Mike D appeared on Later With Jools Holland last night and spoke about his return to music after a long absence.
The ex-Beastie Boy released his first solo single Switch Up last month and an album has been pencilled in for later this summer. It’s the first music he’s made since the final Beastie Boys album – 2011’s Hot Sauce Committee Part Two. The group disbanded amicably after Adam Yauch died of cancer in May 2012.
During the show, the rapper sat down with Holland and talked about his grief at the loss of Yauch: "We had an incredible journey together, and then when Adam Yauch died, I was, you know, I think we were all really pretty devastated, right? You know, when you lose someone that you love to illness, it's yeah, it's devastating."
"For really just a long time, it was just way too sad for me to make music, to even like open up a music file, a Pro Tools file, whatever, I would just get sad, but then I don't know, you know, time has a funny way of sort of like changing your relationship with things, so here I am."
He also talked about his early days starting out with the Beasties in New York. “It was a total magic time,” he recalled. “Most people had abandoned New York City. When I was a little kid in the 1970s, most people had given up on it because there was too much crime. The city was literally going bankrupt so most families had moved on.”
But that meant the artists moved in. “At the same time it was this incredible place where people from all over the world moved to just be their own freaky selves. And they were free to do that, and it wasn’t expensive.”
“We were these kids that were allowed to run completely effing wild around all these clubs. I was literally 15 or 16. It was all there. In New York you had all of that stuff happening all at the time – the birth of house music happening in one club, the birth of hip hop in another, post punk – bands like Bush Tetras, ESG and those bands.”
Diamond and his band are currently on manoeuvres in Europe – they played the Porto edition of Primavera Sound over the weekend. And that album, entitled Thank You, will be out via Capitol on August 28.
