Public Enemy, Brixton Academy, 23 May 2008

In a summer of unlikely ’80s comebacks — Shakin’ Stevens, Indiana Jones, the Conservative Party — the return of Public Enemy to perform It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back could be the most intriguing. Questions filled the Brixton Academy air: Could Chuck D’s party-hardy polemic still raise the roof? Would hip-hop’s court jester, Flavor Flav, still deliver the same lemon-faced lunacy? Had the group’s on-stage paramilitaries, S1W, made it past Customs?

It’s been two decades since Public Enemy’s masterpiece shook up the music world, unleashing a funk-filled production style owing something to James Brown and a bumper bag of samples that owed something to, well, just about everyone else. It managed to be a ferocious aural assault on the injustice of Reagan’s America and the perfect house party soundtrack all at once. But the record has never been performed front to back live before and you could sense a packed Academy wondering what kind of a show they was about witness. From the first thunderous beats of Bring The Noise, Public Enemy put pay to the doubters in seismic style. Next up: Don’t Believe The Hype, five minutes of floor-filling funk and one of rap’s high-water marks.

The group were short of their 1988 complement with Terminator X now the world’s only DJ-turned-ostrich farmer and the group’s svengali, Professor Griff, unavoidably detained by US emigration. The absence of Griff — a kind of rapping Alastair Campbell — robbed the night of a militant edge, but the crowd weren’t really here for the politics. They wanted the house party and that’s what they got: each track unleashed with the same furious energy that made Public Enemy such a force of nature. Flavor Flav prowled the stage, all agitated energy, grinning manically to point out that It Takes A Nation Of Millions had recently been voted number one rap record of all-time — “we couldn’t have done it without you, London!”

Flav’s partner-in-rhyme, Chuck D, may be pushing 50 but his fierce flow has as much conviction as ever. No more so than on Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos, a sledgehammer indictment on conscription in the inner cities, given fresh currency by the Iraq war: “They wanted me for their army or whatever/Picture me givin’ a damn, I said never/Here's a land that never gave a damn about a brother like me."

Flav’s giant timepiece showed the album’s 57 minutes elapsing on the last beats of rabble-rousing anthem Party For Your Right To Fight but Public Enemy weren’t finished. More old favourites were dusted off, including Son Of A Bush, Welcome To The Terrordome and He Got Game; there was an impromptu anti-war protest and a stern word from Chuck D not to “let any rappers come here with less than the 90 minute show.” Kanye, Jay-Z — consider yourselves warned.

Indiana Jones And The Crystal Skull

Twenty years on from Indy’s last crusade and the all-action archaeologist is back: a little creakier but still sporting the trademark fedora, whip and wry grin. It’s 1957, the height of the Cold War, and Dr. Jones and his cockney sidekick Mac (Ray Winstone) are bundled from a car at Area 51, a secret military installation in Nevada. They’ve fallen into the hands of Soviet commandos led by Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) — a kind of younger, more fragrant Rosa Klebb — who wants the titular Crystal Skull as a powerful new Soviet weapon and needs Jones’s help getting it.

Several breathless getaways later, Indy hobbles back to campus to find himself at the centre of a McCarthyite witchhunt. Enter motorbiking rebel-with-a-cause, Mutt Williams, a Brando-lite played with assurance by up-and-comer Shia LaBeouf. The tearaway needs Indy’s help too, this time finding his mother and her companion Professor Oxley, held captive on the Amazon. In return he offers clues that could lead to the mythical Peruvian city of El Dorado and the Crystal Skull of Atakor.

The skull is an ancient Mayan artefact with the power to scramble minds and it certainly seems to have done the trick with George Lucas and fellow scriptwriter David Koepp (Carlito’s Way). What follows is a mind-bending concoction of anti-communist monkeys, Tarzan-style vine-swinging, killer ants and improbable waterfall plunges. Even old Indy flame, Marion Ravenwood, makes an appearance… could Indy be Mutt’s father? Could Mac be a double-agent? Do we care?

It’s a strangely uninvolving cocktail not aided by some zestless performances. Harrison Ford turns in his least charismatic Indy, while the usually luminous Blanchett is unconvincing as Spalko, with an accent that seems to alternate between the Kremlin and Cleethorpes. Her outfit of slate grey overalls, black leather gloves and fierce black bob doesn’t help: it’s not easy to ooze menace when you look like a motor mechanic on the way to an S&M party.

Lacking the tension provided by a truly sinister villain, the movie fizzles like a soggy sparkler and the presence of so many big name actors only refracts the storytelling in less interesting directions (does it really take the brilliant John Hurt to play Oxley, a mumbling cross between Professor Calculus and Worzel Gummidge?). More’s the pity because the first 40 minutes offer plenty of fun and glimpses of the Indy we know and love — a madcap motorbike chase through academia delivers him delightfully into, and then out of, the clutches of the Soviets — and a scene in a small town that turns out to be an H-Bomb test site is vintage Spielberg: funny, ghoulish and a perfect motif for the terror of the atomic age.

Sadly, though, where the first Indy films paid loving homage to matinée flicks of the ’30s and ’40s, this just feels like a money-spinning exercise. Gone at the smart lines and sharp wit, replaced with nonsensical blathering about ‘the space between space’ and an ending that gives the word ludicrous a bad name. It’s time to leave Indy to the cobwebs: this franchise has become a relic.

Rating: **

The Spleen-osphere

This is my first foray into the world of blogging and I feel like a lamb chop in a lions’ den.

Cyberspace is chock full of sociopaths. People whose mouths foam like an overpoured bubble bath and live in a state of almost spiritual rage. Reading newspaper blogs, I get a strong visual image of the reluctant hack committing opinions to the blogsphere with all the enthusiasm of a Great War tommy clambering out of a trench. Sure enough, moments later, the vitriol arrives. Anonymous, web lunatics with names like ‘Buffalo Bill’ and ‘Stalker66′ funnel months-worth of life's frustrations into a few lines of Homeric rage.

During a travel journalism class at the LSJ a month or so ago, I asked our tutor about blogging and mentioned Max Gogarty. Max, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, was 19 and preparing for a Gap year trip to India. The travel editor of Guardian Unlimited in his finite wisdom asked Max to post blogs during his trip…he agreed, submitting his first on the eve of his departure. It was full of the kind of enthusiasm and navel-gazing you'd expect from a 19-year old. BIG mistake.

A day later the blog became a chasm: you needed to scroll for 5 minutes to reach the bottom of the bile. Most was aimed at Max, some at the travel editor and plenty at his Dad who had written for the Guardian and was accused of nepotism most foul. A sample post: “I get up every morning at 6am, haul myself onto the tube to travel to my godforsaken job, where I sit for 9 hours before heading home for gruel and bed, only to repeat it all the next day. Can I have a blog too?” — that was one of the more supportive posts.

I hadn't realised my tutor was Paul Gogarty, Max’s dad. He didn’t mind talking about it but looked harrowed. He’d had nothing to do with Max’s commission but said he had plenty to do to get his son to come back again. He also posted a piece on the site a day or two later, begging posters to go easy on his son and pointing out that he'd had nothing to do with Max's commission.

…of course, that’s the extreme end of the blog spectrum and lots of comment is not at all pathological. But, to paraphrase the old aphorism, it ain’t hard to tell between an anonymous poster with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.