The results, for the most part, were both exhilarating and unexpected. With a few sulky exceptions – we’re looking at you, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder – the participants largely threw themselves into the project with open minds, ready to embrace a journey into the unknown. While the Lollapalooza tour might have already helped merge the stars of MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball, Alternative Nation and Yo! MTV Raps, it’s hard to imagine, say, garage scuzzballs Mudhoney and ’phat booty’ celebrant Sir Mix-A-Lot or New York’s art-rock pioneers Sonic Youth and California’s blunts-rap crew Cypress Hill sharing a mic without his enthusiastic encouragement. Then just 22-years-old, Walters’ genius in pulling together the Judgment Night OST was to encourage the rock, metal and rap acts who expressed an interest in collaborating to actually get in the studio together to kick out their jams. And from the opening one-two of Page Hamilton’s breeze-block riffing and John Stanier’s earth-moving beats on Just Another Victim, a corrosive match up of Helmet and House Of Pain, 77 Haypark Avenue had a new party soundtrack. Given that the cover promised contributions from some of my favourite rock bands – Faith No More, Slayer, Helmet and Living Colour among them – it was immediately slotted into the communal ‘boom box’… a cheapo Sony twin cassette player, if memory serves. If I recall correctly, the Judgment Night soundtrack was brought into our student flat in Belfast in 1993 in cassette form by my friend Michael, a talented drummer, who’d previously introduced the household to the likes of N.W.A., Primus, De La Soul and Geto Boys. Three weeks later, on the campus of California State University, a multi-racial Public Enemy-inspired rap-rock band called Rage Against The Machine played their very first gig. It felt like a new beginning, like the start of something important.
In a city which had witnessed racially-charged riots just four months earlier, the sight of black and white youths losing their collective shit to this momentous musical mash-up was truly electrifying. Earlier in the year the two New York bands had teamed up to record a metallised take on PE’s 1987 single Bring The Noise, and each night of that autumn/winter tour, Chuck D, Flavor Flav and the intimidating Security of the First World posse, would join Scott Ian’s band onstage for an explosive, impossibly thrilling version of the song. The Anthrax/ Public Enemy tour, however, was a ground-breaking endeavour, the very first time a metal band had toured with a hardcore rap act. For a 21-year-old raised in rural Northern Ireland, those initial weeks were quite a culture shock, so the opportunity to attend a metal gig promised a taste of the familiar. On OctoI’d been living and studying in America, specifically the nation’s capital, Washington DC, for exactly six weeks.
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