The Edinburgh connection: Inside Chris Connelly’s jump from Scottish post-punk to Chicago industrial
Any Ministry fan and devotee to Wax Trax! Records story will know how omnipresent Chris Connelly’s credits are to the label’s late 1980s and early 1990s heyday.
Sometimes going under the name Gallopin’ Scorpiosaddlebutt, other times the shortened $corpio, Connelly laid down his baritone croon and/or programming skills to a host of memorable numbers under the Hypo Luxa and Hermes Pan production team, from Acid Horse’s twangy Ennio Morricone club stomper ‘No Name, No Slogan’, ‘Rubber Glove Seduction’s skulking surrealism from PTP, and fronting Revolting Cocks’ psychotropic cover of Rod Stewart’s ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’.
“My brain is wired in a really weird way,” Connelly tells Far Out from his Chicago music basement. Such a skewed approach to music served Connelly well in Edinburgh’s punk scene in the early 1980s, having found a happy marriage between the likes of Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire with the awe-inspiring acoustics of the church from his time as a choir boy. Guided by such a fascination with clashing juxtaposition, school jams and bedroom experiments grew to form Fini Tribe amid the rehearsal rooms in the city’s Niddry Street and Blair Street, in the Old Town area.
“It was that they could be playing something so harsh and then bring in this tape of a Marie Osmond song or something like that, you know, just for like two seconds,” Connelly furthered on the likes of Throbbing Gristle’s disparate sonic weaves. “And it just didn’t throw me off. It just sounded good to me. It was it made it made sense.”
Fini Tribe would reflect such an embrace of haphazard musical alchemy, jumping between a beguiling convergence of post-punk angst, dancefloor muscle, and smatterings of evocative electronica. Such a heady brew of styles had Adrian Sherwood’s fingerprints all over it, the On-U Sound Records production maestro conjuring harder slices of dub reggae coated in tough electronic exteriors that piqued Connelly’s attention, as well as the encompassing mire of unemployment that cast its economic ennui over Scottish youth, instilling some distracting hedonism in the clubs.
“There was a time in Britain in the early ‘80s and the mid ‘80s when Britain was so grim that it just sort of felt like everybody wanted to go out and dance,” Connelly recollects.
Such a potent burnishing of social turmoil and the meeting ground between industrial and dance music would ultimately pull Connelly on the road to Chicago. A chance encounter of Revolting Cocks’ ‘No Devotion’ on John Peel’s BBC Radio 1 show, strangely enough, foreshadowed a submission of new records at his time working at Fast Forward, Rough Trade Studios’ Edinburgh satellite office. In Connelly’s hands came Ministry’s ‘Nature of Love’ and Revolting Cocks’ Big Sexy Land. He was hooked.
“I listened to them, and this little light went off,” Connelly says. “I thought this is really fresh-sounding. This is really new-sounding and exciting. It has compulsion to it. It’s a compelling sound. I want to move towards this sound.”
Having worked in a more organic, live band set-up with Fini Tribe, the latest Ministry and Revolting Cocks releases’ beefy deployment of drum machines and samplers unveiled a new direction for Connelly. “That didn’t matter to me,” he confesses on the synthetic basis of the sound. “I just felt the urgency of the sound was what attracted me to it.”
A flip to the credits revealed that both records were from the Wax Trax! label. Now a huge fan and eager to take a punt on Fini Tribe’s latest single and Can cover ‘I Want More’, a phone call to the Chicago label’s London office in Wood Green’s Southern Studios resulted in an overnight bus demo tape in hand and walking away with a lot more than just a signing.
It turned out that one Al Jourgensen was in the middle of mixing some tracks from The Land of Rape and Honey as Connelly visited Crass’ former DIY studio. Introduced to each other, it didn’t take long before Connelly was in the pub with Jourgensen and offered to lay down some vocal tracks. “This was 11 in the morning,” Connelly recalls with a laugh. “We had a couple of pints and then came back to the studio with a bottle of whiskey and a big bag of speed, and a carton of cigarettes and got to work.”
Adding, “It was really surreal. At some point in the afternoon, I realised I had to get a bus back to Edinburgh. So, I just like ran from Wood Green, got on the bus, went to King’s Cross and went home and realised that the future of the band had changed, and my life had changed in a big way as well.”
A collaboration with Ministry and a Wax Trax! issue of ‘I Want More’ was a big deal. Fini Tribe had run into a slight reputational rut in the Edinburgh music scene, promoters and venues steering clear of the band due to the tendency for destruction in the spaces they played. Yet, Wax Trax! owners Jim Nash and Dannie Flesher were spinning their tunes in the Chicago store across the Atlantic. It appeared that Fini Tribe’s sound was getting a better reception outside Edinburgh.
With nothing but the dole queue back home, and a nagging feeling that his contributions to Fini Tribe had reached a dead end, a few trips to Chicago to cut further Revolting Cocks tracks and play live with the band resulted in a final bow from the band, a packing of one suitcase and joining the Wax Trax! family in earnest. Connelly would stand as one of the key characters of the Ministry conglomerate, featuring in multiple Revolting Cocks records, the aforementioned PTP and Acid Horse ventures, plus heavily involved in Ministry’s The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste. By Revolting Cocks’ Linger Ficken’ Good … and Other Barnyard Oddities in 1993, however, the now Warner Bros funded behemoth grew too much to bear.
“The drugs got too bad,” Connelly states frankly. “I know Al wouldn’t mind me being honest here, but he’s admitted it freely. He was too into drugs, and it started to impede what he was doing just in terms of not being able to focus properly in the studio. So things that used to take a long time started taking a really long time with absolutely no forward motion, and I couldn’t do that.”
The drugs would continue to be a problem for Journgensen across the 1990s, but Connelly would form new musical alliances with The Swingin’ Junkies, KMFDM, and old Ministry drummer Bill Rieflin, among countless other projects, and now performing in Sons of the Silent Age as a vehicle to reimagine David Bowie’s songbook. Still living in Chicago after making the jump nearly 40 years ago, a forthcoming project similarly reinterpreting old Throbbing Gristle numbers, with former members Chris & Cosey’s thumbs-up endorsement, proves that not much has changed in Connelly’s joy for weird, wired music.
“I sit down here with my synthesisers and my reel-to-reel tapes and fuck around basically,” Connelly says with mirth, gesturing to his basement electronics hub. Hopefully, there’s plenty more fucking about yet.
