EPISODE 16 - MARTIN ATKINS

Young Southpaw talks to Martin Atkins (Pigface, PiL, Brian Brain, Killing Joke, Damage Manual, etc.) about his punk rock ethos, entrepreneurial skills, books and zoom talks, as well as Public Image Limited on American Bandstand, Commercial Zone, GG Allin, the ‘Paul McCartney clause’, and much more 

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Martin Atkins: I’ve got four drawers of board tapes, alternative mixes...So if you’re a PiL fan, I’ve got both nights in Paris, it was released as Paris Au Printemps, that was my first show. And I’ve got both nights’ board tapes. It was actually my suggestion that we release it as a live album. I’ve got both nights in Tokyo. We released one night.  

[Commercial Zone] is only Keith Levene’s album in that he stole the tapes. I talk about this in one of my presentations - while we were in New York, there were 17 rolls of two-inch tape. So this is me applying - I have my Master’s Degree now, big deal, but it changes the way I look at things - so instead of just going ‘we recorded a bunch of material, it was crazy’, well how much material did we record? Okay, so I go and look at my cassette archive, there’s 17 rolls of two-inch tape. How much music fits on a roll? 32 minutes. Oh my god. So now I have a spreadsheet with all of the songs, all of the versions. There are some songs on Commercial Zone that Keith isn’t even on, that he didn’t know existed until he took the tapes.  

I don’t think it’s any secret that Keith had a drug problem. Like a really serious drug problem. A really serious problem with serious drugs. We were all using speed and drinking a lot, but he was levels above. There were times...you know John [Lydon] is a magical, charismatic individual. And his charisma protected PiL. There could be 10,000 people in a room and John could stare everybody down, more effectively than security punching people. And we were protected by that. It also allowed for Keith to be not always there at shows. He’d take a two song break. And we’d just do an instrumental version, or John would just sing over bass and drums. And people would be like ‘wow, PiL, it’s crazy’. Instead of ‘hold on a minute, where’s the guitarist? I like this song.’ But we got away with it. I think less and less, but we did get away with it.  

When we booked ten shows in Japan, the walls started to close in on this version of the band. There are very strict drug laws in Japan. You can’t have a Vicks inhaler. They’re illegal because they’re a stimulant. Never mind heroin. And then Paul McCartney and his band, Wings, he got off a plane with like a kilo of weed. He was in jail for 11 days. I mean, the world went mad. He was fined a million dollars, and then let go. But what happened was every Japanese promoter then retroactively inserted something called ‘the Paul McCartney clause’....