Donning a thickly-pasted English accent, Graham Gold exerts an overt confidence derived from an extensive career in the Sal soul of dance music. Holding the golden ticket to over thirty years of musical expeditions and championing the seventies sounds of disco funk, eighties glamour and all that emerged thereafter, Gold has earned himself the upholding respect of a nations dance floor.
“Don’t tell anyone though” Gold says, jokingly diverting the focus on the year that marked the commencement of his career – 1969. “No, you can, I don’t mind. Once upon a time I was worried about it, but I’ve just got all this musical history that nobody else has got. Really, I don’t mind.” With over thirty-five thousand records (and counting) and a first hand witness to numerous influential genres, musical history seems the only apt term to pin to such an expansive career.
Furthermore, in a time when the art of turntablism was still deemed relatively unfamiliar grounds, Graham’s escalating experience in the realm of a weekly blues and reggae haunt saw him marked as one of the fortunate sons: “Everyone wanted to be a DJ, but nobody kind of really knew how on earth you went about it.” At the tender age of fourteen, influences such as Otis Redding, James Brown and the like began to waver through Gold’s mind space and before long it was evident that all he wanted to do was play music. “I was pretty crap at school, so I had to do that otherwise I’d end up in the gutter I think” he laughs.
Blues and Reggae, however, were just the beginning; landing a residency at one of the largest African-American clubs in the UK – Gullivers – delivering the soulsonic disco funk that had be driven into the Graham Gold signature. Simultaneously bypassing the early nineties rave scene through his Gulliver dedication, alongside a wife “who kind of thought I shouldn’t be clubbing it anyway”, Gold’s style continued on in natural progression; from Nervous and DJ International to Glam and Spooky. “It was just like playing ‘Strictly’ and ‘Nervous’ in the eighties was a logical progression from playing disco in the seventies.”
Evidently, with time, Gold’s style has become increasingly hard to define. From the early nineties hip-hop and broken beats to the inception of progressive house in 1992, thrown down with the harder edged trance sounds of latter years and hybridised with the blues, soul, funk and groove of previous escapades. “I’d like to say my style is Graham Gold style. I really do believe that people should get a bit of break-beat, a bit of tech-house and a bit of everything in there. At Peach, three o’clock in the morning, if I come out and just played like three or four breaks tunes I got fifteen hundred kids going mad with glowsticks, but it’s not what they’re used to, well they don’t get it at other clubs. When I play everywhere else I do have to be careful, but I do try and fit in and make it my sound so they know they’ve heard Graham Gold; you can’t get away with it everywhere.”
Graham Gold has, however, gotten away with it on more than one occasion, with the commencement of his Kiss FM radio slot – BPM and Club Nation in the early nineties, not to mention the co-promoted night ‘Peach’ at Camden and his proud label and artist management – ‘Good:As’ – co-owned with partner in crime Giles Sawney; with the label being one of the first exponents to pick up Holland riser Ferry Corsten and Tiesto in the UK, further endorsing the cross-pollination of sounds evident in Graham Gold’s work to date. At present Gold intends to continually spread his sound, opening new label moniker – Relatif – with his eighteen year old son who has “had five years of music teaching, two years of music tech course… all he wants to do is be a DJ.” While previous years have proved Gold to be facilitated in the studio, remixing some of the dons of dance namely Carl Cox and Shawn Christopher, on the side Graham is now working on a new project of his own, waiting eagerly for Pulse’s remix to filter through its initial stages.
After all this Graham Gold, at the end of the day, is all about coming together, moving the dance floor and having a righteous old laugh. “I just like to say ‘these records made me rock or made me go what the hell is this, this is awesome’ and that’s what I try to get over in the music… I may flavour the set with three or four records that I know people know, but at the same time I get off on hearing new music. When I’m checking out everything at home some tracks make me go ‘Oh my god, oh my god I can’t wait to play this because it will take the roof off!’”
And as for Australia, well, “I’m there already in my heart, I’m looking forward to it so much I just can’t tell you!”
Graham Gold plays Summadayze at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl on January 1st 2003 in Melbourne; Sunburnt Xmas at Bondi Beach on December 25th in Sydney.
