Goldie: The alchemist

Has Goldie ever had an unexpressed thought? I'm not entirely sure. He's just such a talker. He can talk and talk and talk, and two weeks after interviewing him, he rings me up when I'm in the supermarket, and for reasons that escape me, I agree to accompany him to a darkened basement off Oxford Street where, for the best part of 90 minutes, I feel like I'm about to die. Bikram, the extreme version of yoga, performed in a room heated to more than 100F, is Goldie's latest enthusiasm, and although I do at one point wonder whether I'm having a cardiac episode, I come to understand why he does it: afterwards he's strangely quiet and calm, like he's been stunned by a tranquilliser dart. (I'm catatonic, but that's another story.)
It's a relief, actually, to see that he can sit still, because interviewing him is not unlike spending several hours in the company of a toddler who's been overdoing the orange squash. When I arrive at his house he tells me he'd been up until 2am the night before, painting, before starting again at 8am; he's already done the photo shoot and is now showing the awed photographer his trainers collection while simultaneously consulting with Chris, the engineer who works for his record label, Metalheadz, who is waiting patiently to get to work on their latest project, an orchestral arrangement of "Timeless", the title track from his 1995 debut album. Mika, his wife of a year, is in the kitchen baking scones and within 30 seconds of walking through the door, he thrusts one towards me: "Taste that! Isn't that scontastic!" before whisking me off up the stairs to show me the love letters he wrote to her, a great big box of them, all hand-written and intricately designed.
Then it's back downstairs and into the kitchen, talking all the time, bouncing off the walls practically. "Did you feel comfortable when you arrived here today?" he asks me later. And I did. He can still look pretty menacing with the gold teeth and the tattoos and the bling, but he's also the perfect host, warm, friendly, generous with the scones (and the trainers – the photographer leaves with a pair and looks like he might burst with joy) and prone to spontaneous outbursts of hugging.
"I can't believe you ever needed to do drugs," I say, because he's 45 now, but in his younger days, hanging out with the likes of Noel Gallagher, he used to "toot for England". In his case, he says, the drugs literally didn't work. "They had a polarising effect. Cocaine would make me go very quiet and into myself." These days, Goldie says, he has just "one vice left" – he smokes – and for the most part lives quietly in a small village in the Hertfordshire commuter belt (just past the golf course, before the church), as unlikely a spot as you could ever think of to find the man who pioneered graffiti art in the UK and was one of the founding fathers of drum 'n' bass. His daughter Chance ("12 going on 26") lives with him during the week, and although he still flies around the world DJing, he's also, since the BBC2 series Maestro, in which he learned to conduct an orchestra, reinvented himself as a mainstream television performer, the latest incarnation of which can be seen in a new BBC2 series, Goldie's Band: By Royal Appointment...

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Carole Cadwalladr @'The Guardian'