Select Magazine January 1998

Back at Radio 1 , Yauch is getting used to the decks especially set up for the on-air DJ-ing occasion. As he silently flicks faders set in the pine-effect control board he appears oblivious to the various friends and technicians hanging out in the studio, concentrating fully on cutting up A Tribe Called Quest with Cibo Matto.

Meanwhile, Mike D has given up on the pop-trivia game next door and is now showing off his clothes. As the co-founder of X-Large he's centrally involved with the designs and passing them over to the label's manufacturing team. "See this?" he hoiks up his jumper to reveal a T-shirt sporting a see-through plastic pocket containing small cards depicting pictures of the countryside. "This is my business-card trick, best idea ever. People can see you've got a card and it doubles as a neat badge." At present there aren't any concrete plans to open an X-Large shop in Britain: the costs are still too high to export the clothes and keep the prices affordable. Instead, we'll be hearing from some of the bands on the Grand Royal label.

"It took us a while to reach an illusory state of competence in the US," Mike remarks in all seriousness. "We've given ourselves the illusion that we know some of what we're doing, so we're now ready to go beyond that. Now is the time. I consulted a lot of clairvoyants and Tarot-card readers and had people perform different ceremonies and that's what all the signs pointed towards." Plain untruths aside, the first releases will include records from Buffalo Daughter, Japan's own scattered mesh of Moogs, samples, heavy drum pounding and bubblegum vocals. Then there's Ben Lee, an extremely young Australian acoustic-guitar troubadour, The Josephine Wiggs Experience, ex of the Breeders, and finally, probably the best of the roster, Butter 08.

Including members of NY art band Cibo Matto and The Blues Explosion's Russell Simmins, they're a more controlled, aloof and stripped down version of what Jon Spencer's band would sound like if he hung out at galleries instead ot run-down shacks in the Mississippi Delta.

"Butter 08 I think will go down well, as will Buffalo Daughter," muses their President and A&R man. "But I could be wrong. You could hate everything, which is 0K." Mike's also been getting off on a lot of British bands: Radiohead, Blur, plus a certain Brummie duo... "Bentley Rhythm Ace! Yeah, 1 love that band.When we played live in New York I used, like, two bars of this one song of theirs for something we rapped over. What was that track... It goes [suddenly attempts to sing] 'DooWAHH woo dugagaga... It's kinda like a hip hop tempo and then it goes into this fast jump beat. It's called something like 'Bentley's Gonna Fuck You Up' or some shit." But what of that Beasties album, and its rumoured country direction? All that's known - seeing as both Mike and Adam are being extremely mute about it - is that recording is taking place in New York, with the same producer (Mario Caldato Jr) and the same team of collaborators (DJ Hurricane, Eric Bobo, Money Mark, anyone suitable who happens to pass by the studio) as 1994's 'Ill Communication'. It's expected in late spring and they'll probably be over here in the summer for a couple of festivals.

"The album's at a sort of middleness stage," confides Mike, almost. "It's the stage where we're starting to get a little more serious than the last stage. We're down from three albums' worth to one and a half." And that's all you'll say on the matter? "I'll tell you this much - we all still have wooden teeth."

Cheers. As the album takes shape, do you see yourselves as returning champions?

"No, I think that we're more like cows that have been out to pasture returning to the feed barn. The band started as a joke, our intention was never anything more. It was something like, '0K let's just have fun, this is a joke we'll do this because it's funny.' And as the band has evolved we've tried different things along those same lines. 'Oh let's try and rap, that'd be pretty funny.' Then it'd be, 'Let's attempt to pick up our instruments again,' having no idea how those things managed to work. And what we're doing now is no different to what we've always done. So be it. [pause] excuse me, I'm about to get ill." It's a mere two minutes until the Beasties' live on-air set commences. Mr Diamond joins Yauch, who's already begun pumping out the Jungle Brothers, one hand on the record flicking it back and forth and the other on the cross-fader, cutting the old-school scratching in and out. Mike cues up the CDs, throwing in tracks off the Tibetan CD like human beatbox Biz Markie's 'Nobody Beats the Biz' and, bizarrely, Noel Gallagher's punishing solo take on 'Cast No Shadow' from the Tibetan Freedom Concert CD, over which Yauch lays hilarious scratched samples of someone shouting, "Rock and roll!"

Listening to Mike and Yauch DJ is like a window into their musical world. There's no coherent theme, no structure and quite plainly no pre-planning. Hip hop grooves are cut up with straight rap, jazz and skewed techno - whatever's to hand. It's the sound of people who aren't bothered about getting things wrong, and are even less bothered about what people think. Concluding with Butter 08's 'Butter Of 69' Mary Ann Hobbs' voice comes across the internal speaker excitedly shouting, "Good work!. That was fucking brilliant!" Their night is almost over. Throughout the set crossovers were mistimed, needles jumped and Mike couldn't work out the controls too well. And that's the general idea: as with everything they do, every project, cause and hare-brained idea, mistakes only make the Beastie experience more vital.