ULTRAVIOLENCE - LIFE OF DESTRUCTOR

(Image courtesy of Earache Records)

Album review: Ultraviolence - Life Destructor (1994, Earache Records)

Interview: Johnny Violent

Written by: dyzlocation.

Of the music regularly played in nightclubs I used to frequent, the usual suspects which filled the dance floor for the duration are particularly memorable. At the time, I was experiencing the cusp of what would come to be known as cybergoth. Bands like Covenant, VNV Nation, Sneaky Bat Machine and Apoptygma Berserk were for me, and for many others, at the forefront. One night, sometime in the early 2000s, a new friend invited me to join her for a dance to a track I had not expected to hear in a goth club. In the clubs, Hardcore Motherfucker rivalled the Sisters of Mercy’s This Corrosion in terms of length - that is, if you had a DJ gracious enough to play the full mix. There is no abridged version of Hardcore Motherfucker and nor should there be. The track appears, of course, on Ultraviolence’s album Life of Destructor and forms part of an oblique, often tempestuous, narrative.

The opening track, I am Destructor, puts me in mind of an assembly line, a techno-modern Promethean Man coming ( being forced?) together. Destructor is born. I am reminded of the opening scene of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2014), though Scarlett Johansson is not quite as metallic. In Electric Chair, Destructor sounds like he is landing, or maybe finding his form and learning how to move. The track spirals into a danceable, confident beat, which leads into Joan, with whom Destructor falls in love.

Impressed with the eponymous Hardcore Motherfucker before her, Joan reciprocates Destructor’s love, until Digital Killing. Whatever initiates this breakdown is not made clear, but that doesn’t matter. We’ve all been there. To enunciate the feelings in words would render them sterile.  The Only Love is a jarring cacophony of machinegun fire and children’s laughter, - distorted, dark, it makes perfect sense. Hiroshima is an addictive beat, danceable as hell. Dancing is the only way to get through the aftermath of this personal holocaust. Finally, Destructor earns his name. Destructor’s Fall is composed of half-heard sounds stretched to abstraction, crying out within the still-living wreckage of a detonated heart. Death of a Child is the final track. It begins with the deep, distant pounding of a fractured system. Joan repeats over and over that ‘It hurts’. I think the child is Destructor himself.

As the album concludes, I am reminded of the end of a rave, just as the sun is coming up. Despite it all being over, the tattered yearning for ascension remains.

Not in my most feverish imaginings - and there were plenty back in those days - would I have thought that I might one day speak to Johnny Violent, the man who created this beast of an album, which accompanied me through so many of my own destructive events.

Our mutual friend Mel Allezbleu put us in touch; Tim and Richard from Earache Records let me use the iconic album cover image. And then Jonathan Casey, aka Johnny Violent joined me for an interview.

To my mind, Life of Destructor encapsulates a great deal of what this archive stands for.

I now consider this the official inauguration of dyzlocation.

_

dyzlocation: Johnny, thank you for joining me. How has your week been?

Johnny Violent: It’s been a pretty good week. Actually, I've been cycling. I was taking photos of dogs on Tuesday, which was exciting. My friend Gracie, her dogs, in a field at sunset. They're really, really lovely. My best ever pictures of dogs. Cooking gnocchi too. It's Italian potato pasta.

dyzlocation: I could eat piles of the stuff.

Johnny Violent: With vegetables from the garden as well. So that was nice. My ME [ME/CFS, or myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome] was quite bad for a number of years, but for the past few years, I've been able to start cycling again and do more photography. Yeah, it’s been a good week.

dyzlocation: Nice. I'm glad to hear it.

I bought Life of Destructor on CD way back when. And it was a strange moment because I bought it alongside London After Midnight, Apoptygma Berserk and VNV Nation. Life of Destructor kind of enmeshed in my adolescent psyche. Ultraviolence appealed to a lot of different subcultures and demographics.

Johnny Violent: Yeah, I don't think that there was ever really a marketing strategy behind it. So what really happened was that we picked up what people chose. People chose ultraviolence, really. There was no marketing thing. To begin with, I wanted it to be - it sounds ridiculous now - but I wanted it to be mainstream. So it would just be people who like dance music. Only those who wanted a more extreme form.

I had a major deal before Earache. And then when that wasn't to be, it never happened. So the people we picked up were just people who were interested. And I think the main ones were the goths and the cybergoths, which was, as you know, a great fringe of goth which came about in the mid 90s.

I think that was the biggest arm, certainly, in the UK, and the gabber thing. So I was listening back to Life of Destructor yesterday, and although it sounds influenced by gabber, most of it was written before I’d even heard any.

The album was mostly finished in 1993 and there was a demo version of it. But I hadn't heard any Dutch gabber. The most similar thing that I knew of was German techno. I think then in 1994 Earache gave me a CD of Dutch gabber. I loved it. You know, I still do love a lot of that music.

So that that was quite influential on the end sound. But it wasn't the whole conception behind it. It was nothing to do with Dutch gabber, which is music that comes from football hooliganism and things like that. And I'm a middle class twat from Nottingham.

At the same time in America, there was the  Industrial Strength label with Lenny D.  Again, I hadn't really heard that until Earache played me. That was in 1993 so the sound of it was rave, only harder. My favourite current band at the time was Ministry, definitely. So with Ultraviolence, there were with bits and pieces of the things that I like thrown in, and then it became its own unique thing.

dyzlocation: That explains a great deal.

Yes, the audiences we picked up… well there was a small metal audience as well. But things were much more fragmented than they are now.  People would dress in a certain way and only listen to one very particular sort of music, which I think is quite different now. I listen to all sorts. I listen to metal, classical, then gabber, you know, all the time. Any sort of music, as long as I enjoy it and there’s an emotional sincerity and something that I connect with. That’s far more important to me than the outward sound of it.

dyzlocation: The inception of the album sounds like it happened during a very exciting time.

Johnny Violent:  With being on an indie label, you know, with marketing as it was, they work off who found us and sort of promote it to them, rather than having the resources to find new audiences, or maybe be able to cross over into into the mainstream or whatever.

dyzlocation: The goths.Johnny Violent:  I mean, I was really keen on goth. I think you can hear in my music that I was a huge Sisters fan in the late 80s and early 90s. I used to pick up bootleg vinyl. You know, the drum machines of the early Sisters music? I think the Reptile House EP was just my favourite thing, the doom of it and the power of the drum machines. What I liked about the Sisters more than other goth music was, there wasn't really self pity in it. I think [Andrew] Eldritch, used to say: ‘power in the face of misery,’ which I really liked. So that's that. That was the spirit of it. I just like the getting the power and the drum machine programming of the Sisters stuff was really influential when I was learning how to create music.

I was just a young guy who wanted to make music. I wasn't in any way interested in being a businessperson. I was pretty useless at it, so maybe the smart thing to be would have been to say that we were goth, or gabber or whatever. Let’s go after that and see what comes. But I just went along with whatever I was. I just wanted to make my music, and I thought if I carried on doing it, I'd do well.

So, there wasn’t a clear plan behind it, but I think in the UK we definitely got the biggest sort of audience. Yeah, we got to play some really cool goth events as well. I was always grateful to the goths.

Life of Destructor did appeal to Goths because of the miserable overtones of it. Nobody took it seriously then, but then the Goths took it up.

dyzlocation: I remember Kerrang loved you too.

Johnny Violent: Yeah, yeah. They loved the first album. I think it got five K's, which was really great. That was my first great review. That was amazing.

dyzlocation: I’ve just been so surprised that I can't find many in depth reviews of Life of Destructor. Perhaps most of it would have been in physical media, magazines and so forth - stuff you can’t find online. I feel like I've sort of missed out.

Johnny Violent: I've got a few. There was an NME review. I think it got seven, but then the Prodigy got 10, and big block out above it. I've got a few clippings. I mean, we were never huge in the press, but there were significant bits here and there.

dyzlocation: I'm interested in the the concept, the narrative behind Life of Destructor. I think the only higher concept album that Ultraviolence did was probably Psychodrama.

Johnny Violent:  Life of Destructor was originally a compilation. I was on Food Records before, and it was originally a compilation of demos I'd made for them.  I think they kept everything that was released, plus the Peel session, and let me have everything else. So it was a compilation of that that I approached Earache with. I think it was six tracks long, which didn't have a concept.

Then signing with Earache, they were going to make fully released albums, so we had to get the samples cleared. That turned out to be too expensive and some people turned us down. Joan Collins’ management turned us down, which was a bit of a disappointment. But, we got all the samples done. And while I was doing that, I got session vocalists in to do various things.

Then we gave the album a concept, just to tie it all together, because it was six different tracks, and I wanted to expand it and give it a theme. So that's where that came from. So not all the tracks were from from that concept, but most of them were either adapted or they were written with that concept in mind.

dyzlocation: That explains why, when I'm listening to Life of Destructor, sometimes the narrative, passes into the background to be replaced by the feeling of what's going on,

Johnny Violent: Yeah, I was really careful with the mixing and the sequencing of them, so that it all fitted together to make to sound like this story. Whereas Psychodrama would be a story all the way through. Then the other albums weren't concept albums at all.

dyzlocation: I enjoyed being led through this very amorphous story in Life of Destructor. I think I know what's happening, but I don’t need to be sure. And having female vocalists was this wonderful balance between the masculine kind of energy, all these grinding gears and then the female vocalist, very well spoken, beautiful voices. It had this wonderful balance.

Johnny Violent: Yeah, any of the female vocals would be definitely written with the concept in mind, and some of the spoken word stuff.

It became a love story. It’s a destructive, unhealthy  love story, where no one comes out of it unscathed. I don't think it's like so much for me now, but I remember at the time, probably because I was quite a confused young man, the concept of love and destruction would be intertwined for me all the time, like confusing angry feelings.

Wanting to be loved and to find something to love obsessed me all the time, probably in quite an unhealthy way. Listening to the album yesterday, that does come across. I mean, I get quite uncomfortable feelings listening to it in my stomach and everything like I used to experience all the time back then.

So it was a real. For me to express that through music, it's very difficult to express through words in any way that's going to be cathartic or helpful. And yeah, so to me, the hard bass drum and the wanting to be loved. I love you. Love me,

I wasn't aggressive towards other people at all. Most people who are confused and angry in that way might pick fights or choose hooliganism or things like that. But, you know, I never blamed anyone else for it. Music would be my way of dealing with it. Was I dealing with that? I didn't really know.

dyzlocation: It’s no surprise that the goths discovered it and loved it, because the music has similarities.

When I when I found you on Facebook, when I was introduced to you by our mutual friend [Mel- thank you!] and I saw your photography. I saw the swans, the dogs. I saw what you're doing now, and I'd love to know more about about you now, because the work that you're producing visually is, of course, very different to the album. I'm fascinated because it was a wonderful surprise.

Johnny Violent: Thank you. That's very kind! So now I'm happily married. I'm 54 years old, so I mean, compared with how I was 30 years ago, when I made Life of Destructor, my life is very different. I have ME, which is really frustrating, so I can't really make music in a meaningful way now. My concentration span, as I think I've explained to you earlier, is affected. I do little bits and pieces, but it's not serious. It's more to make little soundtracks to my photos.

The photos are really to express beauty. I do try, especially with the swans, to show a sort of loneliness and fairytale lost love element in it, which would probably tie it up quite nicely with the music.

Because I take so many pictures of them, I get very fussy and about how the light hits the subject. It means something in particular to me where it might not to other people. And fact, I know that quite a few people just see them as straight up nature photos, which is fine. I don’t necessarily think that's a bad thing,

But to link up with what I was doing previously, I'm not attracted towards any sort of violent imagery or whatever at all with photography.When I pick up a camera, I naturally look for the most beautiful thing. Maybe that makes me a bit basic or something, I don't know. But when I was diagnosed with the ME in 2013 I decided to stick more with the photography, because it's something you can do in an hour or two.

A couple of days ago, photographing the sunset behind the dog, and how the light hits the dog, made me really emotional. It made me cry. I think it made her cry as well seeing the photo. So that is another big link. I used to cry a lot when I made music or listened to it back, which I see as a positive sign, because art is there to move people, isn't it? Otherwise, it's just documenting things.

dyzlocation: I wanted to touch on the music scene as it is today - does it feel stagnant or is it still an exciting place and time? Some critics might say that a lot of music sounds very much the same.

Johnny Violent: I don't think music's all the same now, but I think there was a big technology bump in the late 80s and the 90s, where people could record at home. So that's where people were allowed to do sort of things like jungle music.

I think if you cherrypick the best music from any year, it’s always going to be more exciting than dredging through a thousand albums from the year. I don’t think there’s been the big technology bump, though. In around 2010, it became possible to record at home, instead of needing a studio, which opened up a lot of possibilities.

But there’s always good music around. I always get annoyed when I hear older people saying that young people are in some way creative deficient, because it reminds me of the people I was up against when I was starting out. It was very frustrating. I’m 54 years old now, so I can manage not to think that new music is awful.

dyzlocation: I wanted to say thank you so much for talking with me today.

Johnny Violent: It would be really nice to be able to put this on the Ultraviolence Facebook page.

dyzlocation: I’ll make sure we keep in touch!

Johnny Violent: Nice one, man. I’ve enjoyed it.

Johnny’s photography: https://www.facebook.com/JonathanCaseyPhotography

Ultraviolence: https://www.facebook.com/UltraviolenceOfficial

Earache Records: https://earache.com/