Holy good christ that was a show and a half. Public Enemy are the latest in the line of acts doing the 'Don't Look Back' thing whereby they choose one of their classic albums and play it in full from start to finish. And while I would have personally preferred to see PE doing 'Fear of a Black Planet' it was always going to be 'It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back' if it was going to be any of their back cat. And so it was.
But first, a nod to the warm up acts: Edan was aces, I only saw the last half of his set due to bastard traffic but what I saw was wicked and included him donning a wig and dedicating a tune to "all the old bitches out there, all the over 70s" and also performing a nifty scratch routine with a theramin.
Anti Pop Consortium were a bit too far out there for my tastes, a bit too much cleverer-than-thou beatmaking and flow but lacked the funk I crave in my hip hop. My mates who are big fans said that it blew them away though so who am I to opine on such things?
Kool Keith was... well, Kool Keith. He's mad as shit, wore a sparkly scarf which looked like it was made of tinsel and actually performed a load of songs rather than just turn up and ramble insanity at the crowd. So fair play.
The Bomb Squad played an hour of straight up dubstep tunes which I did quite enjoy as they were bass monsters and ripped the speakers apart but I still maintain that it was a bad choice of music to play as a warm up to Public Enemy as it's just so slow. They seemed to realise that the crowd weren't as into it as they had hoped because a couple of times Keith Shocklee stopped the music, came to the front and ranted at the crowd about this being "music for young people, it's the future" and how "it came from your fucking country, motherfuckers!" I think the mistake was to presume that simply because dubstep is really popular in the underground clubs in Hoxton and New York that it would be a good idea to play a full hour of it to a venue full of people who paid money to see Public Enemy perform an album that's twenty years old. But hey, I'm just being picky here as I think the set was good, just not suited for the crowd.
BUT ANYWAY.
If you know 'Nation of Millions' at all then you'll know that it has loads of live bits recorded from a Public Enemy performance at Brixton Academy in 1987 when they were over on the Def Jam tour opening up for Run DMC and the Beastie Boys (I think I'm correct in saying that Pop Will Eat Itself opened up the whole show and were booed offstage by the hardcore rap fans). And so, I did wonder if they would get Dave Pearce (yes, that Dave Pearce) to come onstage and recreate the opening introduction to the album but alas he must have been busy playing shit house records to idiots elsewhere.
We did get a big show intro though, Flav's voice booming out over the PA with lights and band members assembling onstage and as soon as the "LONDON, ENGLAND.... CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED!" bit came through both Flav and Chuck literally bounced onto stage to the huge drum and bass apocalypse of 'Bring The Noise' and at this point, the crowd went apeshit. You've never seen so many 30-something white boys in clothes a size too big for them look so damn happy.
They ran through the whole album, the biggies of course like 'Rebel Without A Pause' and 'Don't Believe The Hype' but also included "filler" tracks like 'Show Em What You Got' and 'Terminator X To The Edge of Panic' (even though Terminator wasn't there any more and is still raising ostriches on a farm somewhere in the USA). It was all a real treat, each new track sounding fresh and HUGE - songs like 'She Watch Channel Zero' and 'Night of the Living Baseheads' are still stone cold classics and still imbued with all of the polemic and rage which they contained twenty years ago. Sure times have changed, people have found different things to rail against in their songs and artists have gone many different directions but the sheer fury in the lyrics and the beats on this album are still immense.
Once they finished the whole of the album we were treated to a mini Greatest Hits set before they had to stop for curfew so we had Welcome To The Terrordome, Fight The Power, Can't Truss It, Shut Em Down, By The Time I Get To Arizone, Son of a Bush, Public Enemy No 1, and possibly some more I've forgotten.
I came out of the venue sweating like a proverbial and grinning like a loon. Fucking brilliant.
