DARK OBSESSIVES

Big Black are currently the best band in America. With their Chicago contemporaries Naked Raygun and Breaking Circus they have left behind them a shattered trail of excellence that causes addiction among all who cross their path, and in case you regard this as the average angst-drivel from an indie bloodhound, there are rumours that Geoff Travis at Rough Trade wants them more than any other band!

On the lesser side Robert Palmer recently came out in their praise, in print, which is the closest they've ever come to breaking up.

Here in England to be courted by a half dozen labels and to push their pulverising "Atomizer" album (on Homestead, but on Blast First too, possibly), Big Black are...scruffy, witty, far from pretty, scurrilous, scroffulous devils. Santiago Durango (guitar), Steve Albini (guitor/vocals) and Dave Reilly (bass and female fan club). Roland the drum machine is minding the shop.

Big Black's records (three 12-inch EPs, a single and album) sound so fresh it's worth pointing out, because they won't, that they make even Sonic Youth look positively three-cornered in the old hat stakes, yet there is much latent ambiguity about their work and the darkly grizzled lyrical themes that bulge inside the straight-jackets; something disquieting about their rags and dementia. They sit puffing away on old fashioned cigarettes (when did you last interview someone who smokes Capstan Full Strength?), puzzled by my direction, until Dave attempts clarification.

"Like a postcard of the Grand Canyon! On the back it'll say 'it's located here'. It won't say the Grand Canyon is good or bad, just a description and that's the lyrics. A picture on the front, and that's the music."

But the barbaric overtones of the writing--about fist-fucking, voyeurs at slaughter-houses and a town obsessed with paedophilia?

Steve: "If anyone's to blame for the subject matter being brutal I guess that's just my tastes, those things intrigue me. I don't really understand the violence inherent in things, the offhand cruelty..."

The lyrics could merely be titillation, like Stephen King.

Steve: "Probably. The same way people stand around when there's a motorcycle accident. Everyone's really gripped by that because it's a real event. Even bands like Sonic Youth don't fall victim to the same scrutiny we do 'cos we present elements of truth and things that actually happen."

Their stand-out song is easily "Jordan, Minnesota", a true story about everyday American hobbies.

Dave: "You know the horror movies where someone goes into a small town and there's the 'town secret' nobody talks about?"

Steve: "Jordan Minnesota is like that, an isolated town where a significant port of the adult population got their jollies by screwing each other's kids. The youngest were four or five!"

Have you had any trouble for singing about it?

Dave: "People call me 'asshole' on the street. (Adopts Mary Poppins voice.) 'Why don't you offer anybody hope?' People say to me: 'you're just trying to create a problem, taking this volatile music, throwing it out just to see what happens'."

Steve, already infamous in America for his fanzine work (check out "Forced Exposure" for the most bristling Stateside quill), generally cops the lot.

"If someone calls me up on the phone, 'I'm gonna kill you, you faggot, you Nazi'...okay, come on over! I'm perfectly willing to be responsible for it. I get threatened all the time but no-one's followed it up. 'Okay, beat me up, do your damnedest!' When they see how foolish they're being, they leave me alone."

Santiago: "He's the kind of guy who goes and shoots a thousand arrows in the air and doesn't know where they'll land."

Dave: "Kinda cool actually."

I got this from an unattributed clipping. It also appeared in the Headache press kit.