‘I HAD FIVE CARS ON MY DRIVE — A PORSCHE, A BENTLEY. IT WAS JUST EGO’

Goldie, the king of drum 'n' bass, is back with new music. He tells Dylan Jones about his rebellious spirit, what he's learned in Thailand and why we're failing young men like his son

- DYLAN JONES

In the third series of The White Lotus, Jason Isaac's shifty Timothy Ratliff says that people move to Thailand either because they're looking for something or running from something. Goldie, who in the past 30 years has become something of an alt National Treasure here in the UK, moved to Thailand 15 years ago, and he did it for a very particular reason, initially to retire.

“I came here to do nothing as I'd had enough,” he says. “It’s sunny here, it’s beautiful, and I'd had enough of the music games, I'd had a messy divorce, and it was time for a change. I wasn’t in favour, so I wanted to get away. So I went to get some vitamin D.

“The culture's really lovely, the primal stuff as much as anything else. But it’s exploding more than ever now. I hike, I've got into yoga. My missus is from Canada, and she loves it here.”

The man who was brought up in Walsall, in the Midlands, lives in Kamala, a Muslim village on Phuket (he loves the vibrations of morning prayers), with his wife, Mika, young daughter Koko and new baby Yuki.

“I'd been everywhere, from New York and LA to Japan 10 times over, but Thailand really resonated with me. And Kamala is a bit like Tring, I guess, as people only pass through it. But it’s good for discipline, good for health”. Here, Goldie is known as phan tong, “Gold tooth man.”

Another reason he came here is David Bowie, to whom Goldie was close in the 1990s (their brilliant collaboration, Truth, is vindication of Bowie's investment in drum 'n' bass).

“He was the king of reinvention, man, and he always told me to move forward. He said he'd done everything, and nobody could tell him anything, so he didn’t care what he did. He told me to own my music, so I did. If it wasn't for him I would never have written a ballad!”