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.
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