Well, what can be said about the Beastie Boys?  Not a lot that wasn’t said in the late eighties by the British tabloid press at any rate.  If they were to be believed then the mere presence of the Beastie Boys in Blighty would cause the very foundations of British Society to crumble into dust.  The fact that these very same people also wrote the same things about The Sex Pistols and countless other pop phenomena is of course utterly irrelevant.  Much like the Beastie Boys in fact, but the kids loved ’em so that irrelevance was ignored and the ‘threat’ to British Society magnified out of all proportion.

But what of Fight For Your Right?  It was released w/e 28 February 1987 – I was a spotty 17 year old at sixth form, jut the target audience for the Beastie Boys.  It grew slowly, entering the UK Singles Chart at 36 and progressing steadily to its peak at number 11 in the w/e 28 March.  Fight For Your Right was the first single by the group and was taken from their debut album, Licensed To Ill and was backed by Time To Get Ill.  It was classic generation gap stuff, with lyrics bemoaning the fact that Mom insists you go to school, or that Dad says you can’t smoke whilst himself smoking two pack(ets) a day.  You know the drill.

I bought it on 6th April – a Monday, no doubt it offered some respite to difficulties I was experiencing in one A Level class or another.  To be brutally, and somewhat disappointingly, frank with you I never experienced any of the sentiments expressed in the song.  Yes I had the odd run in with me Dad, but apart from his forcing us to listen to Jim Reeves in the car whenever we went out anywhere there were never any seismic rifts.

Anyway, back to the Beastie Boys.  If you don’t like them, or think that you might not like them, look away now…  For the rest of you, here’s a little taster: