Apart from a few superstar rappers, hip-hop has generally lagged behind guitar music in the live business, so it was encouraging to see the Rock the Bells package tour reach Britain.

This was an evening for purists with a line-up including Nas, EPMD and the talented beatboxing and freestyling duo Supernatural & Scratch.

The Pharcyde reformed for this tour, too,
although a bizarre queuing system meant I nearly missed out on the Nineties act from LA. Still, just the final 10 minutes of their set suggested they deserve another shot.

“Everyone was saying Fatlip was on crack,” was rapper Fatlip’s way of addressing The Pharcyde’s previous split. Hilariously, the group then launched into Britney Spears’s My Prerogative complete with a daft dance routine.

EPMD were avowedly old school, with Erick Sermon pointing out that when they emerged in the late Eighties, members of the audience were still in nappies. Theirs was a no-frills approach: at one point the duo were rapping when a man in a baseball cap strolled on to tape up a tour banner that had fallen down.

Nas struck a similar note to EPMD with his demand for “real hip-hop”, sounding not unlike an ale enthusiast in the wrong kind of pub. But the New Yorker brought more drama as well as a big gold chain to the show.

There was a blazing rendition of Hip-Hop is Dead, followed by a return to his triumphant mid-Nineties debut album Illmatic. NY State of Mind and Life’s a Bitch were still sinuous and aggressive, and Nas then intelligently
re-worked Black President to mark the Obama election win.

The crowd danced and whooped, despite the lack of any expensive production values. But Nas was undoubtedly keeping it real.