This gig was always a mouth-watering prospect – one of the greatest groups of all time, with a full line-up, playing one of the most intimate venues in the city. As expected, it turns out to be a superb performance: an awesome collision of thumping bass-lines, crunching hip-hop beats, chaotic samples and funked-up wah-wah guitar, all underpinned by an incredibly powerful political message.
Bono once credited Public Enemy as being one of the groups who inspired U2’s dramatic sonic overhaul on Achtung Baby, saying “You stick on a Public Enemy record and it sounds like the end of the world!” He wasn’t wrong. The opening half-hour or so of tonight’s show most closely resembles a full-scale anti-globalisation riot, with blaring takes on the likes of ‘Welcome To The Terrordome’ and ‘Bring The Noise’ interspersed with blasts of raging anti-establishment invective.
Those “Fuck George Bush” and “Fuck Tony Blair” statements arrive thick and fast, and, refreshingly, Rudy Giuliani also gets a bashing – a timely reminder that before he was an infallible saint who walks on water, the former NY mayor was a right-wing basket case whose “zero tolerance” law and order views would make Michael McDowell look like a tree-hugging hippie peacenik.
Things take a bit of a nose-dive at the half-way point, with the band falling prey to what’s technically known as “arsing around.”
Thankfully, Flava Flav’s magnificent solo take on ‘911 Is A Joke’ gets the show back on the road, before superb versions of ‘He Got Game’ (the group’s contribution to Spike Lee’s movie of the same name, which brilliantly samples Buffalo Springfield’s ‘For What It’s Worth’), ‘Give It Up’ and an absolutely sensational, extended ‘Fight The Power’ (which finds Flav Flav climbing the speakers to touch hands with those on the balcony) bring us to the encore.
They return to perform a pulverising ‘She Watch Channel Zero’, after which Flava Flav delivers a soliloquy so intensely humanistic one feels like uttering “Amen" in its aftermath.
They once sang ‘Don’t believe the hype’. Well – in the words of one Samuel L. Jackson – believe it now motherfucker.