AL OURGENSEN

’m still alive so I’m doing pretty good,” says Al Jourgensen, industrial rock pioneer and Ministry frontman – a man who, in his 2013 memoir Ministry: The Lost Gospels According To Al Jourgensen, details how “I’ve had hepatitis A, B and C and tried to invent D. I lost a toe, all my teeth, nearly an arm and overdosed on heroin twice and had to be resuscitated.” Jourgensen spent his first two years in Cuba as Alejandro Ramirez Casas, the surname Jourgensen coming from his stepfather after relocation to the US. It was the third Ministry album, 1988’s The Land Of Rape And Honey, that established Jourgensen’s pulverising industrial rock template, making him the machine-metal mentor to bands including Nine Inch Nails. He’s subsequently worked with William Burroughs, Steven Spielberg and the Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra. Biafra sings on one track on the self-titled debut album from Jourgensen’s new project, Surgical Meth Machine. The album starts with profanity, bile and a tempo of over 230bpm. Then things gradually slow toward some blissed-out Duane Eddy twangs. “The record is really bipolar,” says Jourgensen. This bipolarity, it seems, is down to a move to California – and the state’s “medical marijuana” programme, which allows use of the drug for anyone deemed to be suffering from a variety of illnesses…

Ministry’s industrial rock bedlamite talks drugs, bipolarity and the Rolling Stones.

Halfway through making Surgical Meth Machine you relocated from Texas to California, which, it seems, had a strong effect?

Yes it did. We got to California and got our weed cards. We set out trying