Every couple of weeks, the electronic music pioneer Clifford Price, aka Goldie, wakes up at sunrise and heads to a mountain near his home in Phuket, Thailand. He has to leave with the first call to prayer as it’s a nine-kilometre hike through dense rainforest up to the summit and it gets too hot otherwise. On the way, he watches out for cobras, scorpions and tarantulas. “You really do see life and death right in front of you up there,” he tells me. “Something falls, it’s a dead animal, and it rots away and things are nourished by it.”
The irony that Goldie, pioneer of jungle music, should find himself, at 56, quite literally hanging out in the jungle is not lost on him. “The power of f***ing manifestation, my brother!” he laughs. But it’s not really about the jungle, he says, it’s about the lake at the top of the mountain, which was formed by rain gathering in an abandoned tin mine. Here, he straps on a buoyancy aid and sets himself adrift, maybe listening to Mahler’sFifth Symphony, maybe some of the tunes he put out on his Metalheadz label in the mid-1990s, the “Old Testament” of drum’n’bass, as he calls it. “I’ll look at the clouds and because I’m the same temperature as the water, it’s like free-falling back through the sky,” he says. “It’s an insane feeling. I scream and wail and cry and... you know?” Sometimes, he thinks it’s what heaven might be like. But then, he reflects, heaven wouldn’t be so still. He would need to keep moving or he’d get a “sore arse”.
