dubstep from 2004 to 2008 – I’m not sure it even touches how much jungle moved from 94 to 98. It was like a relentless force. Putting it into words isn’t so easy. Jungle’s just been a dominating force ever since I heard it. I suppose [it’s like] the people that back in the day were into rock, but then got into punk, and punk just totally destroyed the possibility of them ever listening to and enjoying rock music again. It was almost like one of those forces, you know what I’m saying? Jungle, it was like, ‘this is just so fucking wicked’ [laughs]. For me it encapsulated all sorts of excitement, and mystery. I keep saying mystery, but I think that’s a big part of it. Anything that encourages your own imagination when you’re listening to stuff is exciting. You kind of have to interact with it a little bit, but it’s more rewarding.
