Pigface is a tough band to pin down. With a constantly-shifting lineup that reads like a who's-who of industrial and hard rock, it's always a surprise to see who'll show up to play on each new album, or even each night of a tour. The one constant, the man at the center of the band, is drummer/producer/impresario Martin Atkins.
Martin's credentials as a drummer are impressive: he's played with Public Image, Ltd., Ministry, and Killing Joke. He plays drums in Pigface, but he also produces, which involves managing musical contributions from around the world. The new Pigface record, 6, features members of KMFDM, Atari Teenage Riot, Apollo 440 and Zeromancer, among others.
You may know Martin as Suicide Girls' Tour:Smart columnist, offering advice and stories to bands who are looking to hit the road successfully. He also teaches classes on touring and music marketing at Columbia College in Chicago, and he's currently starting up his own hands-on school, Revolution Number Three, where students learn about the music business by working in the music business.
Martin is clearly excited about the new album and the new school, but, considering that he literally wrote the book on touring (it's called Tour:Smart), it shouldn't come as a surprise that he seems most charged up about going on tour. As he explained to Suicide Girls, absolutely anything can happen at a Pigface show. Lineups and stage sets that change every night might not make journalists or sound engineers happy, but Martin Atkins is loving every minute of it.
Jay Hathaway: Since Pigface has always been a collaborative thing, and you've brought in different people for every album, what stays the same at the center of the band? Other than you playing drums, I mean.
Martin Atkins: Well, it began as just an experiment. It began halfway through the 1991 Ministry "In Case You Didn't Feel Like Showing Up" tour, also known as "The Cage" tour. I was looking around the stage, and there was myself, Bill Rieflin (who now plays drums with R.E.M.), Ogre from Skinny Puppy, Chris Connelly from the Revolting Cocks, KMFDM were opening, and all these people would kind of wander on stage. I couldn't help wonder what would happen if we made an album, instead of just doing Ministry songs. So the day after the tour finished, we went in the studio with Steve Albini and recorded the first album. So, ever since then, it's just been whoever's around. I think Trent Reznor came in the studio for the first album. Going out on tour is more of the same cohesive lineup, fueled by whoever else was around, whoever's touring, whose paths crossed. The idea is just that anything can happen with anybody. At time it's been a raging experiment. At times it's been like rehab for people -- either socially, chemically, or whatever. It's become understood as an anything-can-happen place.
JH: From a production standpoint, does that make it complicated to record the album?
MA: It makes parts of it easier. This album began with some ideas. "The Good, The Bad and the Drugly" has been around for four or five years. We went on tour with Hanin [Elias] from Atari Teenage Riot, the guys from Sheep on Drugs, Charles Levi from Thrill Kill on bass, Curse Mackey singing, and it was the same kind of thing as we did in '91. We were messing around with some ideas during the tour, and went straight into the studio before everybody left. Once people started to realize I was working on a new album, somebody would say, "Oh, here's an idea, here's a riff." It's not a normal process of recording an album. Pigface has never been normal.
JH: Does that process make it easier to make the same tough calls as a producer that you make on other people's albums, instead of maybe being a bit precious because this is your own band?
MA: It is difficult...I think one thing I started to get a handle on with this Pigface album was trying to be as brutal with my own music as I am with everybody else's.
JH: Who was the most surprising contributor to the new album?
MA: The surprises come in many ways. One of the things I enjoyed the most was having Xi Chen he's the singer in a band called Snapline from Beijing, China he sang a version of "6.6.7.11" which is just cool as hell. There's also a track which isn't on the album either, called "Radio China." That's me and a bunch of Chinese musicians in the studio in Beijing. We all watched a Pigface video, and then made that song. It kind of got rolled into my China Dub [Soundsystem] album, and maybe I thought it was just too crazy to involve 30 Chinese people in Pigface. The thing I like about Pigface is that Pigface has an identity I'm not always sure what it is but the people involved in it retain their identity in the larger picture. It's obviously the guys from Zeromancer working on the "Mercenary" track. I like that about it.
JH: It's not just throwing all of this music into a blender until you can't tell who did what. I think that's really cool.
MA: Well, thank you! It's weird, when Pigface started, concert promoters were really freaked out. "Well, who's going to be there?" "Well, we don't know." The lack of knowing was read by concert promoters and some journalists as not being able to deliver something meaningful. But the lack of knowing meant we were delivering something cool and exciting, we just didn't know the specifics of it. I've grown more and more comfortable with that as time goes by.
JH: But, as the guy who's always there, do you get more worn out than everyone else when you're playing a show every night for a month?
MA: Just from a drumming point of view, of course. I'm shagged! But when people show up and just do stuff, that's what energizes me. When Danny from Tool came out for 10 days, it wasn't until I arrived in Denver that I counted the number of people and the number of bunks and went, "Oh, fuck! There isn't a bunk for Danny." So I ended up sleeping on the floor of the bus, which was much more brutal than any show I've ever performed. It was like being punched in the kidneys for 12 hours! But that absolutely doesn't diminish the enjoyment I had of playing drums on that tour with him. Sometimes I jump off stage, and just hand somebody my drumsticks especially if there's two or three or four people playing drums and just run to the back and talk to the sound guy, and watch it. It's pretty wild to watch your own band from the back of the room. I don't know many people who've been able to do that. It's an energizing and fueling experience, even when it's tiring.
JH: Kanye West recently said that his greatest pain in life is that he'll never get to see himself perform live, so it must be pretty amazing to be able to watch your own band.
MA: [laughs] What Kanye West said sounds just really conceited! I hope what I said didn't sound like that. I haven't seen myself perform, because when I'm at the back of the room, I'm not onstage. But I get to see my bandmates and go "Holy fuck! That light-up crucifix and the thing that we bought from the truck stop and 19 people on stage, hanging from the bars that we built over the drum kit ... this is fucking unbelievable!"
JH: So, I read somewhere that you were planning to release the album on 8-track. Did you do that?
MA: Oh yeah! It's out on 8-track. It came out on 8-track before the CD version. I'm teaching marketing at Columbia in Chicago, and at my own school in Chicago, and one of the things I tell my students, ever since I was involved with Metal Box for Public Image, Ltd., is that packaging is really important. I just decided I wanted to do something weird and difficult with the album. There's only 100 copies available on 8-track, and they're $100 a piece. But we give people a $50 coupon if they send us a movie of themselves playing the album in granddad's car that they broke into, or some crazy-ass 8-track machine inside a football helmet, you know. That's what I'm trying to collect: some crazy-ass movies of people listening to 8-track tapes. I'm not trying to collect money.
JH: That's awesome. Especially considering that if you're teaching college students, they might not even be old enough to know what an 8-track is.
MA: It's really weird, you know. I told the students that you have to go the extra mile and really think about this stuff, more than just "Here's a free download and here's a CD." When you go the extra mile, strange things will happen. I can't tell you what they'll be. With Metal Box, a bunch of punks got into a fight, and there was a ton of press about it, because they were making a hash brownie in the metal box, and fighting over the piece in the middle that had the PiL logo on the brownie. You can't buy publicity like that! So I bought a bunch of used 8-tracks to record over, and this guy emailed me. He said, "I saw you just bought that 200 8-track lot on eBay, and there's a cartridge in that lot that I've been looking for since 1982. It's something I used to listen to with my parents. I'll pay you 20 dollars just for the track listing!" And it turned out he was in Chicago, not too far from my office, so I said, "Come down to my office and tell your story, let me film you, and I'll give it to you for free." This guy was shaking. He didn't think he would hold this cartridge in his hands ever again. I feel pretty good about that. I feel pretty good about doing something that's not like, "Oh, here's somebody else releasing an album on 8-track cartridge!" There aren't too many things you can do these days that other people haven't already done 15 times over.
JH: So, on the subject of teaching, is there a conflict between running a record label and teaching a class on the music industry where you tell students that they don't need a label?
MA: I don't think it's a conflict at all, because I've had my label for 20 years in September, and it's not just a record label. It's a recording studio, it's 150 t-shirt designs, a music publishing company, it's a bunch of things. In that same building, we do my books, my art gallery shows, and now my lecturing events. And now it's turning into a school. So, it doesn't feel like a conflict at all. I signed some Chinese bands recently, and I'm producing them and releasing them, but I'm not really doing that in the States anymore. I'll tell anybody you don't need a label, you can absolutely do it yourself, and I'm proof of that. I didn't need a label 20 years ago when I started one. I had 70 dollars.
JH: So, what makes you want to teach people about the music business, instead of letting them figure everything out the hard way, like you had to when you started out?
MA: I started teaching by accident, six years ago. I went into Columbia College in Chicago because they're across from our offices, and I was just intent on bringing 10 interns back to our offices to help with the tour. I just wanted some free labor. So I did a presentation to the faculty, and they said, "Fantastic! When can you start?" It turned out they wanted me to teach. It seemed sort of punk rock of me to say "Yeah, fuck, I'll teach!" I'd been doing spoken word performances, I'm happy in front of an audience. I just started teaching, and...I don't know, I feel like I can communicate some difficult things to students. I can find a way in to turn the lights on in many different ways. I really got into it. And then I realized there wasn't really a book about touring. The textbook that Columbia was using was written in 1962. It was appalling. So I wrote Tour:Smart, and because of Tour:Smart, I've been all over the world, lecturing. I just really like doing it.
On another angle, it's just horrible to see so many bands making the same mistakes that other bands have made years ago. That's one of the reasons I do lectures, and if asked by a hard-up band that needs help and information, I'll always give them a copy of my book. If someone doesn't have the money to pay for it, then they need the book even more than they think they need it. It just seems crazy to me that with a world that's so developed in so many areas, we're on version 6.7 of Eye Surgery or Recording Studio Techniques or whatever, but so many aspects of the music business are still Music Business 1.0.
JH: What have you learned from your students since you started teaching?
MA: Some of my classes are like a crazy game of ping pong. We're all just batting these ideas around and seeing where they go. I think that since I've started teaching, I've learned more from myself, initially, because to stand in front of students and talk about the lessons I've learned actually, some of the lessons I hadn't learned, where I kept making the same mistakes. I was in a lecture about agents, and I'm making all these points and showing all these slides and I said, "Oh, excuse me a minute." I took a five minute break, and fired my agent. So, some of these lessons have really crystallized for me.
JH: So, when you go on tour, are you going to be looking out for things you might want to talk about in class?
MA: Yeah, it's always a circular thing. Things that are happening in our businesses change the things that I teach. Something will happen in my office, and I'll take that into class, but then something will happen in class which turns into something like the Tour:Smart Survival Guide to South by Southwest. Everything changes everything. I think the coolest thing we're doing right now is turning my building into a school [Revolution Number Three], and opening all of our businesses into a learning environment. People can come in and run the music publishing company, or develop a new drum library. That's where all this has led, and the problem with traditional education is that things take so long to get through the curriculum committees and get approved as a class. By the time that happens, it's almost redundant, or a joke. We're going to solve that problem by having the class be the real world, and the real world be the class.
JH: I feel like you could almost run a school like Pigface, where the faculty is just whoever is around and knows something about the topic ...
MA: If you talk to people who've been on the crew of Pigface, it's almost become like a code word, like, "If you've been on tour with Pigface, you can do anything." Because people will! One night it's seven drummers, the next night I've got an inflatable life raft from the Army/Navy surplus store and I'm crowd-surfing on the audience! Then we've got bagpipes and trumpets, and there's six people singing and three bass players, and we've constructed an 8-foot high light-up cross. It's a baptism of fire. It's a sound man's nightmare, but you do that, and you're ready for anything. That's what the school's going to be. It's a Pigface, punk rock, DIY attitude that's enabled the school to happen. When I started Invisible Records, I got to a point where I didn't know I could do a really good job running a record label, but I knew I couldn't fuck things up any more than so-called major labels and major independent labels had done on my behalf. And that was very liberating. I find myself at exactly the same place now. I don't know that I can run an amazing school, but I know that I can't fuck things up and deliver half-assed out-of-date not-very-useful classes to people who aren't gonna get jobs. I'm not going to do that. It's definitely a Pigface kind of attitude.
Pigface 6 is out now on Full Effects Records. Tour:Smart is available from Amazon.com. For more info go to the Tour:Smart and Revolution Number Three websites.
Martin's credentials as a drummer are impressive: he's played with Public Image, Ltd., Ministry, and Killing Joke. He plays drums in Pigface, but he also produces, which involves managing musical contributions from around the world. The new Pigface record, 6, features members of KMFDM, Atari Teenage Riot, Apollo 440 and Zeromancer, among others.
You may know Martin as Suicide Girls' Tour:Smart columnist, offering advice and stories to bands who are looking to hit the road successfully. He also teaches classes on touring and music marketing at Columbia College in Chicago, and he's currently starting up his own hands-on school, Revolution Number Three, where students learn about the music business by working in the music business.
Martin is clearly excited about the new album and the new school, but, considering that he literally wrote the book on touring (it's called Tour:Smart), it shouldn't come as a surprise that he seems most charged up about going on tour. As he explained to Suicide Girls, absolutely anything can happen at a Pigface show. Lineups and stage sets that change every night might not make journalists or sound engineers happy, but Martin Atkins is loving every minute of it.
Jay Hathaway: Since Pigface has always been a collaborative thing, and you've brought in different people for every album, what stays the same at the center of the band? Other than you playing drums, I mean.
Martin Atkins: Well, it began as just an experiment. It began halfway through the 1991 Ministry "In Case You Didn't Feel Like Showing Up" tour, also known as "The Cage" tour. I was looking around the stage, and there was myself, Bill Rieflin (who now plays drums with R.E.M.), Ogre from Skinny Puppy, Chris Connelly from the Revolting Cocks, KMFDM were opening, and all these people would kind of wander on stage. I couldn't help wonder what would happen if we made an album, instead of just doing Ministry songs. So the day after the tour finished, we went in the studio with Steve Albini and recorded the first album. So, ever since then, it's just been whoever's around. I think Trent Reznor came in the studio for the first album. Going out on tour is more of the same cohesive lineup, fueled by whoever else was around, whoever's touring, whose paths crossed. The idea is just that anything can happen with anybody. At time it's been a raging experiment. At times it's been like rehab for people -- either socially, chemically, or whatever. It's become understood as an anything-can-happen place.
JH: From a production standpoint, does that make it complicated to record the album?
MA: It makes parts of it easier. This album began with some ideas. "The Good, The Bad and the Drugly" has been around for four or five years. We went on tour with Hanin [Elias] from Atari Teenage Riot, the guys from Sheep on Drugs, Charles Levi from Thrill Kill on bass, Curse Mackey singing, and it was the same kind of thing as we did in '91. We were messing around with some ideas during the tour, and went straight into the studio before everybody left. Once people started to realize I was working on a new album, somebody would say, "Oh, here's an idea, here's a riff." It's not a normal process of recording an album. Pigface has never been normal.
JH: Does that process make it easier to make the same tough calls as a producer that you make on other people's albums, instead of maybe being a bit precious because this is your own band?
MA: It is difficult...I think one thing I started to get a handle on with this Pigface album was trying to be as brutal with my own music as I am with everybody else's.
JH: Who was the most surprising contributor to the new album?
MA: The surprises come in many ways. One of the things I enjoyed the most was having Xi Chen he's the singer in a band called Snapline from Beijing, China he sang a version of "6.6.7.11" which is just cool as hell. There's also a track which isn't on the album either, called "Radio China." That's me and a bunch of Chinese musicians in the studio in Beijing. We all watched a Pigface video, and then made that song. It kind of got rolled into my China Dub [Soundsystem] album, and maybe I thought it was just too crazy to involve 30 Chinese people in Pigface. The thing I like about Pigface is that Pigface has an identity I'm not always sure what it is but the people involved in it retain their identity in the larger picture. It's obviously the guys from Zeromancer working on the "Mercenary" track. I like that about it.
JH: It's not just throwing all of this music into a blender until you can't tell who did what. I think that's really cool.
MA: Well, thank you! It's weird, when Pigface started, concert promoters were really freaked out. "Well, who's going to be there?" "Well, we don't know." The lack of knowing was read by concert promoters and some journalists as not being able to deliver something meaningful. But the lack of knowing meant we were delivering something cool and exciting, we just didn't know the specifics of it. I've grown more and more comfortable with that as time goes by.
JH: But, as the guy who's always there, do you get more worn out than everyone else when you're playing a show every night for a month?
MA: Just from a drumming point of view, of course. I'm shagged! But when people show up and just do stuff, that's what energizes me. When Danny from Tool came out for 10 days, it wasn't until I arrived in Denver that I counted the number of people and the number of bunks and went, "Oh, fuck! There isn't a bunk for Danny." So I ended up sleeping on the floor of the bus, which was much more brutal than any show I've ever performed. It was like being punched in the kidneys for 12 hours! But that absolutely doesn't diminish the enjoyment I had of playing drums on that tour with him. Sometimes I jump off stage, and just hand somebody my drumsticks especially if there's two or three or four people playing drums and just run to the back and talk to the sound guy, and watch it. It's pretty wild to watch your own band from the back of the room. I don't know many people who've been able to do that. It's an energizing and fueling experience, even when it's tiring.
JH: Kanye West recently said that his greatest pain in life is that he'll never get to see himself perform live, so it must be pretty amazing to be able to watch your own band.
MA: [laughs] What Kanye West said sounds just really conceited! I hope what I said didn't sound like that. I haven't seen myself perform, because when I'm at the back of the room, I'm not onstage. But I get to see my bandmates and go "Holy fuck! That light-up crucifix and the thing that we bought from the truck stop and 19 people on stage, hanging from the bars that we built over the drum kit ... this is fucking unbelievable!"
JH: So, I read somewhere that you were planning to release the album on 8-track. Did you do that?
MA: Oh yeah! It's out on 8-track. It came out on 8-track before the CD version. I'm teaching marketing at Columbia in Chicago, and at my own school in Chicago, and one of the things I tell my students, ever since I was involved with Metal Box for Public Image, Ltd., is that packaging is really important. I just decided I wanted to do something weird and difficult with the album. There's only 100 copies available on 8-track, and they're $100 a piece. But we give people a $50 coupon if they send us a movie of themselves playing the album in granddad's car that they broke into, or some crazy-ass 8-track machine inside a football helmet, you know. That's what I'm trying to collect: some crazy-ass movies of people listening to 8-track tapes. I'm not trying to collect money.
JH: That's awesome. Especially considering that if you're teaching college students, they might not even be old enough to know what an 8-track is.
MA: It's really weird, you know. I told the students that you have to go the extra mile and really think about this stuff, more than just "Here's a free download and here's a CD." When you go the extra mile, strange things will happen. I can't tell you what they'll be. With Metal Box, a bunch of punks got into a fight, and there was a ton of press about it, because they were making a hash brownie in the metal box, and fighting over the piece in the middle that had the PiL logo on the brownie. You can't buy publicity like that! So I bought a bunch of used 8-tracks to record over, and this guy emailed me. He said, "I saw you just bought that 200 8-track lot on eBay, and there's a cartridge in that lot that I've been looking for since 1982. It's something I used to listen to with my parents. I'll pay you 20 dollars just for the track listing!" And it turned out he was in Chicago, not too far from my office, so I said, "Come down to my office and tell your story, let me film you, and I'll give it to you for free." This guy was shaking. He didn't think he would hold this cartridge in his hands ever again. I feel pretty good about that. I feel pretty good about doing something that's not like, "Oh, here's somebody else releasing an album on 8-track cartridge!" There aren't too many things you can do these days that other people haven't already done 15 times over.
JH: So, on the subject of teaching, is there a conflict between running a record label and teaching a class on the music industry where you tell students that they don't need a label?
MA: I don't think it's a conflict at all, because I've had my label for 20 years in September, and it's not just a record label. It's a recording studio, it's 150 t-shirt designs, a music publishing company, it's a bunch of things. In that same building, we do my books, my art gallery shows, and now my lecturing events. And now it's turning into a school. So, it doesn't feel like a conflict at all. I signed some Chinese bands recently, and I'm producing them and releasing them, but I'm not really doing that in the States anymore. I'll tell anybody you don't need a label, you can absolutely do it yourself, and I'm proof of that. I didn't need a label 20 years ago when I started one. I had 70 dollars.
JH: So, what makes you want to teach people about the music business, instead of letting them figure everything out the hard way, like you had to when you started out?
MA: I started teaching by accident, six years ago. I went into Columbia College in Chicago because they're across from our offices, and I was just intent on bringing 10 interns back to our offices to help with the tour. I just wanted some free labor. So I did a presentation to the faculty, and they said, "Fantastic! When can you start?" It turned out they wanted me to teach. It seemed sort of punk rock of me to say "Yeah, fuck, I'll teach!" I'd been doing spoken word performances, I'm happy in front of an audience. I just started teaching, and...I don't know, I feel like I can communicate some difficult things to students. I can find a way in to turn the lights on in many different ways. I really got into it. And then I realized there wasn't really a book about touring. The textbook that Columbia was using was written in 1962. It was appalling. So I wrote Tour:Smart, and because of Tour:Smart, I've been all over the world, lecturing. I just really like doing it.
On another angle, it's just horrible to see so many bands making the same mistakes that other bands have made years ago. That's one of the reasons I do lectures, and if asked by a hard-up band that needs help and information, I'll always give them a copy of my book. If someone doesn't have the money to pay for it, then they need the book even more than they think they need it. It just seems crazy to me that with a world that's so developed in so many areas, we're on version 6.7 of Eye Surgery or Recording Studio Techniques or whatever, but so many aspects of the music business are still Music Business 1.0.
JH: What have you learned from your students since you started teaching?
MA: Some of my classes are like a crazy game of ping pong. We're all just batting these ideas around and seeing where they go. I think that since I've started teaching, I've learned more from myself, initially, because to stand in front of students and talk about the lessons I've learned actually, some of the lessons I hadn't learned, where I kept making the same mistakes. I was in a lecture about agents, and I'm making all these points and showing all these slides and I said, "Oh, excuse me a minute." I took a five minute break, and fired my agent. So, some of these lessons have really crystallized for me.
JH: So, when you go on tour, are you going to be looking out for things you might want to talk about in class?
MA: Yeah, it's always a circular thing. Things that are happening in our businesses change the things that I teach. Something will happen in my office, and I'll take that into class, but then something will happen in class which turns into something like the Tour:Smart Survival Guide to South by Southwest. Everything changes everything. I think the coolest thing we're doing right now is turning my building into a school [Revolution Number Three], and opening all of our businesses into a learning environment. People can come in and run the music publishing company, or develop a new drum library. That's where all this has led, and the problem with traditional education is that things take so long to get through the curriculum committees and get approved as a class. By the time that happens, it's almost redundant, or a joke. We're going to solve that problem by having the class be the real world, and the real world be the class.
JH: I feel like you could almost run a school like Pigface, where the faculty is just whoever is around and knows something about the topic ...
MA: If you talk to people who've been on the crew of Pigface, it's almost become like a code word, like, "If you've been on tour with Pigface, you can do anything." Because people will! One night it's seven drummers, the next night I've got an inflatable life raft from the Army/Navy surplus store and I'm crowd-surfing on the audience! Then we've got bagpipes and trumpets, and there's six people singing and three bass players, and we've constructed an 8-foot high light-up cross. It's a baptism of fire. It's a sound man's nightmare, but you do that, and you're ready for anything. That's what the school's going to be. It's a Pigface, punk rock, DIY attitude that's enabled the school to happen. When I started Invisible Records, I got to a point where I didn't know I could do a really good job running a record label, but I knew I couldn't fuck things up any more than so-called major labels and major independent labels had done on my behalf. And that was very liberating. I find myself at exactly the same place now. I don't know that I can run an amazing school, but I know that I can't fuck things up and deliver half-assed out-of-date not-very-useful classes to people who aren't gonna get jobs. I'm not going to do that. It's definitely a Pigface kind of attitude.
Pigface 6 is out now on Full Effects Records. Tour:Smart is available from Amazon.com. For more info go to the Tour:Smart and Revolution Number Three websites.
-k