Cultural Life: Goldie, DJ & Producer

(David Sandison)

Music

This week, I've been listening to the Argentine tango composer Astor Piazzolla's "Oblivion", Pat Metheny's new age jazz album First Circle, and Miles Davis' track "Blue in Green" on Kind of Blue. My all-time favourite track is Metheny's "Are You Going With Me?" The key to music is in the arrangement, which is something I learnt from him.

Books

I've been flicking through The Great 'Life' Photographers and Sebastiao Salgado's photo book, Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age. I don't really read books. From time to time I read The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying; I find it fascinating. When you are young you don't really care, but when mortality sets in you start to look at life from another perspective.

Film

I watched Punch-Drunk Love this weekend. Paul Thomas Anderson is one of my favourite directors because his cinematography is big and wide – and the way he puts the story together is fantastic. I also watched Mathieu Kassovitz's film La Haine, starring Vincent Cassel. It is a killer film based on three people who come from an urban background whose lives get torn apart by a gun. British cinema doesn't really turn me on, apart from Shane Meadows – he is spot on...

Theatre/opera

I saw David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow at the Old Vic, starring Kevin Spacey. Anything that guy does is good; he is a disturbingly talented guy and he has done a lot for the arts. He's full-on and that's why I like him. I saw Avenue Q at the Noel Coward Theatre in the West End. It was pretty funny, but I think you have to be of the Sesame Street generation to appreciate it. Opera has never really appealed to me in the same way that the Polish composer Gorecki's androgynous, dark, eerie music has appealed to me. Björk introduced me to his music. I felt connected to it – especially when I heard the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. Opera is a bit like green olives. When you are 15 years old, you don't like them, when you get to 70, you might get a taste for them.

Goldie's new album 'Watch the Ride' is out now on Harmless