Could Goldie be becoming a national treasure? Things are certainly moving that way. A few weeks ago, he was standing at the fish counter in Waitrose, Berkhamsted, when an elderly couple came up and said: "You were magnificent!" Which, as he says, "is not like some young kids in Reeboks coming up and saying, 'God, you were wicked last night in Bristol.' And it just felt really good that I'd actually got through to older people."
This was all thanks to last year's Maestro, a BBC2 series in which he and a bunch of other celebs were trained to be conductors. At the beginning, it seemed impossible that Goldie, who couldn't read music and had barely heard of Brahms, could survive against piano veterans like Jane Asher, but he soon knocked that idea on the head.
He didn't win – Sue Perkins did – but he was an unforgettable runner-up and there was a glorious moment when Sir Roger Norrington, the chairman of the judges, told him: "You are a conductor! Bravo!" And now he has been asked to compose a new work for the Proms. The making of the piece is the subject of a two-part BBC documentary called Classic Goldie, which will no doubt wow the Waitrose fish counter all over again.
This is a whole different Goldie from the one I interviewed seven years ago for the publication of his autobiography, Nine Lives, ghosted by Paul Gorman. At that stage, he was still best known as a drum'n'bass producer and DJ, a former graffiti artist, jeweller (he made his own gold teeth), actor and ex-boyfriend of Björk, Naomi Campbell and Stella Tennant. He'd spent much of the 90s partying and told me that in his heyday he could "hoot for England". But he'd already decided that the drugs don't work and seemed to want to shed his former party animal persona.
The first attempt to unveil the new mature Goldie was on Celebrity Big Brother in 2002, but he completely blew it. He behaved obnoxiously and was the first person evicted. He said afterwards it was because it reminded him of growing up in children's homes, his usual excuse when things go badly. But the next year he told the Mirror that he learnt a lot from being on Big Brother: "I've realised what a cunt I can be. Just feeling misunderstood sometimes, I guess, has been my biggest downfall. But I'm not going to be like that any more. I'm not going to be a victim of my childhood any longer."
And it seems he has changed. For a start, he seems far more relaxed or perhaps it's just because I'm interviewing him at home instead of in a hotel. His house in Hertfordshire is far less showy than I expected; it's a 40s pebbledash job with a shaggy lawn and a sauna hut at the end of the garden. It was on the market for £500,000 three years ago, but evidently he decided to keep it. It reminds me a bit of JG Ballard's old house in Shepperton, a warren of rooms into which he has seemingly dumped at random all his favourite things – a gold Ducati Monster motorbike, stacks of paintings mainly by and of Goldie, a tottering mountain of trainers, two husky dogs and – eek! – a giant boa constrictor in a tank. "Come and sit on the Knole," Goldie tells me, patting an enormous orange velvet sofa. "Put your feet up. Relax." But how can I relax when there's a giant snake in the corner?
He says he was thrilled when he got the letter from Roger Wright, controller of Radio 3 and director of the Proms, commissioning him to write a seven-minute piece on the theme of evolution for the Proms. "It was something I would never have imagined doing. You hear words like 'dumbing down', but I think the BBC has been quite brave in saying it's about time we did some other stuff."
At first, he was disappointed not to have been asked to conduct his own work (Charles Hazlewood is conducting the premiere), but now he is happy. He has been working with a young composer called Christopher Mayo and is full of admiration – "He's like a watchmaker who has this hobby of making little carousels that all spin and turn and ballerinas pop out of boxes and woodmakers and cuckoos pop out."
Mayo's role is to give him a choice of options – do you want this chord or this one or this? – and then he chooses. "It's the same as working with an engineer in your normal day to day." But it has meant Goldie has had to learn to work on a different computer programme – Sibelius – from the ones he is used to: "I think generally the software in the classical world is far behind the electronic world, but Sibelius is the programme the classical world use, so I've just swapped one set of tools for another."
Roger Wright suggested his composition should be on the theme of Darwinian evolution, but in fact he's dumped Darwin and called his work Sine Tempore – "because it relates to time travel, the beginning, the end, relativity". It will have a 150bpm beat, which is slow for rap but fast for an orchestra and will begin with the big bang, using every instrument, including the Royal Albert Hall organ. "Why not? When in Rome, eat lions!"
Goldie's strength has has always been his love of collaboration and learning new skills, which is how he keeps reinventing himself. He regrets the fact that "electronic people stopped collaborating about four years ago – we turned into these bedroom people working on our own. But then we realised, hang on, you need to share your idea, which is what classical musicians still do when they play together in orchestras. But I realised, God, there's no money in it. When I think how much money I make DJing every week – I can make 10 to 15 grand a weekend – and these people probably get paid that in a year. They are doing it for the love, they really are."
He still DJs all round the world – recent gigs have included Russia, Austria, Japan and Canada – and says he is in the Premier League of drum'n'bass DJs. I thought maybe he would have got bored with drum'n'bass after Maestro, but he responds sharply: "No. Why would I? The weird thing is that Maestro has somehow improved my DJing. When you've been in this music as long as I've been, you can sometimes become jaded. And when I got back from Maestro, I realised the music is being kept in time for me – all I have to do is to wrap as much dynamic around it as I can. DJs don't realise how lucky we are. So then my sets became much longer and even more diverse because I thought: this is easy."
So could he still be DJing when he's 70? "Quite possibly. I will certainly be making music as long as I live." His next project is to revive his hour-long composition Mother which failed abysmally when it came out on his second album Saturnz Return in 1998, but he thinks it was ahead of its time. Now he wants to reconfigure it as a stage show "with DJs, holograms, videos, actors, dancers, an orchestra on stage, more like an assault on your mind. I think it will be a triumph.
"I remember quite well when I was in institutions, and the only thing I had was 25 other kids from broken families that had nothing and we used to learn break dancing and go to all-dayers all round the country – it was a big thing in the 80s – and battle the guys in Nottingham, battle the guys in London, battle them on the dance floor and it was no longer about violence."
Inevitably, with Goldie, one seems to end up talking about children's homes. His mother, a Scottish pub singer, put him into care when he was three, though she kept his younger brother, Melvin. The fact that Goldie turned out well, whereas his brother spent many years in prison and is "still a bit funny", according to Goldie, suggests that children's homes are not always as bad as they're painted. But it is a subject one raises with caution. Goldie says, on the one hand: "I learned everything out of children's homes. The kids had to stick together, we had to unify, and we did that, and I think that was a great thing." But he also remembers "the nights of sad times, crying my eyes out, wanting to get recognition, when I really wanted love and I just wanted nurturing, but all I got was abuse – you'll never make it, you'll never be anybody. You know, crushed."
When he was l7 Goldie ran into his brother who took him home to stay with their mother. But it was a chaotic home – mother drinking, Rasta boyfriends smoking weed, no food in the house, so Goldie and Melvin had to steal in order to eat. He then went to America to find his father (a Jamaican-born factory worker who pushed off soon after Melvin was born) but was shocked to find his father had another son called Clifford Price – Goldie's real name – "in case one of you died".
Goldie has four children by four different mothers, but says confidently that he is a good father. "I think I've made the same mistakes as any father – I've still got unfinished business, in that sense, but it's something I will personally deal with when the time is right." He is particularly close to his 10-year-old daughter, Chance, who lives with him five days a week, and says that he's gained empathy with women from her, but also through making peace with his mother. He has finally forgiven her for putting him in care: "I'd never actually imagined my mother when she was young. I'd never thought about the stuff she had to go through."
Goldie says he's now sorted – he's over the drugs, over the womanising, over the issues with abandonment. But then he said exactly the same when I interviewed him seven years ago. At that point, he'd just married model Sonjia Ashby and said he was ready to settle down. But they divorced in 2005 and he made some bitter remarks about her: "She didn't want to go out to work and I'm used to being with career women." But also, more seriously: "With hindsight I think I was marrying someone who was a bit like my mother – who would let me down when I needed her."
What really sorted him out, he says, was a course he did five years ago at the Hoffman Institute. "If I didn't do the Hoffman, I don't think I'd be alive now. Because I'd spent so many years searching for something and, like they say, the drugs don't work. I went to rehab and it never worked. It failed miserably in Antigua [at Eric Clapton's clinic, Crossroads Centre]. I felt, 'This is wrong, I'm getting whipped for someone else's sins here.' I did five-element acupuncture for many years, which I found fascinating, but then I got recommended the Hoffman and thought, 'This is for me.' It's not a cultish thing, but it's particularly good for spiritual people, people who vibrate differently. You go and stay for 10 days and you literally empty the box."
He went to cure his addiction, but not his old addiction to drugs. "I was addicted to failure. I was addicted to beating myself up. Self-destructing. I just didn't want the boy to live, basically. And I would get wound up and have this violent temper, really mad. But the Hoffman pulls out all the fuses, defuses the bomb, gives you back the buttons and says, 'Go on, press them, see what happens', and you press them, and there's nothing happening! And you think, 'Wow' and understand where it was coming from. I think when they say life begins at 40, I was approaching 40 when I did the Hoffman and it was a complete meltdown. And I've never looked back."
But he was also helped, he says, by a waterskiing accident (he shows me a huge, zip-like scar all down his leg) that kept him stationary for a year. "That was a useful accident, because I started making music again, and painting, because I couldn't run around. And also because it's the left side, the feminine side, which I really needed to address. So that really calmed me down and I thought, OK now, I know what to do."
And now, he says, he has met his spiritual partner, Mika, who is "very, very beautiful", half-Japanese, half-Dutch, from Montreal. "She moved in about six months ago and we just do normal stuff and have a wonderful life." Because, he must admit, he wasn't really very good at relationships before? "No, but I'm good at this one. I need to become really humble.
"I do now feel very blessed, I really do. Because if I wrote a list of all my experiences, I'd think, 'Fuck it, this person looks really interesting.' I always had a sense of purpose, but I didn't quite know what it was, whereas I've got to grips with what my purpose is now. The two things that I've always had to deal with are abandonment and feeling misunderstood. And I actually feel a bit more understood now, because I've been able to create a dialect that people can understand. And, you know, I'm 43 and I think, 'Shit, I've just started doing this other new thing [working with orchestras] and who knows what it will lead to.' I just feel so creative."
Goldie's Sine Tempore premieres at the Family Prom on 1 August. The two-part documentary Classic Goldie is broadcast on BBC 2, 31 July and 7 August at 9pm.
Going for Goldie
Early life 1965 Born in Walsall, West Midlands as Clifford Price. His mother was a Scottish pub singer, his father a Jamaican factory worker. At three, he was put into care and brought up in various foster homes and institutions until the age of 17.
Career 1980-1990 Joined breakdance group Bboyscorrect and began to make his name as musician and graffiti artist.
1994 Co-founded drum'n'bass record label Metalheadzcollective.
1995 Debut album Timeless under Pete Tong's label FFRR, reaches number 7 in the charts, a first for a drum'n'bass record.
1998 Second album SaturnzReturncorrect, featuring an hour-longcorrect, 30-piece orchestral track "Mother", receives mixed reviews.
1999-2002 Acting roles in The World is not Enough, Snatch and EastEnders.
2002 First to be evicted when he took part in Celebrity Big Brother.
2008 Came second in BBC2's Maestro.
Personal life Has previously dated Bjork, Naomi Campbell and was married to model Sonjia Ashby. Recently appeared on ITV's All Star Mr & Mrs with current partner, Mika. He has four children, twin huskies and a pet python.
Quotations:
Goldie - "Reinvention is one of the greatest things we have the ability to do"
Goldie - "Creating art is like being sick – you bring up all your most innermost thoughts and then you have to ask yourself why you're doing it"
"He (bowled in the door and) was, I suppose, kind of frightening: shaved head, loads of gold teeth, gold watches, gold chains, gold ear-rings, gold knuckle-dusters – and a pitbull." Pete Tong"He's a good mate, one of those blokes you can count on. I'm just happy that he's happy now." Pete Tong