Like most prisons, HMP Nottingham is a forbidding place with high walls and spartan cells — the sort of place where Goldie, the drum’n’bass star who was abandoned at the age of three and brought up in foster homes, once expected to end up.
Not the way it finally happened, although when the metal-toothed musician, artist, actor and friend of Prince Harry passed through the security gates last week it was to visit his 23-year-old son, Jamie, who is serving life for stabbing a man to death in a fight between rival gangs.
“It was soul-destroying,” he says. “I tried to make him smile, talk over some memories. It’s no good waving a stick. What’s done is done. He’s sorry and he’s going to try to get an education in there and he’s taking time to reflect.”
The visit felt surreal in a number of ways: “I was signing bloody autographs for warders. They were like, ‘What are you doing here?’ ”
For in recent years Goldie’s life has taken a turn. He hasn’t cracked the Establishment, exactly, but in his latest reality TV venture, Goldie’s Band: By Royal Appointment, he turns a group of musically talented but disadvantaged youngsters into a band slick enough to play its first gig at Buckingham Palace.
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Harry, whom he met at the Wireless festival in Hyde Park a couple of summers ago, hosted the event, joking that his principal job would be to “keep Goldie in his seat”.
“I said, ‘How much do you pay the cleaners in this place, mate? It’s huge’,” says Goldie. “He told me he used to run up and down the corridors when he was a kid. It made me think about my life at the same age. One of the days I remember best at the children’s home was the silver jubilee, the Union Jack flying, the excitement and people pushing tables together for a street party.”
Goldie, born Clifford Price, was abandoned by his mother Margaret, a Scottish pub singer, at the age of three. His Jamaican father, Clement, left the family shortly after he was born. He grew up the classic angry young man — “driven by demons” — feeling abandoned and misunderstood, that nobody cared for him and he would care for nobody in return. His reflections on “breaking the chain” of life in the underclass are instructive.
What he lacked in material advantage and nurture he made up for in energy and an artistic talent recognised by Mr Hurst, his art teacher. “He was my angel. He didn’t realise the impact he’d had on me until we met recently. I don’t believe the old thing about those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach; he’d painted and played in a band, but he’d decided to exchange riches for wealth, helping young people find their own talent, and that’s what I am trying to do now.”
The young people he sought for his band are not the type whose talent shines on The X Factor, which Goldie despises: “Fake drama, the cameras zooming in on the tears, I hate that, it’s emotion in a can.”
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Many of the youngsters he has discovered have endured trauma. Lester, a folk singer who grew up in Luton, witnessed a murder when he was a teenager, which triggered a depression that ended in a suicide attempt. Natalie, a beautiful young blues singer, suffers from schizophrenia and writes in her songs about the strange figures conjured up by her condition. Finn, a Scots guitarist, has struggled with his mother’s mental health problems since he was young.
Like Goldie, 45, they have learnt to express pain through music. “This is the most extraordinary British talent, all hidden under the radar,” he says.
“For me, music was a way of giving vent to my feelings. If I didn’t have anguish and tragedy to scream about I wouldn’t be what I am. It took me a long time to swallow that bitter pill but I realise it is true now. And what has happened to these kids has shaped them, too.”
All the more ironic, then, that the youngster he could not help transcend a difficult background was his own son.
Jamie was born after a brief relationship with Michelle, whom Goldie met when he left care. “She wanted a kid. That was it,” he says simply.
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“Being 18, when you leave care, you’re in your first flat, you don’t know how to look after yourself, you don’t know what to do. You meet a girl and you have a kid. That’s what I saw as I was growing up.
“I never said: I’m going to be your husband. I said I wasn’t going to be there. I wanted to go to America to find my dad. So I didn’t spend as much time as I should have done with Jamie. I didn’t see him until he was five, although he came down to London on regular visits. I didn’t know how to be a father. I hold my hands up as far as parenting’s concerned.”
He has four children by four women and is now married to Mika, an artist he met in Japan. They live in a comfortable country house in Hertfordshire, filled with paintings, “the sort of house I always dreamt of as a child”.
Goldie loves his vegetable patch, walking the dogs in the woods and playing music very, very loud: “I spent years being angry, thinking: why me? I went to America, like my dad. I had lots of birds, like my dad, but eventually I broke the chain. I got hold of myself and thought: this stops right here.”
An unexpected success on Maestro, the BBC series, three years ago brought him to mainstream attention when he conducted a concert orchestra. He was back conducting — and speaking — in London last month at an offshoot of the annual TED conference, which brings together ideas from technology, entertainment and design. Ten days ago he played four gigs in Miami and now he has an art show in South Korea.
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“I tell these kids I’ve been working with: don’t chase success, follow your heart,” he says. “I didn’t make a record until I was 29 but this is me, having my time now.”
Goldie’s Band: By Royal Appointment is on BBC2 at 7.30pm on Saturday