By the time you read this, The Damage Manual will have reached the West Coast of the United States, their "March to the Sea" a blazing trail of ruptured eardrums and echoing speaker cones, of lost sense and innocence; a realization that we have been sleeping these last few years, waiting for the Bethlehem Beast to scream into town. Martin Atkins, the self-made maker of sonic mayhem, has put together the first real rock and roll band of the 21st century --and last, because when they are through anything else will seem pointless and but a capering shadow in comparison. The Damage Manual brings together Atkins, Chris Connelly, Jah Wobble and Geordie Walker [of Killing Joke fame] to sonically challenge every fundamental truth you have held evident about the nature of loud, aggressive, insightful, emotional music. The Invisible [Records] Manifesto of quiet subversion has been tossed aside and you have but one chance of survival: stand tall before The Damage Manual and pray to all your gods that your bones will be strong enough.

[actually, one piece of the aforementioned paragraph isn't true. the damage manual assault on america was postponed by an unforeseen holiday taken by immigration officials in great britain. That smoking trail across the u.s. isn't the passage of the damage manual, it's just the summer sun burning through the weakened ozone layer. the real deep slash 'n' burn will happen in october. you have a few more months to prepare yourselves. --ed.]

To start off, I'm wondering what brought the idea to the forefront. Why now? Why the foursome chosen instead of another iteration of Pigface?

Martin Atkins: Well, I've been doing Pigface for ten years now. And, uh...I love Pigface, don't get me wrong. But it is difficult to have an intimate relationship with 250 band members. It's almost to the point where we need "Hello, my name is..." cards on a Pigface tour. Because I find myself going, "And you are...?" It's just insane. And I love it. But I also thought--well, I didn't know it at the time--but I'm enjoying the intimacy of being in a band with three other people.

Were they embryonic in the sense that they were instrumentals or did you come out with the idea that you needed to find a vocalist?

Martin: There was a point at which we thought we'd just make music. Then Geordie and Wobble said to me that we should ask John [Lydon] if he wanted to sing. Having been the most recently departed member of PiL [Public Image Limited], and with Geordie not having worked with John, I tried to say to Geordie, "You don't know what it is like. Look, I don't know if I want to enter the new millennium back in a band with John Lydon." But I understood the idea. When you hear my drums and Wobble's bass for eight bars, you just expect to hear John's voice come in. So I understood what Wobble was saying and I understood what Geordie was saying and why. But I did something that was uncharacteristically well thought-out for me. I had talked with some people and the fact that I was working with Wobble and Geordie had struck such a chord in them that I didn't feel it was my right to say John Lydon isn't singing in this band. That wouldn't be fair to a hundred people in Leeds or a thousand people in New York who would really like to see that happen. And so I said, "Look, guys, I'll send some songs to John and we'll let John decide if he wants to be in the band." So I called John up and told him what was going on and sent him a tape and didn't hear back.

For me, I think, if John had been involved this would have been pigeonholed as retro, as a reforming of PiL, with Geordie replacing Keith Levine, and it would have been a retro tour. We'd be out playing with the Buzzcocks and--oh, God--Sisters of Mercy. I didn't want to be in that band. I wanted to be in The Damage Manual.

Chris Connelly has always felt like the right singer to me for this project. You know, Chris and I haven't always gotten along. Geordie and I haven't always gotten along, for that matter. But Chris felt like the right singer. I called him and said, "Look, I'm doing this thing. Is it of any interest?" And he said, "Of course, it's of massive fucking interest. Please send me some songs. I'd love to hear what you are doing." And I went down to Chicago and recorded his vocals with my friend Chris Green.

I'm thinking of "Leave the Ground" with the whole vocal style that Chris uses. I've seen some discussion as well that has people reacting adversely to that song. "What's he doing here?" But I can't help thinking, "My God, they're breaking new ground in a lot of ways with what they are doing."

Martin: Well, that's one of the "fuck off" songs, isn't it? I think Chris' vocal is extremely brave on that track. He's exposing a layer that I don't hear him expose on his solo material. And there are moments like that where his voice fractures and cracks and goes up to another level. I think that is true of all the performances. Geordie, for example, dropping down to this really ultra-clean sound--I call it the River Bank Guitar because I used to watch this show when I was seven called Tales of the River Bank and it was about all these animals--like Toad of Toad Hall (in Wind in the Willows) if you like--and there was this really nice plucked acoustic guitar music that went along with it. And so I called this particular guitar of Geordie's the River Bank Guitar.

I think everybody exposes themselves on this record. And what I've done is to find those moments where someone is exposed and strip away everything else around it. So you have not only an exposed individual, but instead of having the drums continue to bang away, I've taken out the drums and the bass and further exposed that moment. Just stripping away production instead of additive production. Every day I'm more excited about being in this band and what this band is. We are finding out what this band is with every day that goes by.

I have a note here to ask this--and it seems like a silly question now--but how is The Damage Manual furthering the Invisible Manifesto?

Martin: It's an embodiment of the Invisible Manifesto. You've got this studio that I've been building for seven years now. [Chuckles] I don't see any of the money I earn outside of Invisible. The money goes directly back into Invisible and the studio. I think for the New High Into a New Low Pigface album, which was about three years ago--well, four-and-a-half when I started making it--I thought, fuck paying $25-35,000 to an outside studio to make some of the more popular--more successful--Invisible records. What do I need to spend on my studio to get it to a point where it can used for that? And I guess my skills were getting to a point where I thought that if I really put my mind to it, I could make the album here.

And now, I'm at the point where I'm going on tour for six or eight weeks and I need to make sure that my studio is utilized while I'm gone. I think I'll call Jared--because Meg Lee Chin is coming out on the road with us--I'll call Jared and see if he wants to work on his new Chemlab material while I'm gone.

You trace back the beginning of the Invisible Manifesto and it is the Public Image Limited press release. Manifesto is too strong a word for that. John said a lot of things to the press and he talked about a lot of things, but I think that Invisible--the studio, the label, everything that makes up Invisible--is what was talked about. I believed what John said PiL was. It took me a while to realize that wasn't true, that it was just a band on a major label. And if John was to release a PiL album next year, it would just be another band on another major label. How anarchic is that?

Another phrase I was going to toss out to you was "21st Century Punk."

Martin: Yeah, yeah. It is difficult to use the term "punk rock" these days. I do occasionally but then people ask, "What do you mean? You like Green Day or what?"

I was thinking more the original--the historical--outlook on making music.

Martin: I was in London in '78 when The Undertones put out their first record. They couldn't afford sleeves, so they wrapped them up in Xeroxed posters. I was around for all that and I saw that revolution--which is exactly what it was. The first Invisible release, What You Can't See Won't Hurt You, is a compilation. William Tucker was producing a couple of things and he had his own band, Cleft Palette, and they were getting played on the radio. He was trying to find a deal. I was trying to find a deal for my band, Brian Brain, and something else I was involved in. There were all these things going on and I said, "Screw this. Let's just all get together. How much money does everyone got? Let's just put this out." I think I had $150 and William had $70. Everybody put their money on the table and we got the record made. We couldn't afford sleeves either and so we screen-printed shopping bags. Just as we needed them as the record went out the door. And when you saw that record in the rack--well, you don't see it anymore, I don't even have a copy--you would see the handles of the shopping bag sticking up among the other 12" records in the rack and it would invite you to pull on the handles and see what was at the other end. I think the whole idea of anarchic, do-it-yourself punk is Invisible Records. We're not just doing it for ourselves, we're enabling other people to do it as well, people like Meg Lee Chin and Mark Spybey from Dead Voices on Air, all kinds of people.

But I think something that got lost is the actual "doing" of it. I work eighteen hours a day, seven days a week on the label. My days off are measured as once every three years and not in weeks per year. That's what it takes. Not to succeed in the music business, but to survive in the music business. We've got the D.I.Y. thing down. In fact, we've done so many Pigface tours and dealt with so many logistical problems from immigration to budgets to studio time to insane flight/train/bus/van logistics across many continents and time zones that we're getting pretty good at what we do. And that's pretty gratifying in its own right.

It's all very well to say "D.I.Y." But someone's got to pay for it. Someone's got to pay for the studio time. Someone's got to pay for the two-inch tape if that's what you're using. Someone's got to buy the media. Someone's got to put strings on the guitars. I think that we've kind of put a bit of Andy Warhol into the punk rock philosophy, that is to say that the only art is the art of business. I know that the better we understand our business and the better we do business, the more we are able to enable artists that we respect and like to do what they want to do unhindered.

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