Going For Goldie

It can’t be often that the Enable Ireland shop on Dublin’s Wexford Street is visited by someone with a number three single under his belt but Goldie Lookin’ Chain’s tallest member, Maggot, has decided to spend his first few moments in town on the lookout for yet more fashionably cheap hip hop gear to add to his wardrobe.

He has returned with a pair of white tracksuit trousers that finish comfortably above his ankles yet seem to suit his demeanour perfectly.
Interviewing a band like Goldie Lookin’ Chain is a tough one. You feel that there’s a story behind the story but the question is how to get to it? Play along with the joke or try the ‘but seriously’ approach?
We’re faced by the band’s eight main members – Eggsy, Adam Hussein, Maggot, Mike Balls, Xain, Billy Webb, Mystikal and 2Hats. There are various Wu Tang style aliases involved but we needn’t worry about these here.
The ’Chain have just travelled from a festival in Belfast where they played with The Darkness, amongst others and Hussein is sporting a brand new Darkness t-shirt as a result. You can’t escape the feeling that the pints that they’re currently tucking into are merely topping up the excesses of the night before, and that they haven’t exactly spent the drive down from the north discussing world politics.
They are fine company but impossible to interview. Eggsy tells us that they spent their formative years “throwing shoes up onto telegraph poles, like one of your gang members had been killed. They kept taking them down though.”
Each new line provokes huge hilarity from the rest of the party, who then all start talking at once. It’s all good fun but the prospect of thirty minutes of totally unusable tape starts to rankle.
How did they end up signing with Atlantic Records? Eggsy, as often seems to be the case, takes the lead.
“Basically what happened was we just turned up, they pretended to be our friend for a while, we asked them a few questions like how long the band had been going and they’d go very quiet. I got given some flowers and Adam got given some envelopes. Now Adam has to go back once a week and do filing and me and Mysti do some cleaning.”
Then we’re off again and onto a story of how they played Iron Maiden at football and got stuffed six-one. Talk turns to relatively obscure ’80s bands, including the faintly ridiculous Manowar. The penny drops. You were all metal heads, weren’t you?
“Well essentially, yeah”, says Mysti, “West Country metal heads. I went to the bloody Kerrang! Awards, I’m that fucking metal.”
Maggot pipes up. “We presented an award to Anthrax. There has always been a big metal scene in the valleys, everyone’s into it. It’s the same as the West Midlands. Maybe it’s something to do with depressed areas, I don’t know.”
“There’s still a lot of leather jackets with tassels on the arms,” says Eggsy.
It’s a tough part of the world, South Wales, one that has never really recovered from the loss of the coal industry in the ’80s.
“Mostly it was just concrete and rain,” explains Eggsy. “It was just boring, a small city where everybody knows everybody else.”
“There’s not seven degrees of separation,” says Mysti, “there’s two. There was a lot of people fucking themselves over, mainly through draw.”
A bizarre Eggsy anecdote is never far away. “People used to drive around smoking bongs in their cars. There was this guy who went home and smoked his bong and he was a bit of a spiritual weirdo, so he lit all these candles. He got stuck into the bong, fell asleep, woke up and he’d burned his nipple off.”
There’s much laughter and then a pause. “I think it’s wicked,” says Maggot. “I’ll never leave. I can’t wait to get home.”
So now we’re getting a little nearer to what makes Goldie Lookin’ Chain tick. A bunch of bored young men started making tapes and passing them around among their friends, inspired by various styles of music they were listening to, including a lot of hip hop.
“It worked in Newport, helping people kill a bit of time, but we never thought that it would spread beyond there but it started to. People in Bristol started to notice and gradually it spread throughout the country.”
Once audiences started to take note, so did the music business.
“Just out of nowhere a shitload of record companies turned up,” says Adam, “it wasn’t a case of us going to them. Once I put a CD into EMI because I was just passing by but that was the only thing we ever did.”
“We just fuck around a lot and see what comes out,” says Eggsy. “It’s just fucking stupidity. We have the mental age of a twelve year old between all of us, that’s what it is. Magazines are looking for answers all the time, where are we coming from. The mind of a twelve year old, that’s all it is.”
Is he doing himself a disservice? Possibly. On first listen their debut album Greatest Hits doesn’t exactly strike you as a record with a particularly long shelf life. It is very, very funny in parts, puerile in others yet surely little more than a novelty. Go back to it, however, and the strengths of the record start to assert themselves. A lot of the tunes are great, and the lyrics clever.
We talk about Shyne, currently serving ten years for assault with a deadly weapon yet still No.1 in the States. Maggot is dismissive.
“To me that’s just a clever marketing ploy. He never shot someone in the face. He’s not as bad as they make out, he’s just some fucking bloke. It’s all bullshit, don’t get drawn in to it.”
Adam too is not particularly enamoured with the US influence. “I hate people from Doncaster or somewhere, who when they sing or rap, put on an American accent. Why do they do that?”
The irony of course is that, after years of British hip hop striving to be taken seriously, the first band to achieve major success is the one that doesn’t take it seriously at all. So what happens next? Eggsy for one is not convinced that those currently funding the band are in it for the long haul.
“That’s what they do. They take you in, grind you up, fuck you over and if you survive, you survive. That’s just the game, the machine. If we can do this forever we will, but if the record company turn round tomorrow and say ‘we don’t like you anymore’ then it’s back to strimming the grass banks outside the council offices in Newport. Everything in life is like that, someone’s going to shit on you and rip you off. You get fucked over and then you die, that’s what life is.”
Maggot muses on this for a second. “I’ll be working with blind people again.”

Greatest Hits is out now on Atlantic

THE CHAIN GANG

Adam – Brings chaos without disorder but is mainly doing it for his mother.
Ross – The ecstasy specialist, trying to break the world record.
Billy – Has fingers like sausages and could never learn to play the guitar – that’s why he became a rapper.
Xain – Has got a terrible problem with his anus and is trying to poison us every night.
2Hats – Can dance with both feet at once.
Misti – Heavily into Dungeons And Dragons, being in a dark room with loads of men and rolling dice.
Mike – the hardest man in under-eleven soccer violence league. Doesn’t seem to like people.
Maggot – Was born with what we call ‘the mark’. He’s the chosen one.

photos Liam Sweeney