'Bob Vylan ain't got no tanks ... You can't really kill nobody with a microphone'

Chuck D, leader of hip-hop’s radical Public Enemy, talks to Sarfraz Manzoor about the ‘fight for peace and love by any means necessary’, the Glastonbury controversy and ageism

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It’s been five years since the last Public Enemy album, but the band’s frontman, Chuck D, hasn’t exactly been putting his feet up. “I’m a furnace,” he declares, and he’s not wrong. In the past few years, he has published a graphic novel, released a solo album and narrated an acclaimed TV series about hip-hop, all while hosting shows on his global radio network. This month, Public Enemy return with their 16th studio album, Black Sky Over the Projects: Apartment 2025. “I’m diversified across so many areas,” he tells me, “but Public Enemy is a juggernaut - it is a locomotive of its own.”

That locomotive has shed a few parts during the past 40 years - their DJ Terminator X left in 1999 to raise emus and the band’s Minister of Information, Professor Griff, was forced to leave the band in 1989 after making antisemitic remarks in a newspaper interview. (“Griff’s statements were wrong, and I apologised. He also apologised to me,” Chuck D said at the time, after announcing that “Griff had to lose his position.”)

I speak to the frontman while the controversy still swirls around punk rap duo Bob Vylan’s Glastonbury appearance. The duo led chants of “Death, death to the IDF” at the festival, leading police to launch a criminal investigation and the revocation of the band’s US visas. “When people say death to a country, they’re not saying death to a people,” Chuck D says, “they’re saying death to imperialism, death to colonialism. Bob Vylan ain’t got no tanks. They’re using words to say something must end. You can’t really kill nobody with a guitar or a microphone, but you could kill somebody with a drone and a fucking tank. We have to be able to fight for peace and love by any means necessary.” Public Enemy first played in London in November 1987. The day before that gig,