Captain and two bowlers protest their innocence as players are to be interviewed by police under caution

The three Pakistan cricketers at the centre of an alleged betting scam that has thrown world cricket into crisis were last night charged under the anti-corruption code of the game's governing body and provisionally suspended.

After a day that began with the Pakistan Cricket Board agreeing to omit the players from the team for the rest of the tour, and the Pakistan high commissioner claiming they were "set-up" by the News of the World, the ICC suspended the three pending a tribunal.

Outside the west London hotel in which Test captain Salman Butt, fast bowler Mohammad Asif and brilliant teenage prospect Mohammad Amir are also staying, ICC chief executive Haroon Lorgat provided the swift action many in the game had demanded.

"We will not tolerate corruption in cricket – simple as that. We must be decisive with such matters and, if proven, these offences carry serious penalties up to a life ban," he said.

"The ICC will do everything possible to keep such conduct out of the game and we will stop at nothing to protect the sport's integrity. While we believe the problem is not widespread, we must always be vigilant. It is important, however, that we do not pre-judge the guilt of these three players. That is for the independent tribunal alone to decide."

Under tougher new rules brought in last year by the ICC, the players can be suspended provisionally ahead of any hearing if it is in the interests of the game.

The row was triggered by allegations in the News of the World that the three had agreed to bowl no-balls in specific overs of last week's fourth Test at Lord's in return for money.

The charges were announced after officials from the ICC's anti-corruption and security unit (ACSU) spent the afternoon at Scotland Yard viewing evidence and seeking police go-ahead. The police are conducting a parallel criminal inquiry.

The three players will today be interviewed under police caution for the first time. Earlier they had agreed to withdraw from the rest of the tour citing the "mental torture" they had been placed under by the allegations. They protested their innocence and the Pakistani high commissioner suggested they might have been "set up" by the News of the World.

While their team-mates were turning out against Somerset 160 miles away in Taunton, the accused three were being whisked into their country's high commission in London amid a flurry of claims and top level political negotiations.

ICC investigators, who had been examining spot-fixing allegations against Pakistan for some time, have been in London since Monday. Sir Ronnie Flanagan, the former Northern Ireland police chief who was appointed chairman of the ACSU three months ago, arrived from Abu Dhabi to join them, while its chief investigator, Ravi Sawani, met police.

But despite withdrawing the players from the tour, following pressure behind the scenes from the England and Wales Cricket Board and the sport's global governing body, the Pakistan camp remained bullish.

The high commissioner, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, claimed the players had been "set up" by the News of the World. Asked if they had been framed, he answered "yes" and suggested the newspaper's video evidence could have been filmed after the contentious no-balls had been bowled.

The News of the World said it "refuses to respond to such ludicrous allegations". The newspaper is understood to be preparing further revelations for Sunday.

Hasan said of the three players: "They are extremely disturbed about what has happened in the past week, particularly in regards to their alleged involvement in the crime. They mentioned they are entirely innocent and shall defend their innocence as such.

"They further maintain that on account of the mental torture that has affected them they are not in right frame of mind to play the remaining matches."

Pakistani journalists repeatedly asked whether the team was a victim of a conspiracy and Pakistan's sports minister, Ijaz Jakhrani, also suggested there could be another explanation for the apparently damning News of the World evidence.

"Let's wait until the report comes. After that we will be in a position to see if it is spot fixing, if it is match fixing or if it is a conspiracy against these players or against the country," he told the Indian news channel CNN-IBN.

After the three wary-looking players arrived to a media posse and a small knot of 20 or so protesters, officials from the Pakistan high commission handed out copies of an article by the journalist and academic Roy Greenslade.

The piece was highly critical of the methods used in previous stings by Mazher Mahmood – the so-called "Fake Sheikh" behind the sensational News of the World claim that a middleman accepted £150,000 to correctly predict the exact time when no-balls would be bowled.

Although Hasan insisted the three players were "not running away" – they will remain in England and their passports are being held by the team manager – they were whisked out of a side door and departed in a people carrier while the car in which they arrived acted as a decoy.

Mazhar Majeed, the 35-year-old middleman the News of the World alleges was at the heart of the betting sting, was arrested on Sunday and released on bail. Separately, he was also arrested as part of an investigation by HM Revenue and Customs into money laundering through Croydon Athletic, the non-league football club he owns.

Both the ECB and the ICC felt the intense focus on and public clamour for action had made it impossible for the three players to play any further part in the tour. The ICC was under pressure to act before Sunday's Twenty20 match between England and Pakistan in Cardiff.

Sources had indicated all week that a negotiated withdrawal was the most likely solution, but a last minute intervention from PCB chairman, Ijaz Butt, threw a spanner in the works. His insistence that the players might still play was seen as an attempt to reassure the Pakistani public that it was not capitulating.

Israeli and Palestinian leaders begin framework talks on a peace deal which could encompass borders, Jerusalem, Jewish settlements and security

The Israeli and Palestinian leaders, Binyamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas, met for the first day of direct talks in Washington yesterday and agreed that a peace deal could be achieved within a year.

George Mitchell, the White House envoy who joined the negotiations, said the two leaders decided to begin putting together a framework agreement on all major issues – such as borders, Jerusalem, Jewish settlements and security – that will "establish the fundamental compromises necessary" to flesh out a comprehensive peace deal.

Mitchell said Netanyahu and Abbas agreed to meet again in a fortnight in the Middle East and every two weeks after that. The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and Mitchell will attend the first of those meetings on 14 September.

The negotiations are likely to face their first real test with the next round of talks coming just days before Israel's partial freeze on construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank comes to an end.

Netanyahu has so far resisted US calls to renew the freeze, which the Palestinians see as a litmus test of the Israeli prime minister's intent.

Mitchell declined to disclose the detail of the discussions, although he said some of the major issues were touched on. Netanyahu and Abbas met US officials and then met privately. Mitchell described the two men's relationship at the talks as "cordial".

Before the talks opened, Netanyahu said two key demands – recognition of his country as a Jewish state and arrangements to ensure it does not come under attack from within a Palestinian state – were a prerequisite to a wider agreement.

Netanyahu again called Abbas his "partner in peace" and said he was prepared to make "painful concessions" to reach a deal. But the Israeli prime minister said that what he called the "two pillars to peace" must be resolved.

Clinton launched the negotiations by calling for the leaders to show themselves as bold and courageous statesmen and reach a comprehensive peace agreement within the one-year deadline set by Barack Obama. "We understand the suspicion and scepticism that so many feel born out of years of conflict and frustrated hopes," she said. "But by being here today you each have taken an important step toward freeing your peoples from the shackles of a history we cannot change."

Netanyahu said Israel was prepared to make sacrifices to reach an agreement. "Together we can lead our people to a historic future that can put an end to claims and to conflict. This will not be easy. A true peace, a lasting peace, will be achieved only with mutual and painful concessions from both sides … from my side and from your side," he said.

Hamas responded to the talks by announcing that it has joined forces with other armed groups such as Islamic Jihad to launch a wave of attacks against Israel. Earlier this week, Hamas claimed responsibility for the killing of four Jewish settlers in the West Bank, including a pregnant woman.

The Israeli prime minister said there were two issues that he regarded as central to any agreement: legitimacy and security. "Just as you expect us to be ready to recognise a Palestinian state as the nation state of the Palestinian people, we expect you to be prepared to recognise Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people," he said. "I said too, a real peace must take into account the genuine security needs of Israel … new forces have risen in our region, Iran and its proxies and the rise of missile warfare [with Hamas attacks from Gaza]. A peace agreement must take into account security arrangements against these real threats."

Abbas said he believed a deal was possible. "We're not starting from scratch, because we had many rounds of negotiations between the PLO and the Israeli government."

With one band Nick Cave has a carefully built musical legacy. With his other, he can visit his 'lower self' and make chaotic noise. Alexis Petridis meets Grinderman

You would be hard-pushed to call the video for Grinderman's new single Heathen Child anything other than striking. On one level, that's far from surprising. The director is John Hillcoat, best known for his harrowing adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road. His most recent collaboration with Nick Cave was the multiple award-winning 2005 film The Proposition, and that was pretty striking, too: the kind of film you watch through your fingers, a feast of blood and brutality set in 19th-century Australia. Then there's the racket Cave makes with Grinderman, which seems to have more in common with the nihilistic violence of his early 80s band the Birthday Party than the stately, beautifully wrought ballads that populate his most recent albums with the Bad Seeds. Like Grinderman's previous singles, Get It On and No Pussy Blues, Heathen Child is a scouring, ferocious din built around Cave's rudimentary explorations of the guitar, an instrument he only took up a couple of months before the band recorded their 2007 debut album ("What do you mean, have I become more adept?" he deadpans. "What, you're saying I wasn't adept before? Would you ask Jimi Hendrix that question on his second album?"). Under the circumstances, it seems fairly easy to predict the kind of visual accompaniment Cave and Hillcoat might have dreamed up.

But, as swiftly becomes apparent when Cave calls up the video on his laptop, striking comes in many forms. It opens with a beautiful girl submerged in a bath of milk, before Cave and his fellow Grindermen – Jim Sclavunos, Martyn Casey and Warren Ellis, Bad Seeds all – appear. They seem to be dressed as Roman centurions, their plumed galeae and thigh-length tunics accessorised, in Cave's case at least, with a pair of leopardskin underpants.

"We're actually sort of Olympian deities, loosely modelled on the God of War," corrects Sclavunos. "He was an aggressively, arbitrarily violent god."

"There was a miscommunication with the costume department," nods Cave, a little ruefully. "And we ended up looking like gay Roman footsoldiers." He brightens a bit. "Still, we've got the legs for it."

"I think if you keep watching the video, and you witness the supernatural powers we exhibit, then it will become clear how godlike we truly are," suggest Sclavunos, as the kind of very low-rent death-ray special effect you used to get on Tom Baker-era Doctor Who episodes shoots from the eyes of his onscreen counterpart. Later he does a slow-motion hip-swinging dance that reveals Cave drew the long straw when it came to underwear in the video: beneath his tunic, Sclavunos appears to be wearing some kind of posing pouch. As his buttocks fill the screen, the pair dissolve into laughter.

The video is, they claim, all part of the concept surrounding the second Grinderman album, the prosaically titled Grinderman 2, which arrives complete with an accompanying book of illustrations by a German artist who contacted Cave after making a video for the Bad Seeds song Moonland as part of her finals: "I got her to illustrate the whole record, so that we could work out a kind of overarching narrative that ran from one song to the next." What exactly that overarching narrative might be remains a moot point, at least today: "You have to buy the fuckin' record and work it out," snaps Cave, when the subject is broached.

Grinderman's debut served up the sound of what Cave described as "a mammoth midlife crisis" in a sleeve that featured a photograph of a monkey apparently masturbating ("Just for the record," Cave clarifies, "it's not wanking, it's holding on to its genital area, terrified"). The songs were fixated on sex and ageing and masculinity in crisis: Cave depicted himself sucking his gut in and offering to do DIY in doomed attempts to attract female attention: this from a man who in his youth was wont to write songs in which he dealt with recalcitrant females by stabbing them in the head. There's some more of the same on Grinderman 2: "My baby calls me the Loch Ness monster," growls Cave, "two humps and then I'm gone." He says Grinderman's method of songwriting – improvising everything, including lyrics – tends to bring out his lower self: "You can't write that stuff down on a piece of paper. I can't sit in my office and write it down, because when you're writing, you're working from the mind and your mind is telling you: 'Don't write that down, don't go there, it's not a good idea, it's not worth the grief.'" But like the sound of the album, the lyrics also seem more dense and strange, less prosaic than its predecessor. "From the get-go, there were images cropping up in the ad-lib lyrics that Nick was coming up with," says Sclavunos. "There were various hairy beasts. Wolfmen. There were threads. There is a consistent atmosphere of oppressive, hallucinatory evil, an anxious undercurrent. It's got its peaks and valleys, but it permeates everything."

Cave chuckles. "This is Jim's third day of interviews," he shrugs.

In person, Cave and Sclavunos make a great double act. Cave speaks with that rising Australian inflection that makes every statement sound like a question, which shouldn't be surprising, but somehow is. Sclavunos's voice is a low, dolorous rumble that emerges from within a beard you would describe as vast if it wasn't next to that of Warren Ellis, a man whose tonsorial arrangements beggar belief. Similarly, Sclavunos's sharp brown suit pales a little when placed next to Cave, who today sports a scarlet shirt open to mid-chest and a spectacular variety of medallions. They are both infectiously enthusiastic about Grinderman, whose existence Cave credits with revitalising the Bad Seeds. "It just had a kind of cataclysmic effect, you know? It just turned things upside down. For me, sonically, there was just too much going on in the Bad Seeds. There's a sound that's really unique to them, this kind of monstrous sound, and there's nothing I like more than going onstage with them and having this monstrous kind of thing about me, but something had happened where it felt really difficult to make a record like The Boatman's Call again, where you could go in and say, all right, this is basically piano and drums and bass, everybody sit back. It felt like every time I took a song into the Bad Seeds, everyone piled in on it. In the Bad Seeds," he smiles, "you play a song, and everyone's grabbing a fuckin' maraca, y'know?"

Both are extremely funny, which comes as a relief. Cave, in particular, trails a reputation for prickly relations with the press that's perhaps a little out of date – yes, he did once write a song called Scum in which he colourfully decried Mat Snow, then of the NME, as "a miserable shitwringing turd who reminded me of some evil gnome" and yes, he did once punch a journalist in the middle of an interview, but that stuff all happened decades ago, at the height of his heroin-sozzled dissolution. Judging by his more recent cuttings, Cave takes umbrage at journalists depicting him as a former hellraiser now living a life of domestic contentment with his family in Hove, but there's no doubt his life is more settled than it once was. You could argue that it's virtually impossible to imagine how Cave's life could be any less settled than it once was, but, nevertheless, his current arrangement seems to suit him. At 52, his productivity is torrential: by contrast, even Sclavunos – who balances the Bad Seeds and Grinderman with his own band, the Vanity Set, and a burgeoning career as a producer for, among others, the Horrors and the Jim Jones Revue – is taking it easy.

When, in the wake of The Proposition's success, Variety magazine named Cave one of 10 screenwriters to watch, he claimed: "The last thing I ever wanted to get involved with is Hollywood … It's a waste of fucking time and I have a lot to do." Indeed, last year alone, as well as working on another film with Hillcoat, the Brighton-set Death of a Ladies' Man, he produced two film scores, a second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro – which garnered both good reviews and a nomination for the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction awards – and narrated an animated film called The Cat Piano. And 26 years after they formed, the Bad Seeds are in the midst of a startling artistic purple patch: their last two albums, the double Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus and 2008's astonishing Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! are probably the best Cave has ever put his name to. He says he produces records so quickly his label doesn't know what to do with them: "Daniel Miller from Mute had a quiet talk to me to say, 'Pull your fuckin' head in and stop doing so much stuff. You've become a marketing nightmare.' I took some time off." He laughs. "Well, a weekend. It becomes a problem, how to pace all the stuff."

The critical acclaim that seems to come as standard with the latterday Bad Seeds' career is a long way from the polarising effect both Cave and Sclavunos's early bands had on listeners: while Cave seemed to spend as much time with the Birthday Party punching the front row as he did singing, Sclavunos was doggedly thumping a solitary snare drum in Lydia Lunch's screeching no wave band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. You get the feeling that both of them miss at least some of the chaos they once provoked, hence Grinderman. "There's a comfortability with the Bad Seeds that Grinderman disrupts," says Cave. "That's what's chaotic about Grinderman. I get very different responses to it from my very close friends, from my colleagues, people I work with. Some love it, some are baffled by it. Some are like flat-out, 'What the fuck are you doing?' which is exciting to me. There's a pressure with the Bad Seeds that I don't feel in Grinderman. Within the Bad Seeds there is a sense of duty for me to the band's legacy. I don't want to put out a whole load of shitty records with the Bad Seeds. There's a kind of open rule within Grinderman that it's OK to embarrass yourself, to go to places that could be potentially disastrous."

"We've tried flute solos," interjects Sclavunos. "Drum solos. All sorts of dubious territory."

"No one's going to come down on you for it," Cave says. "It's out there in those regions that interesting things are found, but it's creatively dangerous to go there. We go into the studio with nothing at all. No lyrics, none of that, no chord charts. The only thing I had for the first record was an empty notebook with the words No Pussy Blues written on one page. This time I didn't even have that. We play for five days, then we listen to this morass of … bullshit that we've played, and suddenly these great bits of music emerge."

"There's no disrespect to the Bad Seeds," Sclavunos says. "It's more like we want the disruption. I think sometimes the public starts thinking along the lines of, 'Oh, we've got their number,' and they start compartmentalising you. We do make an effort with every Bad Seeds record to do something new, to challenge ourselves. Grinderman helps that along. We want the public to be as on the edge of their seats as we put ourselves."

"People seem to be more concerned about what the Bad Seeds is and what Grinderman is than we are," Cave sighs. "We understand it's confusing. We don't understand what's going on with it all. Life's too short to worry about it." There's a pause. "There was definitely a feeling on this record that we wanted to get back to something that had a really malign feel to it, and take great pleasure in it."

Why?

"It's just more natural," he says, and returns his attentions to his laptop screen, where Jim Sclavunos's buttocks have been replaced by the diverting sight of Nick Cave, middle-aged man of letters, recent recipient of an honorary doctorate from Dundee University for his "visionary songs, stories, books films and poetry", dressed as a Roman centurion, firing an unconvincing death-ray special effect out of his bum.

Grinderman 2 is released on Mute on 13 September. They play the Garage, London, on 23 September, then touring.

Try to excite him in other ways - erotic massage might do the trick

I enjoy sex with my boyfriend of two years – he has a stunning body that really turns me on. But lately he seems bored and has started pressing me for anal sex, to use sex toys and to have a threesome. None of that appeals to me, but I'm worried that if I don't try these novelties, he'll break up with me. How can I keep him happy without doing things I don't fancy?

Your reason for enjoying sex with him is his appearance, so your main arousal trigger may be visual. To help excite him in a more palatable manner, find out which of the five senses cue him erotically. For example, try erotic talk to see if it is auditory (describing scenarios involving threesomes might do the trick), or erotic massage for touch. For taste, try using food such as chocolate, or bring enticing scents into the bedroom (don't deny him your own natural one).

In the process of investigating you'll demonstrate that you too can be experimental. He may be finding your focus on his body objectifying (men experience that as well as women), so he could be trying to deflect that by suggesting erotic play that puts the focus back on you. The "novelties" may seem more appealing once fully discussed. Safety considerations are often the biggest barrier, so negotiation is vital. Anal sex, threesomes and toys all involve trust; he may be unconsciously asking you to do just that.

Pamela Stephenson Connolly is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist who specialises in treating sexual disorders.

• Send your problem to private.lives@guardian.co.uk

Musicians don't often end up on FBI watch lists, but the Last Poets did, thanks to their links with the Black Panthers. Dorian Lynskey looks back at a time when pop and politics collided as never before

One day last December, Umar Bin Hassan of the Last Poets attended a gathering in Chicago to commemorate local Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, who was shot dead by the police 40 years earlier. There were about 30 people, including the widows of Hampton and fellow Panther Eldridge Cleaver, and former members of radical groups such as Weatherman. "We laughed and drank wine and talked about what we all had been through," Hassan says. "I'm glad I made it. It was good to see a lot of those people still living, you know?"

They were survivors of a turbulent period. In 1968, just two years after Oakland residents Huey Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panthers, FBI director J Edgar Hoover called the party "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" and set about spending millions of dollars to infiltrate, sabotage and divide it. By the mid 70s, it was in terminal decline, and Hampton was far from the only fatality.

The Panthers' legacy has been fiercely debated ever since. Some people claim the leadership, especially Newton, were their own worst enemies: paranoid hotheads prone to violence and cronyism. Others regard them as heroes who gave young African-Americans power and pride in the face of endemic racism, only to be brought down by Hoover's machinations. A new project, Tongues on Fire, aims to accentuate the positive, bringing together the party's official artist and minister of culture, Emory Douglas, with musicians such as the Last Poets, the Roots and jazz saxophonist David Murray.

Valerie Malot, a Frenchwoman who is Murray's wife and producer, conceived Tongues on Fire after attending an activist convention in Oakland and seeing Bobby Seale selling a Panther-themed hot sauce named after the famous 60s war cry Burn Baby Burn. "I was really shocked when you've tried all your life to change people's conditions and you end up selling hot sauce at a convention," she says. Malot's focus on Douglas makes sense. He came to work on the Black Panther newspaper when the party had barely a dozen members, and the vivid, revolutionary designs he produced during the subsequent decade are part of the era's visual vocabulary. But the Panthers' relationship with music was much more complex.

When Newton and Seale were preparing the first edition of the newspaper in 1966, they listened obsessively to "brother Bobby" Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, especially Ballad of a Thin Man, which Newton read, rather fancifully, as a parable of racist oppression. At this point, black artists were still using code words such as "respect" and "pushing" when dealing with the subject of race. Even after blackness entered pop's lexicon via James Brown's Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud, Newton and Seale's rhetoric, and Douglas's artwork, only found their musical analogue with the arrival of the Last Poets.

Formed in Harlem in 1968, the Last Poets lost most of their founding members before they even recorded their debut album. The classic lineup on the Poets' eponymous 1970 release consisted of Abiodun Oyewole, Jalal Mansur Nuriddin and Umar Bin Hassan. In his hometown of Akron, Ohio, Hassan had been an angry young man looking for direction when he saw the Panthers' first televised action: their armed entrance into the California legislature in May 1967.

"Woah," he remembers. "I was so excited to see some young black men do that. The Panthers were my first introduction to black militancy. About two months later I saw Huey Newton on the news, standing on the fenders of two cars and throwing down his fists at these white cops. I thought the revolution was going to begin and end in California. I ain't never been in a gang, but if I was going to be in a gang I wanted to be in a gang that stood up and defended the black community from racist cops."

Nobody had ever heard anything like the Last Poets. They combined the militant spirit of avant-garde jazz musicians such as Archie Shepp with the furious poetry of Amiri Baraka, who called for "poems that kill: assassin poems". Their rage was aimed at both white America ("the Statue of Liberty is a prostitute") and apathetic, unrevolutionary black people. Controversially, they called these people "niggers".

"The Last Poets out-niggered everybody," Hassan says with a throaty chuckle. "We had Wake Up Niggers, Niggers Are Scared of Revolution … Our thing was not to use that word as casually as the kids today. You got young kids who think it's OK to be a nigger. Nah, it ain't OK. We were trying to get rid of the nigger in our community and in ourselves. The difference between us and hip-hop is we had direction, we had a movement, we had people who kept our eyes on the prize. We weren't just bullshitting and jiving."

Despite zero airplay, the response to the album from those who heard it was "overwhelming" and the Panthers saw a fantastic recruitment opportunity in the Poets. "Everybody knew how much the people liked us and everybody wanted us to become a part of their thing," says Hassan. "But we kept ourselves independent." They did not need to be card-carrying members in order to be useful. "Music to [the Panthers] was something to get people's attention so they could speak," says David Murray, who was a teenager at the time. "Like a trumpet sounds and then there's a speech."

Very soon the party had a soundtrack, with such radical poets as the Watts Prophets, Nikki Giovanni and Gil Scott-Heron emerging almost simultaneously (although Scott-Heron was sceptical about "would-be revolutionaries" with "afros, handshakes and dashikis" in his song Brother). Sympathetic rock stars such as Santana and the Grateful Dead played fundraisers. The party even attempted to launch its own musical stars. Elaine Brown, a new recruit who later became the party's minister of information and, eventually, chairman, recorded a vocal jazz album called Seize the Time and a follow-up for Motown, Until We're Free. At Emory Douglas's suggestion, four San Francisco Panthers formed a Temptations-style soul group with the Marx-inspired name of the Lumpen, though songs such as Revolution Is the Only Solution and Old Pig Nixon were a long way from the Temptations in terms of chart appeal.

Unlike the Last Poets' output, this was pure propaganda music. As the Lumpen's Michael Torrance explains on the Black Panther history site It's About Time: "The music was simply another facet of service to the Party and the Revolution. Furthermore, since we were an educational cadre, rigorous study was necessary to be able to translate the ideology of the BPP into song." The musicians employed the same strategy as Douglas did with his artwork. "Huey and Bobby always said that the African-American community wasn't a reading community but they learned through observation and participation," Douglas says. "[African revolutionary] Samora Machel said you have to be able to speak in a way that a child could understand." Indeed, the Panthers' most famous song, written after Newton's arrest for murdering a police officer in 1967, was a two-line chant that even children could sing: "Black is beautiful/ Free Huey!"

In 1970, the year the Last Poets began their album with the ominous phrase "time is running out", it seemed to many US radicals, black and white alike, that revolution was imminent. But within a couple of years, the Black Panther Party was in disarray, largely thanks to the dirty tricks of the FBI. "Those who have the power always have the time and resources to get together," Hassan says. "They took their blows for a minute but then they realised, 'We gotta come back at this.'"

The agency fomented civil war between Newton and Cleaver, with bloody consequences. Douglas, who was regularly tailed by FBI agents, remembers seeing his artwork imitated on a forged pamphlet attacking another black organisation. "They tried to destroy and discredit the Black Panther Party by any means necessary," he says. "We knew what was going on but you couldn't put your finger on it." The Watts Writers Workshop, the base of the Watts Prophets, was burned to the ground by a trusted employee who, it transpired, was an FBI plant. The Last Poets were constantly monitored, as Hassan discovered years later when he saw his FBI files. "We were on President Nixon's list, the defence department list, the national security list. It kind of blew my mind."

Not all the blame, however, can be laid at the government's door. The Huey Newton who emerged from jail to retake the party leadership in late 1970 was a troubled, paranoid character who acquired a taste for cocaine and groupies and soon fell out with Cleaver. "Bobby Seale was the brains," says David Murray. "Huey Newton was an action person. He would just go and do it. That might also be why he's not alive [Newton was shot by a crack dealer in 1989]."

Despite positive achievements such as a free breakfast programme for poor children, the mood of mistrust caused Panther members to desert en masse. Elaine Brown resigned the chairmanship in 1977 after Newton approved the beating of a female party administrator. Eight years earlier she had recorded Seize the Time. Now the time was definitely past.

"We all thought we were moving towards bringing about something new, something good, for America – not just for black people, but for all people," Hassan says. "But when you started seeing one brother go one way and another brother snitching, a lot of us went back on to the streets doing what we were doing before, selling drugs or hustling, because we were disappointed." Hassan himself left the Last Poets in 1974 and became a cocaine addict, giving poetry readings in crackhouses. "Yeah man, there was a lot of disappointment."

Asked about the Panthers' balance sheet, Emory Douglas draws a long sigh. "I would say we did the best we could under the circumstances. You have to understand that never in the history of the country had any organisation stood up to the challenges in the way we did and at such a young age." David Murray thinks the party has to be seen in context. "This was a time when California was changing the world. I was a hippie, I was a Black Panther, I was in the Nation of Islam. That was how you grew up during that time – you had to dabble in each one."

Tongues on Fire demonstrates that the era's revolutionary art, visual and musical, outlasted the party that inspired it. Chaka Khan and Chic's Nile Rodgers drew from their experience as members. Bands such as Public Enemy (whose Chuck D remembers singing "Free Huey!" as a child) pitched themselves as the Panthers' heirs: "This party started right in '66/ With a pro-black radical mix." Naturally, they were fans of the Last Poets.

A few years ago, Hassan met former Panther chairman David Hilliard in Oakland. "He said, 'Do you know how important you guys were? People listened to y'all. Y'all made people want to be Panthers and join the Nation of Islam. Y'all were as important as anyone because you made people think.' It took me a long time to understand how much influence we had on that time."

Tongues on Fire: A Tribute to the Black Panthers, featuring David Murray, the Last Poets and the Roots, is at the Barbican, London, on 11 September.

UK research identifying loss of key protein in mice eggs is seen as a breakthrough that may help prevent birth defects

Scientists have made a breakthrough in understanding why older women become less fertile, suffer a miscarriage or have a baby with Down's syndrome.

The discovery could ultimately lead to treatments that would increase the chances of a successful pregnancy for growing numbers of would-be mothers in their late 30s and early 40s.

Researchers led by Dr Mary Herbert, an expert in reproductive biology at Newcastle University's Institute for Ageing and Health, have identified why some older women produce abnormal eggs, according to findings published in the journal Current Biology.

It has been known for a long time that would-be mothers who are nearing the end of their fertility are at higher risk than usual of having eggs that are affected by chromosomal abnormalities, but the underlying cause has been unclear.

The new study has identified problems arising from a woman's declining stock of proteins called Cohesins, which act as binding agents to hold chromosomes together by keeping them inside a ring. They are vital to ensure that chromosomes split evenly when cells divide.

Women's supplies of Cohesins fall as they age, Herbert and her colleagues discovered. Tests on eggs taken from both young and old mice indicated that the amount of Cohesins in women's bodies declines after their mid-30s.

When that happens it means that chromosomes are less tightly held together and they are therefore more likely to result in defective eggs, which can cause problems such as miscarriage and Down's syndrome.

Every cell in the human body, apart from eggs and sperm, contains two copies of each of the body's 23 chromosomes. Sperm and eggs must lose one copy each as they prepare for fertilisation. That process involves a complicated form of cell division.

This problem is compounded with eggs, because the attachments that hold chromosomes together have to be maintained by Cohesins until the egg divides just before ovulation.

When Herbert's team studied chromosomes during division in the egg, they found that the lower levels of Cohesin in eggs in older females led to some chromosomes becoming trapped and unable to divide properly.

"Reproductive fitness in women declines dramatically from the mid-30s onwards. Our findings point to Cohesin being a major culprit in this", said Herbert. More work was needed to understand why Cohesin declines over women's reproductive years, and such knowledge could lead to ways being developed to stop that loss from occurring.

Dr Peter Bowen-Simpkins, the medical director of the London Women's Clinic network of private fertility clinics and spokesman for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said the study was "very exciting" and could lead to real improvements in older women's chances of having children.

"This breakthrough could mean the difference between success and failure – them having a baby or not – for the fast-growing number of women who are trying to conceive after their late 30s," he added.