Somewhere in New York it’s the morning after the night before, and a surprisingly quiet and reticent Adam Yauch is no doubt looking for some respite from a summer that's been punishing by the standards of even the most hard-living bands on the planet.
As one third of The Beastie Boys – arguably the most block-rocking, body-moving and rump-shaking act to be found anywhere in the cosmos – Yauch, aka MCA, and his partners in crime, Adrock and Mike D, have been leaving their inimitable mark on festivals across Europe all summer.
At the end of this month they’ll be heading to the Electric Picnic for a penultimate festival appearance, before heading to London for some sold-out shows, and finally wrapping up proceedings at Bestival on the Isle of Wight. It’s been a long trek by anyone’s standards, and the question isn’t so much "Are you ready for The Beastie Boys?" as "Are The Beastie Boys ready for you?"
Yauch is clearly in recovery mode, sounding tired and drained after a slew of homecoming gigs in their native New York. The question is begging to be asked, so with buttock-clenching embarrassment I ask him when was the last time he got no sleep ‘til Brooklyn?
“Well we just actually did get to sleep. We played in Brooklyn this last Thursday, and it was the first time we’ve actually played there after a lifetime of not sleeping,” says Yauch, seemingly as surprised at that fact as many of us will be. “I’ve been asleep the last couple of nights. It’s been amazing.”
Priorities have changed drastically for The Beastie Boys in recent years: still as provocative as ever, but by their own admission, without the obnoxiousness for which they became known in the mid-’80s, The Boys have become men. Family men (Yauch relates how nice it is to have his wife and daughter on tour with him). Sophisticated men (they take to the stage these days in sharp suits). Wiser men (the hair is beginning to betray a little greyed erudition, and the eyes tell the stories of a lifetime of late nights). If anything though, the music is getting fiercer, and the impact of the live shows is getting more incendiary than a pyromaniac in a fireworks factory.
It’s still a far cry from the brazen punks who first crash-landed over here on tour with Madonna almost 20 years ago, with a giant inflatable phallus and caged go-go dancers.
“I think in that period of time we were probably just a little more into getting a rise out of people,” explains Yauch, a man revelling in the knowledge of hindsight. “When we were on tour with Madonna, we would just try to get booed every night. If we got booed we would say something obnoxious, whereas I think we probably focus on the music a little more now.”
And how. The Beastie Boys have been playing two sets at nearly every festival they’ve hit this summer, and the Electric Picnic is no exception.
Having dropped the funk-dipped, groove-laden handbook for hipsters that is The Mix Up earlier this year, MCA, Adrock and Mike D seem intent not to be seen as two-dimensional hip-hop godfathers, instead showing their appreciation of the more nuanced and subtle end of their spectrum of influences.
Still, these guys know better than most that the party ethic reigns supreme, and that a festival crowd wants to primarily get its rocks off first and its chin stroked second.
“We’re calling them regular shows and gala events,” says Yauch wryly by way of clarification. “I think one way to look at it is that in the regular shows we’re playing more of the singles. It’s for a more regular audience. The other stuff is more B-sides and album cuts that we’re doing at the other shows.”
The regular shows are everything except what their name would suggest: a rampaging assortment of rocking hip-hop animals that changed forever the face of popular music.
You ain’t seen nothing until you’ve seen The Beastie Boys say something. Watching a crowd turning into a churning sea of flailing bodies during songs like ‘Sabotage’, ‘Intergalactic’, or ‘Triple Trouble’ to name but a few really should be something you throw yourself into at every given opportunity. The chaos that tends to ensue is inexplicable even to Yauch himself.
“Sometimes we’ll play a show somewhere and people seem to know mostly the first album. You can sense it on the stage, but I’m not quite sure why or what goes on with that. When we were in Hungary they were definitely expecting stuff from the first album.”
When the album in question is Licensed To Ill which spawned classics like ‘Fight For Your Right’, ‘Brass Monkey’, and ‘No Sleep Til Brooklyn’, you’d suspect even a particularly sedate cemetery would be feeling it. However, for all the boisterous explosiveness of the regular shows, the gala events and the material contained therein seem to be something of great importance to the band. When their instrumental album The Mix-Up was released earlier this year, it was undeniably a disappointment to those eager for more unique Beastie Boys beats and rhymes, but for those aware of the group’s love of more farm-fed and organic sounds, it was like the arrival of a long-delayed gift which has been in construction as far back as 1992’s Check Your Head.
“When we started into The Mix-Up, the fact that we started with the instruments was probably just a little bit of a reaction to the fact that we had done the last record (To The 5 Boroughs) with programming and drum machines,” Yauch reveals. “We started with the instruments, and recorded a bunch of stuff and it sounded kind of cool and instrumental, so we started discussing the idea of finishing the record like that. We didn’t exactly go into it with that intention, but it certainly did end up that way I guess.”
For all of Yauch’s modesty regarding the album, and the belly-aching of many a reviewer demanding their 12 tracks of bona fide rap, The Mix-Up is illustrative of what keeps genius acts at the top of their game: reinvention. It also goes some way to explaining why the gala event at the Electric Picnic will be one of the must-see sets of the festival.
Don’t worry though, the firebrands of old haven’t quite settled down to a life of pipe and slippers yet, and when they do unleash their considerable arsenal to an expectant and hit-hungry crowd, The Beastie Boys will be showing us all that they have evolved from keg-sucking party crashers to insightful and lucid musicians of great insight, as could be seen on their highly charged response to a world gone mad, To The 5 Boroughs.
While The Beastie Boys have been long-time vocal critics of the current American administration, they’re not about to use their political credentials to score popularity points.
“People hate Bush so much that if you say something you’re probably bound to get a cheer. It really depends on the motivation of the artist, and how it comes across. I guess in a way it’s easy, especially in Europe.”
Clearly this committed environmentalist is more than aware of the fondness of some musicians for jumping on the bandwagon. He continues by saying: “I remember when Bush was up for re-election for a second term, and we would talk about it on stage, we would get booed in some cities. But that was kind of another time. I think a lot more people are sick of Bush, I mean especially in Europe.”
These days The Beastie Boys are still the original hell-raisers, but more incongruous than ever. They have the best party tunes on God’s green earth, but recent lyrical subject matter has taken in everything from the American failure to sign the Kyoto Agreement to international terrorism. The years may be rolling on, but if anything they’re upping the work rate, as their touring pattern this summer testifies. As they get older and the world around them gets crazier, they get more at ease with it, and more hopeful.
Still, this is to be expected from a group that always managed to meld so many disparate influences and sounds into their work with such apparent ease. As Yauch tells of his musical education as a teenager in the Downtown clubs of New York, he clarifies how he was influenced simultaneously by the emerging punk and hip-hop scenes. “I think in a lot of ways, I look at them as being similar forms of music. It’s music with a similar intention from two different cultures,” he states.
This, perhaps more than anything, explains the secret behind The Beastie Boys’ success. There is a universality to much of their work that appeals to music fans right across the spectrum; they are the in-house band of a generation, satisfying all of our needs and expressing the mood of the time with more ease than any other band out there.
If you have any doubts, just re-acquaint yourself with a seminal back catalogue that manages to compress the major musical and cultural reference points of the past 20 years into its lithe and compact frame with ease. More than that though, The Beastie Boys have always made songs that are keen on taking names and kicking ass. With that in mind, the Electric Picnic should see some serious damage being inflicted.
“I’m psyched to go to Ireland,” Yauch enthuses. “I don’t know much about the festival, but it’s pretty cool going to Ireland. Irish audiences are great. They’re a blast.”
Further to that, when asked what the audience should expect, Yauch says with typical New York dryness: “You can tell them that Mike D is going to walk on a tight rope. Adrock is actually going to be shot out of a cannon. I’ll be doing some lion taming.”
You wouldn’t doubt him either. And as for advice?
“I would say these festivals can get pretty messy, but if it’s not too muddy I would say wear a suit,” he says. “We’re going to be wearing suits.”
Even if he wasn’t being entirely truthful about the non-musical aspect of the show, be under no illusion that something akin to a three-ring spectacular will be setting up at the Electric Picnic, with The Beastie Boys as your ringmasters. Be prepared for the arrival of one of the world’s greatest bands, and whatever you do, dress accordingly.