When I was just a young man in short trousers with a catapult in the backpocket, we got satellite TV.

For the first time I could see things like Baseball, The Simpsons, German Pornography and MTV. The best thing on MTV by a long, long way was “Yo! MTV Raps”.

It seemed to be beamed in from another planet- I couldn’t understand a word they were saying, the clothes they were wearing, or why they didn’t get into trouble from their parents for messing around with the record player like that.

The original presenter of “Yo! MTV Raps” was a guy called “Fab 5 Freddy”- and last night he was in town to show a collection of clips from the show.

He had some great footage- Run DMC live in the studio was worth the ticket price (0RMB) alone. After the videos were over, Freddy answered questions about various stuff (I shamefully asked “In that Snoop video you made, how did you get the dogs dance around?”
he seemed like a really nice guy, who basically knows everyone that picked up a microphone or put a needle on a record in the 80s and 90s.

Afterwards he signed a pair of shoes and gave them away to the first person to answer a trivia question. I knew the answer so put my hand up politely to be called out by the teacher, unfortunately a guy at the back shouted out and won the trainers. Which illustrates, in a nutshell why despite eventually learning all of the lyrics to Run DMCs “You Talk Too Much“, my rap career was destined to never really take off.

Bonus shoes