"Get him in. I don't want him to feel dissed." Mike Diamond - one third of the Beastie Boys - has spoken. Immediately, security lets in the ticket-less fan. This guy's huge and he's covered head to foot in Beastie Boy tattoos. He once even showed up unannounced at G-son, the band's Californian recording studio. Mike D's used to fanatics. So are the other Beasties - Adam Yauch and Adam Horovitz. You see, you don't just like the Beastie Boys. You love 'em...or you hate 'em.They were very bad boys, the said "fuck" all the time on stage. The audience always booed them and the always told everyone to "fuck off" "I just loved them for that...", said Madonna. Welcome to Beastie world. It's a very fun place to be. People love you, even famous people. The Beastie Boys, pre Beastie-world, started out on their road to world domination in the mid-80s, by becoming the apex of white cool in an America bowled over by hip hop culture. They wore Adidas tracksuits and unlaced trainers of their colleagues on the all powerful Def Jam label, home to Run DMC and Public Enemy, and on their debut album Licensed to Ill they threw exaggerated shapes over hammering old skool beats.They were white boys who played funky music in a way that suggested that everyone could have this much fun if only they lightened up a bit.Of course, it was mostly a carefully stage managed joke, and the gags have flown thick and fast ever since. Their current album, Hello Nasty, with its robotic voices, rhymes about french toast and artwork featuring giant mice is no different: The Beastie Boys are still enjoying themselves.It's hard to draw any other conclusion form an album that begins with a tune called 'Super Disco Breakin'' (B-boys 'til the early morn/B-girls keep rockin' on and on) is peppered with ironic bragging (I'm Mike D and I'm the ladies choice/I wanna get next to you/like a rolls royce) and begins to draw to a conclusion with 'Dr Lee PhD', the tribute to Lee Scratch Perry in which the man himself achieves an admirably neat encapsulation of the Beasties' modus operand: "The Beastly Brothers/And the Beastie Boys/With all their Beastly toys/So put on your beastly draws/And show us your beastly paws".Not that maturity is completely missing from their old skool toyshop. In the midst of all this endless goofing, there lies a web of credible concerns, not the least of which is Adam Yauch's cause of choice, Milarepa: supporting Tibet;s struggle to rid itself of Chinese oppression.So Beastie-world is characterised by a three way mix of good vibes, tomfoolery and an entirely adult devotion to the principles of liberty. Or that's the theory, anyway.My experience with the trio, however, was markedly different. Despite their down-to-earth reputation, it was a combination of paranoia and interview restrictions which heralded my five-day interview experience.Philadelphia is the gun murder capital of the United States, according to the Philadelphia Weekly, who's current edition is concerned that the city is hosting a National Rifle Association convention this week which coincides with the Beastie Boys' arrival to play a secret gig.The gig itself is at the Electric Factory, an aptly named venue since it's a brick shell within an industrial compound encircled by a barbed wire topped fence. Tickets went on sale yesterday at 10 in the morning and all 1500 were sold in minutes.Backstage, their manager John Silva, a short man with what's left of his hair closely cropped, is dashing about and commandeering the phone in the hall leading to the stage. Silva controls Gold Mountain, who look after Beck, Foo Fighters and Sonic Youth as well as the Beasties. They also used to manage Nirvana. "The guest list for Irving Plaza (tomorrow's venue in New York) is so huge we'll make $68.35 if we sell out." The band are late because something fell off the touring bus that was bringing them from New York. They were forced to climb into a car following behind.At around five, Adam Yauch appears in the corridor. His slouchy, slightly fogeyish demeanour is matched by baggy trousers, a grey and brown patterned shirt and a head of very short, silvery hair. He's followed by Mike D, who's wearing a green T-Shirt with a picture of a distortion pedal on it, khaki combat trousers and grey DC trainers.Eventually, Adam Horovitz materializes, wrapped in a baggy green jumper that he may well have slept in. According to rumour, Horovitz may have split from actress wife Ione Skye. The rumour has some credibility, since Sarah Edwards, one of the band's accompanying press officers, says it's a subject not open to discussion. The three Beastie Boys, followed by press officer Edwards, gather on a sofa in their dressing room so we can take photos.They seem reluctant to the point of torpor. Horovitz switches off the television before sitting in the middle, Mike on his right an Yauch on his left.So how does it feel now you're all married? Mike D: "I donno that it feels any different to me." Yauch: "It feels nice to me. But the questions a little strange? How does it feel now that we're all married?" You've all relocated from Los Angeles to New York. Has this caused any problems? Mike, your wife must need to be in LA? Mike: "Yeah, she kinda has to be there." Adam [Horovitz], what about you? Adam: "I don't know about me." Horovitz takes hold of the tape recorder, leans back and whispers into it, so that no one can hear what he's saying. Mike D moves closer, sniggering. Playing back the tape back later reveals the following message: "I ate these sausage sandwiches yesterday and they're making me fart. Awful, ghastly burps and farts." From such puerile burblings were the Beastie Boys born. Horovitz wasn't even in the band when they played their first gig in 1981. John Berry (who later joined Big Fat Love) played guitar, while Kate Schellenbach (now of Luscious Jackson) played drums. They took the stage for Yauch's 17th birthday in 1981. Yauch and Mike D had met at legendary rock dungeon CBGB's and the pair had bumped into Horovitz at a Bad Brains gig at the New York lounge.Horovitz was in the hardcore band the Young and the Useless, but joined the now three-piece Beastie Boys in 1983. "Nobody ever asked me to join," Horovitz recalls. "I just did." He appeared on their debut single, 'Cookie Puss', basically a Jerky-boys-presaging prank call to and ice cream parlour over jackhammer beats which also featured the trio talking in pseudo-Ebonics.The self financed single duly attracted the attention of Russel Simmons and Rick Rubin, who shared a dorm at NYU and a record label, Def Jam. Simmons, whose brother, Joe (Run) Simmons, was in Run DMC, saw the boys as a way to flog hip hop, a genre regarded then, as now, too scary and belligerent for middle America. Licensed to Ill, the band's debut album, realised Simmons' dream. Originally titled Don't be a Faggot, it was funny, inventive and became a Never Mind the Bullocks-style touchstone for a generation of American youth who also loved the live shows that featured the caged go-go girls, giant Budweiser cans and a 20-foot-high hydraulic penis.After the photo shoot, Horovitz is sitting on a huge black flight case backstage at Philadelphia, kicking the heels of his blue leather New Balance trainers against one of its expensive sides. He's going grey around the temples and looks alarmingly like David Duchovny. The signals are: approach with caution.So what happened to your tour bus, Adam?He gives an exaggerated shrug, palms upturned, and looks to the heavens. Across the hall, in the dressing room, the crew are fiddling with the TV so everyone can watch the evening's basketball game. Being from New York, the Beasties are all fans of New York Knicks. It's good to see all that nonsense with player strike over, isn't it?Horovitz shrugs again and stares off into space again. Oh.His father, Israel Horovitz, divorced his mother Doris when Adam was three. He lived with her in Greenwich Village where she ran a shop called Gee the Kids Need Clothes, while his older brother and sister stayed with their dad. He would skateboard to ...Kids Need Clothes during his school lunch break, and, when his mum bought him his first guitar at the age of twelve, it brought them even closer. He still has it, even though it's now broken and is played.When Horovitz was fourteen he was caught smoking dope at school. Noting unusual there, except for the offending weed belonged to his mum. Doris was also a heavy drinker and by the time Adam was eighteen she had drunk herself to death. Licensed to Ill is dedicated to Doris Keefe Horovitz. "She was the coolest person ever," he says later. The band's trouble magnet, Horovitz was at the centre of the controversy surrounding the Beastie Boys when they toured Britain to promote Licensed to Ill. After scuffles during a show in Liverpool, he was falsely accused of hitting a female fan with a beer can. Five years ago he received 200 hours community service for assaulting a camera man at the memorial service for River Phoenix.Around seven, after the Beasties finish their sound check, Horovitz is ambling about the mixing desk that stands in the centre of the Electric Factory's empty wooden dance floor. He pulls what looks like two tiny pink Walkman earphones from out of his ears. They're fixed to thin wires which run under his shirt and down his back: It's a new gizmo that allows each Beastie Boy to hear everything that's happening on stage, without the aid of monitors. Horovitz approves of the new toy and eager to try it out. "We've got some Janet Jackson shit going on," he beams. About half an hour later , the band are back on stage, this time with half of their live band. The Janet Jackson gear appears to be taking some getting used to as there's much fiddling with ears and looking at the soundman while motioning for him to increase the volume; however, Mixmaster Mike, the rising DJ super hero they're borrowing from San Francisco's Invisibl Skratch Piklz, seems to have settled in more comfortably. Prior to climbing onstage he was prowling the corridors with a pink water pistol, and the constant grinning from behind the decks suggests he's content with his new job.As they run through the set for this evening's rapidly approaching show, press officer Sarah Edwards approaches. She insists the subject of marriage and related topics be totally dropped because it will upset Horovitz. "Show me your what?!" laughs Mike D, grabbing my notebook and scanning it for tricky questions. Since the arrival of the catering team the smell of garlic has permeated the Electric Factory's corridors. We're in a room next to the kitchen and the dressing room is filled with the crew and colleagues like Money Mark and Mixmaster Mike, so the aroma is overpowering.The bags under Mike's eyes are so dark they could have been drawn on with a marker pen. He has a single gold stud in his left ear and he's dispensed with the mullet he was sporting, but his hair is still thick and is a curious shade of brown that seems unable to pick up the light. It looks like it was injection moulded to his head, like Action Man. Mike D grew up on New York's luxurious Upper West Side, in a duplex apartment that overlooked Central Park. His father is an art dealer, and his mum an interior decorator who kitted out her home with genuine Leger (post-cubist French artist) murals. Mike was sent to a swish, arty St Ann's school in Brooklyn Heights, and when he reached adolescence he occasionally shaved his head or wore four earrings in one ear. At 17 he moved into a basement apartment on Chrystie Street with Adam Yauch. It was next door to a Korean brothel and was so damp that moisture dripped from the ceiling. Mike met his future wife Tamra Davis just before the band upped and moved to Los Angeles. They were at a friend's apartment and she helped him throw eggs at passers by in the street below.Mike disappears to attend another sound check this time with Money Mark. When he returns, he's carrying a brown paper bag containing his dinner: a caesar salad (no anchovies), and an assortment of Japanese food. He sits on the floor and begins unpacking.Mike, was it out of order to talk about marriage earlier on? He pauses, umms and aahs, then picks through the lettuce and croutons of his salad.So have Adam and Ione split up?Mike stops again. "Weeelll," he says. "A music magazine is not where we feel we should be talking about that sort of thing." When the band take the stage in identikit-blue boiler suits at around 10 o'clock, they're predictably impressive, and the antithesis of the usual farrago that is the hip hop gig experience, ie: men in sportswear shouting themselves hoarse over spluttering drum machines.There's a real sense of restraint and stage-craft about the Beasties' performance, and there's as much power in their delivery of the instrumentals from Ill Communication as there is in the head bangin' oldies like 'Slow 'n' Low'. The tag team humour remains as intact as ever, culminating in the trio lurching aroung pretending to be robots, before the encore, a heavy duty, dance friendly 'Intergalactic' kicks in.It's also apparent their onstage personas are amplifications of their offstage personalities. Yauch is laid back and sags at the knees, while Mike D is a constantly jumping call of energy. Horovitz pulls a lot of faces and raps in a whiny voice that the crowd - mostly booze-addled frat-boys who mosh like they've come for a punch up - obviously love.The Beastie Boys were trapped after Licensed to Ill. Tired of playing at being beer sloshing baboons, they refused to record a follow up for Def Jam, who threatened to with hold royalties as a result (the issue was later settled out of court and Simmons was mocked in the first two issues of Grand Royal). Instead, they moved labels and cities, ending up on Capitol and living together in a house in the Hollywood Hills. For the first time in their lives, they had complete control, so they installed air hockey and pool tables in their new residence. "We were retarded," recalls Horovitz, who slept in the basement, which had a window that looked into the swimming pool. Occasionally he'd be woken by the sound of banging and he'd look up to see Adam Yauch, in swimming trunks, tapping at the window like a dolphin. Recording amid such Olympic scale moments of gibbonry resulted in 1989's Paul's Boutique, a brilliant record that re-wrote the hip hop rule book. Unfortunately, no one bought it, so they began recording a follow-up almost immediately. Picking up traditional instruments for the first time since their punk rock days, the band began to work in the newly purchased G-Son complex in Atwater, Calafornia. The result, Check Your Head was released on Capitol via their own Grand Royal label in 1992. It was loose, energetic, and saw them embraced by America's emerging post grunge rock circuit. During 1993, the Beastie Boys expanded G-Son, setting up Grand Royal magazine there and installing a skateboard ramp and basketball court to boot. They played a lot of Sega golf. Mike even began playing the real thing, and the sport's nattily casual look was integrated into the lines of his X-Large clothing company. By the release of their fourth album Ill Communication in 1994, such teenage fantasising had put the Beastie Boys back at the top of their pyramid. They were cool, successful and doing exactly as they pleased. Work started on Hello Nasty in 1995 at G-Son, but subsequently followed Adam Yauch when he moved back east to Manhattan that year. The band continued to tinker with the album, on and off, for the next two years, mainly at Sean Lennon's loft, "The Treehouse" , Mike's brother's house and the band's eight track equipped practice room, which they call "The Dungeon". Despite the apparent four year hiatus, the Beastie Boys never spent much time apart after Ill Communication. They never really do. "Even when we're not working, we'll call each other up," says Mike. "We'll go and see friends we have in common or go see a movie." During recording, the band had bowling parties to celebrate Adam Horovitz's and co-producer Mario Caldato's birthdays. Horovitz insists there were other parties too. "The time when, erm, Dan Aykroyd and Jim Carrey came by and we did coke for four or five days, that was pretty cool," he says, "We had a whole bar set up, too." "Dan Aykroyd? Jim Carrey?" Ponders Yauch. "I don't remember that, it's sort of a blur." There are neat piles of clothing arranged in front of the bar at New York's Irving Plaza, the venue for another Beastie Boys warm-up gig the following night. Arranged in two rows, with olive green short sleeved shirts folded on top of dark green trousers, there are red labels inside the shirt collars, with names "Adam Yauch", "Adam Horovitz" and "Mike D" written on them in black pen.The bodies that are meant to fill these collars are here too. Mike D in a 'target' T-shirt is deep in conversation with the crew about the evening's show, while Tamra Davis lurks by the bar with a baseball cap pulled tightly over her head. Horovitz is nearby, wearing a white t-shirt that bears the name of his old school: "PS41. The Greenwich Village School". Yauch, in a booth upstairs, is losing his voice but remains happy to talk. Brooklyn born Adam Yauch is the son of an architect and a social worker. An intense kid, Yauch began taking acid and smoking a lot of pot. By the time the band had moved to Los Angeles, he'd combined this with an interest in different belief systems, especially that of the native Americans. "It opened me up to the idea that there's something going on around here that I've been missing," he says. "Drugs aren't something you can go too far with, but you start seeing things that don't fit in to Western teachings." Yauch went trekking in Nepal and Kathmandu and it was there that he met a group of Tibetan refugees who'd escaped there by walking over the Himalayas.Impressed, he began reading books by the Dalai Lama and studying Buddhism, eventually meeting the Tibetan leader at an Arizona retreat in 1993. Yauch bumped into him while leaving a room. "He grabbed both my hands," he says. "He looked at me for a second and I felt all this energy." These days, Yauch is drug and alcohol free and meditates in the morning and at night; however, the band's touring schedule tends to disturb this ritual. It's ruined his voice, too, and he says he has to stop the interview to conserve it. There is an awkward silence.So what did you do last night? He emits a squeak and leaps across the booth, grabbing the tape recorder to see if it's switched off. "Just making conversation. Would you rather we just stared at each other?" Yauch chuckles and offers to get some drinks. The upstairs bar is still shut, so he scuttles off downstairs to the safety of the backstage area..Anton Brookes, the Beastie Boys' chief UK press officer, is six feet of tattooed kickboxer. I notice this as he approaches me. Apparently in a jovial mood, he comes over and taps me on the chest.Brookes: "You asked the question." That's not strictly true. "You did, in a round about way." "The matter's been resolved. Forget about it." "He's a victim." "Who's a victim?" "Adam Horovitz. They've gotten a divorce and he really loved her. Anyway, I don't want to read about any of this in the piece. I'm bigger then you and I'll come looking for you." "Is that a threat?" "Yeah, it is. But only a joking one." That's freedom of speech and non-violence saved then. There's a reason for all this farcical bumbling, ineffectual security and veiled aggression. It takes a lot of work to make the Beastie Boys seem Just Like You. Last January, the Beasties began leaving messages on the answering machine at their American PR company Nasty Little Men, calling in the middle of the night to mumble into the machine in fake German accents. One message insisted the recipient put on his "dancing pants". Have they really grown up yet? Mike D isn't really sure what adulthood is. He thinks the word has negative connotations. "It's like with the Tibetan issue," he says. "People say, 'How can you be politically active and put out the records you do kidding around all the time?' By saying that, you make something like politics unappealing to young people. It's a bunch of nonsense." He doesn't know what the Beastie Boys circa 1987 would make of the 1999 model either. "One possibility," he says, "is that they would think, 'What's wrong with these guys? They don't drink beer and they're not breaking stuff'. It's kind of an impossible question to answer, though. Would they have our records? I really don't know. But musically, there's still the three of us. There's still something that happens between the three of us onstage and in the studio that hasn't changed." One thing that has changed, or at least has begun changing, is Yauch's natural hair colour. He'd never dye his metallic flecks, he vows, except as part of a radical overhaul, like going red or blue. He's glad to be grey. "I feel grown up," he avers. "I like the grey because it makes me look like a math teacher or a movie star." On returning home, my requests for more interview time with both Adams on the phone, since that band are touring, are accepted. On the condition that they're conducted by someone other then the journalist the magazine to America. It seems 'The Question' regarding Horovitz has been raised in another magazine and the Beasties aren't taking chances. Love 'em or hate 'em, you've got to acknowledge the Beastie Boys are pretty shrewd customers. The times have changed since they fought for their right to party, now they just want a bit of peace and quiet.