33% minutes with...Chuck D

The Public Enemy founder is Zooming Record Collector from his study at his LA home. It’s the middle of the night, which is when he works best, he says. Dressed in de rigueur black T-shirt with baseball cap, he’s sat with rows and rows of neatly filed CDs to one side and, to the other, a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf crammed with art books. He’s just become the subject of his own, Livin’ Loud, which collects over 250 of his paintings, sketches and drawings of musical and sports heroes from Gladys Knight and James Brown to basketball player Julius Irving aka Dr J. In between are political cartoons and satirical skits. Always the restless creative, he’s also just launched the cultural app, Bring The Noise, and published his first of what he calls ‘naphic grovels’ on his own Enemy Books. “I was raised with an artist’s mentality,” he says

- Lois Wilson

Before Public Enemy you studied fine arts at New York’s Adelphi University. Had you always wanted to be an illustrator?

Yeah, I expressed myself with my head and hands first and I did stuff on campus, then I graduated in 1984, and in ’85 Public Enemy took off and art took a back seat.

What prompted your return?

One thing was the passing of my father [in February 2016] which led me into just doing it all the time as a subtle therapy type of thing. But the other thing was joining Prophets Of Rage [his rap rock supergroup with Tom Morello] where there was a hell of a lot of hotel time. I heard that Ronnie Wood of the Stones, who is my musician-artist hero, would walk into every hotel and draw the room and that gave me an idea because one of the most difficult things for a band when they tour is the downtime. Before, I’ve always turned my room into a computer lab to record music but then doing art, I turned it into an art studio and that was a different revelation. I’ve done 30,000 illustrations since then.

How do you describe your style?

It’s like jazz, with human mistakes. That’s important, not correcting the mistakes because that’s where discovery lies.

Genesis have published Livin’ Loud. How did you hook up with them?