‘Marketing geniuses’ may not be the first phrase that springs to mind when you think of Goldie Lookin Chain, but consider the evidence. It’s achievement enough that GLC’s ‘patois’ – slang words like ‘safe’, ‘clart’ and ‘spa’, for example – has become an everyday part of the English language. Add to that the way Goldie Lookin Chain have lifted chavdom out of the gutter and elevated it to a new level of coolness that even the trendiest student wants to imitate. And then there’s the GLC website; hidden away somewhere they have an über-groovy, all-singing, all-dancing Flash site but it just doesn’t suit them, so instead they stick with the version that’s so lo-tech it looks like a 12 year old’s school IT project. It won’t win any design awards, but in terms of brand consistency it’s right up there with the greats.
Take it from me: Brand GLC is one of music’s greatest marketing successes of recent years.
With their propensity for swearing, drug references and general unpredictability, Goldie Lookin Chain might not have been the safest – no pun intended - booking for a regular slot on the new XFM South Wales radio station, and certainly not for the BBC’s highest profile annual live extravaganza. However, such is the popularity of the GLC – and such is the power of the brand – that the night before our interview Rhys and Eggsy made a special appearance on Children in Need, teaching the Welsh local news team to rap.
So, how did it go?
Rhys: “It was alright, a unique opportunity to interact with people like Jamie Owen. He’s awesome. Then they have these little girls as well what present it.”
Loo: “Is that Lucy Cohen?”
“Yeah, Lucy Cohen Owen,” says Rhys. “She’s hyper nervous about everything. I nearly got a lift home off her but then she realised…”
Egg: “She sacked it off.”
Rhys: “They’re lovely lovely types. We had a nice time with them, we just got drunk really and got a picture of Eggy wanking off a dalek.”
Loo: “Did you wank the plunger or the stick?”
Egg: “Rhys was on the plunger side, I was on the stick side.”
“I didn’t touch the plunger,” says Rhys. “I thought that would be tantamount to…”
“Robot rape,” Eggsy finishes.
Loo: “What would a dalek jizz?”
Egg: “Castrol GTX innit, naturally.”
“Castrol GTX everywhere, all over the audience,” says Rhys. “That was amazing, we got to stand there and look confused and angry, and you were like that” – Rhys strikes a pose for Egg – “it was good yeah.”
Egg: “And then we finished, and then we came home.”
“We drank booze on Pudsey Bear,” Rhys reveals. “Well, not on Pudsey Bear. But you know what I mean, Children in Need booze, and we got two cars out of Children in Need as well.”
“Yeah, we got a taxi home,” says Egg.
“It’s disgusting really,” says Rhys. “The whole thing is disgusting, it’s a prestige thing. Terry Wogan’s there wearing a tent and he’s Britain’s biggest man, probably drunk off his head, and he takes these special pills so that he can drink and they bring him back down again.”
Loo: “Are you going to be reciprocating with the newsreaders, reading the news in the near future?”
Rhys: “Oh God, no!”
There are in fact some photos on the Goldie Lookin’ Chain website of Rhys and Egg dressed as newsreaders, sat at the news desk.
Rhys: “Egg, you looked really wicked, you looked really good. You looked like a newsreader. I looked like an alcoholic undertaker. I can get them in a church but I can’t tell what state they’ll be in when they get there.”
Egg: “As long as it’s not an open casket it’s an alright funeral. Imagine you had an open casket funeral and your wife had died, and the alcoholic undertaker, right, the casket’s open, but it’s open at the head end but her legs are coming out and it’s just her vadge and legs. That’d be shocking, wouldn’t it?”
Loo: “What, naked? That’s not nice!”
Egg: “But that’s how bad the alcoholic undertaker is; he’s just like, ‘well, she’s in…’”
Rhys: “If Debbie McGee dies and Paul Daniels has a funeral for her, do you reckon he’ll try and saw her in half? And then put her back together again?”
Egg: “And then go: ‘Oh-ho’…”
Rhys: “They always present the coffin – ‘cos they’d have a person in the coffin wiggling their legs – but they’d never open it up so you could see all the blood and stuff pouring out. And that’s the bit you always wanted to see.”
Egg: “My granddad did it.”
Rhys: “If they did that… he did what?!”
Egg: “My granddad used to do it. He was in the Magic Circle and he used to saw people in half, which is quite cool. But he died before I met him.”
Rhys: “He died before he could saw you in half!”
Egg: “He ended up in the coffin and there was no-one to cut him in half.”
Rhys: “That was in Egypt, was it?”
Egg: “No, it was in this country. When he died a lot of his magic tricks got split up among the family and my old man never got any of them.”
Rhys: “He did, he got a saw.”
Egg: “Yeah, which is not much of a magic trick really, is it?”
Rhys: “A saw alone doth not make a magic trick.” He points at my notepad. “So, what’s this you’ve got written down here then?”
Egg: “Yeah, let’s have some questions.”
(continues below)
I tell them that what’s on my pad is a mixture of questions and notes I’ve made about the GLC website; I went on it last night for the first time in ages and found there’s a lot of new stuff since the last time I was there.
Egg: “Have you seen the stories yet? Mysty’s stories? The stories are wicked because Mysty wrote them when he was 10 or 11, found the exercise book again and we just recorded what he’d written.”
Even the cautionary tale about drugs? He wrote those when he was a kid?
“He wrote that when he was a kid,” Egg confirms. “It was nuts. He got the book and we were looking at the book and it was hilarious – what’s so funny about it is that he wrote them when he was a kid, and the references to drugs in it are fucking hilarious. When you realise a kid has written it it’s fucking great.”
I tell them that one of my favourite features on the site is Gordon Ramesses’ Wreckhead Recipes. That’s one that I hadn’t noticed before… how long has that been there?
“He’s been on there a while, Ramesses,” says Egg. “Every now and then these little things just pop up that go on there, you know what I mean?”
Rhys: “I was living in Brixton for a while, and I was learning how to do sound engineering. I didn’t have a lot of money at the time so what you do is you try to get little bits of other peoples’ food… there were seven people living in this house, and you try to get a little bit of their food, to try and make a meal.”
Egg: “Combining the shit in your cupboard, really.”
Rhys: “Yeah. So whatever you had left in the cupboards you’d try to make a meal out of, so that’s how Gordon Ramesses came about.”
Egg: “Gordon Ramesses, he’s Egyptian, hehe…”
Rhys: “If you do have bare cupboards, then you can effectively get a meal together.”
What happened to the hi-tech site?
Rhys: “A lot of peoples’ computers couldn’t handle it. It was running at what was it, 500 gigabongles?”
Egg: “68 gigabytes per millisecond, which is a lot in computer talk. You need an ISDN line and not a lot of people can get these ISDN lines in, so…”
Are you reciting that parrot fashion, Egg, or do you actually know this?
Egg: “I work in IT when I’m not doing the band, so I know a lot about computers. Like for example” – he points at Rhys’ phone, which is ringing – “that’s an incoming call on his phone. I know a lot about computers.”
I’m not convinced. What exactly is it that Egg does in IT?
Egg: “Installation, software programmer, hardware technician… I do it all.”
Do you work in PC World?
Egg: “No, I actually have my own firm, called Computer… Inc… IT… Solutions. Firms come to me… Hodder and Stoughton the publishers come to me ‘cos they’re having problems installing their servers, so they come to me and I do it – it’s just something I do on the side.”
I struggle to stifle my giggles – I just don’t know whether to believe him or not…
Egg: “It’s true! I’ve got a van. I had to get it serviced. Some kids found out I was in the GLC as well and they graffiti’d ‘GLC’ all over it. ‘GLC fuck truck’ they sprayed all over the side.”
Rhys: “’Cos you had a personalised number plate.”
Egg: “That’s right, ‘EGGS1’, which probably gave it away. But it’s just a passion.”
Rhys: “Started off as a hobby, turned into a passion.”
Egg: “Yeah that’s it. And it’s… lust for life with computers.”
Rhys points at his all-singing, all-dancing new phone. “That’s like a computer.”
Egg: “Yeah, that’s one of the first computers. The abacus is the first computer.”
Rhys disagrees: “The brain was the first computer, then the abacus.”
Egg: “Well really, the brain was the brain and the computer was the abacus.”
Rhys turns to me and Loo: “Do you know anything about nano technology and quantum theory?”
Ooh yeah, loads…
He fills us in. “They reckon within 10 years they’ll be able to make a quantum computer that will be able to do more calculations in a second than there are calculations in the universe.”
Egg: “At what point do we give artificial intelligence the same rights as a human?”
Rhys: “I’ve seen I, Robot.”
Egg: “At what point does the robot become a personality? If it can feel pain, surely it can feel emotion.”
Rhys: “Think of it like this: go home, watch Millennium Man with Robin Williams, and make some notes.”
Egg: “People might mock it now, but in 10, 15 years…”
“But Millennium Man grew old,” Loo points out.
Egg: “Exactly!”
Rhys: “It doesn’t really matter.”
Loo: “Did he just break down the parts?”
Egg: “I dunno, ‘cos I’ve never actually seen it.”
“I’ve never watched it either,” says Rhys, “but I’d recommend that you two go and watch it and make notes, then probably burn them and never speak to anyone about it ever again.”
Rhys points at an unusually shaped ring that I’m wearing. “What’s that, a portable ashtray?”
It’s a fag rest, I tell him. I can walk around like this – I adopt a kind of Egyptian dance pose.
Loo: “You can walk like an Egyptian, or a teapot.”
Rhys: “Egyptian – you’d know all about that, Egg.”
Egg: “I am Egyptian as well.”
I am again unconvinced. Is he really?
Rhys: “That’s why he’s into cats.”
Egg: “And Gordon Ramesses, that’s another… but not many people get the connection. He’s called Gordon Ramesses because of my Egyptian blood. The Jones Girls, Nights over Egypt – one of my favourite songs.”
Rhys: “A lot of people have written songs about Egypt or Egyptian stuff. Madness did a song called Night Boat to Cairo, the Jones Girls did the Egyptian thing, there was a rave tune, there was The Bangles… Egyptian music is massive. Mesopotamia by the B52s. Loads of Egyptian music.”
The boys seem a little obsessed with this Egyptian thing. Is that going to be your new direction, Egyptian music?
Rhys: “No, God no. That would be stupid.”
Egg: “That would just be ridiculous. Are you taking the piss now?”
Rhys: “Egyptian rap? Whatever next?”
Well why not? You’ve got the newsreader rap...
Egg: “Got another question?”
Loo: “Did you visit any of the Sŵn gigs over the weekend?”
Rhys: “I did, I went to Callaghans. I went there and it was empty so I left. And then there was another one in Café Europa and it was really busy and I couldn’t get in so I didn’t bother. And then I went home ‘cos I thought ‘this is rubbish’. Adam [from the band] did a show. He said by the end of it he got the crowd going.”
Egg: “He said afterwards he was walking round like he was really important. ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ve just done a show, man’, which I thought was quite funny. You know what he’s like. Fucking hilarious.”
Rhys: “He can be… God bless him, but sometimes… he gets confused sometimes. Let’s just say that sometimes his front room gets a bit dusty, and in the mornings they have to clean it up. He goes to parties and it gets dusty.”
Egg: “Dusty.”
I imagine it must be pretty chaotic when you all get together in the same place.
Rhys: “I can’t remember the last time we were all together in the same place. Have you heard of Skype? We do Skype and telephone links mostly now; we do a conference call once a month.”
That’s very hi-tech…
Rhys: “If people can’t turn up they film themselves on their mobile phone and they email it in or send an MMS message, so you have a picture of them and then the audio. It’s difficult now, because Billy’s got like a fruit farm down in… Surrey?”
Egg: “He’s got a fruit farm in Surrey but he does installation art. The last thing he did, he hired a building in East London, got a load of smoke machines, opened the windows and just had smoke coming out of a building on Brick Lane.”
Rhys: “It was in a building called The Egg. So between that and his fruit farming… he’s never really out of the fruit farm to be honest with you.”
Egg: “But he is into all this installation art – I find it a bit weird.”
Rhys: “Billy’s working on this thing with tyres now. He knows a lot of people with farms, and farmers, for some reason, have a lot of tyres. I don’t know where they get them from.”
Egg: “He’s getting a load of tyres, piling them up so they’re the same shape as a submarine, and he’s getting Yellow Submarine by The Beatles… he’s gonna play it over a stereo but he replaces the word ‘yellow’ with the word ‘black’, so it goes: ‘We all live in a BLACK submarine’. I just don’t understand installation art.”
And people will pay to see this, will they?
Rhys: “Well not yet, but this is what he thinks.”
So he’s going to win the Turner prize, is he?
Egg: “Yeah, it’s all a bit weird.”
Rhys: “Billy tried to run a bed and breakfast as well, but that went tits up so now he lives in this massive house on his own. Stupid bugger. He’s almost like the entrepreneur of it all. He’s got two sides to him – the business side and the artistic side. Mysty has just got this crazy kind of side to him. You know Barry Bulsara? Killed Jill Dando? Apparently you go into his house and there’s just all this… stuff everywhere. That’s like Mysty’s house. If Jill Dando had been killed in High Cross in Newport, he would’ve been taken into custody, but she wasn’t, so…”
Egg: “That cleared him.”
Rhys: “If you’ve got pictures of you with guns on your own MySpace site, what do you think is gonna happen?”
Egg: “I know loads of people who’ve got pictures of them with guns on MySpace and that’s just stupid.”
Rhys: “If you’ve got pictures of you slashing the throat of a young virgin on your MySpace…”
How could you tell from a photo that she was a virgin?
Egg: “Her hymen was exposed.”
Do you know what one looks like? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one. I can’t remember mine.
Rhys: “I’ve seen a manual.”
Egg: “A friend of mine, there’s pictures of him with guns on the Internet, and there’s a short film he’s made – there’s a dead pigeon hanging off a nail and he goes up to it with a gas powered air gun and shoots it about ten times and shouts “fuck yeah!” – that’s just gonna get him in trouble.”
This is the end of the first part of our exclusive interview with Goldie Lookin Chain. In part two the boys will tell you about the Shitbag 2000, Mysty’s broken cock and Eggsy’s fondness for fancy dress. If you want to be notified when part two has been published, either add us at MySpace to receive bulletins, or join the WBW News Yahoo Group. If you can’t be arsed, just keep checking back here, innit? |
