By Angus Batey
Published: August 9 2008 03:00 | Last updated: August 9 2008 03:00
Chuck D has a request: a champagne bucket full of ice. For most musicians preparing to go onstage at the Brixton Academy in south London, that might not raise eyebrows. But Public Enemy's front man is a politicised rebel, and his success predated rap's obsession with bling - diamond-encrusted Rolexes, ostentatious rims on the wheels of luxury cars, and Moet on ice.
Actually, the ice will serve a different purpose - to numb his left foot before some DIY surgery. For three years the rapper, businessman, lecturer, author and political activist has been battling onychocryptosis. That's an ingrown toenail to you and me. Last night, when Chuck was performing at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, it kept him from moving around quite as much as he would have liked, but he managed. This afternoon, however, as he surveyed the vast expanse of the stage at the Brixton Academy, he realised that was not a performance he could repeat. "I was labourin' in Norwich," he says. "But this a gigantic stage! You can't not move around on a stage that big."
Scissors, a knife and bandages are procured from the venue's first-aid kit. The ice is delivered, and the door of the dressing room swings shut. The man about to perform a 20-year-old album called It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back is not the sort to let a painful big toe constrain him.
This is Public Enemy's 61st tour, in the band's 21st year together, and they've sold out the Brixton Academy, which holds 4,900 people. In some respects, this demonstrates their staying power - and yet just three years ago, they failed to sell every ticket at the 2,100 person-capacity Forum in Kentish Town, north London. Their highest placing in the British singles chart came 10 years ago; their best-performing album peaked at number four in 1990. Chuck admits that the current tour's concept - they will perform their acknowledged classic album, Nation, in its entirety each night - has helped bring in both lapsed fans and curious newcomers. But it takes more to maintain longevity in the music business than any one piece of canny marketing.
As we all know - music listeners, producers, investors alike - these are hard times for the record industry. Global sales of recorded music in 2007 were at a 22-year low. CDs - which saved the industry back in 1985 - can now be copied with no loss of quality, free music downloading from the internet shows no signs of decreasing despite recent attempts by internet service providers and record companies to stem the flow, and CD give-aways by magazines and newspapers have helped undermine recorded music's perceived value.
But as the lines outside the Brixton Academy suggest, fans haven't stopped paying for music; they're just spending in different ways - and the principal beneficiary seems to be the live music business. The vast number and variety of rock festivals and outdoor gigs taking place in the UK, and a rise in average ticket prices, suggest a business in rude health. Record companies are jumping in on the action, signing new artists to "360-degree" deals, where the labels take a cut of live income, merchandising and other areas traditionally the preserve of the musician. Live music promoters are also changing the way they operate, with the company Live Nation adding the South American superstar Shakira and Canadian rock band Nickelback to the previously announced captures of Madonna and the Glastonbury-headlining rapper Jay-Z. These multi-million-dollar long-term deals give the company the rights to distribute the musicians' recorded music as well as to book their tours.
And yet Public Enemy are unlikely to interest the likes of Live Nation: the band's margins are too small. Nor are they going to sign on to a 360-deal: they would simply be giving away money that they can presently keep for themselves. How, then, to make it in this new terrain? Chuck D thinks he has a business plan: minimise expenditure, maximise income and synchronise everything around the core brand. Unfortunately, it's not quite as easy as it sounds.
The day before Brixton, in a room backstage in Norwich, the 15-strong Public Enemy team are preparing for their show. Chuck D - born Carlton Ridenhour, in 1960 - is one of nine performers. The others include William "Flavor Flav" Drayton, 17 months Chuck's senior; a DJ; three members of their security guard-cum-dance troupe, the S1Ws (or Security of the First World); and backing musicians known as The Banned. The other half-dozen people occupy supporting roles: management, personal security, operation of the merchandise stall. It is about as lean a unit as can be, but it's still expensive to run.
Getting the group from the US to the UK is probably the single largest expense, but in-country costs - transportation, food and board - add up quickly, too, and help shape the itinerary. A show at a venue such as the Academy will bring in a healthy fee, but the gigs Public Enemy play before and after that - Norwich, then at the Junction in Cambridge - have capacities closer to 1,000, and aren't nearly as lucrative. "Typically, two or three shows are really paying for the whole tour, and the other shows are really just fill-ins to keep the band working each night," says Greg Johnson, who manages the touring side of Public Enemy's business, as well as Flavor Flav's career outside the group.
It would perhaps make sense, then, for the band to undertake extensive tours and to return frequently to key markets - but there are limits to how sustainable such an approach may be. Chuck recalls that a few years ago they made the mistake of playing Bristol twice in a six-month span: "The most that you're gonna get out of that is, play to anybody who didn't come to the first show."
No such mistakes this time round, says Johnson: they won't be returning to Britain for two years or so, "just to make sure we don't oversaturate the market and we keep demand high".
Public Enemy are one of the most-travelled bands working today; Johnson estimates they will be on the road for three or four relatively short bursts during a typical year. The group do not pay retainers or year-round salaries, so financial stability depends on individuals developing their own projects outside the group.
Since 1991, Chuck has been a regular on the US college lecture circuit, and his activities outside Public Enemy today include running a slew of websites, broadcasting a regular radio show, and running a pioneering online record label, Slamjamz.com. Flavor has developed a bizarre parallel career as a reality TV star with a successful series on the MTV-owned channel VH1. The group's DJ, DJ Lord, plays club and radio dates, and one of the S1Ws, James Bomb, has instigated a Public Enemy comic book which is on the verge of securing a potentially money-spinning link-up with DC's Batman. The members of The Banned are all session musicians while, as Johnson explains, "Some individuals in the group are doing well in real estate, construction and home renovation, and the S1Ws have a security consulting business." Only such a complex confluence of diverse revenue streams can keep the band afloat.
Perhaps the group's track record in the music industry is instructive. Public Enemy's initial contract with Sony-owned Def Jam records ended in 1998. Outside the Junction in Cambridge, over a microwaved plate of fish and rice in the tour bus, Chuck reveals that the band turned down a million-dollar advance when they decided not to re-sign with Def Jam. "In order for me to build something, I had to leave," he says. "They wanted to keep us around, but we would have been a token. And the advance would have been paid for with accountability, with them telling us how to spend it."
Chuck had the prescience to appreciate how the interactivity of the web could help his band and his businesses. He had already fought with Def Jam over making music available in the digital MP3 format. After the label stepped in to block free online distribution of a remix project, PE recorded a song about the spat called "Swindler's Lust", and Chuck took to referring in his blogs to the then Def Jam executives Russell Simmons and Lyor Cohen as "Hustler Scrimmons" and "Liar Conman".
His first independent move was to sell the band's 1999 album There's a Poison Goin' On through PE's website. "Another thing publicenemy.com did for us was allow us to cement relationships worldwide with promoters," Chuck explains. "Before, they weren't necessarily able to get in touch with us."
Of course, the band could not have begun life in the online environment at a financially sustainable level had it not been for what Chuck terms their "name equity". The band's political views and Chuck's quotability and outspokenness have helped the cause, too. Today, they do not need the marketing muscle of a major label: instead, when they tour or release CDs in the UK, they hire an independent British publicist who has been working with them for nine years, who secures editorial coverage that would cost huge sums if they had to buy it as advertising space.
Chuck still stands for the values and attitudes espoused at the group's height - "Do I still believe in reparations [for slavery]?" he asks, slightly incredulously. "Hell yeah! Can we say that in the Financial Times?" - and still holds out against having tours sponsored by alcohol or tobacco companies, as it implies his endorsement of products he does not use. These positions help maintain the unusual level of media interest in a band a long way past their commercial prime: on the days of the shows I attend, almost 30 interviews are scheduled - mainly with Chuck - with outlets ranging from a Cambridge student newspaper to the website of The Daily Telegraph; from three BBC digital radio shows to a four-minute segment on Channel Four News.
Public Enemy seem to have found a way to make the current realities of life in the music business work for them: but as a long-term model, it has its limits.
"There's definitely a concern," says Johnson. "When the economy is not doing so well, your market for live performance is limited to those individuals who are not necessarily so sensitive to economic change."
The other big question is less an economic and more a human one. Sales of an artist's back catalogue have traditionally served in lieu of a pension for rock musicians of advancing years; with that particular well running dry, touring may take up some of the slack, but not everyone is going to be happy about gigging into their seventies. And while the superstar likes of The Police, The Eagles or Led Zeppelin could play a string of shows that would generate enough money to set them up for a comfortable dotage, the majority of artists may have to keep gigging until they drop.
"When Chuck introduces Flavor on stage, he says he's 'the world's oldest teenager'," says Johnson. Indeed, as if emphasising the point, Flavor, Johnson and a few others leave Chuck on the bus doing interviews in Cambridge and head to a nearby bowling alley for an hour. "These guys are in great shape," Johnson continues. "Flav can do this for quite some time, I'm sure. But Chuck, on the other hand, is probably gonna say, 'Hey, enough is enough.'"
Retirement from live work is not on Chuck's agenda, and it is conceivable that by the time it is, the lecture circuit, radio work and writing will bring in enough to see him through old age. He has an indomitable public persona, but it is not just his bad toe that causes him to harbour a few doubts about his continued aptitude for performance. "I'm always a person who wants to beat expectations, though I wouldn't mind just living up to them," he grins, getting to the heart of what touring is all about. "You never fully understand the circuitry in your head that makes you do what you do anyway - so at any given moment you could lose it. The whole key to live performance is exactly that - it's a performance. You have to do the songs, or they do you.
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