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Between 2002 and 2004 I shared a studio in Od St. with Raymond Watts of Pig. A fragment of my diary, from 2003.
… since I couldn’t get anywhere with the song, I mooched up to see Bryan and Ollie. Reclining on the chaise longue in their studio was a surprise visitor, Jared Louche of Chemlab, who I haven’t seen in person since we were both onstage with Pigface in Minneapolis in ‘98 - the height of my behaving-like-an-absolute-asshole phase. We were both slightly wary of each other in those days, as much as either one cared, which probably wasn’t much.
But this time Jared and I got on fine. Now he’s working with all the Chicago lot… Acucrack – Jason Novak, Jamie, and all that mob. Plus Martin Atkins of course. So we were really taking a stroll down some dark old alleyways. Actually not that dark; it warmed me to see him, and on ripping form. We had some laughs.
I took Jared downstairs to my studio where his ex-sparring partner Raymond was holding court under the swastika and inverted red neon crucifix (the KMFDM album arrived today, of which more later).
Now then, Raymond requires to be the sun around which all planetary conversation must orbit. But Jared is no slouch in the ego stakes himself, and has combat experience on this particular battlefront.
Raymond’s well-tested technique for dominating an assembled company is to burst in with an enormous, conversation-stopping drama, an urgent and complex Watts career crisis, laid out with pathos and vast charm over many ciggies and legions of wine bottles. The “crisis” is invariably a benign dilemma that will leave him ahead whatever the outcome, but by acting with an utterly winning helplessness, and by flatteringly inviting absolutely everyone’s personal opinion in turn, Raymond can ensure that conversation revolves for hours around his favourite subject (Raymond Watts). I don’t mind, and since there’s much fun to be had along the way, indulge this. But Jared has a technique to brutally subvert any outcome that leaves Raymond in command, whilst appearing totally supportive. It goes like this:
Raymond: (Drawing a deep, rattling breath). Now, “Jared”. I value your opinion. (An excruciating pause to find a lighter and cigarette). Do - you - think - that… (flicking and clicking rhythmically on the lighter to final effect) I - should… (taking a never-ending drag on the snout and blowing out an impossible amount of smoke) collect… all - my poetry, and my lyrics (thirstily gulping red wine) and compile an, an anthology of my writing…. into (chopping out Kilimanjaros of cocaine)… I mean - I’m considering… (snorts the lot with a sudden, industrial suction action) a selection of early works, a limited, a numbered folio, perhaps an edition bound in pigskin (reflectively dabbing at a few granules of powder that were inexplicably missed). But on the other hand, you see… it’s so difficult, should one instead, alternatively I…
Jared: (Suddenly) Yes. Absolutely.
R: But don’t you…?
J: No doubts man. Be firm in that idea!
R: But wha…?
J: The answer is YES, 100%, I’m totally behind the concept.
R: But would y…?
J: Never waver, dude, NEVER. Fuck doubt! The answer is YES!
R: (Weakly) But I…
J: (Leaping to his feet and jiving with extreme excitement, something like…) FUCK THE PETTY MINDS WHO WANNA COMPROMISE! FUCK THEIR LITTLE LIVES AND FUCK THEIR LITTLE BABY BLUE EYES! THEY’VE BEEN BLINDED BY THEIR HYPOCRISY AND THEIR SMALLTOWN SUBURBAN MEDIOCRITY! YOU NEED TO PROVE THAT YOU GOT THE GROOVE? NO! THEY GOTTA KNOW THAT THEY BE GOIN’ NOWHERE! GOIN’ NOWHERE BUT DOWN. DOWN BENEATH THE GROUND, WHERE THEY GONNA BE FOUND! YEAH, BABY DOLL, YOUR DADDY’S THE DEVIL AND YOUR MOMMA DON’T CARE! DON’T LOOK BACK, NEVER GET SLACK, STAY ON THE TRACK – HEY JILL, THAT’S JACK! KEEP DRIVING DOWN THAT FUCKED UP FREEWAY, YOU’RE ON ROUTE 666 - RELAX – YEAH, SUCK IT UP HONEY, YOU AIN’T NEVER COMING BACK!
R: (Very faintly now) I…
J: (Roaring and gyrating his hips) YEAH!!!
Simple, but effective.
I predicted disorder. This is a strange recollection, one that goes back to the very beginning.
In the summer of 1981 I was 16 and I needed a holiday job to earn money to buy a motorbike. Without wheels my range was limited. I lived in rural isolation, miles from anywhere I wanted to go, which was mainly Brighton, a beacon of neon and vice dens.
“You want a pint of lager?” Asked my unreliable friend Andrew Manso, a.k.a. Mano.
“Yeah. Cheers.” I accepted this rare gesture with gratitude. “How’s the black eye?”.
Mano had sustained the injury in a fight with skinheads at the Greeting No. 4 gig in Lewes, which because of my lack of mobility, I had been unable to attend. Accounts of the combat varied, from Mano’s heroic account, demonstrated in full, with karate chops (“… as the third one came at me, big spotty fucker, two little ones were holding my arms, but one of the others …”), to more prosaic versions. e.g. Dave Baker’s languid account; “Yes, Mano got pissed. He started shouting at some skinheads. Then they beat him up, slightly”.
Mano touched the side of his face and his brow darkened.
”No bother. They won’t be smiling anytime soon.”
“Cheers for the beer.” I said, slurping gratefully. I looked around the country pub as the alcohol hit my stomach, the beaten brass bar glowing orange-gold.
“Now listen Mano,” I wheedled, “You said you’d got a job. Tell me. Tell me where I can…”
I paused, checked by a faint but deathly smell that pierced the cigar and sour beer pub atmosphere.
Mano cut across me, businesslike.
“You need a temp job for the summer? Old uncle Mano’ll sort you out. Nice money. Up at the hatchery. Chickens, man. Yeah. ”
“Uh? Chickens?”
It sounded weird, but I was pretty dumb about everything and this was like, paid work.
““We’re the Kids in America”. Dirty little strumpet. I’d give ‘er one though, eh? Eh? Eh? Pffwhoar. Leave it to old uncle Mano. I’ll stick some fuckin’ AC/DC on the jukebox.”
The Hatchery was hidden in dense woodland off a forgotten Sussex lane. Flanking a bombed out gravel forecourt was a massive concrete and breezeblock structure, almost windowless, with a lorry load-in bay. Opposite was a low wooden building with a corrugated iron roof. Here was a rough cloakroom with a punch-card clock-in machine and a “canteen” with Formica tables and a hot drinks machine.
The first day, I rocked up (by bicycle) and I immediately recognised that odd, burned, sour smell that I’d caught on Manno in the pub. It was shit, and sulphur and dead animals and something else – hair? Burned hair? Burning hair, or feathers.
So here’s what happened in the hatchery. The factory of life.
There were perhaps ten of us that worked the machinery. We were a varied and hopeless crew. Mano, of course. Then, an old character called Dougie, the wit of the gang, with the gummy charisma of Popeye, who had worked at the hatchery for 25 years. Then Karen, a simple but fearsomely strong lesbian, Deidre, a sad and gentle 45 year-old mum, and farmer-skinned Derek, the fork-lift truck driver. They are the ones I remember.
Every day lorries from local farms pulled up onto the forecourt and backed up into the load-in bay. Then by the thousand, we unloaded eggs. They were delivered on long, flat blue frame-trays, each egg held upright within a small hexagon. Then we “candled” every tray. “Candling” was the process of manually sorting fertilised eggs from the unfertilised. Two of you placed the trays on a special clear-topped table. Powerful spotlights blazed through the eggs from underneath, so bright that you could see right though the shells and identify the embryos, their little shadow-shapes suspended in the yolk that glowed dull orange in the glare.
The farms and batteries that delivered the eggs were identified only from a corresponding number. You got to know the varying levels of quality of each farm, so that for instance number 10 delivered excellent, clean batches of eggs, and 5’s were not too bad. But eggs from 36, 4 and 3 were frequently rotten and would sometimes be covered in a green-brown, pussy substance with a smell of such primeval repulsion that when first encountered, a bolt of yellow vomit uncontrollably rocketed up your throat and filled your mouth. Many times, shells would explode furiously at the slightest contact, spraying one with a fetid brown puree that stuck in your hair and eyes and fingernails and ears.
The unfertilised eggs went into boxes and thence to breakfast tables. We kept the fertilised.
The first few days inside the hatchery were unbelievably unpleasant. Fluorescent strip lights, the never-ending roar of the giant fans and heaters, the sweltering heat and that smell, that hideous omnipresent smell. Yet after four or five days the brain simply numbed all senses, and one found that one could walk wound the vast building without permanent dry retching.
The fertilised eggs were taken into a series of enclosed steel corridors, each sealed with a heavy metal door, deep in the factory, no higher that six feet in height and kept internally at the temperature of a female chicken’s body. Hot. Mid-way during this part of the cycle the eggs needed to be revolved, by hand, through 180 degrees, an enormously time consuming and monotonous process. Yet I found “turning” inside the corridors a strangely comforting ritual. They locked you in a corridor alone for several hours, enclosed utterly by the heat and warped steel. Deep inside the vast machine, you felt the pulse of the mother, the metal womb, caring for its children.
On the last days before hatching, the eggs were taken out of the frames and transferred into vast “ovens” on perforated metal trays with sides four inches deep. And every other day in the factory there rose a new wave of noise that masked even the roar of the ovens – the sound of a huge new batch of chicks - tens of thousands of tiny yellow Easter chicks. A solitary chick made an insignificant cheep. Joined as many legions their voices became a maddened, shattering scream that fell and rose in patterns of insanity.
We packed the chicks into cardboard boxes, counting in fours – one tiny neck between each finger gap of each hand. 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28…. Boxed by the many dozen I suppose they went back to the farms and batteries that fed us the eggs in the first place. The cycle of life.
Some chicks had been crushed by others, or were injured of deformed. These were isolated, classified as inferior and placed in a special tray, a tray of rejects. These chicks were then taken out and gassed in a small chamber. I stood by while they did this a few times but for some reason the job was always performed by quiet, motherly Deidre. I never liked hearing their little voices fading away inside the chamber as the gas hissed and took effect. But every other day the factory received again and birthed again. The mother of life.
The rhythmic throb and roar of the heaters. The heat and the stink and the shit blasting your senses. The stink penetrating you clothes, your hair, your mind. I lost track of time. Isolated in the anechoic corridors of never-ending embryos, I heard noises that turned in my head into rhythms and pulses. Weeks went by. I spent the nights alone. I had the house to myself for the summer and I didn’t go out. I was too tired to speak and I smelled of shit and burning hair and was by now nearly crazy anyway.
So after the summer I bought a motorbike and a drum machine. Then I started a band. That’s another story, rich with comedy. But it occurs to me that ever after, perhaps I’ve been trying to recreate the patterns and frequencies imprinted inside the hatchery.
Of course one could identify deeper motivations. My adoption. That other lost mother I have never known. Perhaps all that explains the industrial music, the disembodied pleasure I feel from the noise. But even now, as I write, I can hear the mother-machine. Her semi-regular throb, ever-present, all surrounding.
Some time ago I was asked to write a piece about Judda. Who? You may well ask. I never sent through the work – but on reflection it’s not a bad start point, so here it is.
To understand about Judda it’s first necessary to describe London and Camden in the early 1990’s. And that is a distant land, seen dimly now. London was deep in recession. The late 80’s were supposed to be a time of excess and decadence – yuppies, Thatcher, all that. I suppose that perspective is also true but I don’t recall much improvement to the aesthetics of the town before the whole economy crashed again.I remember the dirt and peeling wallpaper in dim lit corridors, the broken buzzers to thousands of bedsits and DSS flat shares. There were squats everywhere, but landlords didn’t care - the property market had slumped so far that vast piles of Georgian and Victorian splendour sat rotting and unwanted. It was a grimy time, the last year or two before the internet changed everything. It’s strange to think about that now. Imagine organising a gig. No mobile phones (hardly, anyway), no websites, no email, no Facebook Groups. Nothing but word of mouth and printed flyers.
Everyone was on the dole. Ecstacy was the drug of the moment (at £15 quid a pill!); backstreet raves were everywhere, springing up with the weeds in the gutter. Scenes blurred and merged. Fetish had yet to become a mainstream, commercialised affair and the last echoes of punk could still be heard faintly reverberating. (A lot of the older techno-heads had been fourteen-year-old punks, now in their late twenties drawn back to the experimental and anti-police vibe around the underground rave scene).
In the mainstream music press that period in Camden is remembered for the rise of the Britpop bands - Blur and Suede and Elastica and a load of second string indie bands with floppy haircuts posing around; playing The Falcon, pretending to be bisexual and drinking too much lager in the Good Mixer. We thought those bands were simpering, self-satisfied cunts and we gave them a kicking whenever we could.
For something else stirred in the bowels of North London. There was a genuine semi-illegal subculture in those days and it was also centred in Camden around the tube, the market and the stables, before wannabes and foreigners in T-shirts and the smell of fast food swamped the place. This introverted industrial-grunge movement was an odd alliance of acid housers, intellectual perverts, gothic rockers and piss stained crusties. After Sheep on Drugs (briefly the undisputed champs), there were three bands of any importance in this scene - Pig, Cubanate and Judda.
All of us celebrated self-destruction. But for all our debauches Pig and Cubanate were really quite posh. Flicking through pictures from the time Raymond Watts looks ludicrously chiselled (who is this strutting fop?) and we (the early Cubanate) rather clean-shaven and delicate.
But Judda were proper nasty.
Judda’s sound was a guttural, clanking roar that (to my mind) only ever made sense live. Frontman Pedro was a mountain of leather and dreadlocks and tats, barking and grunting at the front of the stage. Andy, the pierced and perverted keyboard player was also positioned up front. As I recall he wore his enormous moustache in a walrus like style, scowling and prowling under a trilby and a cream suit. Bass player Jez and the rest of the band bristled with spikes, nose rings and studs. Judda were always fighting and arguing, splitting and re-forming. Often live on stage. They were also constantly whipping or piercing or buggering or being buggered by each other. One story I remember about Andy is that one day he failed to turn up to rehearsals because his boyfriend, with whom he had been playing some kinky homo bondage game, had left him muzzled and bound, dangling from the ceiling of his Finsbury Park flat in a crucifix position. Andy struggled extra hard and tried to explain that he was urgently needed at the studio but his partner couldn’t hear his muffled protests through the gag - and anyway just thought Andy was enjoying himself so left him dangling for a few more hours.
Clubbing was very different back then, a dirty and dangerous business. If you lived in Camden, you could pretty much walk it to Islington or the West End or Manor House. No one had any money. It was always Wednesdays Hard Club, Friday The Ballroom, Saturdays Slimelight. You could be out most nights in a darkened room listening to darker music. I would often run into Jez or Andy at the Hardclub or the Slimelight. Most disturbing of all were my occasional confrontations with Pedro, who always managed the improbable feat of being even drunker than I was. I really liked the geezer but it was hard to tell the difference between “Pedro pissed and friendly”, and “Pedro pissed and pissed off”. The bruise count was about the same.
Cubanate and Judda played and sold out several shows at the Camden Underworld, always advertised as a confrontational “Cubanate versus Judda” by the promoters Mags and Kath - aka Mechanical Promotions. One time they even got Pedro and me to mock-up a boxing match weigh-in and we were photographed facing off, eyeball-to-eyeball. I was glad, during this event, that we weren’t actually going in to the ring together because Ped had a stone or two on me and looked a bit tasty besides. Up close he always smelled of booze and sweat and violence.
Nevertheless Cubanate usually won the musical confrontations. Judda looked dirtier and darker but we had a manager (there were endless stories of the abuse Judda heaped on would-be managers) and we played more so we were tighter. Cubanate were more ambitious, more focused, more structured. Judda just didn’t give a fuck. By this I don’t mean that they didn’t believe in their music. Oh, they were intense about the band; Judda was their lives. But for all the aggro they were more scared than I was about sitting down with the suits from record label. Judda saw that as supping with the corporate devil - whereas that was the bit I liked the best. That righteous political attitude may sound ridiculous these days, when everyone is a whore, and fastidiousness about from whom you take money is seen as embarrassingly passé (unless it’s say, from a high profile carbon polluter), but then Class War was alive and well.
In 1993 Cubanate made a video for Body Burn, our first single. You can see it on Youtube. In retrospect I’m rather pleased with that video now, considering the 8mm vintage and the old brown shoestring budget. But more importantly it’s probably the one remaining glimpse of both bands together. The director wanted a crowded, violent feel to it so I bought in Jez and Pedro as extras to make up the numbers. You can see them clearly in the video. Plus Joolz Beeston who had just left Nitzer Ebb and was drumming for us.
Briefly, over winter ’92-93 there was a fad for “Industrial”. Major label A&R were told to look for a British Nine Inch Nails. Soon the Melody Maker and Kerrang! and EMI Records were coming to see us all. Cubanate even recorded some demos for London. Judda did record some stuff, with Raymond producing. But no label would touch them, even in those days when Sheep on Drugs, Ministry and NIN were in the charts. This was partly because Judda were always at their best live and loud, partly because of the vitriol they spat at any A&R men who turned up. And a bit of lip from some indie upstarts is acceptable (shows “attitude”) but five burly speedheads with extremist views and (shall we say) flexible sexuality bearing down on you in leather is another thing.
Pig, Cubanate, Judda. I always tried to harness the three bands together, to try to build up a scene, to gain a sense of momentum in the press. But whenever I suggested a collective approach Raymond was evasive and mercurial as ever. And Pedro would just laugh. One time, an hour before an Underworld show, a music journalist took me and Ped upstairs to The World’s End to discuss this upcoming London Industrial / whatever movement. Serious and intense, I gave the journo my usual shtick – which this was the edge, about how to use the anger, the links I saw between the personal and the political… But Pedro was out of his skull on cider and (I think) acid. After my opening sally, spitting Strongbox and coagulated flecks of sulphate, he violently demanded silence from us all, and then announced that he would only discuss one subject – marmosets. Then Pedro talked. He gibbered and gabbled about marmoset fur and marmoset noises and marmoset fighting habits and marmoset mating habits until the music hack got bored, stood up and left. Afterwards I tried to remonstrate with Pedro but I stopped because it was pointless. He was all fucked up. I don’t think he even recognised me by that point and anyway, I thought the cunt was about to panel me.
The last time I remember Judda playing together was around ’95, ’96. I always said that the ground was cut from underneath us all from the moment The Prodigy’s “Firestarter” reached number one. The mainstream always steals from the margins and that was the death of it all. Suddenly none of us sounded like the future any more. Hardclub died when they removed the plastic cave from Gossips. Slimelight changed – they built a bar, rather than simply positioning a skinhead on slabs of beer in the corner. Soon, a wave of bedwetter bands like VNV Nation had moved in. By that time Cubanate were touring Europe and the US where we got tired and sick and all fucked up ourselves. But that’s another story to be told. When we got back, the moment had passed when Judda might have been signed.
And because the scene never quite took off, because it all happened just before the internet, there’s almost nothing in the digital consciousness to remind anyone that Judda and all that happened during that time ever existed. The city goes on and covers the memories over with another layer of shit. Now only the brick walls and the pavements remember.
