GOD interviewed in Berlin, January 10 1993
+ short introduction on Pathological Recs.
Originally on Spex, by Lars Brinkmann. Photography by Petra Gall.
Jazz, not jazz – in their 7 years of existence, God have skillfully maneuvered themselves from one extreme to another. A symphony of extremes.
Kevin Martin is God. But Tim, Steve, Scott, John, Dave, Gary, and Lou, Russell/Justin, maybe even Peter, then another Gary, and a very important/famous John – they are all also God. God – Germanic; interpreted as a being that is invoked or a being to whom sacrifices are made (the great Brockhaus Encyclopedia) – has nothing to do with it. This God is from London, not Amsterdam, Melbourne, nor Quakenbrück. This God has ten heads and is therefore at least two and a half times as big as its namesakes.
Martin: “God? We might as well have called ourselves Dog.”
Kevin Martin is the organizer, singer or saxophonist, cover artist, and semi-official spokesperson for the band. He's also the unfortunate owner of the label Pathological, whose extremes—ranging from industrial and grind to mid-free jazz, Japanese slo-mo metal, and avant-noise rock—might mirror his own band's ingredients. I meet him in a spartan room, crammed with just two beds. Somewhere in SO36, back courtyard to the right, then left, 3rd floor, it's called "Die Fabriketage" and has all the hallmarks of a youth hostel. It's a cold, anthracite-gray Monday afternoon in the merry month of January. Yesterday, God played at The Loft, today I was robbed by junkies, and the day before yesterday, I had my eyebrow popped open. It stinks here, and my head is pounding. Are those rolled-up mattresses on the beds, or striped bed linen? Of all days, today I'm supposed to face a band that's among the most important I've encountered in years... Mr. Martin, could you please be so kind as to introduce yourself?
Martin: “God is now in its seventh year. At some point, we called ourselves God and recorded a truly terrible demo. At the time, I was naive enough to think it would be interesting. So I sent it to Mark E. Smith from The Fall, and he loved it so much that he immediately included a track on his ‘Disparate Cogscienti’ compilation. After that, we played with bands like Napalm Death and Loop in constantly changing lineups. We got some very controversial reactions. The hardcore scene, in particular, proved to be very conservative in its tastes; the crusties even threw bottles and chairs at us. We kept going, and then Beggars Banquet approached us. I don't think it was because of our music, but because of the attention we were attracting. They wanted to do a 12" with us and talked about a great career. We made the ‘Breach Birth’ 12", which sounded and sold so well that I was only 50% satisfied. For me, things soon reached a point where people liked the band for the wrong reasons, journalists jumped on this noise band bandwagon and started comparing us to bands like the Butthole Surfers – it stank. Eventually, no one saw or heard the music the way I did, as a kind of white noise with what I call jazz influence. So I wanted to push the band, which at that time consisted of Scott Kiehl, Lou Ciccotelli, and Russell Smith, further in the jazz direction. A decision had to be made: either change direction or put our lip service into action and bring in real jazz musicians. We wanted to make it even more obvious, to grind even more atypical facets into our sound, to distance ourselves even further from this "just noise" thing. We were looking for people with a similar spirit and similarly unconventional minds. Tim Hodgkinson and I met, and I thought to myself, someone who looks like that and still has that "lust for life" has to be able to play saxophone with us. (...) I didn't want to use these people; they were already so extreme on their own paths. I just wanted to bring them together with the band and develop a new sound. A sound that no one could pigeonhole us with.”
Tim Hodgkinson, one of the three regular saxophonists, is a legendary figure of the English avant-garde. He has been involved in over twenty bands, projects, and collaborations. His band Henry Cow, which he founded in 1968 at Cambridge University with his university friend Fred Frith, is considered by the NME, for example, to be one of the most uncompromising and technically complex bands of the 70s.
Hodgkinson: "My first band, when I was still in school, was more into Ayler and Coltrane, what used to be called the new wave’ in jazz, and which comes pretty close to what many in this band listen to and like. So I was kind of drifting away from it and now coming back to it. In school, I thought I wanted to be like those people, I wanted to be like Coltrane. I was totally poisoned by this music coming across the Atlantic. Made by middle-aged African Americans. When I first heard Coltrane, it was like 'wow,' like a complete overhaul—then I looked in the mirror and realized that I was just a British public schoolboy."
Were you also fascinated by the political dimension of free jazz? Its function within the Black Power movement?
Hodgkinson: “Not at that time, no.”
Well, I know that from my own experience; middle-class kids are often drawn to any kind of radicalism.
Hodgkinson: "I'm actually more upper class than middle class." Martin: "Shit! You're fired!" Hodgkinson: "Yeah, no, of course I was interested in that, but that came later. I didn't know anything about that when I started listening to this music. Sometime later I read a book—unfortunately, I can't remember the title or the author—but it was really funny. It talked about things like Elvin Jones' dialectical drumming. For me, the most important thing was the feeling inherent in the music, this longing, this yearning. You also find this addiction and necessity to make music in God. That's the common thread: you simply have to make this music. You didn't choose it, you don't do it for money or to entertain people—you simply know that you need this outburst."
And the listener knows this at the latest when they find themselves in the concert hall confronted by an eternally crashing and rising wall of repetitive, hypnotically pumping noise. Feverish wandering, searching behind pillars and in corners for a hiding place, for the best/most painless way out. Or simply standing still, closing their eyes, and completely relaxing from the waist up. One of their song titles calls this feeling "Hate Meditation." Sometimes this rolling roar sounds like a maelstrom of pure energy. No beginning, no end, just an eternal, heavy rolling on.
Martin: “It’s about electrifying entertainment, a kind of ecstatic atmosphere. Especially live, we try to reach a state of consciousness in ourselves and the audience that is normally unattainable in everyday life. We don’t make destructive music; if it were destructive, it would only be in the sense that it’s a concentration of emotions that some people—in its sheer intensity—can’t handle.”
It’s said that God, when properly mixed and with a decent—meaning very loud—sound system, can sound very nuanced live. Their debut CD, “Loco,” recorded live at St. Mary’s Church, at least hints at this. The people from their then-label, Permis De Construire, and the mobile recording studio trembled at the diabolical sound level with fear. And you can even hear a power outage in it if you listen very closely.
There was no audience present, but tracks like "Fucked," "Sick Puppy," "I'll See You In Hell," and "Love's An Illness" exude so much joie de vivre that they're practically enough for two resuscitations. The sound, of course, still plays tricks on you. You're absolutely certain you heard something specific, and then the next time it's gone or sounds completely different.
Since "Loco," God has found its stable lineup. In addition to the aforementioned musicians, the following also grace the 1992 release “Possession”: Steve Blake, his partner John Edwards, Dave Cochrane, and third bassist Gary Jeff. Justin Broadrick shares guitar duties with Russell.
Martin: “Justin is an exception because Dig from Earache is downright paranoid when it comes to a project with him. He always sees the dollar or pound notes in his eyes; Justin is nothing more to him than his personal cash cow."
On top of that, far more serious problems arose in the form of their new label, Venture (Virgin subdivision).
Martin: “You're quite welcome to print this! The week you were supposed to come to London (Oct '92), Virgin had apparently already decided they didn't want us anymore.”
They told me you had fallen out and weren't playing anymore; in fact, that God was practically broken up...
Martin: "Nonsense. We wanted you to come. We played that evening. A little later, I had a meeting with the head of Venture and he explained that it all stemmed from EMI's takeover of Virgin. Apparently, we were too extreme for them. He even tried to get us to change our artwork, the pictures, and the title. In reality, they didn't want to support us because they themselves didn't yet understand what was going on. They were terrified, afraid of being fired. No one could be found who was willing to loosen the purse strings for promoting our record. There was, for example, the 12" with remixes of “Hate Meditation” that didn’t happen. Jim Thirlwell, Billy from A.R. Kane, and Jack Dangers worked for peanuts, just because they liked the music so much. Venture didn't support us in any way, though. I think they didn't even like our music. Venture only signed us because I told them that John Zorn and Justin were on the record, and that we were recording in New York at Bill Laswell's. Of course, that was exactly what they wanted to hear back then; they were slobbering like little, greedy dogs <laughter in THX Dolby Surround sound> Smith: "Well, record companies always want to know exactly who's playing what, when, and where. They saw this constant change as a sign of instability."
One might consider it a mistake that God signed with a jazz label at all. But in a time when noise in its harshest form—as atonal thrashing without structure or conventional instrumentation, as pure hatred of matter and consummate misanthropy, as a single, gigantic clamor for sonic vomiting and death—makes its way to jazz festivals, as demonstrated, for example, by the Japanese noise institution Merzbow led by bondage expert Masami Akita, with their three appearances at the Russian Amur Jazz Festival in Khabarovsk, there should also be some room for God in jazz. I'll be completely honest, and I must also admit, not without a little shame, that despite Brötzmann, Painkiller, Alboth, Naked City, Last Exit, and whoever else is currently revitalizing jazz, I still harbor some old prejudices (music for academics, bloodless, academic noodling, etc.) and a small batch of new ones (music for art directors and other tragic hipsters, lifestyle soundtracks, etc.).
Hodgkinson: "Jazz was very emotional and direct at a certain point in the 60s. In the 80s, it became very cerebral and artificial again. Like any other form of music, 99% of it is simply incredibly stupid. We want to pick up where jazz was at its most radical." Martin: “But I understand the danger you see there. A few years ago, we had this Courtney Pine / Jazz Warriors thing, where they sold us jazz as a fucking style. And the media totally sold out on it. Of course, we want absolutely nothing to do with that. Bullshit.” Hodgkinson: “For me, God is hardcore. Because hardcore isn't a style, but an attitude—or maybe just a feeling. I'd like to integrate some trumpets soon, so we're developing our sound every day. What should we call it? I mean, the word "progressive" doesn't mean anything anymore, it's just kind of an insult. And I don't really know where that leads; we're probably some kind of <laughs> subconscious band.”
So, once again, it's about breaking all the chains, call it boundaries, categories, conventions, or IKEA, God doesn't want any of that. They don't even know exactly what they want. Or maybe they just don't want to commit to anything. As long as such a broad, energetic and groovy symphony of extremes emerges, as long as God renews themselves daily and strives for higher things in constant battle with the elements, then we really couldn't care less.
PATHOLOGICAL RECORDS
The story of Pathological is one of tragedy. Initially, the label was the brainchild of Martin, who at the time ran a club in London and more or less facilitated some of the first gigs of Godflesh, Silverfish, Napalm Death, Bolt Thrower, Carcass, among others. His connections to the bands were less business-related and more personal. Pathological's first and arguably most ambitious project was to compile a discography that would attempt to bridge the gap between sickos from a wide variety of musical genres. Dig Pearson had other ideas. He suggested to Martin that Pathological become a subsidiary of Earache, focusing on bands that had nothing to do with the label's typical grunt-heavy sound. Easier said than done. The Earache logo ended up on the back cover, but the agreed-upon money never materialized. When Martin tried to collect the outstanding sum from Dig, he was given the runaround. When they ran into each other again, he gave him a check for £200, which he later called back. So Martin continued on his own. In collaboration with Permis De Construire, he released God's "Loco." The third Pathological release was the highly acclaimed, excellent Terminal Cheesecake LP, "Angels In Pigtails." Next came father-and-son Brötzmann's "Last Home," KK Null's Japanese avant-industrial metal head Zeni Geva with their best-of compilation "Maximum Money Monster," and a spoken-word album by Lydia Lunch. With PATH7, Martin fulfilled a dream of his friends and re-released two legendary albums by the American band Oxbow on a single CD, titled "The Balls In The Great Meat Grinder Collection." The most recent release I'm aware of is the CD "Ghosts" by Martin and Broadrick’s joint project, Techno-Animal. Also worth mentioning is the consistently excellent Pathological artwork, which could go down in the annals of design as an anthology of this generation's morbid tastes. Ironically, with his Evian/Naive parody, Dig also stole a graphic idea from Martin – who used to adorn his products with ever-changing small Pathological logos that referenced McDonald's, Visa, Lufthansa, JPS, and so on.
