Interview by Alex Zander
The Atkins Diet: Easy Listening For Difficult Fuckheads
Since appearing on the scene in 1980, English-born Martin Atkins has become one of the leading lights in the world of industrial metal. His label, Invisible Records, has been home to some of the most important acts of the genre. Born on August 3, 1959, in Coventry, England, Atkins took up drumming at an early age and soon displayed a notable proficiency. Martin joined John Lydon’s Public Image Ltd. He then concentrated on his industrial fuel/inspired collective, Pigface. Throughout the 1980’s and early ‘90s, Atkins played with a large number of bands, including Ministry, Nine Inch Nails and Killing Joke. Since then, Atkins has put most of his efforts into maintaining Pigface and Invisible Records, occasionally joining other bands on a temporary basis. His most significant recent project, the Damage Manual, involved contributions from Jah Wobble, Killing Joke’s Geordie and Chris Connelly. An EP and an eponymous album were released to critical acclaim. Atkins was on a (drum) roll.
As founder of Chicago’s own Invisible Records, producer extraordinaire and the driving force behind Pigface, he had appeared in MK ULTRA’s pilgrim issue. Since then, he made 2 other covers and appeared on our nationally syndicated radio show MK ULTRASOUND. The bands on Martins’ imprint Invisible Records have been the topic of many interviews with some of our favorites, who just happen to be thee most innovative and creative bands over the past decade. The bands include Ohgr, Evil Mothers, ChemLab, Killing Joke, Psychic TV, Lick, Ashtrayhead and of course Pigface. Also there are some of the most enjoyable compilations, including Nine Inch Elvis, Opium Jukebox, 2 Ministry tributes, a great Alice Cooper comp and some great double-discs of trippy delights called Drug Test.
2001 opened the door for a revolving lineup of bands plugged into Atkins’ latest brainstorm, an indie-music fire starter he’s dubbed Underground, Inc. Inspired by the energy he finds flowing through the underground music scene, devoted to realizing his vision for indie music’s future, he’s completely committed to the bands he has embraced. He is not only in it for the cash, he loves doing what he does, and his track record is a true testement to that.
I joined Martin to chew the fat at his new office, studio and home, where I was greeted by his wife, kids and the family dog, Porridge. This is his third space in Chicago since 1998, and how they find the energy to move so much gear and product would baffle most. But I know Martin well enough now that he IS energy and is not lacking motivation. With the motivation this man exudes, he could literally move a mountain, or at least blow it up. For the first time the focus of our conversation was not Pigface or Invisible. I wanted to know why he was getting buried in another mountain of work, a mountain called Underground Inc.
Alex Zander: Why Underground Inc. when you have Invisible?
Martin Atkins: I formed Invisible before I joined Killing Joke. I had a label before that. It’s something I always dug. But it seemed to me there was such an identity to Invisible. I know the guys in Thrill Kill didn’t want to sign to Invisible. They were on Wax Trax! And fuck knows what other labels they’ve been on. Why not just keep Invisible to be the label for Pigface and everybody that’s on Invisible, but open things up. We’ve got 15 years of experience with dealing with a large distribution machine, selling to the mom and pops, working this county. Fuck, it’s huge, it’s great, wonderful, it’s so much fucking work. By creating Underground Inc., it’s a great place for small/medium-sized labels to be. If I’m not happy with the leverage I have at the distribution level, with the attention I get from a national distributor, then it’s fucked for everybody else. If I have 5 titles, even if they’re selling 10,000 units a piece, it’s fucked. I’ve got 260 titles on Underground Inc.
AZ: What’s the benefit or a small label like Cracknation, Jason and Jamie, doing their thing through Underground Inc.?
MA: Well, an easy thing to look at is Alternative Press, left to their own devices, they’d probably take out a quarter-page ad. Well, it’s just cheaper for them to take have 3 cuts in a 12-cut, full page ad that we do, 12 titles. You see those ads that we do. So that’s the gist of the really boring part of it. But, we’re all doing those ads together. We use that ad to then say to a group of 17 independent stores, “hey, we’ve taken out this ad, have you ordered the stuff?” We’ll bounce it to our distributors and say, “hey look!” Do more with an ad than simply take out an ad. So, when I call my distributor, I’m the guy who has called them about Thrill Kill Kult, I’m the guy who’s called them about Pigface, Einsturzende Neubauten, or Meg Lee Chin. Whatever. And I’m the guy calling about Cracknation. It just has to do with leverage. It’s gross. It’s gross in both ways of gross. We’ve done 60 titles this year, so we have their attention. so if I say to them, “I really need you to put My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult album on the front cover of your book that goes to every store in the country, they’ll listen. Once that stuff happened I knew that this was a good place for all those people to be. It’s still tough because I don’t think a lot of the labels we’re dealing with understand how tough America is, or how bands call and say, “hey, we’ll do our own posters and that’s gonna help!” I’m like, “well, what is the reason that the store is going to put up your poster? In fact, you need to tell me why you think this envelope is going to get opened? Nevermind the poster getting up on the wall.” People look at me like I’m crazy, but it’s worth that.
AZ: Anybody who’s worked in a record store knows that a lot of that stuff just goes out in the trash bin.
MA: Yeah, I mean, I’ve paid $10,000 to marketing companies to call record stores across the country and go, “Hey, what do you think of that promo we sent you of the new Meg Lee Chin?... oh you haven’t seen it...alright, we’ll send you another one.” So you send another, and you know it’s sitting there; they just can’t be bothered to look. So you send them another and you pay someone to make the phonecall to say, “Ok, do you have an envelope with a donkey on it?” This one company had a donkey sticker... “You do have that envelope, that’s the Meg Lee Chin album. Can you open the envelope? Alright, could you put the CD on? Could you listen to it? Thanks a lot.” That was a few years ago. It’s really tough.
AZ: What gave you the idea to do this?
MA: I think that I wanted to use our experience, what is it, fucking 16 years? And our machinery to help labels that didn’t necessarily want to sign to Invisible. I also wanted to, not necessarily, produce and engineer every single record that came out through the machinery. It has to do with me changing my focus. I don’t play drums very much anymore, I don’t engineer very much anymore, I’m producing the new Pigface album and I’m running my company. I’m trying to do a better and better job of doing that. It’s very complicated because I’m still an artist and I still have feelings for bands whose music I like. But I’m doing a better job of running my company.
AZ: And that comes from just the experience?
MA: It comes from the experience and it also comes from, I think, I know people who run really tight ships, who don’t have as much empathy for an artist for a band that’s on the road, whatever I can do to help. I think at certain times in my life I’ve been very, very helpful to bands that maybe I was harder working on their band than they were. Lab Report for instance, we did over 2 and half-thousand promos. We took them out and had them do a half-hour opening slot for Pigface. They didn’t do anything on their own. I did four albums with them and I should have just told them to fuck off. You’ve had this opportunity and you’ve done nothing with it. we were getting phonecalls from all over the country, people prepared to pay $300 for a Lab Report show, $400, for just two guys and a couple of instruments in the back of a pickup truck - they’re going to be making money every night of the week. I think now I’m doing an alright job of saying I work as hard on anything as the band themselves are working. I’ll match your efforts, but I’m not going to work twice as hard on your music as you are.
AZ: I think bands like Thrill Kill, Chris Connelly will always play. Meg seems like she’s never taken a break. Then you’ve got bands that won’t do anything. What’s it take for, say some guy from Davenport, Iowa says I’ve got this little label, and I want to get under Underground Inc. What do you want to see from them?
MA: Well, first you’ve got to call me. Who are the bands that don’t do anything?
AZ: Let’s say someone like MACE, a band like that. They want their name to do all their work for them. They did this five years ago and now they want to come back and do something. What would it take for a band like that?
MA: An act of God. Someone winning the lottery. For MACE? There are bands who’ve called and wanted to do stuff. You know what? Pay all the bills and I’ll be there for you. There are bands now I wouldn’t fucking go near. The fact is that a mediocre band that works their balls off is always going to do better than a fantastic band that’s lazy. That’s just a fact. I think that the major label machinery, the press, has fostered the belief, the fantasy, that it’s not about hard work, it’s not about diligent follow through, it’s not about doing 250 shows a year, it’s not about starving in a band and not showering for 4 days, it’s about something else that cannot be defined. The reason everybody’s done that is 1, the press on the major labels want people to believe it’s magic. Imagine the headline in MK Ultra: “Here’s another band that’s worked really hard, day-in and day-out!” It’s not very sexy. The bands want to believe it because if you’re faced with the alternative - sit around, talking about it, fantasizing about how I could be, if this, if that, if only this, if, if, if... That’s a lot easier than actually doing it, rolling up your sleeves, going and playing to 9 people on a Tuesday night in Boise. Because you’ve got to play in Boise to get to Seattle. Or playing the wrong venue on the wrong night, with the wrong opening band with horrible diarrhea on a fucking Sunday afternoon, all-ages show in San Antonio, TX. You do that because you have to. You’re running the business of your band; you need to know what’s going on across the country. These days I’ll work with a hard-working band and I can help them present their music. I don’t know how to help a band that doesn’t get it. If you don’t understand what’s involved or you won’t listen, then I don’t know what to do.
AZ: To the audience it looks great. It looks like, let’s say a Pigface show, you’ve got 15 people on stage, 13 drummers in the last case, to the audience looks great. These guys are having the best time. They don’t see what it takes to put something together like that. They don’t see what happens afterwards when everybody tears down their own shit.
MA: Well, we do have a good time. There’s no amount of money that would make me got through all of that: printing all these posters and doing all the insanity if we didn’t have a good time. And if we weren’t having a good time I don’t think people would go because that energy comes off the stage.
AZ: I think that some people have the impression it’s a three-hour job. Some bands think that they’re going to go in, say a band that wants to get signed, they’re gonna come in, do an hour and a half show, do some press and that’s it. What do you say to somebody like that?
MA: Fuck off. Fuck OFF. Give up. Two years ago I had a flight delayed from San Francisco to LA. I called 75 radio stations from a pay phone while I was waiting for my flight. It’s doing an extra interview after the show because the guy wasn’t around before, even though your knees are swollen, you haven’t had a shower and you can hardly talk because you’ve been screaming at the promoter because the PA wasn’t big enough. It’s 500 little tiny things and I think people want to believe it’s one big thing. Bands want to believe there’s a guy in LA or New York in a big office with a penthouse view. And behind a velvet curtain there’s this big green button, and that guy may or may not decide to press the big green button that means superstardom. It’s just so not about that. The reality is everybody’s future is in their own hands. You can make a massive difference to your own career. It’s not sexy. You can call the venue and make sure they have posters; you can call the local stores. Sometimes a band will come in and say, “Well, we’ve just finished our four-week long tour and here’s a list of 10 stores that didn’t have our CD.” Well why didn’t you call me while you were at the store? This is fantastic information, this is market research that you did on your own behalf. Actually this store won’t do this because of that, but these five stores should have had your CD’s, let me make a call. I think some bands want to believe it’s not about the largest amount of work that I’ve ever encountered in my life. It’s just not sexy. You want to think it’s about a fucking four-foot long rail of coke, a limousine and the major label exploit bands who believe that. Once you buy into that, you’re fucked. You’re waiting for the major label to tell you when your next album’s gonna come out. You want to work hard like the people we work with now like Krztoff from Bile, holy fucking shit. Look out. How powerful to have a group of people like that, the guys from Sleezebox, running their own business, understanding what’s going on, getting it out there. They have taken the power and they’re running with it. Now, we’re organizing ourselves, all the labels that are doing this stuff. They’re working hard on their own, but they see if we do this together, that hard work will equal ten times the benefit together. Everybody watching out for everybody else. Meg Lee Chin and Chris Connelly handing out postcards for the Thrill Kill Kult tour, Thrill Kill Kult handing out postcards for the Pigface tour, everybody handing out postcards for the new Chris Connelly album. It’s great. It’s all of those communist propaganda posters come to life: unity is strength, all of that stuff.
AZ: Do you want it to be, five years from now I don’t want to have drama, I don’t want to do Pigface and I just want to sit back and run this thing? Or, I want to do both and just not worry as much?
MA: Well you see what’s going on here. I love working on music. Last week I was chopping the heads off ceramic nuns with a wet saw and photographing my nuns with Newcastle Brown Ale collage, bottle tops and flowers, I mean I want to do all of that all the time, use my abilities and the machinery we have here to help a band like Voodou I am so proud of what we’ve done with them and for them. I don’t say what we’ve done with them like we’ve put them in plaid outfits. I mean in conjunction with their efforts, together with them. A year ago they were on the first Notes compilation, they opened for Pigface, we saw them, they were here in the studio in January, now they’re on the road with Thrill Kill and Michelle is singing on the new Pigface album. I want to be able to help bands like that more and I want to help more bands like that. I want to have quicker, easier, better accounting machinery. many times when a band’s on the road, we’re on the telephones making sure the packages have gone out to the venues, the radio knows about it, the stores have got the posters, etc. sometimes what we need to have is somebody sitting here churning out progress reports for the bands. That’s a personal goal for me because a lot of bands we deal with, I’m probably between 10 and 80,000 dollars worse off for dealing with them. But, they have an idea of that. They might think I put maybe 30 or 40 grand into them. Robert (Hyman) is doing a brilliant job of getting things sorted out. Whether a band is supposed to get a statement once a year or twice a year, four times a fucking year, hey, look at where this is at now. So that the bands can understand where we’re at, where their business is at, how far they’re going in a certain direction. That’s a goal of mine and I think we’re close to achieving that. Just carrying on what we’re doing. The way things are in America right now, I need to not forget the goal of simply just being around because a lot of labels aren’t. Wax Trax! isn’t, Reconstruction, Fifth Column, Slipdisc, none of those labels are around. Two years ago people would say, “How are things going?” Well, we’re still here. This year the curve is exponentially upwards, which is a result of all the time and effort everyone’s put in.
AZ: I’m impressed that you stress that you care about the bands and the music because a lot of labels only care about the bank account.
MA: I need to care about the overall financial picture, because with the way things are growing, Bile, Nocturne, Thrill Kill, Cherrie Blue, Voodou, out on the road right now. Every one of those bands need a little bit of help. Four or five other bands are in the studio. We have 8 new releases this month and we just signed a deal with Einsturzende Neubauten in December. I mean all these little things. The next thing you know we’re fucked. We just got $100,000 that flies out the door. We need to stay on top of that. We need to stay on top of where each individual band is for their own progress. But I think that we have the tools to help the band, whether it’s relationships with agents, relationships with venues, you know I just talked to a promoter in Portland and Seattle, we’ve been working with them for 15 years. There’s a club in Minneapolis I go back to 1981 with. But it’s not a goal of mine to be sitting behind a desk. I want to play my drums whenever I feel like it, do artwork whenever I feel like it, produce music whenever I feel like it and oversee everything that’s going on.
AZ: That brings to Pigface. The new album is January, you’ve got 33-34 people on it. What’s this album about? The last was the Best of Pigface, which was a great collection for the fan. It’s nice to have something like that. But is this a departure from anything you’ve done in the past?
MA: It’s similar in that you can hear Curse, Jared, you can hear Charles Levi, you can hear Frankie Thrill Kill, you can hear everybody. That’s the great thing about Pigface. It’s not like, “Well who’s that?” Everybody is themselves within Pigface. I think the difference is, the closest album to this for me would be Notes From Thee Underground, there’s only like 16 people on there. Look at Jello Biafra, what did he say? “Mental illness is the road to freedom.” Well great. But Penn Gillette, for instance, took all of the fucklists from my fucklist and the Preaching tour. Some guy in Denver wrote to fuck cute, skateboarding chicks who turn out to be lesbians. Everybody writes fuck the police, fuck this, fuck that. But Gilette read all of those out and interrupted a voice-over for a Disney movie to do that. They sent me photographs of him with tape wrapped around his head to keep the headphones on. There’s much more interaction with all of the people. Fallon was here for three days working on stuff. Michelle from Voodou was here. Frankie was down here. A few people have mailed in their contributions. But, to me, it’s the record I’m already proudest of.
AZ: What’s the title of it?
MA: Easy Listening for Difficult Fuckheads. For me, to be working with Edsel, Fallon, etc, that feels good to me because they weren’t fucking born when I was in Public Image Limited or when I did American Bandstand. But at the same time, to be working with Keith Levine, who I haven’t spoken to in 20 years, he was the guitarist for PiL, co-founder of The Clash, to have Chris Connelly working on Pigface again and En Esch, it’s all of the spirit of when Pigface first began. But I think the major difference is there’s ten times the input a’la producing the record. Whereas I think that possibly Notes, definitely Gub, definitely Fook and probably Notes From Thee Underground, things just existed. Here’s this song that’s 7 minutes long, fuck off. Whereas, this album, here’s this song that’s 7 minutes long, god, I like the chorus, but if Chris Connelly was singing in the chorus it would be fucking great. So I asked Chris to come in and sing – OK. Then I take I verse out, why don’t I fuck with that, put the middle bit at the beginning, and producing and arranging the songs so isn’t it cool that there’s 14 people on the song. Isn’t this a cool song. It’s not a cool song because so many people are involved. To me a lot of the songs succeed in and of themselves. It’s the most diverse, but it’s also the most focused and I’m really pleased with that. There’s a track, to me, that reminds me of the stuff I did with Nine Inch Nails on “Wish,” there’s bits of Ministry in there, there’s bits of Ruby and psychedelia and trip-hop. Of course the sitar and those nasty guitars, layered vocals and bullshit, obscenity and it’s fucking cool.
AZ: Now how do you pull off something like 13 drummers on a stage without rehearsing? From the balcony it looked and sounded great.
MA: It was pretty wild. Once again, that probably had more to do with the help and support of our crew than it had to do with any kind of magic. It was magic, it was a magic moment, but I think that you reach a point with an exhausted crew on a tour like that and you better hope that if you have an opportunity in Iowa four weeks before the 13 drummer show to buy your crew pizza at midnight because the venue hasn’t done their job and everybody’s exhausted, or you can make somebody a sandwich, anytime you can show your crew that fucking care about them, you better do it. Because the last night of a tour nobody wants to be thinking about 13 fucking drumkits. The tour manager doesn’t need 13 people, “Where’s the dressing room? When’s that song? When do we come on again? Do you have any more drumsticks? Who’s got the snare drum?” The lighting person, everybody thinking, “I’m gonna be home tomorrow, I’m gonna have a shower, shag the girlfriend. No one’s thinking about, fuck (laughs) 13 drumkits. The soundman doesn’t need to deal with it, the lighting person doesn’t need to deal with it. We called a band in Columbus, Ohio and said, we really like you guys, you can come and hang out, jump onstage with us? OK! I’m like ok, how many drumkits do I have kicking about? You think of something and you hope that there are enough people who care around you who can help you realize that.
AZ: I’ve seen you drum with a lot of people, but LeAnn (Dickless from The Beer Nuts), she really kept up.
MA: She’s a great drummer, but she’s just really nice. She’s pretty stunningly talented at pop songs, singing pop songs in the back of the bus, and then before the next line of the pop song, asking a question where that line of the pop song is the answer to. It’s a stunning party-game ability.
AZ: You know, she gets through 3-4 times a year, Beer Nuts shows, but a 90-minute grueling set of Pigface could tear anybody up.
MA: Yeah, I remember when Danny from Tool came out with us. When was that 1998? Yeah, he came out for the last 10 days of the tour. Me and Joe Trump were playing and we had the third, black Pearl drumkit, hey he’s fucking playing in Tool. I looked along the line and I liked that camera angle of three drummers in a line. It looks good from the front. But, it’s good from the side, and I see Danny like “ooohhh, fuck,” there’s bits of tape just coming off of his hands where he’s taped his fingers up. It is tough. There’s times we’ve played 4 hours. There’s an energy level that fuels all of that. But once you get caught up in that energy level, you’re not exhausted. You’re just caught up in it. But LeAnn was great. I’ll tell you who was really good as well, Krztoff was great. I really like him. Matt Walker is fucking solid. He’d never rehearsed with us, he’s just really solid.
At this point we wrapped up, talked shop for about another hour and then I let Martin free to watch the soccer game with his Brit visitors who were still nursing a hangover from a night out on the town. It was our 5th interview w/ Mr. Atkins in 7 years, a man who knows nothing of the word exhaustion, who works tirelessly for the bands you love and continues to still make the most creative music this side of the corporate machine. And Underground Inc. is showcasing and developing the newest and true cutting-edge sonic art. For one reason, and that’s the same reason we’re still around. Do the math.