Straight Outta Compton

Police is against the N.W.A

"I thought what was happening at Macola was where rock'n'roll was in 1964 and '65," Heller told me during our 2006 interview. "It was where the music business should be. If you sold 10,000 records you got $30,000 dollars, and Jerry Heller went over to cash the cheque because he had the only bank account, and you split it up on the corner and everybody got money."

Following the release of attention-grabbing debut album 'Straight Outta Compton' in 1988, NWA were quickly dubbed "the world's most dangerous group". It transpired that the FBI were investigating their lyrics, in particular, 'Fuck Tha Police' (or, as the surprisingly coy album sleeve titled it: '-- Tha Police (Fill In The Blanks)'). Crazily, there were attempts to ban the group from playing the song, which only fanned the flames.

The album's most focused and political statement became a free-speech issue in the United States, where the right to say what you think is enshrined in the laws of the land. As the countrywide tour to promote the album attracted more and more publicity, the cogent and largely principled 'Fuck Tha Police' became conflated with an album that elsewhere mixed sociopathy, misogyny and misanthropy with a production that took Public Enemy's scorching sonic template and ran (off) with it.

The attentions of the police - culminating in the group's arrest after they predictably ignored an instruction not to perform 'Fuck Tha Police' in Detroit - probably helped build a siege mentality within the NWA camp, and may have kept these combustible personalities together for longer than would otherwise have been the case. Inevitably, though, arguments over money proved their undoing.

Royalties, which typically take months to work their way from shops to distributors to record labels and on to artists, weren't arriving fast enough to keep tempers from boiling over. At a gig in Phoenix, Arizona, each member was given a cheque, but only if they signed a contract.