WHERE NOIR THEY NOW?

Contemporaries of Husker Du and Sonic Youth, Chicago's BIG BLACK were the nasty somethings in the woodshed of American independent rock. Five years after they split, they are more influential than ever and their back catalogue is about to be reissued. King Of Abrasiveness STEVE ALBINI blew in from the Windy City to talk grudgecore with DAVID QUANTICK

The very thin man with the very wiry glasses sits, bonily, behind a mixing desk. He is playing some long-lost avant garde tape and he is scowling at his sandwich. It has got cucumber in it.

"English people put cucumber in their sandwiches," Steve Albini sighs. "And no-one else does."

So where do other people put their cucumbers, then?

"In salads," croaks Steve exasperatedly. "Huge slices in salads!"

Suddenly you know that this is the man who brought a new horror to rock. The man who gave us Big Black's 'Songs About F--ing'. The man who stunned millions of students with his "punk rock" group Rapeman. The man who produced The Wedding Present. Tremble, cucumber slices, tremble....

ACTUALLY STEVE Albini is someone you should know everything about, if only for Big Black, the Chicago-based hellcore punk terror band he formed in 1981 who had a parallel career of equal importance with the likes of Husker Du and Sonic Youth, whose best records managed to combine an obsession with the eternally disgustingness of life with a guitar noise beyond punk, metal and, indeed, language. More grudge than grunge. Big Black ripped the heart out of several corners of music and were astonishing in their own right.

Southern are reissuing everything they ever did, plus an LP of their legendary sweat hell sex war last British gig (hey! I know, I was there! It was great!) so now we can prove that Big Black--like Old Mould and Moore, Gordon and co--were great and important and necessary even in these days when everyone is American and too loud. And Steve Albini--slightly abrasive, direct and not one to compromise just to impress people--is here in this studio to remaster everything for the reissues.

"I'll talk about anything," he drawls, so we talk about the strangeness of early Big Black--drum machines before they were sexy, lyrics about death, lust and decay (generally in the same verse), and Albini's acid guitar.

"It still sounds weird to me, it still doesn't sound like anything that was released at the time," Albini declares. "I still get a kick out of listening to records that don't have an ingrained time period, records by people like The Cravats or Metal Urbain or early Cabaret Voltaire. They haven't dated because they were never really of their time."

Big Black--by the time of their glorious 'Songs About F--ing' LP, with the line-up of Albini, guitarist Santiago Durango and bassist Dave Riley--moulded their scratchy rage into an extraordinary explosion of Raymond Carver deadpan horror lyrics, crashing drum patterns and trepanning guitar. Along the way they had paid tribute to a few unlikely progenitors with covers or Wire, Cheap Trick and Kraftwerk songs, acquired a growing fanbase and a rep for interesting humour. But Big Black were the sort of band who, inventing a blueprint, worked within it rather than move away.

"I definitely appreciate bands that know their limits and stay within them," says Albini, siting Kentucky's Slint as a particular favourite. "The first three or four AC/DC albums are amazing, even though they're fairly interchangable in mood, style and tempo....I'm a firm believer in trusting your initial response to something."

Steve has a proverb for us: "There's a cliche about film criticism that says you can't talk your way out of a belly laugh or an erection. If you see something and you explode with laughter, it doesn't matter what was going on you laughed--it's funny. And if you see a sexy scene and you get a hanger, then it worked, it was erotic, and there's no argument because, ah, the evidence is before us. And that's how I look at music."

As Big Black got better known, they acquired a reputation for oddness. The lyrics were what glum people call sick, their sleeves were often Savage Pencil drawings of peoples' brains moving rapidly away from their skulls, and Albini's onstage aggression and general tenseness made many people see Big Black as bad evil frightening men.

"Generally speaking, these are not people who have met us," drawls Albini. "I sort of pride myself on being a normal human being and not a rock caricature, not pandering to other people's expectations fo being psychopaths or cray-ZEE people..."

Albini--unlike many--recalls 80's alternative rock as a time of goofiness. You thought Sonic Youth and the Butthole Surfers were serious attitude bands? It seems you were wrong. They were "goofy".

"A lot of the bands around then did have fairly serious personas, and a lot of them who didn't had fairly goofy personas," Steve asserts. "People like Swans, Lydia Lunch, and Pussy Galore had attitude. Bands like Sonic Youth and Killdozer and the Butthole Surfers were fairly goofy; even though Sonic Youth were serious and interesting, there was a joke element even then. There didn't seem to be an artificial persona to Big Black..."

I suggest that, if Big Black existed now they would have joined their goofy contemporaries on Geffen. Steve becomes almost agitated.

"That's not true at all," he says firmly. "Big Black had the opportunity to be on several major labels. We were called by EMI, RCA, Arista, Wamer Brothers and I hung up the phone on all of them. I recognised then what had been made more obvious since, and that is that major labels have absolutely no value for a band that wants to function independently."

We'll return to this later. For now, more chronology. After Big Black parted company because they could do no more, Albini formed the evocatively monikered Rapeman, named after a Japanese cartoon character. Immediate controversy ensued. Rapeman's brief British college tour was shambles, every show was either cancelled or picketed by student unions.

"Huh!" snorts Albini, "English people are wierd! Even English people must recognize that. You people just love finding things to get upset about. You get upset in the most florid ways, the most extreme hyperbole. The only place in the world where the name 'Rapeman' was controversial was England; everywhere else in the world it was of trivial importance. When I was in Rapeman, I can't say it realty surprised me because I had been exposed to English people before, but I didn't think that people were serious initially. I thought they were pretending to be offended--but people were honestly upset by it and I was flabbergasted."

Hmm. Rapeman duly foundered--worldwide, it must be said--and then Steve moved into an area of similar controversy. He shocked the world of rock by producing its prime purveyors of tuneless grunting, the Wedding Present. To some, this was a worse crime.

"That's pretty weird," says Albini. "I understand people associating me with bands I've worked on as an engineer, but I don't understand why I am the only engineer in the world who's expected to be discriminating about the bands he's worked with..."

Steve is pale with annoyance. "I don't endorse the bands I work with, I work with them because that's how I make a living. I think it's ludicrous that there are some bands that are appropriate and some bands who are inappropriate for me to work with...Although I don't want to work with people whose music I can't stand and people who are assholes."

Pop fans will note that Albini has been fulsome in his praise for his next project, Polly Harvey. Probably he also likes the Wedding Present. In the meantime he is not making any records on his own, which seems a shame.

"The reason I don't have a band is that for the longest time I've been disgusted with the mode the American independant scene operates in and I don't want to be associated with that. Currently the independent music scene, with a few shining exceptions, is concerned with making a successful career, selling a lot of records, and that's never been a concern of mine. It makes people do the most disgusting things in search of that and I don't want to be associated with people who think like that."

But surely, in the caring '90s, The Man just gives indie bands space to, like, do their own thing and create and all that bollocks? Steve shakes his lockless head.

"Starting with Jefferson Airplane and The MC5 and going right up to Sonic Youth and Husker Du, it's never worked. In 30 years no band has ever come out of the system alive. They get signed, they get arm-wrestled into spending too much money on their records, they get into debt to the record company, they spend 18 months trying to get out of it, it doesn't work and the band breaks up. That has been such a constant that I can't believe anyone still falls for it..."

Steve gazes calmly into the hell that is corporate rock. "It boggles my mind that everyone thinks they can pull the wool over the eyes of a company that's had 30 years' experience in dicking rock bands. Now that means that bands are being arm-wrestled into sounding like Nirvana; and the only way record companies can imagine doing that is by hiring Nirvana's producer, so every band on a major label has been remixed by Nirvana's producer this year...and I just don't have any interest in being part of the continuum."

STEVE ALBINI is the sort of person we have always needed. He may be a little abrasive at times, he may not come pre-packaged with a lot of safe rock attitudes, but he is one of the true independents. His back catalogue is his best defence; go and listen to it (It is, incidentally, being reissued on vinyl "as archive material" because Albini believes that the aluminium in CDs will oxidise in the next ten years and the medium--conveniently for record companies--will become defunct).

Albini thinks of Big Black and says, "We were a pretty good live band". To anyone in a band now, he advises, "Develop your aesthetic and execute it, you will find your audience, your audience will find you". And Steve Albini says about Steve Albini: "I really don't give a shit what people think of me, that's not an issue. What matters to me most is the way I conduct myself."

EBONY'S ARE GOOD

FIVE ALBINI MOMENTS BY ALBINI

1) "LUNGS"--1981 (45)
"I GOT kicked out of my first band and that weekend I bought a guitar and immediately started recording the first Big Black record. It was pretty horrible because it was pretty self-obsessed....At that point I was just satifying my curiosity about what it was like to make records."

2) "BULLDOZER"--1982 (12")
"THAT WAS with the first line-up. Santiago Durango and Jeff Bazadi[sic]. Oddly enough, a friend of mine played drums on that because the drum machine had become....unreliable."

3) "ATOMIZER"--1985 (LP)
"'ATOMIZER' WAS an OK record. Having listened to most of that stuff for the first time in seven years yesterday, most of it is pretty embarrassing. I was sort of trying to figure out a way to weasel out of re-releasing it."

4) "SONGS ABOUT F--ING"--1987 LP/"LIQUIDATOR" 1992 LP and video of final British live show in 1987
"WE MADE a splash immediately before we broke up; now a band starts shopping its demos to majors after its third rehearsal. By the end, I think we improved; on the live record and video we were probably as good as we were ever gonna be. That gig was exciting--there was this giant belch and everyone involved in this giant belch felt immensely relieved afterwards."

5) RAPEMAN--group 1988
"I COULDN'T take seriously a political debate about the name of a punk rock band; that seems to me to be an absolutely trivial issue, like the size of a shoe. How can you say that one shoe size is better than another?"

Article by David Quantick, group photo by Lawrence Watson, Albini with microphones photo by Pennie Smith, dramatic Albini photo uncredited.