b l a c k ~ o u t

"The fire of God has touched my hands / I've seen the darkness in men's hearts / And I've played Hendrix albums at 78 speed" - 'Ergot' by Big Black.

RANCOROUS GUITARS throb like turbo-charged killdozers and pummel the patrons of Amsterdam's Paradiso club. Suddenly Steve Albini - a human sparrow loco on Superman steroids - launches himself head first off the lip of the stage and flies into the gaping maw of the audience.

They don't spit him back quickly. A moment of genuine rock mania is perverted by pawing showbiz salivation. People learn to swallow anything eventually - even a runty gobshite geek like Albini and the fearsome visceral vilebrations of his compadres Santiago Durango and Dave Riley.

This is partly why the Big Black "frantic metal depression" experience will never pass this way again.

CHICAGO'S TYPHOON trio of everyday terror are on the verge of rock stardom and atl that entails. And so, going typically against the grain, they're calling it a day with a final tour of Europe. Australia, America and an album titled 'Songs About F******'.

Today, as it happens, is Steve's 25th birthday and he has erotic activity on his mind.

"It's a tradition that I always get laid on my birthday," he explains as we walk the dope-scented, hooker-happy streets of Amsterdam.

Wishful thinking, it turns out.

Steve purchases sex aid Ben-Wa balls for a girlfriend and admires a steel ring and leather penis appendage dubbed The Seven Gates Of Hell. But the nearest Albini gets to sensual stimulation in the next 24 hours is wearing some pink 'n' black polka dot knickers on his head, a birthday present from Kim of Sonic Youth.

So what's your interest in sex aids then, Steve?

"I think they're really funny. It's realty neat that people would go to all the trouble of making these implements to get their rocks off with. The more obvious ones like flesh coloured cucumbers don't really interest me.

"But this big harness contraption. The Seven Gates Of Hell, that goes on some guy's cock, I think is really funny. It's a lot of weight, I've got one at home and use it as a lamp. It amuses me to think there are guys out there who really enjoy wearing a pound and a half of leather and steel on their peckers like jewelry or a medal for their conquests."

Tell me, did any of Big Black ever get bedded on the road in your five year career?

"I never did, there again I don't get laid much," admits bassist Dave Riley, the only drinker of the band.

"I did once," chime both Albini and fellow strafe guitarist Santiago.

Another myth of rock and roll lifestyle bites the bullet.

BIG BLACK, a case of all mouth and no trousers? In a literal sense it's true, looking at the rags clinging like denim cobwebs to Steve's twiglike legs - the ripped 'n' torn Jeans which got us ejected from a Dutch restaurant earlier - and listen to him jaw-Jabber in the Paradise's dressing room.

Big Black might be as sexually enticing as a lame, starving bull in a rage, but the paradox is their songs analyse how society warps furtive urges far more adeptly than the garter rump 'n' nonsense of Madonna.

In a far more important sense the oft misinterpreted intentions of Big Black's music, their refusal to kiss ass in pursuit of a career, their disdain of rock jerk-offs--"Such as The Mission whose beer we stole yesterday in Belgium and which you're drinking right now"--mark Albini and his cohorts as King Kongs in a business of chimps.

And now King Kong is about to spurn the glamour of Fay Wray.

"The real reasons we're breaking up are many," explains Albini, a bespectacled but fright dingbat. The initial direct reason is Santiago is going to law school and so he won't be available anymore.

"But since he came to that decision it became obvious that this is a real good time for us to break up anyway. So far we haven't done anything embarrassing so our legacy will not be soiled in later years.

"A lot of musicians who're working with necessarily limited audience like us, make he mistake of trying to be professional careerists. And to do it they end up having o suck showbiz dick till the blood shoots.

"The goal of Big Black has always been o do things on our own terms, to avoid he pitfalls of the rock and roll lifestyle at he same time as disregarding conventional musical cliches and expressing something worth expressing.

"Now. though, people no longer respond to us as normal human beings. My perception lately has been more than half he people who come to see Big Black don't have any idea of what we're talking bout. They have no reason to be at a Big Black gig other than it's some sort of social unction for them.

"You know how the strangest things become hip? Like how Sonic Youth accidentally became hip? I don't know what it is about us that's making people put us in the same category as ail the other flavours of the week, but I think that's what we're in danger of if we don't quit."

FIVE YEARS down the line Big Black aren't going out with a whimper but a whizzbang, both live and on vinyl. From Albini's toilet-seat scribblings in Forced Exposure to he subject matter of their songs, the band have never been less than controversial. Their whole attitude since the initial burst of 'Lungs' until now has been "to shake people up, put them in touch with their own mortality so they feel more alive at the end."

Both their current (uneven) EP, 'Headache' and the upcoming album 'Songs About F******'--perhaps their best slap in the face yet--continue with the band's aim to "shock people out of their smug complacency".

The limited edition of 'Headache', with a song based on the real fife and death case of a doctor who bounced his newborn deformed baby on the head till the mite expired and was then exonerated, certainly shocked me. Its cover photo was, in fact, a morgue shot of the mashed head of an auto accident victim.

At which point I nearly said hello to my breakfast once again.

"I don't think I'm sick at all," denies Albini. "I think I'm perfectly normal. I have an interest in unusual things sometimes but I don't think there's anything unhealthy about it. I think that what would be unhealthy would be maintaining that interest in secret and fetishising it.

"First, the photographs are so incredibly potent just looking at them makes you run through a whole stream of emotions you don't normally feel," he argues, "and I think that's valuable. Second, the image of a human head Flopped open puts you in touch with your own frailty and mortality.

"You can't get a more personal realisation than that you're human and one day you're going to die. That's what that picture's 'message' imparts.

"Third, beyond that it's a commentary on the images of violence that surround us every waking hour: images on TV, cinema, adverts or in books. Images that aren't true because they're so many generations removed from the reality of violence. People are comfortable with glamorous Hollywood versions of violence or cartoon heavy metal versions, but this picture shows the true result of violence on a person and it makes everyone feel uncomfortable.

"Moreover, we've deliberately decontextualised the image. We're not taking an image like, say, the monkey with its head split open on the Animal Liberation album and using it to put over an overt proposition."

"The Animal Liberation thing is an example of exploitation, be it positive or negative depending on how you look at it." chips in Dave.

"And we're not like the ladies in downtown Chicago who went through garbage cans outside an abortion clinic," continues Steve. "They spread all these foetuses on the sidewalk with the names of their mothers on cardboard underneath them. That's exploitation of a potent image.

"Basically, to take any image that has its own power and to attempt to define its limits with your own perspective is pretty f****** self-important and smug."

Those phrases again! Self-importance and smugness. Such human qualities in extremis drive many of the true-life characters that populate Big Black songs to vile and violent actions.

There's the warped adults in 'Jordan, Minnesota's ugly story of a child sexploitation ring; and then a psycho beats a girl to death after intercourse because she refuses to have sex with his brother on 'Fish Fry' from the new album.

Unfortunately, though, Big Black's public image has become blurred with the people they sing about.

ANOTHER DAY, another country: Wales. For 24 hours I've been observing Big Black and despite the insane row they make onstage what strikes me is how gentlemanly they are.

In the dressing room of Newport's Civic Centre, Santiago, a man with the cool demeanour of an assassin, quietly flicks through a book on baby-rearing to team how to help his newborn niece and compiles a set list with meticulous margins.

Between gulps of fruit juice, Albini sinks into a deep depression as he argues how the poster prices should be kept down to a couple of pounds and complains that Big Black are being sucked into business situations they despise.

Dave Riley, a warm heart in a crocked body, is out chatting to fans, two of whom make it backstage. One, an American who claims to have met Albini briefly three years ago and treats him like a long lost soul-brother tries to swarm on the guest list. Steve, long one of the most hated men in the Stateside hardcore scene, gives him short shrift: "Tough titty dude, no way!"

"Jesus, this whole business sucks," explodes Albini afterwards. "Things have gotten way out of hand. Not only are coke-snorting business morons in Europe trying to make something out of our hide but the kids are as well. I have never asked to be on a guest list in my life.

"You can bet that guy wouldn't have given me a buck if I was broke and met him in the street. People no longer have any respect for us or themselves now we've got this far, everything is being degraded by the starmaking machinery. It's a good job we're splitting up."

Before that though wilt come the mind-shredding 'Songs About F******'.

Apart from a totally unexpected motorik cover of Kraftwerk's 'The Model', which together with Cheap Trick's 'He's A Whore' is the trio's valedictory single replete with pastiche sleeve. The album continues in the severed vein Big Black have made uniquely their own.

Fear, psychopathology, phobias, bigotry and insecurity spurt like blood from tracks such as 'Colombian Necktie'. The tatter's titles is a South American colloquialism for someone having their throat slit from ear to ear so their tongue falls on their chest.

Of all the songs though, maybe 'El Dopa' is the standout. Based on the book The Awakenings by Oliver Sacks, author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hot, it chronicles the true story of a group of people who fell mysteriously asleep for decades just to wake up old but with senses intact.

"What interested me about that topic is how radically these people's lives had been destroyed," elaborates Albini. "They'd slept through the best years of their lives when they had the chance to make something of themselves. The sense of loss was horrific. I also personally fear the passing of time, getting old and becoming a burden on others." Steve laughingly outlines his perfect suicide solution.

"A shotgun in the mouth. You don't even know you've pulled the trigger because the brain is destroyed before it has a chance to respond. The thing is it's a bit messy so you have to do it in the house of somebody you don't tike."

Don't expect news of Albini's passing for a few years, though. Dave might go back to college--"To put in a few semesters for that degree I should get when I'm 50."--but after Big Black, Steve wants to form another band. There's also the outfits he's planning to produce in his basement studio such as Urge Overkill and the Honeymoonkillers... What's all this talk about you mixing a Depeche Mode single, Steve? "Where did you hear that?" The Albini runt grunts with mirth. "It's not in my calendar." So when the three men in hats finally check in their trilbys in Seattle in a couple of months time it'll be the best decision they've made since forming. After all, as Albini points out, "We might have gone on to suck and that would never do." Article by Jack Barron, originally appeared in Sounds August 8, 1987, complete with *s in place of dirty words. Why can't these brits come up with any INTERESTING fucking questions, jesus...