The Word Made FLESH

GODFLESH MAINMAN Justin Broadrick passionately despises his native England, for reasons explored in depth below, but if he ever moves over here, he ll need a few linguistics lessons without delay. For no reason other than my own innate pedantry, I am forced to intervene when the genial 27-year-old begins enthusing about one of his numerous side-projects, Techno Animal, describing the new material as full-on and really brutal .
I hate to break it to you, Justin, but in this country, the word brutal means shite , as in The new Cranberries album is absolutely brutal .
Really? he exclaims. You serious? Fucking hell! I ve got an Irish mate, Dermot, and I say brutal all the time and he never pulls me up on it. Fuck me, I ll have to take note of that if I ever come over to Ireland (laughs).
Mind you, Justin s little vernacular faux pas is in the ha penny place compared to some of the journalism contained in his band s press pack. Perhaps due to the mechanical and steely nature of their music, Godflesh have had more ridiculous horseshit written about them than probably any other alternative band in existence. Most of their reviews are virtually unreadable, with phrases like soul-shatteringly violent industrial mayhem and a maelstrom of cybernetic carnage being bandied about indiscriminately. It s all rather reminiscent of the way English music press writers used to drone on about ethereal miasmas and sonic cathedrals in relation to 4AD bands.
Yeah, crushing hell machines ripping your senses limb from limb and all that wank, chuckles the affable Brummie. That is really tiring to read. It s like, Oh, bollocks, here we go again . Clichi after clichi. I could write it myself at this stage. The American ones are the most hilarious.
Personally, I d settle for Godflesh sound like a steamroller committing suicide .
There s also the kind of stuff which is incredibly pretentious yet makes some kind of sense, Justin continues. When you read a piece and you know that the guy writing it gets what Godflesh are about . . . that s satisfying. But I hate reading all this crushing hell machines stuff. Actually, the best one I ve ever read was an American review of Streetcleaner which gave it 0 out of 5. But the guy hated it for all the right reasons! Said it was the single most depressing record he d ever heard, and that we had no musical validity whatsoever (laughs).
The 130,000 punters who shelled out for Godflesh s last release, Songs Of Love And Hate, might beg to differ.
Justin Broadrick has a dark and spectral secret lurking in his past which makes Charles Haughey s closet look relatively well-kept and skeleton-free. In 1986, while in his mid-teens, he played guitar parts on Napalm Death s riotously unlistenable noisecore opus Scum (28 songs in 25 minutes Spiritualized it was not).
It was quite bizarre, he understates magnificently. In 1986 we were all kids. I d reached the end of my tether by the time Scum was recorded. It was real novelty stuff, anyway. We were silly little kids and we didn t think there was any longevity in it whatsoever. There was one song on there, You Suffer , which was one second long (laughs) . . . got us into the Guinness Book Of Records.
It s amazing the way it s been turned into some sort of long-lost underground classic. I still do interviews with people who say Oh, Scum was an amazing record and I m like, Eh, what? We did it when we were 16 for a laugh! .
Then, after a short spell in Head Of David, came Godflesh. The band has always essentially been a two-man operation Justin on guitar and vocals, G Christian Green (known as Ben) on bass, and a drum machine for company although several auxiliary guitarists have come and gone.
I met Ben because we were all living in this really nasty suburban area of Birmingham at the time, explains Justin. He was part of this group who were all five, six years older than me, really obsessed with music. Basically, they were the only people I knew in a ten-mile radius in my area who wouldn t beat you up on the street, y know? I met all these guys by proxy, they d be standing in a record shop or something. Birmingham s a big city but it had a very small alternative music scene at the time.
After releasing a rather poor eponymous debut, Justin and Ben spent 1989 recording what many still consider to be their best work: the truly murderous Streetcleaner. Personally, it s the darkest and most unsettling record I own, and you re talking about someone who possesses a copy of Don Henley s Greatest Hits.
I listened to it about two weeks ago, for the first time in a year, says Justin (referring to Streetcleaner rather than Don Henley). It was really fascinating . . . more nostalgic than anything else. It brought back memories rather than feelings of musical appreciation, y know? And I found that really problematic, but then I listened to it again, to try and give myself a distance, to delude myself that I didn t make this record, to listen to it for what it is. It does stand up with time, I think. That was the album that did it for us.
The music isn t the only ominous thing about Streetcleaner, though. There s its sleeve, a depiction of a fiery pseudo-religious hell, and its disturbing title.
Yeah, the title comes from the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe. I read a book about him once it was fascinating, because it was written before he was caught, and in the book there s this chapter which is like What to do if your husband does this, or this, or this et cetera. Sutcliffe s thing was that he was cleaning the streets of prostitutes for God.
And then there were the inferences of a streetcleaner being a slang term for an Uzi submachinegun. It s such a loaded word, with lots of really full-on connotations.
After Streetcleaner came the clinical techno-grind of 1991 s Slavestate and the tribal onslaught of 1992 s Pure, both of which consolidated their rapidly-germinating reputation. Surprisingly, though, Godflesh have always found most favour with the metal press rather than the music weeklies, continually getting lumped in with cretinous industrial outfits like Ministry and the Revolting Cocks. This may actually have set their career back, as Justin explains.
There was a tour we did in America with Napalm Death, he remembers. Nocturnus (awful science-fiction death metal Satanist outfit with keyboards JO B) opened the bill up, but they re not even worth mentioning. They were hilarious, they were just pure comedy. They were idiots, the most offensive characters you could meet and we had to share a tour bus across America with these fucking cunts.
But then that 91 tour in general was a nightmare. Streetcleaner had just made its impact in America, and over there everything was Earache this, grindcore that. There was a mania for the whole Earache/grind thing back then in both Britain and America people were into the label as much as the bands. I remember trying to explain to everybody what we were about, but as far as they were concerned we were an Earache band.
Also, some people were put off by the fact we were using a drum machine. That s always been the case when we toured with Napalm Death in 1988, some of the crowd were spitting at us! The fact that we play slow music counted against us, too. We had people shouting Speed up! at us. So I d go over to the drum machine, change the setting and slow the track down even more, deliberately (laughs). Really confrontational. But a year later we were able to play the same places as a headline act, off our own bat.
As I hinted earlier, Godflesh devote just as much care to their album sleeves as to their music. The artwork for 1994 s Selfless, in particular (a beautiful shot of human cells growing on the side of a microchip), stands out.
We stole designs for our sleeves for ages, admits Justin gleefully. But we ve stopped all that now, because if we get caught we re fucked. The cover of Slavestate is a digitised image of a kid s face, from that film with The Monkees, Head. And the sleeve of Streetcleaner is from a Ken Russell movie called Altered States. It s one of the visions suffered by William Hurt s character in the film he experiences this mad dream.
We found out that the visual is taken from the original Dante s Inferno, and Russell just treated the hell out of it, colourising it like fuck. He actually stole it himself that s why we haven t been sued!
There s also a shot on the inside of the CD booklet for Pure, he elaborates, which is taken from Ken Russell s The Devils. It came out really bad, but still somebody recognised it, and they were like, Eh, you want to stop doing this. It s from the last shot of the movie, where they burn Oliver Reed and raze the whole village. The sequence is brilliant, but the shot itself on the booklet is a piece of shit. I don t know how they recognised it. Since then we ve cleared absolutely everything.

Godflesh s latest release is a bass-heavy reworking of their last album, titled Love And Hate In Dub, which received the thumbs-up from Peter Murphy in the last issue of HP. Although the overt hip-hop and electronic elements on the record might surprise those who are only familiar with Godflesh s earlier, harder material, it won t shock anybody who s ever encountered Justin Broadrick in person. By the sound of things, he must have a record collection the size of Mont Blanc; over the course of our 90-minute conversation, he enthuses about everybody from Red House Painters to Wu-Tang Clan, and describes Aphex Twin as the most important musical artist of the last four or five years.
I love things like dub, hip-hop, and techno which isn t sort of sucky house music, like Jeff Mills, he explains. Hardcore and breakbeat stuff, and also Alec Empire (who s worked on Bjvrk s new album JO B). He s really inspirational.
Basically, I just wanted to stretch it further. Before the original Songs Of Love And Hate was mixed, I was pissing around, doing things like removing the guitar parts and adding delays. I just got off on it so much. I was thinking, This is minimal, but the grooves are really chunky when you take away the riffs . The Songs Of Love And Hate tracks were rock songs that was the parameter. So when I sat down to remix the album there were no confines any more. I did it all on an Apple Mac over three months. It was really self-indulgent; I didn t even let Ben come into the equation (laughs).
Justin has also fondled the faders for artists as diverse as Pantera and The Lemonheads ( After remixing Pantera I got offers to remix bands like The Wildhearts, and I was like, Fuck off! It would ve been nice, though, taking major label money ), as well as juggling his own recording commitments.
I am quite prolific, he says. I d do even more stuff if it wasn t for the day-to-day drudgery stuff of the music business: y know, you want to do something and you ve got these ideas now, and the record label says, Well, you ve just done this and make you wait six months. It s a problem because I m a real studio-type person. I like pricking about. I have my own studio. I live in Shropshire, on the Welsh border. It s a semi-mountainous area; a really tremendous-looking valley, really idyllic. But I just wanted to get the studio away from any other people.
Does the isolation help when creating what is basically loner s music?
Yeah, he affirms. We re totally detached. Whereas having a studio in Birmingham, if you go out for an hour, you re shitting yourself thinking the place is gonna be ransacked when you get back. I wanted to get out of the city anyway. We were living in a crack-dealing area in Birmingham. So depressing. English cities I just find so numbing. The people are just so ignorant . . . I despise fucking London. I mean, Birmingham is bad, but London . . . it s disgusting. The way people treat each other is despicable. It s nice to get a bit of mutual respect, y know?
I just detest anything that epitomises Little England. Like Parklife, that epitomised it for me. I could not stand that record. Obviously there was something quite cynical about what Blur were doing in 1994, but on another level it was really sick and nationalistic. Made me want to vomit.
What is it in particular that you find so objectionable about the place?
The bigotry. The stupidity. Living in modern England desensitises you to the bigotry of people. I got beaten up every day when I was a punk in the 1980s, and my parents were hippies living in a really bad area of Birmingham. I was brought up in a commune. My stepfather regularly got the shit beaten out of him for having long hair.
I mean, bigotry is inside all of us, and you always have to look inside yourself and watch out for signs of it. I can t believe that more people don t do that. n

Love And Hate In Dub is out now on Earache.