HEROIN FOR THE DAMNED
A CONVERSATION WITH RAYMOND WATTS OF PIG
Having recently released Red Room, and having re-released and re-mastered Sinsation, Raymond Watts, a personal representative of our favorite side (served with eggs and toast), kindly responded to a few questions about his recent efforts, including his upcoming 40-date Heroin For The Damned Tour with Curse Mackey.
Referring to the inspiration for Sinsation and reflections on his work, Watts explains, “I recorded most of it [“Hamstrung on the Highway”] in ’95 . . . it’s a genuine interrogation; it wasn’t taken from a movie . . . Back then I was in quite a dark place, and I was looking for myself. I think there’s a reflection in what I was seeing, as someone else being interrogated was an interrogation of myself and of where I was going, because I found myself in a vortex . . . Luckily it’s gone, but I felt I had to go to the most extreme and darkest of places to find myself and put the spotlight there . . . and that went hand-in-glove with me pushing myself to the very limits, to the edge of my life. I was in a complete swirling vortex of massive addiction.”
“I’m lucky and blessed that I found my way back from that place,” Watts continued. “And I realized, too, that you don’t actually have to take yourself to the edge of life to be able to write about it. There is imagination inside the creative process. It’s not just practical exploration, like a field trip to the edge of death or to the deepest points of depravity . . . you don’t have to do all that,” he finishes with a laugh.
SINSATION (REMASTERED) ALBUM REVIEW
Along the same lines, on Sinsation are tracks such as “The Sick”, which Watts describes as, “an exploration of myself . . . this idea of being sick and being blind so having to explore the dark . . . It was quite an extreme time”. As well, “Painiac (Nothing Touches Me)”, he adds, is “a collision of the words ‘maniac’ and ‘pain’ and it just seemed to frame a certain emotion at the time”. The inspiration for all of this? “Drugs. Isolation. Under the guise of self-discovery, but it was self-destruction masquerading as self-discovery . . . and the main catalyst was often extreme exhaustion. Put it under a Bunsen burner and a magnifying glass and BOOM! There’s the record.” The song “Golgotha”, the name of which comes from an ancient hill in Jerusalem where Jesus and others were crucified, “relates to the same . . . going to the place of crucifixion, cremation, creativity, whatever – this sort of funeral pyre to one, illuminate the darkness, and to two, get something from the ashes, which might be a little pearl that you can do something with; that immolation of self.”
PIG began after Watts started out in the mid-1980s industrial rock scene as a member of KMFDM. Having toured with the likes of Nine Inch Nails and Einstürzende Neubauten, Watts also did sound design for the Punk: Chaos to Couture exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as collaborated with the late fashion icon Alexander McQueen for the soundtrack to McQueen’s masterpiece, Plato’s Atlantis.
With regards to the upcoming Cold Waves XII, held in Chicago this September, the first stop of his North America Heroin For The Damned tour with Curse Mackey, Watts says “I think it’s a great thing. What Jason Novak and his whole crew have done is created not just a great legacy and an event to honour Jamie Duffy [Chicago-area sound engineer and musician who passed away in 2012], but it’s also a gathering of the clans; it’s a place where people feel like they’re amongst their own.”
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Main Photo Credit: E Gabriel Edvy | Background Photo Credit: Stephen Lovell-Davis
SPILL ALBUM PREMIERE: PIG – SINSATION (REMASTERED)
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