THE work of a Sedgley photographer who helped launch the career of international star Goldie has made it to Moscow.

Musician, artist and actor Goldie, who featured in the James Bond movie The World Is Not Enough went to Russia with love to open an exhibition of images from his early career featuring pictures by Martin Jones.

The exhibition, called Golden Archives: Stairway to Fame, is a collection of pictures taken when Goldie was a breakdancer with Wolverhampton’s B Boys crew and an aspiring graffiti

artist.

Martin Jones was Goldie’s manager from 1984 to 1990 and secured a number of street art commissions for his young protégé including a 40-foot mural for BBC’s Children in Need appeal in 1988.

The show, at the MSK Eastside gallery in the Russian capital was the brainchild of promoter Dimitry Oskes who had booked the star for a DJ set and during research saw images of a similar exhibition from 2010 in Wolverhampton, where Goldie lived during his early career.

Martin Jones said: "I'm amazed and delighted that photos of Goldie's early career have now been seen and appreciated in Russia."

The Stairway to Fame concept was created by Goldie and his crew on the Heathtown estate in Wolverhampton where they painted the walls in stairwells between floors on blocks of flats in a bid to gain recognition from fellow graffiti artists.

The plan worked and people travelled from around the UK to see the Stairway to Fame images, which also became a regular feature of TV documentaries about the street art scene.

Martin Jones’s pictures show how Goldie’s work was recognised internationally when he travelled to New York to meet leading figures on the Hip Hop music scene which had strong links with graffiti art.

The collection also includes a picture of work on a commission to graffiti a West Midland’s bus for an advertising campaign which became popular among young people across the Midlands and was known as Goldie’s bus.