NME headed up to North Shields to catch Mike D‘s first UK solo show in an intimate social club, where the Beastie Boys icon told us about going it alone, his incoming album and the importance of keeping weird grassroots venues alive.
The first of the rap pioneer trio to emerge with solo music since the passing of Adam “MCA” Yauch in 2012, Mike D – real name Michael Diamond – surprised fans last month when he made an appearance on stage with his sons Davis and Skyler of indie-dance band Very Nice Person at Ojai Valley Women’s Club. He soon played a couple of live solo shows in the US at some unusual locations where he debuted solo material before dropping his first single ‘Switch Up and later ‘What We Got‘.
Always keeping fans guessing, his first UK and European gigs came later with eyebrow-raising news of a launch gig at a social club and bingo hall in North Shields, not far from Newcastle. After a pie and pint in the pub round the corner where local lad Sam Fender used to work and perform, we asked a post-soundcheck Mike D what this was all about.
“I mean it with total enthusiasm: this is exactly why we’re doing this run of shows. We made new music and I just had this idea to release a track, play a couple of shows, and then again. In doing that, I realised we’re in a funny place where so much of our bandwidth is taken up with going to festivals and we’re so used to going to the same venues over and over. It sets an expectation.”
He continued: “The shortcut would be to try and pick venues where people would like, ‘What? Where is it? What is that place?’ Coming from New York, this is a totally foreign thing – which is great! I couldn’t love it more.”
And how are his bingo skills?
“I don’t have a strong bingo background, but I’m open to it,” he replied. “I’m pro-bingo.”
Hardcore Beastie Boys fans may already be aware of the band’s connection to North Shields, however. They were huge fans of the hedonistic ’80s new wave metal band Venom, local lads whose banter was sampled on ‘Mark On The Bus’ from their 1992 album ‘Check Your Head’.
“I had this 7” that Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth put out years and years ago on this label he had called Ecstatic Peace, and it was just the monologues from one Venom show,” Mike D remembered. “It was all the in-between spoken word and yelled snippets. That’s totally implanted in my mind.”
After blasting out the samples complete with shout-outs to Newcastle Brown Ale throughout the show, Mike D and band did their best too to further implant Venom in the memories of the packed-out crowd at King Street Social Club.
The social club was certainly one of the “what the fuck?” venues that Mike D and co were aiming for, seemingly a little Phoenix Nights on the surface but bringing the likes of Caribou, Daniel Avery, Marie Davidson and Optimo among the world-leading DJs and dance acts to this coastal north eastern town. With his recent gigs including a surf shop parking lot, women’s club, a Latino drag bar, and a roller rink, Mike D told us he was looking for spots that were “not conventional music places” that made it “more exciting for us on different levels.”
There was a time when it wasn’t so unusual for major acts to play in grassroots venues in corners of the world like this, but the UK is currently in the doldrums of “the complete collapse of touring” with only 12 locations left on the primary or secondary circuit for artists where it used to be 28 back in 1994. After decades of decline and the spiralling cost of living and touring, thousands of fans and communities are now without nearby access to live music and countless opportunities for artists are lost. It was recently revealed that over half of UK grassroots venues made no profit in 2025, with 6,000 jobs gone. Mike D agreed it was essential to “incentivise the arts”.
“It’s funny because I’ve been spending some time in London over the last five or six years because my partner is from there,” Mike D told NME. “I’ve been hearing from a lot of people that it’s really a struggle for grassroots venues and the government isn’t really doing anything to help ease it. If you don’t have places for bands to figure out what they’re doing, then how are you going to have any domestic music scene?
“I was really excited when this offer came in to do this place. They told me the venue is this cool place that subsidised so they can keep the ticket price reasonable. Sadly in other places, especially the US, we are not up to speed with that. I don’t understand why London isn’t either, but that’s a whole other political thing.”
Asked about the magic of grassroots venues, Mike D replied: “For me, I’m a sucker for places that are what they are: they’re of a certain history, they haven’t been updated or made into a replica of themselves.
“So much of what you find now is someone will buy a place like this and say, ‘Oh, we’re gonna make it really nice’. Then it becomes like Las Vegas, it loses everything it had, it becomes a replica and they clean it up too much. You lose this very tangible history that you can feel. To me, that’s happening more and more. Maybe, it’s because I’m getting fucking old.”
That smell of a small, sweaty room, the energy that comes from the true one-off experience, and the punk identity of our surroundings only embellishes the performance of Mike D and his backing band 5D (featuring his two young sons and collaborators). It was a back-to-basics approach that saw Diamond along his path back to releasing music, after over a decade of other projects including production work on the likes of Soft Play‘s (then Slaves) second studio album ‘Take Control‘ and The Hives‘ recent ‘The Hives Forever Forever the Hives‘.
“We so much loved all three of us being in a band with each other for Beastie Boys,” Mike D told us. “When Yauch died, it was an extremely sad time for me so making music was just not on the table. Then being a dad was something I put myself into and eventually I worked on the [Beastie Boys Book] with Adam [“Ad-Rock” Horovitz] and that really helped both of us as we were really able to shine a light on our past together.
“I took a minute where I was watching my kids make music for a bit, which was an interesting thing as I was also working on producing records for other artists. That was fun and everything – and hats off to really good record producers, I’m not knocking it – but for myself I got to a place where I was feeling the most about what I was producing when bands were more executing my ideas. I was like, ‘What the fuck am I doing? Bands shouldn’t be doing my ideas, they should be making their own ideas and I should be making my own ideas’.”
Did he feel the pressure of being the first Beastie Boy to go solo?
“To be honest, there was no race to the finish line on that one!” Diamond replied. “I’m still thankfully good friends with Ad-Rock and he’s not racing me on this one. It wasn’t until I had to sit down and do the first interview that I realised that was a thing.”
The North Shields show bounces with all the punk energy that made Beastie Boys such a vital crossover act, albeit this time with a modern sheen. There’s a politically-charged cover of Delta 5’s ‘Mind Your Own Business’ and amped up renditions of Diamond’s “old band” fan favourites ‘Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun’ and ‘So What’cha Want’, but his new solo cuts burst with a future-facing post-hardcore meets hyperpop rush that call to mind the confrontational sounds of Death Grips, Sleigh Bells and Turnstile.
Diamond explained how he found his new sound, with a little help from the clear perspective of his sons.
“On the one hand, there’s a lot of commonality in terms of how I worked with Beastie Boys – plugging in seemingly random instruments and falling in love with how certain things sound and starting to play around with that and building up from there, keeping all the happy accidents that occur every step along the way,” he told us. “Then getting a bit further down the line and really editing fearlessly and cutting stuff back.
“The difference was that I had to get myself into a place of being very free in terms of doing my vocals. In the band, we were all each other’s best editors. There was almost a little bit of competition and one-upmanship, in a good way. Here, I realised early on in the process that even with a lot of amazing collaborators, my kids were my best editors. They don’t relate to me [in that way]. They haven’t listened to ‘Hello Nasty’ a gazillion times. They were extremely frank with me on my vocals, which was super helpful.”
Revealing that there’s an album on the way soon, Mike D assured that it would be the best of the old school and the new to show how far he’d come.
“The way I describe the record is that musically it’s still pretty immature, and lyrically it’s a little bit more mature,” he ended. “I just feel like there’s more of the things I had to tap into. I had to learn how to feel all over again.”
Mike D’s remaining UK and European tour dates are below. Visit here for tickets and more information.
JUNE
5 – 26 Leake St, London, UK
6 – 26 Leake St, London, UK
10 – Saalchen, Berlin, Germany
13 – Primavera Sound Festival, Porto, Portugal
14 – Beyond The Pale Festival, Wicklow, Ireland
16 – La 2 de Apolo Nitsa, Barcelona, Spain
18 – Blender at Bolwerk, Kortrijk, Belgium
19 – De Casino, Sint-Niklaas, Belgium
20 – Beyond The Streets, Paris, France