Del Pike was in the front row when the Beastie Boys' infamous 1987 gig at Liverpool's Royal Court ended in chaos, with tear gas bringing the night to an abrupt halt. The then 20-year-old was among the 3,000-strong audience on May 30 1987, a night that has been retold countless times since.
A night of chaos at the Royal Court
The Beastie Boys—Adam 'Ad-Rock' Horovitz, Adam 'MCA' Yauch and Michael 'Mike D' Diamond—were a year into promoting their debut album Licensed to Ill. Their worldwide tour across 100 cities in North America, Europe and Asia had drawn intense scrutiny from the public and tabloid media in the UK due to the album's controversial lyrics and marketing. The tour ended abruptly in Liverpool.
Del told the ECHO: "The Royal Court is more of a theatre now, but in those days it was pretty raw. You'd walk in, it was just a big empty space. It had certainly seen better days in the past. It smelt of beer, people were still smoking indoors in those days and the toilets weren't very nice. There was nothing fancy about it."
Dragged over the barrier
Recalling the moment the gig turned, he said: "I remember feeling very excited about them coming on stage, and getting in early, getting down the front, making sure that you got right down there. I just remember being squashed, a huge surge forward sort of pressed me up against the barriers. Then I remember looking back just seeing a lot of stuff being thrown around."
"Just before the tear gas came out, I was dragged over the barrier by a St. John's Ambulance medic and escorted out into the street, closely followed afterwards by a lot of people coming out coughing and in tears because they'd released the tear gas. It all seemed to be over in a very short time."
He added: "As for the actual gig, I can't even remember what I heard from the stage. I just remember that all being a lot of chaos between the band and the crowd really. I can't remember who threw the first can, I don't remember that, but there was definitely a sense of people going there to see what was going to happen."
Aftermath and headlines
After the gig, Del went with friends to Macmillans, a now-closed venue in Concert Square that was his usual Saturday night haunt. Feeling "little shell-shocked" by the events, he woke the next day to find the story had made national headlines.
He said: "I remember the Sunday morning, it was on the front page. I remember the photograph of Ad-Rock on stage with the baseball bat, and I just remember thinking 'Oh wow'. I suppose I went from being kind of scared to quite excited really. It was like 'Oh okay, that was something we were at'."
The New York Times reported that two men and two women were taken to the Royal Liverpool Hospital for minor head and facial injuries. The day after the gig, Ad-Rock was arrested in London and charged with assault causing grievous bodily harm in relation to the event. Released on bail before continuing the tour in Japan, he appeared at magistrates court in Liverpool on November 10 1987 and was found not guilty.
Reflecting on the night
Years later, Del—now a Magical Mystery tour guide—has reflected on why the night unfolded as it did. He said: "When I used to teach media studies, I did an awful lot of research into this and about the Mods and the Rockers in the '60s and all the stuff about creating folk devils and moral panics. I just believed it was that."
"It was the idea that there'd been a scuffle, there'd been something said, something had been done, there was a little bit of controversy, and of course it was, it was made bigger, it was kind of publicised and it was exaggerated to the point where maybe people were going to the gig for the wrong reasons. From what I can remember, there was a lot of fans there, and it was great. But it was very possible that a lot of people went because they wanted trouble."
