Metalheadz Sunday club nights had started by then at Blue Note in Hoxton Square. There wasn’t much else there, then — Shoreditch hadn’t started happening as an idea yet. In a lot of ways, it was our fault. We even had board games upstairs! Yeah, sorry about that one. Anyway, it was a good idea at the time. All the big drum ’n’ bass DJs and producers — Doc Scott, Photek, Fabio, and Grooverider, everyone — would go there to escape some of the madness that was going on in the ragga–jungle side of things. We wanted somewhere the music-makers could listen to music and play exactly what they wanted without having to worry about the hits you’d be under pressure to play on a Friday or Saturday. At the start it was empty — for the first few weeks there was room for me to breakdance, and this was in a small room with a low ceiling that held maybe two hundred people. Soon it started to fill up, so people would have to be down there by 7:30 to get in. I’m geeing all the DJs up by calling them and playing sixteen bars of something or other over the phone just to keep them on their toes — “You’d better have some good shit for me on Sunday.”

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Anyway, Bowie wanted to meet, so he decided to come down to Blue Note. We’re sitting on the steps outside and he’s rolling a cigarette, loving the place — “You’ve got a great set of people in there” — feeling the influence. That’s definitely where the energy came from for his drum’n’bass reinvention with the album Earthling [1997]. That’s what he was the master of — reinventing himself — but you always knew it was him.

So, we’re sitting on the steps and all my mates are just kind of walking behind me going, “Is that him???” “Go away, yes, cool, chill.” Most people on the underground leave people alone: that’s what they’re like. Bowie comes back for a few weeks in a row and people kind of get used to him. Meanwhile I am very busy getting off my tits — doing acid, E, coke, whatever. And this thing comes to me in the night: it comes to me. I wake up, and it’s there, wow, this is really good. I call David — “Look, man, I’ve got this great idea—”

“Yeah, we want to make a record, a drum’n’bass record.”

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“Woah, we’re not going to make a drum’n’bass record. I want to make a ballad, Dave, I really want to make a ballad. I think a ballad would be unbelievable, because it’s what wrenches me in your music — your voice.”

“Whatever, man, whatever you want to do.”

And that’s how [Goldie and Bowie collaboration] “Truth” on Saturnz Return happened. If you listen to that song now you can still hear how David Bowie sang the fuck out of it.

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A couple of years or so later we made a British gangster film called Everybody Loves Sunshine together, and when the production ran out of cash at one point, David put thirty grand of his own money in. I remember us sitting in this caravan on the Isle of Man — David’s wearing a suit, and I was in a trench coat. There were some pretty serious Moss Side gangsters around on that set — some of whom are no longer with us — but I looked over at the Duke, and he was knitting. He said it chilled him out. Surreal is what I call it but, either way, I’m not going to be learning to crochet any time soon, Dave. That’s what I call self-reinvention, though, and Bowie taught me some great lessons about what it really means to be an artist. I remember him saying to me once, “Goldie, did you know Michelangelo said that when you blow the dust off a piece of marble, the sculpture already exists inside?’ And that idea has always stayed with me. Oh, wow. God bless you, sir! Yeah, I’m looking up to the sky for you, mate, hearing that little chuckle...

Excerpted from All Things Remembered by Goldie. Out now in the U.K., and January 1 in the U.S. via Faber & Faber (pre-order here).