Skinny Puppy were among the first of the North American industrial pioneers, paving the way for the likes of Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, and Front Line Assembly. Initially taking their cues from earlier industrial noise-smiths like SPK, Portion Control, and most obviously, early Cabaret Voltaire, Puppy quickly moved out of their shadows to establish a fearsome original sound. Hammering beats, slabs of electronic noise, sampled dialogue from obscure video nasties, and Ogre's trademark distorted growl. Puppy's music trawled through disturbing vistas of pain, degradation, and inhumanity. Whereas the bands that have followed them serve up such imagery as vicarious thrill a minute entertainment, they managed to sound genuinely disturbed (and disturbing).
Unfortunately the churning cauldron of despair evoked by their sound was replicated internally. Personal strains turned into cracks, which turned into emotional gulfs, as conflict and distrust stained relationships within the band. After a mammoth two years spent on their latest album The Process and the death of band member Dwane Goettel from a drug OD, it became apparent that the emaciated mongrel had gasped it's last.
The Process is a significant departure after the heroically uncommercial doom-fest of their previous album Last Rites. The first release on a new label (Rick Rubin's American Records home of Slayer, and The Black Crowes) the album was supposed to mark a new and revitalised Skinny Puppy. "It was supposed to be the rebirth," Ogre pauses, "abortion.
"To me it was the next step in where we were going. Obviously it wasn't Last Rites, it didn't have that amount of noise, dissonance, and unstructured music. There are some songs, and that's what we wanted to do, even though [cEvin] will say otherwise. That's why we signed a deal with a major label, that's why we went to these measures. I - as a singer - wanted to get some songs to perform live. Last Rites as a tour was an all right tour but the songs we were performing weren't really happening with the audience, and they couldn't see it because we work in a triangle with them behind everything, but I was painfully aware of it. So that was my goal, and so be it."
American sent the band to Malibu to record the album, maybe someone thought that all it would take to repair the rifts was some palm trees, and Pina Coladas. Whatever sun, surf, and babes weren't on the bands agenda. Embroiled in a complicated digital studio that no-one seemed to know how to work, producers came and went (both former Swan Roli Mossiman, and Martin Atkins attempted the task), and the bands individual members were unable to reconcile their personal and musical differences. "Our big fights were over guitars vs. heavily laden techno music," says Ogre. "I'm not a big fan of techno. So the biggest fight for us, and the biggest fight between Dwane and myself was that Dwane was following a really heavy techno line in his life, I mean he was just absorbed, fully absorbed in techno. Hard Set Head was a very techno driven song to begin with, now it's less so. There's more Skinny Puppy in there, there's a heavier groove going on there, with some elements. You can hear the elements of techno within Hard Set Head, within Mortar."
However because of the recording techniques the band were using, altering the songs became a laborious process. "With Mortar the most difficult thing for me to overcome was because all these things were on tapes. We couldn't really break apart a lot of stuff, because we were dealing with sequencers, and a lot of outputs on K2000's that had multiple things on em, and usually percussive things. So there was no willingness to break that down and take out those elements that were driving me crazy and making it difficult to work on. And Mortar is an example of a song that actually took a huge change after however many stages, after Rave (long time Puppy producer David - no relation - Ogilve) came back on board right at the end, he was the one that finally convinced Dwane to take out some of these sounds that were to my mind derivative techno. My big fear was that I have seen so many bands, like Cabaret Voltaire, jump off what they were doing and become techno bands.
"To be honest I was terrified to go out and do Skinny Puppy again, I was ready to do it but there was something that had to change, both live and musically. And that's why we had these struggles over things musically. My biggest fear live was that I wanted to reinvent myself, it was time to do that. This was because how many times can you draw on the same scenario, to an audience that has seen you for 10 years in a row. So I was terrified, and also afraid of becoming a parody. Tragically the swansong holds up to what it was, all that emotion, we didn't get back together, we didn't mend our friendships, it was the same tension."
Recording the album became unbearable, with the band split into warring factions. Ogre decided to quit the band for good, leaving Key and Goettel to finish the record. "They thought I was on the other side. Which was the ongoing fight within Skinny Puppy for 10 years, the fact that there were polarised camps. Always two against one, or three of us against each other, which was not good. After ten years of that it just becomes second nature, you feel like this is the only way it is, and it's not, obviously. It wasn't until I removed myself from that situation that it kind of solved itself."
Ogre moved to LA and began working on W.E.L.T. with Mark Walk whom he had met through Martin Atkins's industrial cabaret Pigface (and who also worked on the Ruby album). cEvin and Dwane eventually left Malibu and returned to Vancouver to concentrate on Download. After no contact between the former Puppy bandmates for a year, Dwane was found dead of an drug overdose in the bathroom of his parents house. "All through that time form when they left Malibu and went back up to Vancouver, Dwane was obviously having problems. There had been warning signs in Malibu about those problems. When I quit cEvin told me that Dwane had stabbed himself in the leg, was taken to hospital and they sent him home once to get clean. All this was over a women he had, and she wasn't very good for his head."
Ogre has pieced together a version of the events from friends, in the aftermath.
"He had come back after five weeks trying to get clean, to Vancouver, They were working on Download in the studio, and I guess he walked up to cEvin and said "look at me" and cEvin's like "what?" cEvin's the kind of person that doesn't notice anything unless it's so obvious. Not to slag him, it's just the way he is. So cEvin says "well what's wrong?" and Dwane says "well look at me. I'm totally high." So they put him on a bus sent him back to Edmonton, and in that period of time he'd given some dope to his sister to hold, went six days and then went crazy. In the sense that he needed it. He got a package sent out to him from Vancouver, from somebody who wasn't meant to send him any dope. He went into his parents bathroom and overdosed. He just took too much, it was a total mistake." There has been some speculation that the OD was a suicide, but Ogre is adamant that such rumours are untrue.
The irony of Dwanes death is that morbid Puppy watchers expected Ogre to become the casualty. His drug problems have been well publicised, surfacing in oblique Puppy lyrics, discussed in interviews, and snidely referred to by various commentators. It's an irony Ogre is all too aware of. "The most ironic thing about it is that he saved my life one night, when I was really messed up. I was shooting coke and heroin, I was right at the end of my rope. I went over to his apartment and spent the night there because I was terrified to be at my own apartment, things were coming out of the walls, it was really ugly. So I went over there, and I ended up passing out on his couch with a lit cigarette. I woke up and he was talking to me, I'd set the couch on fire. So I was freaked out, and I somehow got home, I don't know how, I was delirious. Woke up the next morning - I still have this huge scar on my leg - I just sat back and went "my god." That's what weirds me out the most, I wish I could have helped him, but I was kinda out of the loop. I'm angry about that, but at the same time I understand where they were coming from because they were being protective about the album."
Ogre's own drug problem reached critical mass several years ago, when he became critically ill with Hepatitis A in Sweden slap bang in the middle of a Pigface tour. He'd been sick for months, but so out of it he hadn't noticed. The illness was so far advanced by the time he has dropped off at a Swedish hospital that the doctors had trouble diagnosing the illness. "They thought it was B, then they thought it was C, then they thought it was AIDS. I was terrified. I was in a hospital, dropped off by Pigface, stood in this little box. And at that point you have time to really look at what's going on in your life. I'd had 4 seizures, 3 of them by myself, but still would have kept doing it if I'd had money. But I bottomed out, burnt my bridges in Vancouver, left with Pigface, got sick, and then went into rehab. It was like 3 weeks it wasn't an extensive stay, but it was enough. It was in Edmonton, right between the insane asylum and a penitentiary, about 40 miles outside of Edmonton. So there was nowhere to go. In that time you just kinda look at yourself. I had a one way ticket to Los Angeles, and it just happened.
"I certainly won't say that I'm clean all the time. There's time's I've had relapses, but never with needles."
Ogre hasn't really been back to Vancouver since moving to LA, "because when I go there I know where to go to get needles, I know where to go to get all these things." His drug addiction cost him most of his friends there, and created an unhealthy reputation. "A lot of people had it in for me for whatever reason. You become this strange enigma and all these people in Vancouver have it in for you, I had no friends up there really, no good friends, because a lot of the friends I had up there were around me when I was really messed up. For anybody to go through that with somebody you like it's very difficult to start a relationship up when they've had to abandon you once and you come back and say "hey, I'm better now," "Yeah, sure you are." I'm totally understanding of everything that happened with my friends in Vancouver. Like Dave Ogilve who produced our records, we were very close but he was with me in the studio one night, we were working on Last Rites, and I shot up. I had a seizure, so I was shaking, and he grabbed my hand and held my hand. He sent me home and he sat up that whole night. I went home started drinking, and passed out. But he sat up, and he kept that experience, and will always keep that experience. So I understand totally how that must be."
Despite the extreme difficulties that the last several years have thrown at him Ogre is optimistic about W.E.L.T. "There's definitely a future there, I thought there wasn't, but then I met Mark. Now it's turned into something I can stand behind. There's a lot of intensity in the music, there's all the emotion of what was happening during this period when we were making the music that creeps me out to this day, it's a really dark record. When I was listening back to it I got goose bumps. It's turned out really good."