Fortunately for all concerned this time we have a most sober sounding Chris Connelly captive on a phone line from Kansas city; boy, you should see our phone bill! The last time we attempted to interview poor Chris amongst the wreckage after RevCo's now semi-legendary gig at Glasgow Tech all your starstruck cub reporters could squeeze out of him was, "Do you want to see my willy?" Hardly awe inspiring. Anyway that was a long time ago, and we are now infinitely more jaded, not to mention wrinkly. Plus waving your penis around is a lot less effective over the phone.
So, a nice way to kick of the interview, a brief bit of nostalgia for us all. Chris groans as if he still hasn't got over the hangover: "God, I'd taken every drug I could get my hands on that night, just so I could show my mother what a good boy I really was (laughs). Trying to act straight in front of my mum; she didn't notice though. I thought I was melting."Lets hope she doesn't read to much of your press Chris.
"The last album was a little bit fragmented. This time we had nothing else going on, so we had six months spare to do a really good Revolting Cocks album.
"The differentiating factor on this album was that we had just gotten off tour with Ministry and we couldn't stand to live with these Ministry songs. We had to throw off our guises and put on our Revolting Cocks outfits. We really needed to write some new material. We're lucky in that we have these alter ego's, because we do want to keep working but we can't keep churning out NWO.
"Everything we do is dealing with extremes, with Ministry we wanted to do something louder and faster than anyone else. But with Ministry the timing has to be exact, it can't be sloppy.What differentiates the Cocks from Ministry is that with the Cocks we made the songs extreme by making them three times as long as they should be. We start with a groove and just stick to it."
"Actually through William Burroughs secretary James Grearholtz -Ministry did some work with Burroughs- Leary showed up at one of our Christmas shows with Ministry. He's a great guy, the perfect Revolting Cock. He's done it all before we were born. He's very on the ball, very lucid for a man of, I think, about seventy. It was perfect to have him do a vocal for the Cocks. I hope I'm that on the ball when I'm his age. I probably won't be, I'll probably be batty by that time."
"If you've got a body of work behind you like Leary and Burroughs do, then it's easy to put what's going on now into a more general perspective. To take the reasons people are doing what they are doing and fit that into more of a human nature perspective. I can only read history books, I'm only as good as that. These guys really have a grip on it through their own experience, which is really admirable.
"It's unfortunate that they don't get much credit as modern thinkers, Burroughs has his literary standing, but Leary is often dismissed as a crank outside of the already converted drug subcultures where your into Leary and Burroughs as a matter of course. "A lot of people dismiss them offhand because of the drugs, they don't think to ask if there's a reason for it. I mean, there's a reason why there are raves all over Europe. I've done my studying, it relates to what I was doing when I was fourteen and fifteen in many ways. I thought, why not? What else is there? The only beef I have with it is that there seems to be little political motivation behind it. But then I think: `Why should there be?' The whole Crass records thing that was such a big deal when I was young, what did that amount to? It increased peoples awareness at the time, but a lot of them have forgotten about it and got regular jobs. There's not a lot of people perpetuating that theory. The raves give kids some freedom, and why not? They've got fuck all else going on."
"Actually no. I mean, I love my wife very much, it's certainly not an attempt to have an easier life. I'm still out of town on tour for half the year."
"It hasn't affected my perspective, my work is one thing, and my marriage is another. That's always been the way. I cherish my work single mindedly, no one can compromise Chris Connelly."
"In Chicago it got to the stage where people knew where I lived. I go on tour, I do my duty, I do my interviews, so leave me the fuck alone. I like my privacy.
"I don't want to have to put on a disguise every time I go out. You can avoid that. Case in point; I made a conscious decision to move somewhere where nobody knows who I am.
"I get pissed off when I hear celebrities whining about being recognised. Unless you're really huge you can disappear. Especially in America because it's such a large country. The cool thing is I have a fax and a telephone, if anyone needs to get in touch they can, I don't need to be there in person."
"At the beginning of 1991 after the European Cocks tour, Al and I had a falling out. It lasted a few months. People fall out y'know, but eventually we made up and became friends again. And we are great friends. We've put all that behind us, it hasn't affected anything. It came at a time when we were both having a rotten time. It was the result of what people were saying about us behind our backs. It grew into something really stupid, and when we made friends again a few months later, we both said that if either of us has a problem again then we should talk to each other. Since then our relationship couldn't be better.'
"You bet. With the Cocks we relax, I wish you could sit in a room with us for ten minutes, so you could hear what we actually talk about. With Ministry and the Cocks we talk and we laugh, we make up these grandiose plans; just for the fuck of it really. With the Cocks we can actually do some of these things. We want to do a gig on Mount Olympus. We sit down talk about the most grotesque and bombastic aspects of rock n'roll, and we develop them to the Nth degree. We've played shows in togas, we're just perpetuating those myths.
"But if we can do the orchestra thing, damn straight we're going to do it. We're going to put on the most ludicrous rock n'roll show ever."
"Well what I want to do, butI don't know if this will happen, but all the band are in agreement, is to only do one show in Britain: Glasgow. It's our favorite gig, last time was just so much fun. The best show I've ever done.
"Fuck London. We know what's going on, we live in America but I've lived in London and I know what it's like. London's fucked me up the ass so many times. That been there, seen that, done it all attitude. Not interested. We want to play a gig where people don't care about having to see the Revolting Cocks because it's the gig to go to. If they feel that strongly they can jump on a train to Glasgow, it'll be a lot more fun.
"Plus my mum doesn't want to go to London (laughs). So I have some ulterior motives."
"Murder Inc, um... fuck em. That one album I liked doing it, I liked the music OK, lyrically it was passable. But it was good I knocked it on the head after that. Those guys are a bit too into how they used to be in Killing Joke. I wasn't in Killing Joke, and basically I couldn't give a shit about Killing Joke. I just want to make music, so I gave them the old heave ho.
"I'm not really into collaborations, I've stopped working with Pigface, I'm really happy with what I'm doing at the moment. Doing the new Cocks album was really like it used to be with Finitribe. It made me take a step back and realize you don't have to make music to please other people. There's nothing like sitting down and writing songs with your friend, and it working. With the Murder Inc album, I had nothing to do with the music, I wasn't even there, I was brought on afterwards. That's a fine way to make a record, but the spark we have going on in the Cocks, the humor, and interaction between the guys, is just great. If I can't get that with something else then it isn't worth doing."
"Yeah. If it happens I'll be trying to put it out in the States myself. We have a lot of really class material that was recorded before we ever had any records out. It's all pre-1984. I think there's about an hours worth of really good songs. They're just sitting there, they never came out, and we spent all this money recording the damn things.
"We had our aesthetic at the time and we were working very much alone. I mean we weren't The Shop Assistants, we weren't Hue and Cry. And we really took a lot of shit. People say that bands attempting to do something outside of the media should expect to be ostracized for it, but we really were ostracized. We couldn't get a gig, it wasn't for lack of trying that we didn't play live much, nobody would touch us with a shitty stick. Hell that's why I left the band, it wasn't the music. I couldn't keep going without feeling I was getting somewhere. We kept coming out of the studio with what we felt was great material, and we couldn't get a review.
"It's a good way of us collaborating, I would like nothing better than to do some more work with the Fini's, but I can't just get on a bus and go to Edinburgh from Kansas City. These are the guys I grew up with, and I think over the years I'll do some more work with them. One of these days I'll have time on my hands, I'll come over to Edinburgh for a couple of months and maybe knock out a couple of singles."