6 Mix - Dave Pearce meets Chuck D

On November 3 1987, BBC 6 Music and then Radio London DJ Dave Pearce introduced hip-hop group Public Enemy live on stage at London's Hammersmith Odeon. The next year, the band sampled Dave's intro for the opening track of their 1988 album 'It Takes A Nation Of Millions to Hold Us Back'; the record which propelled the band to stardom worldwide. Since then, 'Nation of Millions' has been proclaimed as the greatest hip hop album of all time, feted by everyone from Rolling Stone magazine to Jay Z. Two decades on, Dave and Public Enemy front man Chuck D meet to reminisce about the birth of rap music in the US and UK and how things have changed in 2010. The pair discuss how they met, how Dave ended up becoming the first person to play them on UK radio, and the role the band played in bring rap music to the mainstream on both sides of the Atlantic. They also discuss the firebrand politics which came to characterize their lyrics and the role they played in taking rap from an underground sound which wasn't played on daytime radio to becoming the pre-eminent sound in mainstream music. Chuck D also picks a selection of music which soundtracked the era including LL Cool J, Stetsasonic and the World Famous Supreme Team and plays the music which informed his childhood including James Brown. There's also a chance to hear live music from the infamous 1987 Hammersmith Odeon show, last heard on radio over two decades ago.