The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

I’m really not into big shows. The last time I saw the Beastie Boys was in 1992. They were supporting Henry Rollins, touring small venues on the back of their Check Your Head album – something of a comeback for them, as 1989’s Paul’s Boutique had gone largely unnoticed. It was a truly powerful show. The boys were edgy and sporting punkish, oddly coloured hair; the set was venomous and shockingly loud. They looked like they had something to prove, or perhaps something to grab back. That was 15 years ago. They’re bona fide global pop stars now, having long been at the level of cool whereby they can do pretty much what they like – Hollywood, magazine publishing, Buddhism – and watch it sell.

The Stool Pigeon caught guitarist/MC Adam “Ad Rock” Horowitz hours before the band took the Brixton Academy’s stage in sharp jazz-cat suits, pushing their seventh album, The Mix-Up, a collection of off-the-cuff dubby funk instrumentals. Despite my remit of getting some sort of comeback from him to many UK critics’ disdainful reactions to the languid all-instrumental album, I don’t think there’s much to claw at – after all, it’s difficult to get such a thing as a ‘scoop’ on the Beastie Boys. They give their fans what they want – dialogue, treats (they were one of the first acts to give away MP3s online), even having them shoot their own concert footage for the film Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That! Being so self-deprecating and irreverent, their relationship with the press has almost always been that of court-and-court-jesters. Ask a silly question; get a silly answer. I leave it open and just wonder aloud what’s going on with this new direction, if indeed it is a new direction. “Ah shit, you tell me,” Adam shrugs. “What is going on with it?”

Well, The Mix-Up is their lowest charting album over here yet, and it has to be said that they’ve done all this before, and better. Though the Beastie Boys started life over 25 years ago as a scrubby hardcore band “scraping money for fries and gravy”, it wasn’t until recording the aforementioned Check Your Head album that they picked up instruments with aplomb again, delivering a clutch of genuinely impressive laid-back funk instrumentals spread across the set. But not only is much of this similarly styled new release rather bland, it does seem like an lazy step backwards, even for a band that has made several reverses in their career.

“I don’t necessarily disagree with that,” Adam offers. “Basically, the last record we made was an all-rap record – and it’s interesting that people didn’t say that [a step backwards] about that one – and so when we came back to record again, we said, ‘Let’s just play our instruments and see what we come up with.’ We just started doing some instrumental stuff and we were into it, so we were just like, ‘Fuck it, we’ll record what we’ve been working on and put it out.’ We’ve never put out an actual instrumental record before. We’ve done a compilation of already-released stuff, but we thought, ‘Fuck it, let’s see what happens.’ It wasn’t like this big plan we had. We were just in the mood for recording an instrumental record.”

One of the Boys recently joked, perhaps in response to similar provocation, that their label called in a deadline and they simply had to give them an album of whatever they’d knocked out thus far. Some of it does sound that way. But were their giant corporate label happy with the results? “Oh man, they love it,” Adam enthuses, “an instrumental record in 2007? Are you kidding me? What with the whole trend of instrumental jazzy records? Justin Timberlake’s new instrumental record? Pink’s new instrumental record? It’s perfect for them.”

I suggest that they must certainly have a great relationship with Capitol. Adam laughs, sensing my mild taunt. “You know what? Actually we have. For a long time. Really, they let us do what we want to do.”

Then, perhaps to prove this point, the Beastie Boys should switch tack completely and record an all a capella album next.

“Barbershop quartet,” Adam spits back instantly, “that’s what I’m talking about.”

Ludicrous as that sounds, it’s not inconceivable that they could actually get away with it.

“I don’t think we could,” Adam deadpans. “We each sing worse than the other one sings.”

Though I’m shy to actually say it out loud to him, I think he’d probably admit that, when you strip it down, they’re not even remarkable rappers or musicians either. They get away with doing what they want because they have that certain something – and certainly the respect of their peers. On Jay-Z’s behind-the-scenes Fade To Black video documentary, Beastie Boy Mike D turns up at Rick Rubin’s home studio while Jay is recording ‘99 Problems’ – a track whose slamming rock beat might well have been an off-cut from the Beastie’s Def Jam years. Jay-Z, then the biggest thing in hip hop, beamingly refers to the geeky Mike as “one of the architects of this shit”. It makes me wonder why the Beastie Boys haven’t done more high-end collaborations, as rappers are often wont to do.

“We’re friends with Q Tip and Biz [Markie], and they’ve done a song each with us,” Adam recalls, “but we’re actually trying to do that collaboration thing with the record we got out now. We sent it to a bunch of different people and hopefully get some to sing over a track, or rap, or sample a part…”

Sensing the nearest thing to a scoop we might get, I press him for just who might ‘hopefully’ be involved. “I don’t think Mary J Blige is gonna do it,” he grins, “but M.I.A. might. Snoop Dogg says he wants to do it. I’m hoping Justice might do it. I’m friends with Mark Ronson from the neighbourhood, he’s probably gonna do it.”

Who – apart from maybe Mary J - wouldn’t want to do it? Whether you think that their new album is lame or genius, their kudos is undeniable, and it’s something they’ve achieved through just being themselves – for a lifetime, in pop terms. Is it true that the family that plays together stay together? Do these three affable Jewish fellows still socialise together?

“You know, I never really liked them, let alone be friends with them,” Adam says with perfect sincerity. “It’s a business relationship. I don’t really know how they feel about me, but from what my management tells me, they do like me.” He’s joking, of course. “Umm, yeah, I know. Unfortunately we spend way too much time together. We are in each other’s pockets.” Not literally, I hope. “I owe Mike D a lot of money. He paid for dinner the other night.”

A quarter of a century on… pop star, movie star, a house in Manhattan – still taking the piss. You can’t help but love that.