public enemy uk tour 1988

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It Takes A Nation: The First London Invasion Tour 1987

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Watch Public Enemy's first show in the UK from 1987

New York crew Public Enemy are legendary within hip hop, and the members are all, individually, considered icons. From Chuck D with his scream rapping to Flava Flav and his clock chain. This being said, when rare footage of Public Enemy’s first-ever performance in the UK surfaced, old school hip hop heads were more than happy to watch and reminisce about what many deem the golden age. 

In 2017, 30 years after it was filmed, footage from Public Enemy’s 1987 performance in London emerged on YouTube, showing members Chuck D and Flava Flav performing a medley of their greatest hits. The video is from the group’s ‘ Def Jam Tour 87’ DVD. However, the show was also televised on BBC Two, showcasing the crew’s entire set. This is rare footage of their early live performances, especially considering the show was outside of the US.

In the video, the group are introduced by a young Dave Pearce to a roaring London crowd. Pearce hosted tours for many US hip hop groups during the 1980s, including Run-DMC , Beastie Boys, Mantronix and Afrika Bambaataa. Speaking to the raucous, rowdy fans, Pearce commenced, “Hammersmith Odeon, are you ready for the Def Jam tour?!! Let me hear you make some noise!! In concert for BBC Television tonight and Fresh Start To The Week (Radio London), let me hear you make some noise for Public Enemy.” 

Disappearing into the shadows, with darkness setting in, the crowd begins to intensify as an extended air raid siren sounds. All of a sudden, the duo jump onto the stage and begin performing. The set opens with ‘Too Much Posse’, after which they transition to ‘Bring The Noise’. As well as Chuck D and Flava Flav , the group’s DJ, Terminator X, does a solo performance showing the crowd his scratch tricks. 

The rare footage even features an iconic line from Chuck D, who, in a bid to rile the crowd even further, tells the crowd, “all the people that love the prime minister be quiet”, which of course, invoked a swell of screaming. The rapper then proceeded to declare, “all the people that love the queen be quiet”, which caused the same reaction.

25 minutes through the footage, Flava Flav begins to comically dance for the crowd as Chuck D tells the DJ to “Drop a beat for him to do his moves”. This rare footage is straight from the hip hop vault and is a true throwback to Public Enemy in their heyday. You can watch the full video of the crew below.

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Public Enemy: It Takes a Nation: The First London Invasion Tour 1987 [DVD]

“Peace. Armageddon has been in effect, go get a late pass… step. This time around the revolution will not be televised…step. London, England… consider yourselves… warned!”, Professor Griff intones, as an alarm siren wails in the background.

So begins Public Enemy’s classic (if that’s even strong enough a word) 1988 album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back , and so begins the concert that makes up the bulk of the Public Enemy DVD It Takes a Nation: The First London Invasion Tour 1987 , recorded at Hammersmith Odeon in London, November 1987. It Takes a Nation captures hip-hop invading London, via footage of Public Enemy’s set on one of the first major hip-hop tours to reach that side of the ocean. As the opening act on the tour, supporting LL Cool J and Eric B. & Rakim, Public Enemy are the first foot soldiers in that “invasion”. The first image they present to the audience is suitably militaristic in tone: Professor Griff and S1Ws (the Security of the First World), dressed in their Black Panther/Fruit of Islam-inspired security outfits, walking through a carefully planned series of steps, as Griff gives his fierce introduction. Minutes later the crowd is witnessing Chuck D and Flavor Flav, bounding across the stage in all-white outfits, clocks hanging around both their necks. Public Enemy took the stage like a firecracker, ready to light the audience on fire. They were, as Chuck D puts it, “fearless”.

This was no real invasion, though: the London audience members were willing victims. Public Enemy are greeted with hysterical cheers from the large audience. In the DVD’s commentary track Chuck D describes the audience as “a raucous hip-hop crowd.” The film — a combination of concert footage, interview footage, and backstage footage — strives to give the impression that the UK audiences were more receptive to PE than most US audiences would have been at the time. “I see that London is the capitol of the world of hip-hop,” Chuck D declares from the stage to rev up the crowd. In interviews with the British press he seems awe-stricken at how into hip-hop the people he meets are, and particularly by the fact that people in London seem to really ‘get’ Public Enemy, that they understand the lyrics and the sound. In the US, he says, “the sound has to cut through first”, before people listen to the message. There’s one scene in the film where you can see his brain working overtime, trying to figure this out. “I’ve got flame in my eyes, I’m obsessed with this London thing,” he says.

Though intermittent and brief in the film, PE’s interviews with the press capably demonstrate where their heads were at, where their intentions lay at this point in their career, in between their first album Yo Bum Rush the Show — a much-delayed release which PE thought sounded out-of-date by the time it came out — and their bolder, more confident, more aggressively pro-black second album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back . “Our main objective is the preservation of the young black mind,” Chuck D explains. They want to make black youth understand their history and culture, he says, not just for the sake of knowledge but to make the black community stronger, to show “black people we’ve got to love each other.” They want black people to not just say they’re ‘proud to be black’, “but to know why and how.” Even the perennially goofy Flavor Flav turns serious in front of the journalist’s microphone, explaining the group is “out here to serve a purpose”.

If Chuck D’s statements about the group’s quest to spread knowledge and understanding prefigure the lyrics of It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back , the overwhelming sonic attack of that album is likewise prefigured in Public Enemy’s energetic live show. In this concert (shown cut-up through the film but also included on the DVD in its entirety), the group works overtime. They’re giving everything they’ve got to keep the crowd energized and happy. They run powerfully through many of the songs on Yo! Bum Rush the Show , plus a couple that will end up on It Takes a Nation upon its release the following April: “Bring the Noise” and “Rebel Without a Pause”. The performance overall shows PE to be hard-working showmen in the tradition of James Brown. They’re pushing the right buttons to keep the crowd loud and keep the energy level high: yelling “all the people who love the prime minister, be quiet!”, pulling the “I heard racists want to stop this concert, what do you all think?” trick. They’re relying on classic call-and-response techniques, but shifting them in an anti-authority, socially conscious direction.

In a way, It Takes a Nation offers a blueprint for rap showmanship more than musical performance. This is by no means a “pure” hip-hop performance. In other words, Chuck and Flav rap along to their own recorded voices, and often the recorded voices are much higher in the mix than the live ones. They’ve been doing this their whole career, and Chuck has admitted that it’s because his voice isn’t strong enough to carry a whole show (and few voices are, as evidenced by the number of MCs who have anonymous friends helping out by rapping along with everything, beefing up the vocal sound). But while this might be a useful tactic for maintaining a high-energy live performance, it doesn’t translate well to a concert recording. The image of Public Enemy performing is the star of the concert portion of the DVD, more so than the sound.

Public Enemy are seen by some as a monstrous live act, as amazing live performers… and they are. But watching this DVD, and listening to the audio version of the concert that’s included as a bonus CD, will get you thinking about what makes a performance “great”, about how much it really has to do with the music alone. The pleasures here are more about the energy, the group’s presence than how skillfully they’re presenting their music. The importance also comes from the group’s stance as meaningfully rebellious entertainers, about what they were choosing to do with their minutes on the stage. Chuck D says in the DVD commentary that they created Public Enemy to be in the tradition of socially aware black musicians, from Bob Marley to Curtis Mayfield to Aretha Franklin, and also notes that this was “unprecedented” in rap. Nowadays it’s easy to compartmentalize Public Enemy as part of some subgenre of “political rap” or “positive rap”, but what they were doing at the height of their career went beyond that. They weren’t simple preachers or lecturers; they were entertainers, making music that moved people across the globe. It was bold, powerful music, but it also had a point rather than just to make the musicians richer. That point wasn’t to convert people to a political ’cause’ — it was to make people really think about the world around them, to make us see the world as it is, not as governments and corporations want us to see it.

• Counterbalance 17: Public Enemy - 'It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back' - PopMatters
• What Old School Hip-Hop Says About Our Political Moment - PopMatters
• Public Enemy: What You Gonna Do When the Grid Goes Down? - PopMatters

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• November 1, 1987 Setlist

Public Enemy Setlist at Hammersmith Odeon, London, England

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• Countdown to Armageddon Play Video
• Raise the Roof Play Video
• Too Much Posse Play Video
• Bring the Noise Play Video
• Miuzi Weighs a Ton Play Video
• Rightstarter Play Video
• Rebel Without a Pause Play Video
• You're Gonna Get Yours Play Video
• Timebomb Play Video
• Public Enemy No. 1 Play Video

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4 activities (last edit by [deleted user] , 7 Mar 2023, 03:12 Etc/UTC )

Songs on Albums

• Miuzi Weighs a Ton
• Public Enemy No. 1
• Raise the Roof
• Too Much Posse
• You're Gonna Get Yours
• Bring the Noise
• Countdown to Armageddon
• Rebel Without a Pause
• Rightstarter

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How Public Enemy Became The Most Exciting Band On The Planet – A Classic NME Interview With Chuck D

In 1988, Public Enemy were the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world. Danny Kelly visited Def Jam HQ to hear Chuck D’s plans for global domination…

Public Enemy main man Chuck D has a variety of colourful ways of describing himself. Sat in Def Jam’s downtown office waiting for an audience, I’m nervous. For days now – in the bath, in bed, on the plane over, and here, in my head – I’ve been practising those two little words of greeting: ‘Yo Chuck!’…’Yo Chuck!’ over and over. Like I said, real nervous.

But most of my palpitations have nothing to do with the broadcast persona of Chuck D but rather with the realisation that has dawned on me over the last few months of just what an important hombre he is. For what it’s worth, and for the moment at least, Public Enemy are the greatest damn rock’n’roll band in the world! Now the man at the hub of their steel web of intriguing parts, Chuck D, walks through the door and towards me. One more mental rehearsal – it’s only two words – and my mouth goes into action: “Hello, Chuck, pleased to meet you…”

He is wearing his Los Angeles Raiders cap and jacket; silver and black, like the sides of ‘Nation Of Millions…’ The Raiders are the bad boys of gridiron football, the violent outsiders that the vast majority love to hate: draw your own conclusions. The way Chuck tells it, Public Enemy’s ascension has been anything but haphazard, accidental or lucky, rather the result of talent bolted to scientific planning and attention to detail.

“In the ’60s, my parents were in their 20s so the house was full of it. First jazz, then Motown and all that.” There’s always been music in Chuck D’s life, long before the first explosion of rap turned him into a crusading fanatic. Motown, Atlantic, Stax, all the giant figures from the pantheon of black pop get mentioned. Were these people heroes? “There were idols that I didn’t realise were idols ’til later… The Temptations, The Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, y’know, most of the people that get followed today except now they call it Rare Groove.” Public Enemy offer a fairly apocalyptic world view on most things. Are they part of the black pop tradition? “Well yeah. Public Enemy is a reflection of the street, of how black people are living, just as all those groups and sounds were about how we were living back then. That’s the problem with most R&B today; it doesn’t reflect…the masses. Back then it did. Especially Motown. Me, I’m a top notch Motown fan. I study Motown: for its relationship to the streets, for song arrangements, for its ability to reach the listener’s inner feelings.”

The success of ‘It Takes A Nation…’ goes beyond the mere quality (massive though it is) of its music and lyrics. An hour long, linked by recurring themes and live inserts, and a distinct leap forward from their previous it is nothing less than a work of art. Its existence quashes forever the last vestiges of the notion that rap acts can never be anything more than interchangeable parts on a hit-making conveyor belt.

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Again, the word ‘accident’ is not part of Chuck D’s vocabulary. “I’ll let you in on a secret,” he laughs, after I’ve harangued him for five minutes about the godlike genius of Marvin Gaye. “When I was putting ‘…Nation of Millions…’ together, I wanted it to be the ‘What’s Going On’ of Rap. Not in its content, but in its sense of arrangement and going into places no rap LP had gone before. Now I’m not worried whether people like the individual songs – and I ain’t going to start boasting about them – but I know that no rap album has been made in the places I made this one go. I mean, the live inserts, the beats, the attitude. Forget about the words, I’m talking about the totality, the attitude.

“The LP is also different because it ain’t as immediate as most rap. Sometimes you can’t make people feel as good as they wanna straight away. There are things on this EP that people aren’t gonna like the first time they hear them, thing that you have to keep going back to, things that’ll take a bit of uncovering… It cannot easily be ignored or moved out of the way. That’s very important for rap; that idea that the music was disposable got me hot, but then again it was true, until we did this album. We had to work against that whole network of prejudice – we had to make sure it stuck like glue.” In succeeding in those missions, Public Enemy – like Gaye, Mayfield, Sly, Davis and very few others before them – dismantled the traditional, ingrained, way that black artists are signed, marketed and listened to.

Chuck is not inclined to make any bones about it. Most of Public Enemy’s success – with the listeners, with the press – is down to a combination of careful hard work and intuition that other groups are too lazy, or stupid, to employ. “It’s a science,” he insists. ‘I mean, rock’n’roll is there to be studied and learned about. Rap has closer links to rock’n’roll than to any other music. What is rock’n’roll? It’s the projection of attitude , not the deliverance of sound. Attitude. Rap acts have that attitude, that character, that rock bands have used to get across to the public. They just haven’t learned to project it.”

Public Enemy’s biggest problems have come from the less easy to control matter of how people respond to their image and stance, rather than their music. The gun-toting ‘Security Of The First World’ comes to mind. “I’ve experienced this before, but in order to keep playing gigs we had to ensure that there was an order of those gigs we played. People need to see the presence of a force of order, and that presence needed to be uniformed, just like the security at a big office building will be uniformed for easy identification. That was crucial in ensuring that people had the space and time in which to enjoy themselves.

“Now that we’re playing places with their own security, ‘Security Of The First World’ are a symbol, a symbol that Public Enemy are at war, and that black people should be at war to regain their enslaved minds. It’s the war to regain awareness; that’s what ‘Countdown To Armageddon’ is about.” But the whole SW1 seems so calculated to provoke. “Of course you’re going to be worried by the sight of black men in uniform. To that extent, it’s deliberate, of course. It makes people feel the same way I, and other people, feel when they see a policeman. Or how all the Vietnamese felt when they saw all those uniformed Americans coming. I want everyone out there to realise that black people feel things too.”

The other part of Public Enemy that its inventor has to keep constantly tampering with is the non-musical output of Flavor Flav and, more recently, Professor Griff, the way that pair behave, the things they say. Chuck isn’t daft enough to pretend he doesn’t know the value of controversy, but he’s aware too that there has to be limits or the group’ll be ostracised. It’s a tough line to walk.

“Well Flavor”, he begins slowly, “will be Flavor. OK, look, Flavor’s gonna make mistakes, but people aren’t going to treat his mistakes in the same way they’d treat one of Griff’s outbursts, where a real threat is perceived. Flavor’s always gonna be Flavor but there’s no real sense of threat. Flavor is only a threat if everyone starts to think like him; then he’s a threat to black people. I’m the mediator in all this. Flavor is what America would like to see in a black man – sad today, but true – whereas Griff is very much what America would not like to see. And there’s no acting here – sometimes I can’t put Flavor and Griff in the same room. I’m in the middle. When Griff says something too much, I come to the rescue of white people; when Flavor does something, I come to the defence of the black public. I do constrain them, but not much, because Public Enemy are the only black group making noises outside of their records. But that controversy has to be harnessed.”

Chuck D is either the most literate, together musician I’ve ever met, or a brilliant actor and bullshitter. Probably plenty of each. He must, I just know, have a game plan for the Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band in the World. “Public Enemy’s programme is the taking of music followers, and those who are willing to listen, to see black life as it’s lived. “It’s a college course in Black Life,” he laughs, “as a matter of fact it’s a whole damn degree you can earn.” Maybe, I suggest helpfully, you could put the exam papers on the inner sleeves of forthcoming record releases. “You’re giving me ideas! Maybe we could give out those little degree certificates with the Public Enemy targets in the wax seal…” “Yeaaaaah Boyee!” I say. Well, in my head anyway…

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When hip hop came to town - remembering the night that Public Enemy dazzled London

Inside a packed-to-the-gills Hammersmith Odeon, three men in army fatigues stalk the stage. Wearing sunglasses and carrying Uzis, the men perform mili - tary step drills while ranting about ‘Armageddon’ and ‘revolution’. Through the speakers, the wail of sirens fills the air, not quite managing to drown out the scream of whistles emanating from the crowd. The date is 1 November 1987. Hip hop is already on its way to becoming a world-conquering genre, thanks to the slick rap-rock of Run DMC and the frat boy japes of the Beastie Boys. But it’s fair to say no one in London has ever seen anything quite like this.

One of the uniformed men raises a fist and turns to the crowd. ‘London, England,’ he bellows over the sirens. ‘Consider yourselves… warned! ’

With that, the drums kick in and two sweatsuit-clad New York rappers rush the stage. Public Enemy have arrived in the capital.

‘The anticipation was huge,’ recalls the group’s frontman, Chuck D. ‘No one knew what the hell was going to happen. We could hear the whistles from behind the curtain, and when we stepped out we created war on the stage. The atmos - phere was like when The Beatles hit the US; we were invading the British Isles! Thirty-five years on, there’s nothing to compare it to: I think it’s one of the great moments in hip hop.’

If this sounds like hyperbole, a quick glance at the raucous YouTube footage will bear Chuck out. The effect of that concert — which also featured Public Enemy’s Def Jam label mates Eric B & Rakim and LL Cool J — on the nascent British hip hop scene was huge. Kevin Foakes (aka DJ Food, producer for legendary London label Ninja Tune) was at the gig, aged 16. ‘I was one of those whistleblowers,’ he laughs. ‘I was beside myself at points. There was already a scene happening in the UK, but that concert energised it. Basically, if you weren’t at that show, you weren’t a hip hop fan.’

Chuck recalls something similar: ‘The seeds were growing in the UK and we encouraged them. After the concert, we went out into the streets in Hammersmith, we got on the Tube — we were beatboxing, talking to fans. I think we were the first US rappers to do that. We fuelled as much pandemonium off-stage as we did on it.’

The reason ES Magazine is reminiscing with Chuck about this mayhem-inducing first stay in the capital is a new BBC documentary he fronts, entitled Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World . The series charts the genre — which celebrates its 50th birthday this year — from its inception in the slums of the Bronx right through to the billiondollar-generating, chart-dominating behemoth it’s become. Via interviews with everyone from Ice-T to Eminem, each episode intertwines rap’s history with the socio-political backdrop, through the crack epidemic of the Eighties up to the recent #BlackLivesMatter protests. ‘It’s a celebration of this brilliant, beautiful art form that came from a city which, in the Seventies, had been left for dead,’ Chuck says.

There is arguably no better candidate to front a show like this, simply because when it comes to changing people’s worldview via hip hop, Public Enemy are still unmatched. When the group emerged in the mid-Eighties, they were unlike anything that had come before. Flanked by their camouflage-clad, gun-toting bodyguards (the ‘Security of the First World’), Chuck and his clock-necklace-rocking hype man Flavor Flav eschewed ‘party’ rhymes for hard-hit - ting diatribes on racism and police brutality. They quoted Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey, and even dubbed one of their entourage ‘Minister of Information’.

‘There was nothing on the planet like Public Enemy,’ Chuck says, with a grin. Foakes can confirm this. ‘I got lit - eral goosebumps the first time I heard them’, he recalls. ‘They were just serious . You often didn’t know what they were talking about, which was an education in itself because you went off and found out about it.

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The group’s fiercely pro-Black stance made it initially tough to get airplay in the States, so they were pleasantly surprised to find the British media more receptive. ‘The UK had the greatest DJs and journalists,’ Chuck says. ‘All sum - mer [of 1987] I was doing interviews with Melody Maker and NME ; they really understood the scholarship in our music.’

No one knew what the hell was going to happen. When we stepped out we created war on the stage

But while our music press may have been hip hop-friendly, our tabloids were less so. A few months earlier, the Beastie Boys had toured the UK, to be greeted by screeching headlines such as ‘WORLD’S NASTIEST POP GROUP ARRIVE TODAY’. Foakes recalls the furore: ‘The tabloids stirred it up so that people came to Beasties’ shows expecting aggro. But it never felt dangerous. I just remember Mike D wearing that necklace with a Volkswagen badge, so we went straight out and started ripping VW badges off cars. The bigger, the better; if you got a 12-inch one off a camper van, that was great.’

The hysterical press reaction to the Beasties was partly what fired up Public Enemy for their own British tour. ‘The Beasties were just three happy-go-lucky white kids from New York — and the [tabloids] shredded them!’ Chuck laughs. ‘So, I felt like: “I’m ready to take them on!” We went into interviews like they were a performance after that. For us, interviews were another part of the show.’

By the time of the Hammersmith gig in 1987, Chuck’s invectives in the music press had made a name for the group over here. But he still wasn’t expecting anything like the riotous reaction they received. ‘What amazed me most was how people created their own gear,’ he remembers. ‘Companies hadn’t started making [merchandise] yet, so the London kids had spray-painted our logos on their jackets. It was a remnant of the punk era. Phenomenal. I was like, “What the hell?!”’ Foakes, it transpires, was one of those very kids. ‘I stencilled the Public Enemy logo on to my black bomber jacket,’ he recalls. ‘Before the show, Chuck and Flav came out to greet fans, and someone grabbed me, like: “Look at this guy’s jacket!” You could tell Chuck was thinking, “This is wild.”’

But Public Enemy did more than just inspire home-made fashion among their London fans. As Foakes notes, ‘A lot of London crews were trying to get time with them’ — and true to their ‘men of the people’ rep, the group immersed themselves in the burgeoning British rap scene. Then a teenager, rising UK rapper Betty Boo tracked Chuck and co to the Hammersmith McDonald’s where she performed an impromptu freestyle for them (‘We got footage of it!’ Chuck laughs). From there, they spent time riding the Tube, chatting to aspiring rappers who wanted to follow in their footsteps.

‘A lot of them were enamoured by the US, taking the US approach [with their accents],’ Chuck recalls. ‘We told them: “No — sound like yourself! Be yourself and you guys are going to be much bigger!” Those were the seeds for the next layer of UK rap.’

The advice seems to have been taken to heart. By 1988, early British hip hop groups such as London Posse and Demon Boyz were releasing records focused on real life in the Big Smoke, all proudly delivered in London accents. In 1989, Brixton collective Hijack caught the attention of LA gangsta rap star Ice-T, who signed them to his own label. UK hip hop had taken its first tentative step onto a much larger path: a path that’s lead to the creation of whole new genres — such as grime — and today finds the likes of Stormzy, Dave and Little Simz exploding on a global scale.

A lot of UK rappers had taken on US accents. We told them, ‘No — sound like yourself

So, does Chuck still take an interest in UK rap today? ‘Of course,’ he grins. ‘I still like classic cats like Hijack, She Rockers and London Posse. But there are new cats dropping in, too. And not just from London, Manchester or Birmingham, either.’ He cites Irish-Ugandan poet/rapper Amy True as a rising star to keep an eye on. ‘The UK always has brilliance coming out of it,’ he adds. ‘But so does Africa and other parts of Europe. Hip hop’s been around 50 years now — it’s coming out of everywhere.’

This, ultimately, is what the Fight the Power documentary seeks to celebrate and explore: the strange fact that a genre born among burned-out buildings, and forged amid poverty and racial inequality, has still somehow managed to conquer the world.

‘European thought isn’t used to calling Black people “kings and queens”,’ Chuck says, as our chat draws to a close. ‘But I don’t accept anything less, man. Hip hop changed the world, and it did it with grace and dignity. The music has been castrated and capsized over the years. The narrative has often been that hip hop is kids’ stuff; some adolescent game. With this documentary we’re seizing the narrative back.’ London, England: consider yourselves warned. Again.

‘Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World’ is on BBC iPlayer now

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Public Enemy :: It Takes a Nation: The First London Invasion Tour 1987

Live albums are always a tricky proposition. Anybody who’s been to a concert that was filmed or recorded, particularly hip-hop, can attest to the fact that the energy you feel in the crowd is entirely different from how it comes across when replayed afterwards. It’s hard to accurately capture that excitement, that raw energy that pulses through the crowd, the give and take between the audience and the performer. What might seem like mistakes or miscues after the fact are entirely different in person, because they’re part of the kinetic experience of the event. If a performance was exactly like the album version of a song, there would be no point going to a concert. CD’s and DVD’s allow for perfect reproduction of a song time after time digitally, but at a live show the song is going to be different almost every single time. If somebody does something wrong, you just keep going. Even if everything is done right, the performer can ad lib things in or leave things out at will for the sake of variety or to excite the crowd.

The opening of Public Enemy’s “First London Invasion Tour 1987” will sound very familiar to long-time P.E. fans, because it’s the exact same “Countdown to Armageddeon” that actually opens the seminal “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” album. This time however the presentation doesn’t cut off to open with the classic “Bring the Noise.” Instead the live performance continues, and at long last we get to hear the London show that we got only a tantalizing taste of before. The music is actually from three seperate days worth of shows filmed November 1st-3rd in 1987, and as is the unfortunate case with many live albums these days the songs are artificially cut to create a “start” and “end” instead of preserving the performance as is. Not only does this make it impossible to determine which day’s set the songs are from (the album and the liner notes certainly don’t indicate) it creates an incredibly disjointed feeling since the songs can be from different sets altogether.

One thing’s for damn sure – when you hear a “fade out” at the end of a track the audience and performers didn’t all simultaneously lower their volume in sync – some studio engineer did. To date the best live album I’ve ever heard was a bootleg performance by The Roots my man Disco Dave made for me. Instead of trying to chop up the hour + set, he simply put down marks APPROXIMATELY where one song began and another ended. If played from start to finish the performance was seemless, but I could “chapter ahead” like a DVD if I wanted to start a specific “scene.” It’s too bad musicians and their record labels don’t have enough faith in their audience to trust that we’ll understand live shows don’t have specific starts and stops to each song. Great performances are like great mixtapes – they seemlessly blend from one song to the next with instrumental blends, ad libs and voiceovers. One way Public Enemy could have rectified this situation if they wanted to use all three days worth of performances would be to present them as grouped “sets” from different shows, like Boogie Down Productions did on “Live Hardcore Worldwide.” That way the ad libbing, crowd interaction and audience participation during each set is left preserved instead of on the cutting room floor, and the sets can be grouped around specific songs so there are no repeats from one day’s performance to the next.

These nitpicks aside, it’s great to hear Public Enemy live. At this point in their career they only had “Yo! Bum Rush the Show” in stores (at least in the U.S.) so songs like “Bring the Noise” and “Rebel Without a Pause” were brand new material. The “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” album wasn’t released until April 1988, so the crowd’s excitement at hearing these P.E. songs for the first time is palpable, and Public Enemy themselves weren’t fully rehearsed from doing them thousands of times around the world – everything was fresh and the excitement you hear is real. The album also comes with a bonus DVD so you can watch these performances, and that’s a huge bonus for this release since it does preserve some desperately needed concert context. That alone redeems this release from being just another poorly conceived live album butchered by overly aggressive studio personnel. When you want the full story, pop in the DVD – when you want the audio adrenaline of the live show even in in chopped form, throw in the CD. There’s a media for whatever system you use, wherever you are. It’s also nice to see that on the audio disc they include some “bonus tracks” in the form of non-London performances such as “Miuzi Weighs a Ton” live from San Francisco in 1999. Of course since this is Chuck D and Flavor Flav on the mic with the Bomb Squad providing the beats, the lyrical and musical impact is not at all in question. “London Invasion” is a fair set for both long-time and first-time Public Enemy fans, but could have been even better with a little more forethought about the final product.

Public Enemy 1987 Live @ Def Jam Tour London

Public Enemy 1987 Live @ Def Jam Tour London : Ever since they exploded on the scene in 1987,  Public Enemy has been one of the most influential and powerful forces in Hip Hop. Over 30 years of nearly constant world-touring has secured their status as one of the best and most impactful (live)acts in Hip Hop ever. In 1987, Public Enemy invaded London as part of the Def Jam ’87 Tour with LL Cool J and Eric B. & Rakim.

Recorded a few months after the release of their debut Yo! Bum Rush the Show , P.E. performed songs from their debut album, and a couple of tracks that would later appear on their classic sophomore album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back , with some live segments from this show that would be integrated on Nation of Millions as well. Charged with the powerful lyrics of Chuck D, the spirited hype of Flavor Flav, the paramilitary security of the S1W’s, and the impeccable techniques of Terminator X, Public Enemy conquered the capital of the British Empire as well as the rest of Europe.

Public Enemy 1987 Live republished from TimWestwoodTV

Written by HHGA Staff

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Public enemy: it takes a nation - the first london invasion tour 1987.

Recorded Live on November 1st, 2nd and 3rd, 1987 from Hammersmith Odeon London, as part of the European Def Jam Tour. With additional footage of Public Enemy on the streets of London.

Flavor Flav Chuck D

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10 may 1987, releases by country.

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Chuck D on the 35th anniversary of Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

The rap legend describes the greatest hip-hop album ever as "a call to arms and a challenge."

California Dreams was better than Saved by the Bell. There, I said it.

Thirty-five years ago — on June 28, 1988 — the music world exploded, courtesy of a Molotov cocktail thrown by a group of former Long Island radio and club DJs. This collective — fronted by rappers Chuck D and Flavor Flav and DJ Terminator X, as well as a production team who literally called themselves the Bomb Squad — had already made their mark under the name Public Enemy , and a blistering first album on Def Jam titled Yo! Bum Rush the Show.

That debut announced the band as an uncompromising force in the still-emerging hip-hop scene, with song titles like "You're Gonna Get Yours," a repeating text crawl on the cover reading "THE GOVERNMENT'S RESPONSIBLE," and the now famous Public Enemy logo featuring a silhouette of a Black man in a rifle's crosshairs. But even that bold introduction could not have prepared anyone for what would come next.

Public Enemy's second Def Jam album, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back , was a combative and creative leap forward not just for the band, but for the entire genre, taking rap to uncharted new places both lyrically and musically. A political manifesto to the Black community, It Takes a Nation… preached self-empowerment and Black power while also admonishing everything from playing-it-safe radio stations to corner dealers for "selling drugs to the brother man instead of the other man."

The album's vitality came not only from Chuck D's rapid-fire delivery and the hype-man antics of Flavor Flav, but also from its ear-bending production style — from a team that included Hank Shocklee, Keith Shocklee, Bill Stephney, Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, Rick Rubin , and Carl Ryder — that sought to mimic the group's energetic live show with faster beats, samples upon samples, and an abundance of vocal sound bites taken from various speeches and recordings spliced throughout the record.

Whether it was the pure speed of "Bring the Noise"; the pulsating, horn-infused jazz swing of "Night of the Living Baseheads"; or the ominous, piano-laden prison-riot thriller-movie vibe of "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos," It Takes a Nation… was not only a manifesto, it was also an emphatic declaration of what hip-hop could be, opening up avenues of unbridled creativity and raw passion that previously seemed off-limits. And it is that mix of intensity and innovation that makes It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back the greatest rap album of all time.

On its 35th anniversary, EW sat down with Public Enemy frontman Chuck D — who also just released a series of illustrated journals titled STEWdio: The Naphic Grovel ARTrilogy of Chuck D — to deep dive into one of the most important and influential releases in music history.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: The thing that bowled me over when I first heard this album as a teenager in 1988 was the attitude and intensity. Was that something you all were consciously trying to capture on wax?

CHUCK D: Well, our first album, Yo! Bum Rush the Show, was a culmination of a lot of different things, and on our first tour, we realized that one thing that will set us from the rest of the pack is going up another five or 10 beats per minute and speeding it up. Performance-wise on stage, we could step up to being rather physical and keep up with it, so why not? We came from an athletic background, and we thought a lot of people were music lovers and musicians, and they were kind of slow in the pocket. I said, "Well, maybe our advantage is to never let them see you be slow, weak, or at a tempo where you're just bopping. Let's raise the intensity."

What were some of your biggest influences when you were making this record?

Bob Marley, James Brown. Bill Stephney loved the Clash, and we just poured it all in the blender because we knew that hip-hop was a culmination of records. From the Rolling Stones to the O'Jays, there was sights, sounds, bits and pieces, especially live. That's why with It Takes a Nation of Millions… , we wanted to say hip-hop is not just in the United States. The first words you hear are from London. We also wanted you to know that hip-hop at its best is a live performance. That's why we cut excerpts from our live performance over in London… New Yorkers will always pride themselves on being the next step ahead, but we threw it back at New York and everywhere else like, "Well, you all are actually behind because this is the new movement, and it's got power and speed." I think that's the first two things that It Takes a Nation… signify. A: It happened in London. And B: It was live at a concert that you wasn't at.

Speaking of the album opening with the London live stuff, is it true that side 2 was originally going to be side 1, and side 1 was originally side 2?

How did that happen?

We made our albums for cassettes because that was our biggest medium. We wanted our albums to pretty much transmit in tapes. They had an A side and a B side. A lot of times what the early record companies made a mistake on is that they never made the sides even. If you don't make a side even, if the second side is longer than the first side, what you have is the kiss of death on the first side, and that's silence.

We were very careful that if side B was 29 minutes and 30 seconds, then we're going to try our best to make side A be 29 minutes and 35 seconds, so you'll get no silence. That was our radio experience. If you hear two seconds of dead air on the radio, you notice it. We don't want no dead air.

It's such a startling way to start your record, though. Obviously, there's a precedent for that with James Brown's live intros and things like that, but when you guys flipped it and made that side 1, was there any thought like, "Are we really going to start our record with some stage banter?"

It was made for live. With the second side, we found a way that would've actually worked, but at the last second of mastering, [producer Hank Shocklee] said flipping the side would make it work better. So, we don't bulls---. We go into it live in concert with Griff opening it up, and we go right into "Bring the Noise" at 109 beats per minute, which was an insane BPM at that time.

What was the process like of incorporating all those vocal samples from speeches all over the album? How did you find and catalog them and figure out what would work where?

I cataloged three rooms of records for Spectrum City, our DJ outfit. My whole job was to conjure up the voices. Again, we didn't want any dead air whatsoever. Even if a record faded and then the next record came in, that was taboo to us. If anything, that fade better happen and that silence better be a microsecond before the next joint. So I was filling those spaces up with interstitials that had words in key areas.

Like with Wattstax. At that time, Wattstax was a concert that by 1987 was forgotten. It was almost like this thing that happened that people didn't even believe had happened — 100,000 Black people inside a stadium checking out the music of the day. I had categorized it for the longest period of time, and when it came time to use it, I was like, "Oh, s---. We didn't take any of the music. We took the live event!" We had our own live interstitials that were put inside It Takes a Nation… and this was adding probably the greatest Black live event of all time into what we considered a keystone, groundbreaking live event that documented hip-hop's next generation.

Speaking of your own live bits you added, after It Takes a Nation… came out, anytime any song my buddies and I were digging ended, we'd be like, "Bring that beat back!"

The influence for that was Gratitude, the live album by Earth, Wind & Fire, [who] were coming off of That's the Way of the World . Their next record was Gratitude , which was live with a lot of that stuff from the previous couple of albums. Gratitude went over big in Black communities.

I could keep you here all day talking about the lyrics on this album, but do you have a favorite line that still rings true to you in 2023?

Well, I have a lot, but it would have to be "Can I tell 'em that I really never had a gun?" We've lost ourselves in the culture of guns. It's mass nihilism. It's crazy.

My favorite was always the "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" opening: "I got a letter from the government the other day. I opened and read it. It said they were suckers." That actually might be my favorite lyric ever.

Yeah, that's a lot of people's favorite. In my prime, people gave me credit for being the first out of the blocks. That came off of the running track. I'm going to try to nail you in the first 15 yards out of the blocks, like boom ! "Here it is, bam ! And you say, 'Goddamn!'" Or "Yes, the rhythm, the rebel!" Or "Bass! How low can you go?" That became a signature. It's also how Berry Gordy did his stuff at Motown. He said the first 10 seconds better not be playing around.

I think that's one of the reasons I go back to "Night of the Living Baseheads" so much as the song I love the most on this album. It starts with the speech, and then you and the beat just jump in so hard.

The making of that record was so odd because we kind of reduced it, in the words of Rick Rubin. We had a straight-across track with a sample, and then I remember going to [Bomb Squad producer] Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, and I said, "Well, let's erase it from the two-inch." When you erase it from the two-inch, you don't have the crutch of going back to it or unmuting it. So we had no other choice but to fill those empty spaces with what we call cram-sampling. A cram sample is, if you got five seconds of nothing, you got to fill those five seconds up with something that bridges it onto the next beat.

This album is such a leap forward sonically from anything before it with the beats, the samples, and things cutting in and out. It comes across as carefully orchestrated chaos. What was the approach you were going for in terms of cramming in all that stuff?

The first thing Hank looked for is a steadiness of the studio . For Yo! Bum Rush the Show, we used Spectrum City Studios. It was almost like an experience of, "Okay, we're in a spot, but we're kind of trying this place out." And then we recorded "Rebel Without a Pause" at Chung King, which was a Def Jam mainstay and Rick Rubin's go-to studio. The Beastie Boys and Run D.M.C.'s Raising Hell had been recorded there. Then we recorded bits and pieces of "Bring the Noise" at Sabella Studios.

This is where Hank's brilliance comes in, because if Phil Spector was the wall of sound, Hank is a wall of noise — because of his ability to hear the noise, hear through the noise, and then be able to make a pristine mix of it all. Hank wanted to have a place to call his own, which became Greene St. Studio, where Run-D.M.C. did some initial work. So all of a sudden, we began using Greene St. Studio and engineer Rod Hui.

That relationship was a very key anchor point in the creation of It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back . It was a stability and a locality of something that we could call our own that wasn't crowded yet. With the success of Public Enemy and It Takes a Nation… — and later on, Fear for a Black Planet — Greene St. became an impossible studio to book afterwards. Hence, later on, I'm in one studio and then you got Sonic Youth in another studio on the same session, and we're ordering the same food. And then, Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore are like, "Oh, come in. We're doing a song." That's how I did my vocals on "Kool Thing."

I saw you live at a few shows around that time — in the tiny 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C. and also at the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland…

We played at the Capital Centre with the Beastie Boys in April of 1987 and then later came back to play it with the Def Jam tour a day after coming out of Philly, and I was known for saying, "F--- go-go."

Exactly. That made a lot of waves in D.C. We're a go-go town, Chuck.

We came from Philadelphia, which was a raucous takeover, changing-of-the-guard type of gig. And then when we played D.C., we got no response because it was a whole different city. I was like, "How the f--- can Philly be so different from D.C. only a hundred-some-odd miles away?" I was flabbergasted. I was looking at a still crowd without knowing that it takes probably a year for that market, and you got to go through the go-go routes. I just said, "F--- go-go. What the f--- are y'all doing?" That caught some attention, and I had the audacity at the time to be able to say, "Well, you know what, man? Love and hate's the same emotion." I didn't know how it would go the rest of our career, but the next year we came to play D.C., and D.C. was in love with Public Enemy.

I remember at one point during that '88 show you said, "I want all the brothers to stand up and put your fist in the air." And then you said, "I'm not talking to you white people. You can sit down." Which is what I then did. [ Laughs ] The album is so clearly a message for the Black community, so how much did you guys talk or think about what white audiences were going to make of all this as you started to get more popular and see some more people like that at your shows?

My answer was, "I'm talking to Black." That was our nationalist record. Fear of a Black Planet was pretty much, "Okay, I'm going to include everybody in the mix," but It Takes a Nation… was straightforward: "This is us needing to talk to us, trying to fix us right now." A lot of the people in the Def Jam camp, like the Beastie Boys, brought me in, but who I was talking to was not directly white folks at all. No.

I had white folks all around me. I grew up in Long Island. I went to college and university. I went to a white high school. Def Jam was white. You know what I'm saying? Rick was from Long Island too. We knew how to talk to Black people, even though we were in the middle of white folks, and it was, "Hey, Black folks need this message. White folks are getting messages from everywhere."

I mean, the biggest thing is that we knew everything about white America. They knew nothing about us. Nothing. I knew everything about white America. Everything. I knew more white American history and Italian history and all that than most people who were white and Italian. It Takes a Nation… was definitely a Black narrative — like, "Listen, this is what it is." Of course, white folks are going to pay attention to it, because if they're in their culture, then culture is to seek out and try to find out about as much of what is coming their way as possible. That's what that was.

As a teenager, this was the album that got me to go read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. You were educating people, even if they were not the audience you were speaking to.

We were asked to challenge Black people. We were like, "All right. Your white friend knows more about you than you know yourself, so you're volunteering yourself to slavery. Once somebody knows more about you than you know, what are you doing?" Really, It Takes a Nation… was a call to arms and a challenge.

How did you settle on It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back as the album title?

It was actually a lyric in "Raise the Roof," which was on Yo! Bum Rush the Show . The original title of the album was going to be Countdown to Armageddon . But there was an article from Toronto, Canada, and the editor of that particular music magazine actually titled the article "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back," talking about one of the lyrics from "Raise the Roof." So I had the article and I come back to our headquarters. When me and Hank saw "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back," we were like, "That's a long-ass title, but it sticks out. If you are going to use something long, why not?" That's it. We changed it. "Countdown to Armageddon" then became the name of a track on the album.

And the cover art and photo by Glen E. Friedman are so arresting — no pun intended.

Our art direction had to definitely be on what we had centered our intent to be, but everybody was coming to the table. Glen had enough background where he knew what was punk and what wasn't, and we knew what was rap and what wasn't. We could take a little bit of this or a little bit of that and figure out how to come up with something that would depict the attitude along with how we sounded with one or two images.

The cover was very significant. It Takes a Nation… was actually knocking that posse shot down to just me and Flavor, and the group was on the back. And then by the third album [ Fear of a Black Planet ], no group at all. But we saw a tendency in Black albums that every single Black record had to have everybody looking for validation on the cover. If the group had eight people on it, everybody had to be on it. Anybody left out, then it's f---ed up. Hank railed against that. It's like, "Listen, man, the concept of the record needs to stand out, not just everybody's there for a vanity shot."

The jail shot was in midtown Manhattan. It was cold up in there. We were also trying to get a cover for "Don't Believe the Hype," and what we did is that whole multi-shot with the camera negatives at that particular time. That camera roll ended up being iconic in itself. But yeah, we shot it to make those visual statements.

Any thoughts on this album's themes in terms of where we stand today, 35 years later?

Well, it makes it easier for me to travel the world and be able to say, "Okay, this is a theme I think we need to hit at now." Like mass incarceration. "Don't Believe the Hype" actually fits right now. We're talking about challenging misinformation. "Bring the Noise" is like, "Hey, we ride limos too" — respect the genre of hip-hop and rap music as important as anybody else out there or any other genre. I mean, the "beat is for Sonny Bono and Yoko Ono and Run-D.M.C. and R&B as well" — I was just making those statements inside the grooves, and it was very important that we do that. I actually haven't heard the album in a while. Maybe one day this year I'll listen to it.

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