One thing has been clear for almost 40 years - LL Cool J is a star.

“I don’t rap about problems, you know. I don’t rap about the ghetto or nothing like that,” he says in an interview in Big Fun in the Big Town. “When kids come to my concert I want life’s pressures to be taken off they backs, you know what I’m saying?”

Cool James is standing in the middle of Queens, in a leafy street lined on both sides with tidy brick houses. We just met him and his grandmother in one of those homes, the one with a gold record on the wall and plastic on the furniture.