Concrete, Bulletproof, Invisible & Fried: My Life As A Revolting Cock
by Chris Connelly

Industrial excess warrior turns rib-tickling raconteur

The cacophonous musical Jackass that is the industrial genre doesn’t often get dealt with in print and, predictably, Connelly’s eye-of-the-hurricane account of life in the Wax Trax! glory years takes the Hammer Of The Gods approach, although displaying a poetic articulacy and self-deprecating humour, without which the book could have been as unbearable as some of the music.

Browned off struggling with techno group Finitribe in his native Edinburgh, 22-year-old Can fan Connelly landed up in late 1986 Chicago under crazed Ministry supremo Al Jourgensen, the tome’s junkie villain, who he ends up despising. Employed as a kind of industrial poet laureate, he is placed with Revolting Cocks while enduring stints with Ministry, Pigface and the Murder Inc alliance with scene idols Killing Joke.

The book was written before the untimely death of bassist Paul Raven, one of the more likable figures around Jourgensen’s circus of excess; the relentless pharmaceutical antics give his death from heart failure after an all-night party extra poignancy. It’s a miracle Connelly himself survived to relate the book’s grimmest comedown near the end, by which time he’s become “sick of the genre I used to be part of” and “singing like Fozzy Bear on crystal meth”. For that analogy alone, he deserves immortality.

ISBN 9780946719952

Reviewed by Kris Needs
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