2. The Last PoetsThe Last Poets

I was a John Peel listener like anyone who had any taste, any lonely soul – there were a lot of us and it was great when we all got together. He played this. I’d never heard anything like it. It was around that period after the Mexico Olympics and the Black Power protest and to this day, surely, this must be the first hip-hop record, not in terms of its music composition but in terms of the content. Everything is there. It is supreme. I wanted to know more about it, so I went out and bought some books – Soul On Ice, Seize The Time, all those things. That’s really powerful. John was never quite as bumbling as he liked people to think.