Band sends bill for Gitmo ‘gig’
Members not confident of getting paid for use of music in torture
Skinny Puppy, the seminal industrial rock act formed more than 30 years ago in Vancouver by cEvin Key (a.k.a. Kevin Crompton) and Nivek Ogre (a.k.a. Kevin Ogilvie), recently made international news after forwarding a claim of $666,000 to the U.S. defence department for unpaid royalties.
The sum is what the band feels is fair for its music being used to torture prisoners at the notorious Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
“Apparently, we have fans in the department who like our music, but they should have hired their own band,” Key said.
“Most of the tracks they chose were ironic ones about being socially aware of your surroundings and of falls of major societies in history due to misguided policies.
“It’s all a bit much having that used as a weapon against the listener when its original intention was to expand people’s thinking.”
There had been rumours of Skinny Puppy music being used in this manner in the past. But when a former guard at the facility came forward with firsthand experience and on-the-record testimony of what Key calls the “how, when, how often” of the band’s music being used in this manner, he started to get a bit cross. He doubts that there will be any settlement.
“But it will be interesting to see what the future developments are in the story,” Key said. “I mean, we heard they were also interspersing songs from Sesame Street and others, so who knows?”
To be considered on par with Muppets in terms of fear factor is flattering in a surreal way, the musician admitted. The group’s latest album, The Weapon, took its title and concept from the Guantanamo news and the original cover design was going to be the invoice to the government. That was eventually turned down in favour of sending the real thing.
Ultimately, it is just another chapter in the weird and intense history of the band, which has never really received its fair shake as progenitors in the whole industrial/dance/ doom scene.
The group certainly went through difficult times with bad record deals, infighting among band members and the unfortunate heroin overdose death of key third member Dwayne Goettel in 1995.
But since re-forming in 2002 with the well-received album Greater Wrong of the Right, the group has been on a steady roll to reclaim its rightful place in the world of dark, grinding and harsh synthesized punk.
“We have been lucky to have kept a good profile in a certain segment of the worldwide underground, particularly in the United States, which allowed us to come back,” Key said.
“Touring the new album is going well and the set list draws upon it quite a lot. We’ve also started into re-releasing some of the old catalogue, but that process has been largely Spinal Tap all the way, trying to deal with the bad ’80s deals we signed.”
Somewhere down the road, there might be an invoice to the whole concept of the music business being sent out on an album cover. But Key said Skinny Puppy has been around for such a long time now that they have weathered those ups and downs and developed a place in the history books.
“Lucky for us, the interest at the start was to do something for fun and we did what we did without really seeing ourselves as a band,” said Key.
“When that snowballed really fast, we decided to just go with our interests in dark writing, dark cinema and what we thought was rhythmic noise.
“Over the years,we haven’t changed how we make music, either. But the equipment and the recording process improved greatly along the way, and the music reflects that.”
Even so, he thinks that The Weapon is a return to the straight-ahead approach of days passed. If a song needed too many mixes, didn’t have an immediate melodic or rhythmic base, it didn’t make the final cut.
The big bonus today is that the equipment is up to the job, where back in the day it was a challenge to keep a piece of gear together through a whole tour.
Today the band keeps the old, cool analog gear safe at home in the studio and takes the non-boutique stuff on the road to pound it out.
Expect to hear some of the Guantanamo hit list this weekend.