Beastie Boys’ Mike D on his party days of yore: ‘We were young and full of testosterone’

When Michael Diamond started work on his first solo album, he couldn’t help but think of his late bandmate, Adam “MCA” Yauch. It’s been 14 years since his fellow Beastie Boy died of cancer aged 47, a tragedy that brought the wildly inventive hip-hop trio they shared with Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz to an immediate and premature end. All this time later, Yauch still looms large in Diamond’s psyche.

At 60, Diamond has returned refreshed and energized by his time away from the mic, but he is also older and wiser than the cocky MC who once declared himself the “illest motherf***er from here to Gardena”. Diamond never imagined himself as a rap elder statesman. Back when the Beastie Boys released their debut album, Licensed to Ill, in November 1986, few people would have believed it would be talked about with any kind of reverence 40 years later.

The head of their label, Def Jam, rap mogul Russell Simmons, told them the genre had no chance of longevity. Produced by Def Jam co-founder Rick Rubin, who arranged for members of the metal group Slayer to provide uncredited guitar work, it was a pioneering blend of rock and hip-hop – lyrics about drinking, debauchery and girls shouted over Led Zeppelin samples and punchy 808 drum machine beats – that made superstars of the Beasties almost overnight. Boisterous single “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)” was embraced by exactly the sort of frat boy jocks it intended to satirise.

Not that the band minded all that much at the time, playing up loutish personas of their own. They set off for a celebratory world tour with a stage design comprising beer kegs, a go-go dancer cage and a 25ft hydraulic penis that would rise out of a box when they played their biggest hit. We were young, raging with testosterone, and running around having a lot of fun.” Today he’s speaking to me over a video call from his home in Malibu.

His salt-and-pepper hair is freshly surf-tousled; this wiry New York punk kid is happily settled into life as a middle-aged Southern Californian beach bum. He’s full of stories, and fond of digressions. This revenue helps to fund journalism across The Independent.

The Beastie Boys had to do their growing up in public. By the time the Licensed to Ill tour arrived in Britain in 1987, they were at the centre of a confected moral panic, with MPs calling for them to be banned from performing in the country and a tabloid story, which the band instantly denied, about them mocking sick children at a festival in Montreux. At an infamous gig in Liverpool, a riot broke out and Horovitz was arrested for assault.