A guy in London sold the right to Cleopatra and they just went ahead and re-released it and they used the wrong art work. They used the art work form the album which had a different number of tracks on it, so there is no correlation between the songs on the cd and the list on the back of the cd and it was really bizarre because I didn’t know anything about it. I had just heard about it through the grape vine. People just would come up and say "Hey. I heard you just re-released Praise the Lard" and I’m like "No, I have no idea what your talking about". So then I had to track down the label that bought the so called rights to it and try to get my money out of him; which was of course impossible. I even had a private detective out looking for this guy. So did you receive any royalties from the re-release of Praise the Lard? Well Cleopatra bought it, the just kind of assumed the guy had the right to sell it you know. The rights were reverted to me and I was thinking about re-releasing it, or maybe I would redo this or redo that. It was kind of on the back burner, maybe redo the art work and stuff like that. Then I find out that Cleopatra had already made a run of it, something like 5000. I could have been like well fuck that and make them take all of them back and destroy them, but some people wanted to get a hold of it. But, Cleopatra basically sent me royalties and publishing and stuff like that and cut that other guy out of the loop. I just couldn’t see pulling them all back. It just seems like another fuck up in the book of misery that is Pig. What about you and Sascha? Will you be teaming up again? We are working on a project called Swine, a project I put together in Japan last year with a couple of Japanese musicians. One of which I worked with a few years ago before the Nihil times on a project called Shaft. But Sascha came over to London where we recorded the first half of the album, and he brought over Lucia over who is the vocalist from MDFMK. I’m going off on Tuesday to Tokyo for a month and hopefully have it all mixed in like 4 weeks. Then Sacha is coming out for about ten days or so in the middle and then I’ll just hang out there mixing it until its all done. It will be released in Japan at the end of April and then we’ll be touring in June. Whats the deal with American labels? Well I kind of like to think that I rub every fucking label up the wrong way. But its not always acrimonious, like when I was with Nothing it was totally fine when we parted company. So was it just a one record deal with Nothing? Yeah that was basically it. They were just too busy so I just took Wrecked back to TVT. It was just a small label backed by Interscope. I just think they didn’t have time to give Pig the attention that it needed. But now TVT sense Wrecked has proactively put a spanner in the works on me releasing anything in America at all. Its really extraordinary that an a&r woman starts telling me that Pig isn’t radio enough. So I’m like "Well listen darling. Why did you fucking sign me? If you know anything about Pig you would know there has never been anything radio about it". With pig being such an unusual style of music, do you compose with a fan base in mind, or do you just put things together the way they seem right to you? Exactly the later. I think if you start thinking about satisfying the audience or what the audience wants, your chasing your tail. You just have to do what you want to do and if people like it its all well and good, and if they don’t so what. But its frustrating when you get a label that starts doing an album like that with you and then they turn around and say well its not radio enough, we're not letting you out of contract but we aren’t going to put your record out. Well have you dealt with that a lot? No this is the first time with TVT. That’s why I like to deal with my manager and the various people I work with in Japan. It's because its basically done on trust and we never wade through pages and pages of contracts. We just agree on a budget, a delivery date and a budget for a video and a few live shows. We just say fine that’s it and I deliver on time and it was all fine. Then all of the sudden I’m dealing with these people like at TVT who are trying to control their artist. They want to know who my engineer is or what studio I’m using. And I’m just like fuck off, just give me the money and I’ll give you a record. So then they sell some Pig songs to some movies and don’t pay me the money they owe me, and they won't finish financing the album. So they’re just basically grinding the whole thing into the ground. So I'll just go on and do some music for some games and some tv commercials and carry on doing Pig stuff and if the record label wants to get in the way and just be difficult then fucking let them. I’d rather just give the stuff away for free then. Bryan from Haloblack runs a site called thesickcity.com and I just give him little bits of videos and tracks that are obscure or unreleased or just basically hard to get in America and if people want to download them well fine. Seems like quit a useful outlet. I heard your "Head Like a Hole" cover. How did you get involved with that? Well they just called me and asked if I would be interested, and I thought it would be fun. I picked Head Like a Hole because it’s a nice pop kind of tune and thought it would be fun to make something 180 degrees big band thing. That’s also the same way I got into the KMFDM cover. They sent me a letter asking me if I would be interested. At first I wasn’t, I thought how fucking sick to do a tribute to a band that I was a member of? But after I thought about it for a few days it sounded more appealing so I cranked it out in a day and it was a lot of fun. And your involvement with hellbent... How did that come about? Bryan Black called out of the blue and asked if I could contribute a little to the new album. I wasn’t sure how it would work out being 2 completely different styles, but I think it all came together very well in the end. Your cover art is very interesting, how much input do you have in the making of it? Stephen Davis is the guy that I the work on Sinsation and Wrecked, and I like working with him. I give him the info like the track titles and stuff and he bangs it out in like 10 minutes. You know he’s free to do whatever. You can’t have 4 people in a car each with a couple of fingers on the wheel. The most input I have is I may suggest a change here or there and that’s it. |