Inner City Life

"Inner City Life" is a portion of the album's first track, "Timeless: Inner City Life/Pressure/Jah", which is a 21-minute opus. The song fuses the breakbeats and basslines common in jungle with orchestral textures and soul vocals by Diane Charlemagne. It has been described as a ghetto-blues ballad, 'a yearning reverie of sanctuary from "inner-city pressure"'.[3] The track features a sample from Ike Turner's song "Funky Mule", from his 1969 album A Black Man's Soul.[4]

"Inner City Life" peaked at No. 49 on the UK Singles Chart in 1994. In 1995, it re-entered the chart, peaking at No. 39. "Inner City Life" was performed live at The Word[5] on Channel 4 and it was included on the soundtrack to the film Trainspotting (Trainspotting 2: Music from the Motion Picture, Vol. 2). At the time of the release, the single didn't receive much radio play, according to Goldie. In a 2008 interview, he said:

It’s still a good b-line after all this time. The thing I was kind of mad about was it never got radio play. No one would ever want to play it on the radio. Rinse FM or Kiss FM would not play the record and I found it very difficult, because when you look at it conventionally, it’s a good record. But then it was completely out of sorts and I found that very difficult as far as "Timeless" was concerned. "Timeless" was made first and then "Inner City Life" came out of it and I always found it very difficult that no one wanted to play it on radio and didn't want to give it the air time.[6]

Andy Kellman from AllMusic described the song as "emotive".[7]

Rupert Howe from Muzik wrote,

This is a masterpiece of melancholy, with all the dark/light, bass/melody contrasts in jungle thrown into kaleidoscopic relief. The spectral strings move disturbingly in and out of focus, the low frequencies seem to open up underneath you, and the eerie mutations of Diane Charlemagne's vocals float in the ether, utterly lost in space. Emotionally, it's all over the place - joyful one minute, intense enough to suck the daylight out of you the next. Anything to make you feel more alive."[8]

Charles Aaron from Spin noted,

...Goldie has been doing time for a couple of years in London's hardcore techno and jungle scene where insanely speedy breakbeats mixed with goofy vocal snatches run on endless loop. But with "Inner City Life", he inhabits another realm altogether. Like Marvin Gaye ruminating while rushing, he fades a breathtaking vocal by Diane Charlemagne (plus muted trumpet) in and out of ethereal beats. Fraught with dub's tensely apocalyptic vision and techno's hopeful twitch, this is finally the sound of an urban pulse that acknowledges both black and white expressions and tensions, and the feeling of coming up, going down, and needing to keep dancing forever. No other jungle I've heard has sounded like this. Or any other dance music, for that matter."[9]

The music video of "Inner City Life" was directed by Mike Lipscombe.[10] The video has a sepia tone.

In 1996, Mixmag ranked "Inner City Life" at No. 34 in its list of the best singles of 1996, "Mixmag End of Year Lists: 1996".[11]

David Crawford called the track "epic" in the 2010 book 10,001 Songs You Must Hear…, adding that it "boasted swirling strings, a clattering break beat that evolved throughout the track, and Diane Charlemagne's sweet, soulful vocals on top."[12]

In 2013, Complex included it in their list of "The 15 Best Songs From the Electronica Era". They noted, "Chock full of soul, precision breakbeat edits, and strings, "Inner City Life" helped let the mainstream know that drum & bass was more than the chin-stroking dark sounds in the corner, and was more than capable of making tracks that could move you emotionally."[13] Same year the song was ranked No. 30 in Mixmag's list of "50 Greatest Dance Tracks of All Time".[14]

In 2018, Time Out listed the track at No. 23 in their "50 best '90s songs" list, adding, "Fusing jungle’s intricate breakbeats, sub bass and unbridled futurism with heart-aching soul soundscapes and the lamenting voice of Diane Charlemagne, this beautiful-yet-brutal piece of sonic art switched an entire generation on to the power of jungle and D&B."[15]

• German jazz band [Re:jazz] covered "Inner City Life" on their 2004 album Point of View.
• English rapper Wiley sampled "Inner City Life" on his song "Need to Be" from the 2008 album See Clear Now.
• Aaron Jerome and his musical project Sbtrkt sampled the song on the song "Timeless", in 2009.
• It was sampled on "Strictly (Kassem Mosse 'Need to Feel edit' remix)" by Commix in 2010.
• British band Hackney Colliery Band covered "Inner City Life" on their album Common Decency in 2013.
• British DJ Om Unit sampled "Inner City Life" on his song "Parallel" from the 2014 album Inversion.
• Goldie remastered the song in 2017.[25]