Bad Brains first sessions return as band reflects on riots, exile

Bad Brains, the Washington band long regarded by eyewitnesses as the best live act on the planet, are rereleasing their wild first studio sessions — and speaking openly about the drugs, self-sabotage and expulsion from the UK that shadowed their rise.

"They said we incited riots," the group say of the authorities who eventually kicked them out of Britain, in a new interview timed to the reissue. The remark sits at the centre of a story that runs from feted stage triumphs to an excruciating capacity for self-destruction.

Who were Bad Brains?

Frontman HR, born Paul D Hudson, remains the band's defining image. YouTube footage from their prime shows him as equal parts straining sinew and raw electricity: he bucks, contorts, punctuates rapid-fire snarls and otherworldly croons with impeccably timed backflips. Around him the band surge, forging blisteringly fast punk informed by an unusually wide record collection.

The sources are named: the Damned and Dead Boys on one side; P-Funk, Stevie Wonder and Chick Corea's Return to Forever on the other. That range, welded to hardcore velocity, set them apart.

They were outliers in the already outré 1970s punk scene. Young and black, they fuelled themselves with an ideology that united the 1930s self-help mantras of Napoleon Hill with Rastafari. Old punks, who agree on little else — who was first, who was fastest, where to file the Faith/Void split LP — agree on this: for those who saw Bad Brains in their prime, they were unequivocally the best live band on Earth.

What does this change for punk history?

The rerelease restores the group's earliest documentation to circulation, and the interview reframes a legacy often reduced to chaos. Bad Brains helped change the face of American punk as it morphed into hardcore in the early 1980s. Defeat was never far from glory: the band balanced scintillating live performances and a strong run of records with a persistent capacity for self-sabotage and scaring club owners.

Their influence is measurable in the roster of artists who followed:

• Rage Against the Machine
• Deftones
• Lil Jon
• the Roots
• Beastie Boys

That list spans rap, metal and hip-hop — few punk bands of their era reach that far.

The new interviews and reissue arrive as the band, older now, confront the contradictions directly: the mantras and the mania, the backflips and the blacklists. For a group once deemed a public-order threat in two countries, the first sessions now function as evidence — of a band whose documented beginnings outlasted the riots, the exile and the self-destruction their own story records.