BLACK OUT

The no compromise guitar attack of Chicago's BIG BLACK is about to come to a sudden end. JOHN TAGUE finds out why and bids the hard liners a fond farewell.

BIG BLACK have just completed their final British tour, but apart from references here and there you wouldn't immediately think it. The tour's been marked by a reluctance to advertise it as a 'farewell' extravaganza: there's been no hype, and only modest publicity. For now, bassist Dave Riley and vocalist Steve Albini have no immediate plans to form another band. Albini intends to run a recording studio he's just built in his house for six months and see if anything comes along. He doubts it will.

Third member, Santiago Durango, is the reason for the split: he's going to law school at the end of summer and so can't commit himself to Big Black activities. Without the diminutive guitar player, Albini sees no reason to continue. "We figured, without Sant it wouldn't be the same--it's not worth trying to replace him. But once we decided to bag it completely, it just started looking like a better and better idea because too many bands drag on way past their prime... It's funny though; as soon as you tell people you're breaking up everyone loves you. I kinda wish we hadn't told anybody 'cos then we'd still get people that we respected coming to the gigs. But in a sense it's not fair to keep it a secret. Originally we didn't want people to think that these are records that have been put out to cash in on a band's last couple of days. Then we realised that anyone who understood us would understand, and anyone who didn't, we didn't care about."

The band knew the split was coming about 10 months ago, but kept stumm about it until more or less now. They've attempted to cram everything they wanted to achieve into the past few months, releasing an EP Headache, with an LP Songs About Fucking coming soon. If there's one thing Big Black don't trust it's commercialism, and their records have become anti-fashion documents, refusing to compromise to market forces or to any concept of 'hipness'.

Albini: "In America there's a big movement for bands like us who, for want of a better term, are pushing to be more experimental, to get clinical, y'know, more acceptable. If you listen to recent Swans' records, or the Skin record, which is the Swans under a different name, a lot of it is basically commercial music. It's very cleanly produced, very conventionally acceptable, it uses traditional values, stuff like that. I'm not saying that's a bad band, what I am saying is that we wanted to completely remove ourselves from the realm of commercialism. Not only did we not want to widen our audience, we wanted to make it so that people who understood what we were talking about and cared would be there, and those who were in it for the fashion trends or because it was an acceptable social thing to do would be chased away. It didn't work of course, it backfired tremendously and we ended up trendier and hipper than we were. That's the thing we're sorriest about most at the moment, that quite by accident we became hip."

And what about the infamous cover for Headache, the photo of a corpse with its head split open (released only on a limited edition, covered in a black plastic bag to avoid attention, and sold-out within a couple of days of its release)--was that an attempt to fly in the face of fashion?

"That was basically to try to wake people up. There are so many images of violence used, especially in records that don't have potency in them whatsoever--heavy metal, cheesey punk rock death obsessives--that we figured if we put out a real photo, of a real dead guy who's really dead on the cover of a record, then all these arguments about violent images dulling people's senses would go right out the window. When you're confronted with a real dead guy, there's no way you can fail to respond; you feel weak, vulnerable, you don't want to confront it. And that just shows you can't be dulled by that sensation."

It's the end of Big Black. They've made some of the most unnerving, abnormal and down-right visceral music of the eighties. Music, as Albini says, that you can't fail to respond to.

And what of Santiago Durango? Why has he decided to become of all things a lawyer? "So I can make a lot of money and get laid a lot." Once people got into rock 'n' roll for the very same reasons, now they get out to become lawyers.

Things sure ain't what they used to be.

I got this from an unattributed clipping. From the cluelessness of the interview, I'd guess it was from one of the big 3 British music papers.