“I was already listening to a lot of rap when I met Chuck. We met at the Def Jam offices in New York City because I knew people who worked there and I was always hanging around their offices. Run DMC had already exploded and it was an exciting time. I heard the first Public Enemy before it came out because someone at the label played me the tracks and it blew me away. I’d started wearing PE T-shirt on stage and Chuck heard about this and came to see us when we played the Beacon Theatre in New York [in November 1987], and I suppose it was a case of mutual admiration so we kept in touch.

“It was my idea to cover [Public Enemy’s] Bring The Noise. We were finishing off the drum tracks for the Persistence Of Time album [in late 1989] when I told [drummer] Charlie Benante that I’d transposed the song. He heard it and said ‘This sounds fucking awesome!’ so we cut a version and put it on a cassette. I sent it to Chuck so see whether he’d sing on it. He said he’d have to run it by Rick Rubin. He called me back said that Rick thought it was a band idea because Public Enemy had already recorded the track on It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back [released in April 1988] so it would be redundant. I just told Chuck to play the tape and, when he eventually did, he loved it.

“When did we record with Chuck? I cannot tell a lie so I have to tell you that Chuck and Flavor Flav never came into the studio. We got their vocals from [the master to] Bring The Noise and sat there without sampling technology and cut them into the track word by word until we made it work. I’ve never told anybody that because nobody’s actually asked when we cut it together. It took forever and our version was in a different key but in the end we were even more stoked with the results because it was so great. Doing it before sampling had exploded kinda meant that we were ahead of our time.

“The planets did align when it came to making the video because we had a day off in Chicago and PE had a day off so they flew up and we had an amazing day. At that point I turned round to [our manager] Johnny Z and I said ‘We should take this on tour.’ It came together quite easily and we went out [in September 1991] but the idea of putting a metal band out with a hip hop band was a risk.

“In the States we were playing colleges which wasn’t where we were used to playing. The supporting acts were the Young Black Teenagers and Primus so it was a varied bill. Public Enemy would come on and, at times you could see the dividing line between our fans and theirs. But we knew we’d made the right decision when we got to Madison Square Garden and we did Bring The Noise with Chuck and Flav and the place looked liked it had been destroyed by the end of it when the pit went from 100 to about 1000 hardcore metal heads.

“Going to Europe was the next step and Brixton Academy was the final show of the run. We knew that would be amazing because both bands had a hardcore audience. I think in my mind, I had this odd idea of selling metal records to black teenagers all over the world but in the end the audience was 90 per cent white… which was still the biggest black audience we’ve ever played to!

“I do think we lost some of our hardcore audience who turned around and said ‘fuck you!’ after those shows because we weren’t metal enough anymore. I understood that audience because I used to be that guy! But I also think we left a massive footprint in the cement that meant it was OK for musicians from different musical worlds to collaborate. Are we the fathers of rap-rock? I hope not, but I do hope we opened some doors that helped people think differently.”