Just to make things clear straight away: Timeless is the greatest, most musical, most mature, best Drum & Bass album of all time. Period!
That it became so was mainly due to the mental mapping of its creator Clifford Joseph Price, alias Goldie. Timeless encapsulates his entire personality at the time. It is an expression of his complex twists and turns between anger, sadness, and thirst for life, attention-seeking and B-boy competition, explosive energy and boundless musicality, love for the Jungle community, and an unyielding stubbornness to keep going. Goldie himself would probably describe these twists and turns as alchemy, a concept that has driven him since his earliest days.

It is this alchemy that has repeatedly made Goldie controversial in the circles of Jungle and Drum & Bass. In a community that was long based on white label dubplates, he focused on distinctive branding for Reinforced Rec. and later his own label Metalheadz. Where anonymity prevailed with few exceptions, he exploded into superstardom. While everyone else was tinkering away in their bedrooms on Amiga computers, he rented a professional studio. And where tracks were bangers hammered together in a few hours for the next weekend, Goldie told sprawling stories in meticulous detail. The title track »Timeless« alone is said to have been created in a good 20 sessions over four months. Tony Marcus of Mixmag, who was allowed to attend a studio session, later said: »They spent hours just working on a few seconds of music. They’d take the snare, reverse it, flip it upside down, make it go faster, into echo, harmony, everywhere. Eventually it sounded nothing like that tiny little noise they started with.« You can read about it in the liner notes of the 25th Anniversary Edition of Timeless (Metalheadz).

Participation and demarcation

For all his egocentricity, Goldie would be the last person to claim that it was all his doing alone. There are plenty of interviews with him in which he thanks his mentors during his many years as an orphan and adopted child. With a broad smile, he talks about the diverse influences that range from Supertramp and The Jam to The Buzzocks and UB40 to Kevin Saunderson and Nellee Hooper. On the first vinyl pressing of Timeless, he personally dedicated individual tracks to Jungle scene heroes Grooverider, Randall, Kemistry, and Dillinja.

And Goldie has always understood that an excellent sound engineer plays a crucial role in the creative process. For “Timeless,” he brought in the experienced Rob Playford to mix the album and get the ideas and impulses into shape. Playford was actually the head of the Moving Shadow label and thus in direct competition with both Reinforced – where Goldie was responsible for much of the artwork – and Metalheadz. But it was precisely this mixture of competition and community that allowed the self-contained British Jungle scene to flourish in the early 1990s, as can be clearly felt in the personal flashbacks of its protagonists in Paul Terzulli and Eddie Otchere’s book “Who Say Reload” (Velocity Press) . Labels and producers tried to outdo each other every week with the next banger. But at the same time, they also helped each other out to establish contacts with trendsetting DJs Doc Scott, Grooverider, Fabio, and Randall, to clarify business issues, to set up distribution, or to arrange ideas and samples for a track.

The mix of competition and community allowed the self-contained British jungle scene to flourish in the early 1990s.

It was precisely this mixture of competition and community that resonated with Goldie, who had made a name for himself as a breakdancer and graffiti artist in the B-boy scene. It was the community that enabled Goldie to discover Jungle in the first place and to look over the shoulders of producers Nellee Hooper, Howie B., Mark Rutherford, and John Gosling.

It was the B-boy in Goldie that drove him to outdo the others. Or as he explained to BBC presenter Christopher Tubbs in 2013: »Someone does a backspin [in a breakdance battle]. You gotta go in and do something better than that. You take the backspin, two headspins, two 1990 – see you later.«

For eternity

Thus, Goldie didn’t just want to deliver the next banger for club nights. This is already evident in the title track, »Timeless.« The album’s opener was planned as a 40-minute Jungle journey. Only the limitations of the sequencer software available at the time thwarted this plan. However, at 21 minutes long, the track still broke all the mold of the Jungle scene at the time – in terms of its length and complexity, but also musically and sonically.

Naming his debut album Timeless shows how serious Goldie was. You could dismiss it as arrogant wishful thinking. However, it was a conscious manifesto, born out of absolute clarity and determination. And Goldie was right. Few Jungle and Drum & Bass releases have aged so well. The track “Timeless” still has the same energy, pull, and emotional depth today. It remains unmatched.

The heart is open

The fact that “Timeless” still vibrates and touches listeners thirty years later is not only due to its production quality and sophistication, which were ahead of its time. In interviews, Goldie always wears his heart on his sleeve. His art – whether in graffiti or music – is a direct transmission of his feelings in all their diversity and directness.

“Timeless” shows all the emotions that have made Goldie over his first three decades. At times, aggression, deep satisfaction, and endless sadness contrast sharply from one track to the next. Sometimes they flow seamlessly into one another within a single track. Goldie’s unconditional drive to follow his intuition, to let his feelings flow into the world and shine through unfiltered, makes “Timeless” accessible, tangible and, above all, listenable outside the club.

No wonder that “Timeless” was released on vinyl and CD in completely different versions in 1995. While the vinyl tore up the clubs with reduced VIP mixes and more bass, the CD was designed for repeated home listening with the full range of emotions. Vinyl lovers therefore had to live with the fact that the 21-minute epic “Timeless” was not available on vinyl until 2021. It was only with the 25th anniversary re-release on golden 3LP that all the tracks were brought together, bringing a decade-long search and hope to an end.