Rarely for the world’s greatest entertainment mogul, he is quiet and composed. He is dressed down, in vest, jeans, shades and cap. “You can just hear this shit boomin’ out the windows on Eighth Avenue, right?” he asks. He taps his shell-toes to the gloopy funk of Reverse, a work-in-progress track from his new album, Forever. In the back of the surrounded Jeep, Sean “Puffy” Combs takes another sip on his Belvedere vodka. They muscle in and out of traffic, ensuring that the flanks of the central vehicle are constantly covered. They take up three lanes and move in sequence. Today, we proudly republish the original September 1999 cover feature with the artist we must now (seemingly) call Sean Love Combs.Īt high speed in low evening light, a fleet of black Jeeps with tinted windows rolls along a Los Angeles freeway. In a brilliant feat of reportage, writer Peter Lyle embedded with Puff in Los Angeles, London and Paris, while ace photographers James Dimmock (portraits) and John Spinks (fly-on-the-wall) captured the excitement and agitation surrounding every international move of the Playas’ Playa. But after months of wrangling, The Face secured unprecedented access to the artist-entrepreneur who was about to rebrand himself as P‑Diddy. The man born Sean Combs was, therefore, appropriately elusive. Twenty years ago, Puff Daddy was the biggest noise in hip-hop culture, a multi-hyphenate before the phrase had been invented.
Creative, resilient, revolutionary: these are our Archive Heroes. Over the coming weeks we’ll be posting a selection of these Face encounters with the best of the best. To celebrate Black History Month, we’ve dug through our 40 years-deep back-catalogue to find interviews and profiles with the world’s greatest talents across film, music, fashion and the arts.