"Candyman Castaway"
Alternative Press #79, Feb. '95

In almost any recording studio, the scene would raise few eyebrows: a man standing at a microphone, accompanied by a lone pianist, singing a simple romantic ballad. But this particular room is the renowned, perhaps even legendary, Studio A of Chicago Trax, locale for a long list of Wax Trax and Ministry-related sessions, and the participants, Chric Connelly and Bill Rieflin, are best known for pushing the limits of loud, angry, sociopathic rock. Many of their various records, full of feedback, distortion, rhythmic frenzy and above all, rage, line the walls in the studio's anteroom as a reminder.

The pair couldn't be more oblivious. With little warm-up, Rieflin's confident keys and Connelly's mellifluous voice capture the essence of John Cale's "Close Watch" in two easy takes. And while this simple execution, performed without a trace of hip irony, isn't quite representative of the more complex music on Connelly's new album, "Shipwreck", which they've just completed, "Close Watch" (slated to appear as a single b-side) does reflect both its prevalent themes - love and psychosis - and its frequent mood - somber.

Four years ago, when Connelly's first solo album was due out, the snickering rumor was that it was "cocktail" or "lounge" music, before these genres had become trendy. But while "Whiplash Boychild" was titled in homage to '60s crooner Scott Walker's "Boychild" album, the record owed as much to Peter Murphy, Nick Cave, and most of all, David Bowie. Moody, yes, but not necessarily anachronistic. Connelly's industrial-dance following largely rejected it nevertheless. His second album, 1992's "Phenobarb Bambalam", came a little closer to his work in Pigface or Revolting Cocks, but even in its best moments, it was a bit underproduced and after the fact.

"With 'Whiplash Boychild'," says Connelly after the takes, "I knew where I was going, but didn't exactly know how to get there. 'Phenobarb Bambalam' is a representative picture of me at the time - I was a mess and the album's a mess."

"Shipwreck", by comparison, is far less dismissible. While it still inspires closest comparison to admitted influences Walker, Bowie, and Cave, it adds arrangements that recall Cale, Brian Eno and even the Beatles in their most avant-garde pop constructions. It is retrospective and instantly familiar but at the same time, modern and individual.

"In many ways I'm sort of wiping the slate clean," Connelly says. "I categorized all my sensibilities and feelings about music, all the aspects of Fini Tribe, the Cocks and Ministry that I loved, and tried to put them into one record. Careful planning, the right songs and the right musicians."

Perhaps the vital statistics of those musicians - who sit in the control room listening to the final mixes - help to explain Connelly's new, or renewed, direction. Despite Rieflin's notoriety as a drummer in Ministry, Revco and Pigface (and on "Whiplash"), he's also an accomplished pianist, has studied guitar with Robert Fripp, and played with Adrian Sherwood's On-U Sound crew. Chris Bruce, a "Bambalam" veteran (who plays guitar, bass and sampler, and brought along bassist Mark McNulty), normally collaborates with Prince alumnae Wendy & Lisa. William Tucker (who plays guitar and does programming) also sat in on "Bambalam" as well as MInistry / Revco / Pigface, but has also shown propensities for experimental noise (in Regressive Aid / Scornflakes), dance pop (in Swinging Pistons) and funk. And Connelly points out that the hand-picked engineers for "Shipwreck" are known for working with the Purple One, David Sylvian, Trevor Horn and Seal.

"I'm not interesed in thrashing something out now," says the 29-year-old ringleader, joyfully describing lead track 'Candyman Collapse' as "more like the Bee Gees than Black Sabbath." "What I want to do is create the perfect musical setting for everything I write. My mind changes all the time and I'm not going to make a sonically uniform record. If you listen to the 'White Album', you've got 'Rocky Raccoon' and 'Helter Skelter.' Just blasting through it with blinders to the outside world, and at the end they've got this completely schizophrenic record. That to me is honesty."

He feels the same about "Shipwreck". "Listening to the songs yesterday was an emotional roller coaster for me," says Connelly, the morning after finishing the recording and mix. "And therefore I knew it would work because I'd not romanticized anything, I'd just been brutally honest with myself."

Brutal honesty, seemingly, is something for which the singer has newfound respect. Over coffee and cigarettes, for the next three hours, Connelly details the intimate particulars of his life thus far: childhood, adolescence, marriage, career. The '90s being the decade of recovery, one could cynically view his confessional as just a ploy to be this year's Billy Corgan - especially since Connelly has also recently shorn his locks. But as it happens, bringing up these issues seems the only way to explain 'Shipwreck's tracks.

"When Bill Rieflin suggested the title, I was totally shipwrecked, my ship was sinking rapidly, and I was disappearing into this weird fucking psychosis that I didn't understand." After an early '93 tour with Ministry, Connelly had retreated to Kansas City, Missouri, to be with his newlywed wife, who was attending film school there. Unfortunately, cultural isolation took its toll on the world traveler.

"'Candyman Collapse' is a happy way of describing how I was collapsing, how everything was falling down around me. 'Anyone's Mistake' is about drinking to escape something and waking up the next morning and it's 20 times worse because you drank. I went through a period before Christmas [in '93] where I was polishing off easily two-and-a-half liters of wine a night. When I wrote 'Drench' I was incredibly paranoid. I was too scared to be in the house, too scared to be outside, too scared to travel. You can be completely safe, but you're terrified because there's a telephone in the room."

The situation was in many respects the culmination of Connelly's failure to come to terms with the suicide-by-Valium of his then-girlfriend Tracey during the 1991 recording of "Bambalam". "Nothing was wrong with our relationship," he explains. "It just happened one day. And I have her on a pedestal, thought she was perfect."

Connelly dealt with the trauma by plunging himself into a new relationship - and a wide varietyof projects he now mostly regrets. "There's so many records that I don't see having any artistic merit whatsoever. When someone says, '[Pigface's] 'Gub' is the worst record I ever heard,' I agree with them. I think it's complete masturbatory nonsense. It's just ... exploitative. Murder Inc., I didn't have anything to do with the music - the music was all done, and then I went into the studio by myself and recorded my lyrics. Doesn't sound like a band, 'cause it's not a band, everybody hates each other!"

A few months ago, a story in "Option" mentioned a royalty dispute between Connelly and Tucker on one side, and Martin Atkins, Invisible Records owner (and instigator of Pigface and Murder Inc.) on the other. Connelly and Tucker both decline to directly address the issue on the record, but Connelly's feelings still filter through.

"There's an example in every genre of people capitalizing on something. These people are trying to make money as well. They just try to disguise it with their sort of Yoko Ono school of thinking. Maybe you learn from your mistakes or whatever, but every mistake I've made, you can buy."

"With the exception of the Cocks," Connelly continues, "I'm through collaborating to make music. I mean, I'll collaborate with a very close circle of people like those on this record ..."

But, he says quietly, "I'm not involved with Ministry anymore." After a year-long falling out and eventual reconciliation between Connelly and Al Jourgensen, "There came a point on 'Psalm 69', I was writing with Al, and I said, 'Al, you don't really need me to write lyrics, you're really good at it, do it yourself, bye.' And he was in agreement with me. I'm much happier in this way, it's not as much strain on my voice, and I'm not contriving anything."

Connelly doesn't specify, but some of this obviously contributed to "Shipwreck"'s "What's Left But Solid Gold?" in which, he says, "I used the image of alchemy to try to illustrate that you may have a friend who's not worth their salt, and making the decision that you're not going to be able to turn lead into gold, so just leave it alone."

Unfortunately, such sophistry was not so easily applied to his own psyche. Self-marooned in Kansas City, and with a lot of time on his hands, "I discovered certain things I'd never realized about myself as a person. With one thing or another, it pretty much cost me my marriage. I ended up going into therapy for months." Connelly and his wife are now seperated, though she designed the new album's artwork.

As is typical in analysis, the singer searched for the roots of his problems in is childhood. The upbringing in Edinburgh, Scotland that Connelly delineates should give pause to almost any rockers who think themselves tortured artists. "My father died when I was six. He took us to teach us how to swim, and in teaching us, he broke his neck in a swimming pool, and died a week afterward. I'd never thought about it before. I have this almost nstantaneous romantic attachment to water. All these songs with numerous references to water."

Raised by their mother, amidst a typically character-filled Catholic family delineated in "Spoonfed Celeste," Connelly describes himself and his older brother as "rebellious tearaways." "That's where a lot of the guilt comes from. To this day, my mother really thinks I'm a loser, no matter what I've done."

At the age of nine, Connelly was incapacitated for a year by a broken leg, but the handicap introduced him to the radio, particularly John Peel's programs of obscure music. Connelly also sang in the school choir, remaining there his entire time in the education system. At 14 he formed Rigor Mortis, who played "a hybrid of Throbbing Gristle and sort of pop," he recalls. By 1984, the sextet was renamed Fini Tribe. "Back then I was writing about my view of the world and how awful things were," says Connelly, who rewrote Fini Tribe's "Detestimony" on "Shipwreck". "I wanted to achieve the feeling again."

But between Fini Tribe's creative stagnation, and his mother's aggravation, Connelly felt hard-pressed not to take the opportunity upon meeting Ministry's Jourgensen, Rieflin and Paul Barker (who made "some of the only records I felt any kinship with at the time") to offer his services for their Revolting Cocks project and follow them back to Chicago.

"Meridian Afterburn" reexamines his initial fascination with the Midwest. "Coming from Edinburgh to America, it was fuel to a lot of the early imagery in Cocks songs," says Connelly. "I was bowled over by things that everyone else saw as normal, like drive-thrus, or the bottomless cup of coffee."

In retrospect, Connelly sees his work in the Revolting Cocks as either an artifice, or "let's say, an experimental phase in primal scream therapy which I didn't really gain from. I wasn't prepared to give anything of myself away." Though he isn't dismissing all his work in the field that brought him notoriety, he says, "To me, that's a completely dead and over-with genre. There's certain records that I heard in the early to mid '80s that blew my mind, and I don't see any progression."

Connelly is not absolutist enough to have the air of a twelve-step survivor, but it's obvious that he's mellowed from the RevCo days when, it may be said, he never met a drug he didn't like.

"Yeah, I've certainly done my fair share," he admits. "I've bypassed that stage where I'm looking at rock and roll as some kid in a candy store: 'Wow, I have a license to get fucked up all the time.' I've gotten over thinking that you have to have an image of a drug abuser to make people buy your music." Though "Early Nighters" is dedicated to, and was written the day after River Phoenix's death, it obviously resonates to the demise of Tracey and others in Connelly's circle.

Still, he has a hard time breaking from his previous image - if only because Revolting Cocks fans don't seem to want him to. "Believe me, a lot of people don't like what I do. They're pissed off. I've got some great hate mail!"

Though it was intended only as a rentpaying lark, Connelly's side project with Tucker, Songs for Swinging Junkies, has helped ease the transformation. Featuring stripped-down versions of Connelly songs, the shows were first just intimate gatherings in quiet Chicago clubs; since finishing this album, they've released a three-song EP and taken a short, well-received tour. For artists who previously dwelled in a realm of supreme artifice, such a deliberately unadorned breaking down of the audience / performer barrier was, to say the least, unique. Connelly plans to tour with the entire band early this year.

"I'm hoping to have time to myself to sort out a lot of things: 'What am I doing with my life, where am I going, and how many people's lives can I ruin?' 'Cause I've done it time and time again. Doing the album's been really great for that. I've got these songs out of my system, trying to mesh all these feelings and trying to come out of it a more virtuous and better person."