From the Metal Box to a Chicago museum: drumming, label-running, teaching, and what ties it all together

Transmission 336: Interview with Martin Atkins

Martin Atkins has been a working drummer since the age of nine, and by 19 he was on Metal Box with Public Image Ltd — a position he secured through eighteen months of near-obsessive persistence, calling Virgin Records every time the band lost a drummer until they finally let him in. He went on to become a core member of Killing Joke, toured and recorded with Ministry, and in 1990 founded Pigface, an open-ended collective built on the principle that rehearsals were optional and anyone could walk onstage — which at various points meant Trent Reznor, Ogre, Genesis P-Orridge, Jim Thirlwell, Lydia Lunch, and Steve Albini, among dozens of others. His drumming runs through a significant portion of the post-punk and industrial canon: the rhythmic architecture of Metal Box alone placed him at the centre of one of the most influential records of the late 20th century, and his presence across PIL, Killing Joke, and Ministry connects three of the primary vectors through which punk mutated into something harder, stranger, and more abrasive.

He ran Invisible Records in Chicago for over two decades, releasing approximately 300 albums, built his own studio to keep the operation solvent, taught at the Musician’s Institute for 22 years, and wrote Tour:Smart, a blunt manual on everything bands consistently get wrong. In 2006 he relocated temporarily to Beijing, embedded himself in the D-22 underground scene, and recorded PK-14, Snapline, Hang On The Box, and Subs before making his own album under the name China Dub Soundsystem. He currently runs a museum in Chicago dedicated to post-punk and industrial music history.

Which artists or experiences shaped your initial musical direction, and what factors led you to choose music as a profession?

When I was a kid I listened to everything: Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Yes, Cream, because I’m old. I’m 67 years old in August. That’s what was around then. I started playing drums because my dad bought me a drum kit when I was nine. My dad wasn’t around much, so I played the drums like a good boy, until my hands bled, every day. I started to work with bands when I was 11 or 12, whoever. I don’t remember ever thinking I wanted to join this kind of a band or that kind of a band. This was before punk. There were just bands, different kinds of rock bands, heavy rock, psychedelic rock, whatever.

My influences were the things that I saw, like the Chieftains. I remember seeing the Chieftains. The guy was playing an Irish drum called a bodhrán, and those rhythms were in my head. That became the rhythm for Under the House with P.I.L. So I would just concentrate on playing, and I got pretty good. Then punk happened, which was startling, and that took some adjusting because punk said it didn’t matter if you could play. I’m like, well, hold on. I can play really well. Fuck off.

But the energy of punk overwhelmed the threat of punk for me. I moved down to London because that’s where this energy was, and I needed to be closer to it. I think I was quite young, maybe 16. I moved to London and eventually joined P.I.L.

Martin Atkins was in the room when post-punk became industrial, and he has been taking notes ever since.

How did you join them?

The first time I went to London, I had some auditions. I didn’t drive, but my dad had arranged a ride for me, and I arranged all these auditions for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. On Wednesday, I was reading a magazine called Melody Maker, and the ads for musicians were on the back pages. I saw this ad: “drummer required for a band with a rather well-known singer.” I’m like, I bet that’s John’s new thing because the Sex Pistols had just broken up. I called the number. “Hello, Virgin Records.” Oh my God, this is Johnny Rotten’s new thing, isn’t it? Yeah. I’m like, great. I’m the man for the job. I’ve been playing drums for seven, eight, nine years. But I have to go back to the north of England Thursday evening. So I need an audition tomorrow. They said, well, there aren’t auditions tomorrow. The auditions are on Friday. I kind of pleaded for an audition. They said, it doesn’t work like that. The auditions are Friday. So I went back to the north of England feeling like a fool. The signpost said Newcastle 200 miles, Newcastle 150 miles, Newcastle 120 miles. I’m going in the wrong direction. Opportunity was behind me. I was frightened — maybe that was the closest I would ever come to a real opportunity.

When I got back to the north of England, I called the band I was in. I said, hey, I’m moving to London. I’m going to leave the band. They called me back the next day and said, well, we’re going to move to London too. Let’s go.

For the next 18 months, any time PIL fired or lost a drummer, I would call. I would call Virgin Records. I got to speak to Jeanette Lee. I got to speak to Jeanette Lee’s mom. Almost stalker-level. Then eventually they called and said, come to the Townhouse. I thought that would be an audition, but it was to play on and co-write a song called Bad Baby on the Metal Box. Then after a few more weeks we did the John Peel show. A few more weeks after that, we went to Paris. My first two shows were Paris. Then we went to America and toured America.

Chicago, London, Beijing, New York, Los Angeles. How much does geography actually change how you make music?

There was an energy to London in 1977, ’78. It was powerful and frightening at the same time. I was 18 years old. I was making music. I had a band before PIL called Brian Brain, and we had a single we were working on. Then everybody I knew moved to New York in ’82: John, Jeanette, Keith, my friend Jeff, everybody. We were making music in New York, and that was wild and adrenalizing and frightening. I lived in Times Square, which now is like Disneyland. Then it was like a crime scene. It was dangerous. Los Angeles, I was there for a couple of years in Los Angeles. But Chicago — there’s that industrial energy. That’s why I was drawn to Chicago. I went to Beijing, I think, because I wanted to be inside the unfamiliar. Beijing, 2007, there was Starbucks and 7-Eleven and Subway, but it was still more unfamiliar than Chicago or London. That was an adventure.

Pigface started as a collective rather than a band. Was that a philosophy or just a practical solution?

I think it was an experiment. I was still in Killing Joke, and I toured with Ministry. There were nine or ten people on stage with Ministry. Ogre from Skinny Puppy, Bill Rieflin, he and I started Pigface. Paul Barker, En Esch (read ourinterview with En Esch) from KMFDM (read out interview with KMFDM) — they were the opening band. In addition to anybody I could find: Steve Albini, David Yow, Trent Reznor, different people. It was just an experiment to see what kind of music we would make.

There was an experiment on top of the experiment. When we played live, I thought, what can I do with everything I have at my disposal? I screen print, so I make big scenery to try and create a spectacle that helps the show. With Pigface, one of the things at my disposal was not giving a fuck. I always want the audience to be challenged, excited, emotionally bombarded. But I felt like if I did a show that was bad, I’d still had a really insane career. So I could use my position to experiment and not be frightened of what happened. Especially live with Pigface — people would just wander on stage that we hadn’t met before. Jim Thirlwell from Foetus (read our interview with Foetus), Lydia Lunch, Genesis P-Orridge, Beef from Gwar wandered on stage in his outfit. People would just wander on stage. We’d play for three and a half hours.

I think having been in PIL, Killing Joke, Ministry, maybe I was just trying to create some stability, so that even if people changed, it was still Pigface, still my thing. But it was riskier than that. The first tour, we didn’t rehearse. Which I think was a bad idea. But we were just experimenting.

What did running Invisible Records teach you that being a musician never could?

Doing all the things you need to do to promote a record — or a book, same DIY thing. It was difficult to see an artist not do very much for their record on my label. It made me understand all of the things you need to do to succeed. It’s not just having a good album or a good live show. It’s so much work, and it feels like it’s more work now. It gave me an appreciation of all the other people you need to help you. I started my own studio for financial reasons, because I was spending a lot of my money sending my bands to other studios in Chicago. But I was surprised — having our own studio right there really helped the identity of the label, so that even strange and difficult music was presented really well. Just another part of that same experiment.

How much of what Pigface was doing in the early 90s felt like a genuinely political act to you?

All of it. Just to not be on a major label, to be responsible for ourselves, to stand on stage with an increasingly diverse group of people — which more recently has included rappers from the south side of Chicago, Gaelynn Lea, who plays folk music on an electric fiddle from the confines of her wheelchair. We just do this thing and that becomes the statement. It’s a political thing to be in charge of your own self.

What were you watching musicians do wrong that made you feel someone had to write Tour:Smart?

Everything. Every single fucking thing, including me. I’ve been teaching for 22 years now, and sometimes I’ll put an experience into slides to talk about the economics of a tour. It takes me a few years, and I’ll be looking at my slides and go, holy shit, I needed to learn this. Sometimes it takes me a while to assimilate everything that gets fed into my head. Bands do so much wrong. It’s not easy to tour, but nothing is complicated. There are just a lot of small things all at the same time. I think smart people have difficulty touring because they think they can think their way through a problem. Sometimes you just have to work your way through problems — work two months before the tour starts to put things in place, safety nets to help you, people to help you. I just started to try and give musicians these examples to help them.

What does Extremities actually mean to you now versus when you made it? Going back to that album after 35 years, what surprised you?

This is a very large subject for me. When we made Extremities, it was a knife fight. That’s how I can best describe it. I spent my time waiting for somebody — it would be easy to say Jaz Coleman — to come at me. Not with a baseball bat. Jaz wouldn’t do that. He would come at me with an idea for a ballad or a song that we could not release in 1991 after Outside the Gate. I toured with Ministry, and I decided Killing Joke had to release their most dangerous album simply to survive. All of these other bands had taken inspiration from Killing Joke and run with it, and after Outside the Gate it was very, very difficult.

We made the album, released it, and did some tours. We were ferocious: myself, Dave “Taif” Ball on bass originally, then Paul Raven came back, Geordie on guitar of course, Jaz, and John Beckett on keyboards. We were fucking ferocious. But I didn’t spend any time with the album except to make it.

Coming back to it in February of last year, I realized it was the 35th anniversary, and Paul Raven is no longer with us — he passed away 18 years ago — and Geordie had passed. I was best man at Geordie’s wedding and he was one of my favorite guitarists ever. I listened to the album, then I sat behind my drum kit, which is set up at the museum, and I played a couple of the beats. Oh fuck. I made that album when I was 30 and now I’m 66. I’ve had a spine surgery, hip replacement. I kind of took it for granted. So I spent a couple of months just working on playing those beats, making sure I could honor the album.

Then I started to lose weight. I was in bad shape. I nearly died two years ago. I was in the ICU for seven days, coughing up blood. I had blood clots on my lungs from my hip surgery. I ended up losing 45, 50 pounds and working really hard before I started to put the band together.

I sent a message to Randy Blythe from Lamb of God: are you a fan of Killing Joke? He sent me a picture of a chapter in his new book, which is called Money Is Not Our God. I talked to Mark Gemini Thwaite, who was Peter Murphy‘s guitarist and a huge Killing Joke fan, and he really wanted to play guitar. There were a lot of flights, a lot of rehearsal time, a lot of complications. We ended up rehearsing at the museum amongst all of my Killing Joke memorabilia. It was kind of glorious and really heavy. Geordie’s first wife, Ginny, flew in from Detroit and cried. I cried. It was heavy.

Along the way I got a tremendous appreciation for what everybody did on that album. Some people were like, yeah, I’ll sing a song, Extremities, yeah. Then they’d email me back the next day: fuck, what’s going on? This is complicated. All of us worked really hard to make it happen.

The club where we played, Reggie’s, is behind the loft we used to have for Invisible Records, 2024 South Wabash Avenue. We had the entire third floor of this building. H-Gun Labs were on the seventh floor and they did Public Enemy vs. Anthrax, Ministry, KMFDM, Frontline Assembly, Killing Joke, Money’s Not Our God, Nine Inch Nails, Head Like a Hole, Down In It. This location was significant for me. We rehearsed there with Killing Joke. Jaz set the cash register on fire in the Money’s Not Our God video underneath the train tracks behind our building.

So I bought a cash register and said at the end of the show I was going to take it outside and set it on fire. It felt silly to me, because I’m a grown man with four children and a museum. Now I’m going to go in the alley and pour gasoline on this cash register. Grow up. But I did it. Eighty-five people came outside and stood in a circle. We set this cash register on fire. It almost became a moment honoring Paul Raven and Geordie — almost a funeral for them. People were crying and hugging. It was a wonderful thing.

How lucky am I to have gone through this experience with that album and those people. There are a lot of people in Europe who want us to come and do that there. But I said, hold on — it’s the 45th anniversary of the Flowers of Romance album. So we’re doing a different group of people. Chris Connelly from Ministry is singing. We’re performing The Flowers of Romance on April 11th. In the same way, I get to immerse myself in that period and think about Jeanette and Keith and John, work with these different people to bring that album to life, and have people tell me stories about the album. Jeff Tweedy from Wilco, Justin from The Locust — all these people have got different stories about that album. It’s a wonderful thing to be my age. It’s also the 35th anniversary of Pigface. Will we do a Pigface show later in the year? I honestly don’t know. I’m old and I’m tired, but I’m also energized by all of this.

Is there a collaborator you wish you’d spent more time with?

We were just talking about Geordie, but then — hold on. We did Extremities, we did the Damage Manual, three releases with the Damage Manual. We did Murder Inc., myself and Paul Ferguson and Raven and Geordie. We did Murder Inc. with Chris Connelly. So that wasn’t bad. I like working with Leslie Rankine from Silverfish and Ruby. I did a couple of shows with her six or seven years ago. I really enjoyed that because I got to sit on stage with her and just play these very simple beats. I don’t think there are many people who would play those beats without embellishing them. I’ve done Extremities, I’ve done my PIL stuff. I don’t have to embellish beats to show people what I can do. I really enjoyed working with Leslie. I miss hanging out with her. The pandemic kind of fucked up a few things. Once there are some changes here in America, Leslie will come out and visit the museum and hang out for a week, and maybe we’ll make some music.

How did the Damage Manual actually come together? What was the initial idea, and how did you manage that many strong personalities?

It began in an interesting way. I signed Mick Harris from Napalm Death to my label, who had a project called Scorn — a kind of low-frequency drum and bass vibe. I really liked it. But Mick was difficult — not in a traditional way, but we booked some gigs for Mick and he wouldn’t get on the plane. We booked interviews with some really big magazines. He didn’t show up, or if he did he was two hours late. People from magazines have egos. They left. It was like, what are we doing? Our worst enemy is the artists themselves.

One day Mick said to me, you know why you might really like Scorn? I’m like, oh, I don’t know. Tell me. He said, early Scorn is lots of samples off the Metal Box. It’s John Wobble‘s bass (read our interview with Jah Wobble). Okay. Fuck you then. I called Wobble. I’m like, Wobble, you want to do something? I miss your bass playing. He’s like, yeah. So I went to London and found a studio in Soho — where we’d recorded Betrayal, Wobble’s first solo album — because I wanted to press that memory button. I had all of these loops and ideas.

Me and Wobble are in Barrack Street, London. My phone rang. It was Geordie: hey, where are you? I’m in London. Fucking hell, Geordie. Get down to the studio. Geordie came over. It felt like it was really meant to be. People really liked what we were doing. But it was very difficult. Everybody was — yeah. There were a lot of changes within the industry at that time. We had immigration problems trying to get to America to tour. It became very expensive. Unfortunately, it didn’t last very long.

You went to Beijing in 2006 to explore the emerging Chinese music scene. What made you go there specifically? And do you still follow what’s happening musically in China?

I think I’d had enough of the American music scene. We put out 300 albums on Invisible Records. Somebody said to me, you’ve got to go to China. Okay. Then somebody else said, you’ve got to go. Somebody arranged a situation where Michael Pettis (read our interview with Michael Pettis) — who ran D-22, the key underground venue in Beijing at the time, a New York guy — arranged for me to see five bands a night and record them. He arranged a situation for me to see five bands a night at D-22 and record them. I loved it. It felt new and everybody was excited.

I booked a regular studio and started to take some of the bands — China MC Brothers, Hang On The Box (read ourinterview with Gia Wang), Snapline, PK-14, Subs — into the studio to record with them, and at the same time recording bands live and shooting video. Then I started to make my own album, China Dub Soundsystem, in the same way that I would make a Pigface album. I was working with all of those artists, a scratch DJ called DJ Wordy, Tibetan singers, a girl who was in the studio upstairs signed to a major label — she came and sang on a song. To me it was the last Pigface album. I even had shirts made that said Pigface in Chinese. But at the last minute, after mixing it in Chicago, I thought, well, this is different from Pigface. I should call it something else. I called it China Dub Soundsystem. But I should have had more faith in the Pigface audience, who had already been on a long, strange, difficult journey. I might re-release it as the last Pigface album. I don’t know. But I love that album.

What are you working on right now?

I’m working on The Flowers of Romance Revisited. I’m working on the museum. We just opened a four-bedroom Airbnb upstairs, which doubled the size of the museum. It’s full of artifacts, vinyl, test pressings, books, cassette tapes, signed memorabilia — Lydia Lunch, Peter Hook, all kinds of stuff upstairs. We let bands stay there. I’m working in the neighborhood where I live in Chicago. There are lots of really great things going on: record stores, cafes, restaurants, bookshops. I’m trying to make sure I’m helping anybody there I can.I think I decided to do this PIL Flowers of Romance thing too quickly after Extremities, but there was no choice — it’s the anniversary. I don’t know what I’m going to do next. I might do a Pigface show, or work on my book, which has been postponed. I want to work on that. I’m excited. I’m interested in a lot of things. We’ll see.

Photos courtesy of Martin Atkins

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others