
As incongruous gigs go, this takes some beating. Here is the indomitable Chuck D of Public Enemy, a towel over his face, waving his microphone around like a lightsaber as though channelling the force. It's a pretty apt move: for 25 years, this dauntless polemicist has operated as a kind of gruff Jedi for social progress, in song and out. His fellow maverick MC Flavor Flav, meanwhile, is spelling out his Twitter handle (it's @FlavorFlav). As ever, a stopped clock swings around his neck. But a chunky wristwatch sits on his arm, in case he really does have to check what time it is. Two hours in their company fly by.
This intimate gig was announced just the other day and sold out instantly. The nine members of this incarnation of PE are set up in a tiny room in a west London recording studio (the room, frisson fans, where Amy Winehouse recorded Back to Black). A small air-con unit labours uselessly in a corner as 100 or so lucky people suck what air there is, having either paid large sums for a ticket, or exerted leverage to get on the guest list. Our phones have been sequestered, because the whole thing is being filmed. No one wants to see footage of people checking their Twitter updates while Public Enemy are bringing the noise. "Lock the doors!" commands Chuck D at one point; his authority is such that you are never quite sure if he is messing or not.
He still has a lot to say. PE's set veers between adored hits like Rebel Without a Pause (from 1988's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back) and latterday tracks, like Get Up Stand Up, off 2012's Most Of My Heroes Still Don't Appear On No Stamp. In between, there are introductions, rants about J Edgar Hoover and holograms, and American football analogies. Chuck D pokes fun at how much everyone paid to get in, and reserves special ribbing about hors d'oeuvres for those in the climate-controlled producer's capsule upstairs. In the bar, there is actually a cocktails menu which riffs on Public Enemy song titles. Among the options are a Believe the Hype amaretto sour, or a Call Me Flava limoncello spritz; it's £8 for one, two for £15.
So why are a quasi-revolutionary African American outfit dedicated to fighting the power doing in the belly of the British music industry, playing to a bunch of entitled Jonahs tiddly on limoncello spritzes? Public Enemy are generating income by leveraging more intimate access to themselves. It's one of the ways of making your legendary status pay when your band's back catalogue is no longer as profitable because some arse put it all on YouTube. Recent PE albums don't sell as well as they once did, although the PE track Harder Than You Think (originally 2007) charted as recently as 2012, having being remixed as background music for the Paralympics. (Chuck D's solo album The Black in Man came out online last week).
Tonight, these rock'n'roll hall of fame inductees are more in band mode than usual. Rick Rubin – now a super-producer, then the guy who ran Def Jam, PE's first home – recalls Chuck D explicitly styling Public Enemy after the Clash. PE have since been called the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Led Zeppelin of hip-hop, although quite why, after 30 years of domination of international pop, hip-hop success still needs to be expressed in terms a sheltered 60-year-old white actuary might understand is a mystery. No comparison really captures the radical novelty, in the mid-to-late 80s, of a campaigning sound system with a security detail and terrific pop tunes. That outfit may have changed a little – the controversial Professor Griff is notably absent – but still thrills. PE's dancers-cum-minders, Security of the 1st World, still bust their paramilitary chic. A drummer provided live breaks while DJ Lord plays the decks (Terminator X retired to farm ostriches).
Guitarist Khari Wynn is a languid band leader in pressed trousers who, at one point, solos with his teeth, Jimi Hendrix style. Bassist Davy DMX plays a six-string that he lends to Flavor Flav for a while: the blues he plays is one of many unexpected interludes in a set that vacillates between chatty bonhomie, raw power and WTF.
Normally, Chuck D is the straight man, and Flav the wild card. Tonight, Flavor Flav solemnly dedicates his performance to everyone suffering in the Crimea, Palestine and Libya and to the abducted Nigerian schoolgirls, while a mischievous Chuck D tries to get a word in edgeways. Soon after, they are in splenetic sync on Don't Believe the Hype as the room, entitled or not, jumps with them.
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