Even if they’d never met, Justin Broadrick and Kevin Martin would still have been kindred spirits. Locating themselves on the sharpest cutting edges of modern music, both have traced restless creative paths that now find them operating in musical spheres far removed from where they began, reshaping genres and mutating blueprints as they went along. Those latest incarnations – Broadrick composing colossal dream-rock as Jesu, Martin carving apocalyptic dancehall as The Bug – have yielded both their most acclaimed and most accessible noise to date.
For all their musical parallels, however, Martin reckons they could have been ships that passed in the night. “We’ve made completely opposite journeys through our lives,” he smiles, sitting in a café across from his studio in Bethnal Green. “Justin grew up in the grittiest, grimiest parts of Birmingham, and now he lives on the north coast of Wales. I spent my teenage years in Weymouth, a seaside town; all I knew was sea and grass, so I’m happy getting lost in concrete now.”
“We lived in one of the really revolting areas of Birmingham, a terrifying, bleak shit-hole,” nods Broadrick from his studio in the wilds of Abergele, where, he gleefully offers, he can see a grazing cow from his window. “Thanks to my music, I’ve managed to escape that environment.”
Broadrick’s mother and step-father were musicians, playing in a hippy band called Maniac. “They were pretty hardcore,” he remembers. “My step-father would cut giblets ‘from’ my mother onstage, that sort of thing. They were all failed musicians, really. I remember bringing my first Black Sabbath album home; they were <i>disgusted<i> [laughs]. ‘Sabbath?! They’re just a shitty local band who made good!’ Typical inbred local envy…”
Surrounded by guitars and reel-to-reel recorders, Broadrick demoed his first track at the age of eleven, shortly after seeing his first gig, Crass. A year later, having discovered Throbbing Gristle, he was buying industrial cassettes at Birmingham’s Rag Market, and attending early shows by Whitehouse, pioneers of ear-splitting ‘Power Electronics’. Suitably inspired, he started his own cassette label, Post Mortem Recordings, and released fifty cassettes – including some of his own experiments in Power Electronics – over two years.
It was at the cassette stall that Broadrick met Nick Bullen; only a year older, Bullen played in his own punk group, who’d had a track featured on Bullshit Detector 3, a cassette compilation released by Crass. “He gravitated towards the more brutal, confrontational stuff,” says Broadrick, “And I was one of the few like-minded people he knew, so was soon playing guitar in his band, Napalm Death.”
Now a commercially-successful, internationally-renowned metal phenomenon, Napalm Death started out as Crass acolytes with a penchant for hardcore punk and the early thrashings of Metallica and Slayer. Their residencies at The Mermaid, a pub on Birmingham’s Sparkhill estate, earned them a reputation for playing one-second ‘songs’. The venerable John Peel was enough of a fan that, following his death in 2005, many speculated that a Napalm Death disk must have been in the fabled Record Box that contained of 140 favourite waxings. “And actually, we weren’t in there,” Broadrick laughs. “But there
<i>was<i> a copy of the single my parents had recorded in 1979 as a punk-rock band called Anti-Social!”
Broadrick’s tenure with Napalm Death was brief, brevity being a key element of their art; he would feature on side one of their debut album, 1987’s Scum, but by its release was already drumming for Head Of David, local noiseniks enamoured of Sonic Youth and Swans. Aged only sixteen, he found himself touring across Europe and recording with Steve Albini, before being kicked out of the group. “Apparently the singer thought I was insane,” Broadrick laughs. “I was into the whole confrontation thing, a bit out of control, they still lived with their parents.”
Cast adrift, he purchased a drum-machine. “I wanted to play guitar again, and scream. I was listening to Big Black, and to Public Enemy and Eric B &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; Rakim, this ghetto music that was as funky as it was Hellish. I wanted those huge, monolithic drums, behind really brutal guitars.” This would be the blueprint for his next group, Godflesh, although Broadrick would take great pleasure in fucking with that formula as their fourteen year career progressed.
For Justin Broadrick, John Peel had been a crucial early champion; for Kevin Martin, stranded in Weymouth, his radio show was a desperate lifeline to the outside world.
“I saw more violence in Weymouth than I’ve seen anywhere else,” Martin shivers. “There was an army base, a naval base and an RAF base; three different kinds of nutter to spend the weekends beating the shit out of each other. My friends were all outsiders: rockabillies, punks, mods, hip-hop people.”
Martin gravitated towards the post-punk music played on Peel’s show, groups like Public Image Ltd and Throbbing Gristle. “They seemed to be questioning everything, which appealed to me, because I thought nothing made sense. My family life was all-out warfare between my parents; my dad was a wife-beater and a child-beater.”
Martin escaped to London, settling in Brixton, where he ran The Mule Club, at a local pub nestled next to the police station. Promoting shows by Napalm Death, Extreme Noise Terror and Godflesh, Martin was running a strictly not-for-profit operation, all door-money going to the bands. He regarded getting his group, GOD, to play resident support act – “My apprenticeship” – as recompense enough.
“The intention of the group was to express my repulsion at the horror and tedium of everyday life,” Martin remembers, “To mix free-jazz and noise-rock. We were a supremely loud group; at our final show, there were twelve people onstage, and me screaming my head off and playing saxophone through an array of FX pedals. I just needed to get that shit out of my system; it was like therapy.”
Martin booked Godflesh for their first ever gig; they would soon become regulars at the Mule Club. “He put us on with such regularity, because we enjoyed each other’s company so much,” says Broadrick. “Kevin was mental back then, playing sax like a punk John Coltrane, and screaming his head off.”
Broadrick would produce GOD’s first album in 1992, and subsequently often joined the group onstage and in the studio. He focused most of his energies, however, upon Godflesh, who were swiftly perfecting their fusion of metallic riffs, industrial noise and electronic rhythms. An early American tour, supporting Napalm Death and playing to long-haired metal kids, was greeted with derision. “People didn’t get it at first, couldn’t believe there was music this slow, this brutal, this cold, made by machines,” he says. “But within a year or two, the same people who’d been calling us shit were loving it!”
Godflesh found themselves the unlikely subject of major label attention, signing to Columbia in 1994. Freed from that contract following the Selfless LP, the deal nevertheless bought Broadrick a home and a recording studio. “Columbia offered a stepping stone towards being creatively free. The labels were tapping into this extreme music, expecting it to sell millions, which it didn’t, although the bands we influenced, like Korn, eventually did.”
As the decade wore on, Godflesh’s music became more experimental, Broadrick throwing jungle breakbeats and ambient drones in among the riffage, and applying his remixing skills to heavy types like Pantera and Isis. “I was alienating our audience,” he smiles. “But I couldn’t help it; I was excited by too much other music, and wanted to bring these ideas into Godflesh.”
More of these ideas filtered into Techno Animal, an industrial Hip-Hop project he’d begun earlier in the decade with Martin, offering the latter a chance to unshackle himself from the group format and experiment in the studio. “We saw it as some magical laboratory, where all sorts of sorcery was possible, continually surprising and shocking ourselves,” says Martin. “We were stretching parameters… Rock music seemed so finite by comparison, in love with the past, closing all these doors to possibility.”
Martin’s final break with rock followed a late-era GOD show, where most of his audience walked out on a performance by the support act, avant-junglist Boymerang; he’d already begun working on the earliest Bug tracks, following a transformative experience at a Sound System clash. “It was at some warehouse in the East End. No stage, no the audience penned in between these two sound systems, lit only by a single bulb above each mixer. It was the most deafeningly visceral sound,” he remembers, still awed. “You either let it re-arrange your internal organs, or you got out of there.”
Between 2001 and 2004, collaborations with sound system veteran The Rootsman yielded a series of 7”s which cemented The Bug’s sound, Martin building deafeningly overdriven and vicious rhythms behind Dancehall a capellas sourced by Rootsman. The tracks were collected together as Killing Sound in 2006, Martin’s ear-scouring, bass-shredding avant ragga winning plentiful critical plaudits. A run-in with Dancehall legend Cutty Ranks proved not all his MCs were so enamoured with the Bug’s unique approach.
“I got Cutty to record his vocals over a simple bashment rhythm that sounded nothing like the final track would, because I knew he’d want off the project,” he laughs. “When it came out, he called me, yelling ‘What’s all that fuckin’ noise about? If you want a proper Ragga track, give me $500 and I’ll get one produced here in Jamaica!’ And I said, Cutty, I’m not interested in being fuckin’ ‘Ja-Fake-an’, I want to make my own music, which owes as much to my roots as the collaboration between you and I. He begrudgingly accepted what I was saying, but he obviously wasn’t at all happy.”
The title to the last track on Godflesh’s final album, 2001’s Hymns, Jesu would prove to be Justin Broadrick’s salvation. Feeling stifled by the expectations of his audience, Broadrick’s passion for Godflesh was waning; long-time bassist G. C. Green quit the group following the album’s release, while Broadrick suffered a nervous breakdown en route to a planned tour of America.
“I woke up the morning we were supposed to fly to America, and it was like a classic Brian Wilson moment,” he remembers. “I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do it anymore. I just knew this was all wrong now. I split the group on the day of its first date in America, which cost me lots of money and lots of friendships. My life just imploded, crumbled on every level. In response, I began making music that was really emotional; I could pour my heart out through this stuff.”
With Jesu, Godflesh’s pulverising industrial noise was recrafted as a machine of loving grace; 2007’s Conqueror moved profoundly, at glacial pace, Broadrick’s colossal guitars tolling aching melodies, his serrated bark now a caressing sigh. It was heavy, yes; moreover, it was affecting. “I’ve always been drawn to melancholic pop, melodies that would move me to tears, ever since I was a little kid,” Broadrick says, “I always wanted to do something like that, but never felt skilled enough as a musician to approach ‘proper’ song-writing. But I discovered my own way of doing it, and it became the perfect platform for me to begin again.”
The Bug’s new album, London Zoo, is similarly the sum of traumatic experience, Martin’s three-year struggle to produce so ambitious a project on a meagre budget. By the sessions’ final stages, skyrocketing rents in London meant Martin was now living in his studio, without a shower or kitchen, and fast losing his mind. Such tensions inform London Zoo, but the album takes a step back from sonic extremism, this more nuanced – but no less potent – sound exemplified by Tippa Irie’s ferociously melodious, maddeningly catchy ode to urban vexation, ‘Angry’.
“I wanted to make an album that faced up to fucked-up truth of living in London right now,” Martin explains, citing Public Enemy and The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’ as equal influences alongside his obsessive collecting of Ragga 7”s from Jamaica, and his love for Grime. “I could have made a total ‘noise’ record and said, ‘This is London’. But London isn’t just that, it’s full of beauty, as well as retarded ugliness. I wanted both. London is such a cultural melting pot; I was interested in fanning the flames a little, seeing what happens when the sparks fly. When cultures clash, I like to see what happens.”
As with Broadrick, Martin’s is a career characterised by a near bloody-minded commitment to pursuing his own muse, never compromising in his mission to discover his own voice, an endeavour now seemingly repaid by celebrity fans like Thom Yorke, Massive Attack and Grace Jones wanting to work with The Bug. “I’d be a fucking liar if I didn’t say it was a thrill,” he admits. “But what makes it most thrilling is, I know in my heart I haven’t compromised one iota. Art is increasingly becoming product, and everything I do is the antithesis of that. That’s why I struggle; if I wanted an easy life, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing.”
Words: Stevie Chick
