Danny Turner chats to Subjective duo Goldie and James Davidson about the making of their second album and its poignant nod to drum&bass

Goldie’s 30-year career has seen him pioneer the ’90s UK jungle, drum & bass and breakbeat scenes and work with a litany of high-profile musicians including Bowie, Noel Gallagher, 4hero and Pete Tong. Despite numerous sojourns into acting and the art world, 2017 saw the iconic musician return to the musical fold with his album The Journey Man, working alongside ex-Ulterior Motive producer and revered sound engineer James Davidson.

Seeking to realise their potential as a production duo, Goldie then invited Davidson to begin writing and recording at his home studio based in Phuket, Thailand. The result was a new project, Subjective, debuting with the cerebral ambient album Act One – Music for Inanimate Objects (2019). With tracks left over from those initial sessions, Pete Tong encouraged the duo to record a second long player, The Start of No Regret, which moves further towards Goldie’s drum&bass DNA.

“I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE GOOD TO CREATE SOME REALLY WELL-DESIGNED BUBBLE LETTERS THAT PEOPLE COULD READ MUSICALLY”

– GOLDIE

You’ve been spending a lot of time together in Thailand. Is that solely about promotion?

James Davidson: “Thistime it was supposed to be solely about promotion and to show people where we wrote it and what we were doing, but as tends to happen when we’re in the studio, we ended up writing. We’ve actually been making a few really good Rufige Kru tracks, which was great because early tunes like Beachdrifta and Terminator were huge for me. That sound’s completely different to Subjective because we’ve been resampling old Metalheadz DAT pads from Timeless and leaning towards that DNA.”

How did you first get noticed by Goldie?

JD: “I first got noticed by TeeBee from Subtitles Records back in 2007. He put out our first Ulterior Motive single in 2009. Then I met Goldie at the SUNANDBASS festival in Sardinia and he told me to put the album out on Metalheadz, so we ended up releasing The Fourth Wall in 2014. He really liked the sound of the album and asked if I’d be interested in engineering his new record at the time, The Journey Man.”

Goldie: “Iliked the engineering but I also liked the fact that it wasn’t brittle. These days there tends to be no headroom on tracks and a lot of smashing, whereas I come from the DAT generation where there is headroom. James is in a digital bubble capturing analogue loops and when I dug a bit deeper and listened to tracks like Ulterior Motive’s The Elephant Tune I thought they were amazing. Knowing it wasn’t analogue, I felt there was warmth to his sound, a lot of which is down to James’ exterior hardware, which he builds himself.”

So you found in James an engineer who could take your sound to the next level?

Goldie: “I feel I’ve always had a role in taking engineers to the limit and had reached a glass roof with people like John Gosling and Mark Rutherford working out of William Orbit’s studio in Crouch End on Rufige Kru tracks like Krisp Biscuit. When you start doing classical music and zooming in at a score or an arrangement, as soon as you go back to electronic music and discard the ego you realise you’re just pushing buttons. I had loads of recordings on DAT that were like bottles of wine fermenting on tape, so I got James to come to Thailand and throw himself into all of that stuff on The Journey Man. If you know drum&bass and programming then you’ll know that, compositionally, the track Prism is no joke and James really shone through on that because he has no glass roof. I wanted to stand back a little bit and share the fall with Subjective, which has been an amazing project to do that with. That’s why we’re here, but unfortunately he’s eating us out of biscuits at our home here in Thailand.”