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

Mike D: ‘Humility was not part of ‘Licensed to Ill’’ - (Dan Lowe)

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. “He was a big brother figure to me,” says the rapper known as Mike D. “I feel like he had an influence on me making this record.”

It was Yauch, he explains, who pushed the group to chase their wildest dreams. “He never allowed us to be limited to things that seemed sensible or realistic,” recalls Diamond. “However big or beyond the idea was: absolutely that’s the one you’re going to go for.”