And Now A Word From Martin Atkins

"The dusty world of the label archives seems never ending. I just realized today that much of this is pre-e mail era... so in between painful files full of international conversations about the density of the black for an AP advertisement or a mastering job or sequencing of an album - each part of the conversation memorialized then Xeroxed/printed because one of the fax machines used that horrible thermal paper - there will be a gem... and some of it so very easy to miss it makes me more careful after each discovery and then the whole thing becomes more time consuming again...

Earlier this week I found a sequence of great photos of me in the UK with Martin from Test Dept in his studio and hanging with Meg Lee Chin - then some shots of us in her apartment where the front room was also her 'egg' studio.

LOADS of itineraries, gig contracts, Pigface riders with just about EVERYTHING crossed out, laminates, photos... and in amongst all of it, bits of artwork... I'd forgotten I did the cover to Spoon Breakfast at the local Kinko's, cutting out pictures of spoons and gluing them up for the back cover. Many thought (with a knowing wink and a nod) that the title referred to some kind of collective Pigface heroin habit... in fact, Spoon was he name of Chris Connelly's cat and Breakfast was the name of mine... GUB the title of the first album was the name of Steve Albini's cat. Now, there's a fantastic competition subject ruined! There was so much grief over the competition to guess the word play /imagery on the front of 'Below The Belt' that I learned my lesson,

No I didn't.

A small envelope tumbles to the floor and here are the original passport photos used by Chris Connelly to do the paste up for the first Pigface promo photograph, a marvelous the anarchic 8 x 10's worth of anti-computerism... randomly sized heads cut out and stuck on the bodies of people from a sportswear catalog... juxtaposed over the top of what looks like Mt Everest or, at least, somewhere appropriately high. In amongst all of it are several from Trent.

I'm still grappling with these weird cross currents of emotions... not the least of which is finding reminders everywhere of the contributions good and bad from William Tucker and Paul Raven... bits of art or photos, scrawled messages here and there send me back into that time. Why the cross currents? Because it feels like the guy doing this should be looking back at something long over, ended and done with, not going through all of this whilst putting together a Killing Joke book, scheduling screenings for 16 days in China, working on a great new Pigface album and still mixing amazing music from China...

What's the word... it feels like it should be a reverie - and in a way it is and will continue to be - but its also tinged with a kind of panic - a fear of losing some tiny physical fragment of he larger picture , some postage stamp sized piece of the jigsaw puzzle that, missing, ruins the 3 day taken, finished thing. That feeling, hovering, can sometimes prevent me from even starting these tasks, the fear of the missing piece, laughing at my disorganisedness AND hoarding at the same time....but, so far so good. We'll keep posting this stuff as we find it and I'll keep you up to date with the goings on in our world when I can.

P.L.R.
Martin Atkins"