BYE BYE BLACK BEAUTY

So, farewell then, BIG BLACK. This week they're packing it in. DAVID SWIFT celebrates the last days. Picture: LAWRENCE WATSON.

This Sunday night, Seattle in Washington will shake like no other city. Deep under the downtown skyscrapers, in an underground steam plant turbine once employed by the woodchip industry, Big Black will play their farewell show. Pride and power will combine to ensure that this sign-off by the greatest thing about Chicago since Frank Sinatra's ode will be a spectacular ending to a short, but illustrious career. People, we'll miss Big Black.

These three guys and their drum machine are quitting before anyone gets the chance to say 'they sucked'.

At Big Black's farewell show in London, over 1,000 people jammed into the Hammersmith Clarendon--the venue so far over the fire limit that a hose wouldn't have snuck in the door. For the first and last time, BB's foghorn Steve Albini is humbled. Through the lips that drink shall not pass--it interferes with the bile coming out--he mumbles "gee, really wish I had something to say to you people". This last London concert was a pyrotechnic event.

Big Black played out their last days with spunk and fire. I mean, do you realise that 'Bad Penny' is the greatest slice of sulphuric guitar chomping since the Gang Of Four's 'Damaged Goods' EP? And that the new LP, 'Songs About F**king', actually lays concrete over Sonic Youth's 'Sister'? Let me tell you more...

On the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, the five-mark coins are trickling into the porn-box coin slots. On any normal night, you can stand outside the 'kino' houses and listen for the rattle. But not tonight, for over the road from Germany's most-walked pedestrian area, Big Black are producing a far greater noise from within the dank walls of the Knopfs Musichalle. It's their first show on a "goodbye" whirl that will take them, in the next three weeks, through Germany, Belgium, Holland, Britain, Australia and the States, ending with the Seattle show.

Jet-lag aside, Albini (mouth), Santiago Durango (law) and Dave Riley (wit) play a Hamburg show that confirms completely the impression first gained at the University of London gig at the start of this year--Big Black are/were one of the hardest, purest forces in rock 'n' roll. I used to think that The Three Johns could bat around a beatbox until Big Black arrived. And Albini is one of the great pick-pushers of the decade, as he arches back from his $700 custom-made guitar ("build it like a tank, I told him") like a willow in a storm.

Dave (bottom), Steve and Santiago plan their retirement.

After four days travelling through Europe watching Big Black, I wonder if all critical perceptions are going out the van window as we speed up and down Germany's autobahns in search of the next show. Big Black are special and loud and awesome. But if this is so, and they've got an ear-ripping LP due for release, why give up on the eve of further greatness?

Many people want to ask this. As Albini says, after Santiago is pursued to the point of mental breakdown by a German goth girl who seeks the same answer--"I never once thought we'd get to the stage where we'd go to Germany and people would say, 'oh please don't break up, THIS IS SERIOUS!'"

Big Black are splitting up because Santiago Durango wants to go to law school. He qualified for entry with a mark which put him amongst the top ten per cent in the United States. At 2am in a Hamburg bar, he explains why this is a path he must follow: "My father brought the family from Colombia to the United States, he's done his bit. Now I'm the next dynasty, I must help the family, and this is my way of doing it."

Later, he tells the other side: "I specifically remember talking three or four years ago about other groups we had admired who had made about three or four LPs and they had slipped terrifically, and we thought, boy that's not gonna happen to us."

Durango's mouth moves slower than his brain. He's smart, and he keeps the smarts mostly to himself. Albini, however, can't resist an interjection, and for putting his lips where they're not wanted, Chicago clubowners have virtually banned him out of existence. He tells the split his way:

"If you can tell yourself that you have gone as far as possible and remained true to your values, then to continue in that vein is just futile. Boring."

You're showing incredible discipline, pulling out now...

Says Dave Riley, who once swapped bass tips with the Parlia-ment/Funkadelic crew when he worked in their studio time: "I wouldn't call it discipline, we didn't even have to think about it. It's not like we're poking out our eardrums, we've just decided to end this project. There are certain parameters within Big Black that would be silly to f**k with, just because we sold a few records and could come to Germany and so on."

Albini: "This is our vocabulary, the three of us. If we tried to plug someone in when Sant left, and called it Big Black, it would be katastrof!

"I want to pull out now. Everything I wanted to do with Big Black will be done in these next three weeks, the final shows."

So, what have Big Black achieved? Formed by Montana cowpoke kid Albini in about 1982, they dawdled through a couple of reasonable-enough releases until the 'Racer X' mini-LP (1985) and 'II Duce' single, hyper-spaced projects which in turn gave bloom to 'Atomizer', an NME critics' fave of last year and perhaps the first LP to successfully propel guitars and drumbox beyond the norm since 'Alan Vega-Martin Rev'. 'Atomizer' was their turning point, a scarred, ugly reminder of unacceptable faces of freedom--freedom to pervert children ('Jordan'), freedom to burn through frustration ('Kerosene'). Big Black told us Society Is A Hole.

In Bochum, Big Black play at their very best and are then confronted by a series of fanzine and radio interviewers who allege that their manifesto is 'not very nice'.

"But," explains Santiago to a lady from a Munich radio show who's driven 600km just to speak to them, "there's an overload of supposedly 'right' images in American society that are completely false. We deal with the forgotten side; the Manson family, mass murderers; these are actions and motivations that are within us all."

The rather gross 'Headache' pic sleeve--the US limited edition version starring a close-up mortuary slab axe victim--causes some disquiet amongst the interviewers.

"But the image isn't harmful; it's the way it's processed," says Dave.

Albini gets his ten cents' worth: "The 'Headache' cover is confrontation without context. Normally you're told, there's a guy who's been run over, but you never see the result, it's always explained in context. We're giving you the cold fact."

Big Black reason that the dilution of the fact makes a mockery of the event.

'El Dopa', from 'Songs About F**king', updates the documentary function of 'Jordan'--events in the news one day, forgotten the next. In the former, the sleeping sickness epidemic of the 1920s flu epidemic is retold. Several dozen US citizens who suffered the sickness literally slept for 30 years, until the late 1950s, when a scientist injected the correct chemical that had been lacking in the brain, and enabled the victim to awaken. Upon learning that they had missed the best years of their lives, they promptly requested death.

This, too, is the end.

What are you going to do now, Steve?

"I've got my label. Ruthless Records, in Chicago. And I'm definitely gonna get a band together, but it will be radically different to Big Black." He's got a day job. As one of Chicago's top photo-retouchers, Steve keeps the Marlboro Man looking good around the world.

Santiago?

"After I finish law school I envisage a return to the music business somehow. There's many shortcomings in Chicago--nowhere to rehearse, the clubs are all bad."

Hey, if you open a club, Albini won't get barred! And Dave?

"Well, I've got a few things planned. But I've learnt a lot off these guys."

Albini tells of their final shows (to be played in the US this week): "When we set up the final tour we decided to be complete prostitutes for three shows, and completely gregarious for the rest. So the highest bidders got three of the dates, and, for the rest, we're playing a benefit for a kid who's in a coma in Boston, in a cathouse in Cincinnati, and in the steam plant in Seattle."

I'll remember Big Black's last weeks in many ways, but mostly for the gargantuan thrillpower of 'Bad Penny', 'Cable' or 'Kerosene' live; and the sight of Albini, his Die Kreuzen T-shirt dripping from his spindly body, his eyes bulging from their sockets and all flesh-veins erect, taking the microphone in every city and, his tastebuds thirsting for the backyard barbecue set-up in Chicago, screaming to the house: "SAY, WHERE CAN A GUY GET SOME DECENT RIBS IN THIS TOWN??!!"

Thanks, Big Black.

"I've been talking to Dave, the NME journalist, who doesn't have much of a handle on things yet. There's a lot of America in us, and that still seems to evade people over here."

Steve Albini, Tour Diary, July 20, 1987