Justin Broadrick, the singer, guitarist of Northern Noiseniks Godflesh, is an odd chap. We just spent an hour watching a man who looked either possessed and at least seriously mentally disturbed, worrying about whether we would actually survive an interview with such an intense individual. After the concert when finally got to talk with him and Robert (ex Loop, and now ex Godflesh) we found a very polite, funny and terribly sane individual. Spooked the shit out of me. Anyway we met with Godflesh in Edinburgh in April, Easter Sunday in fact and had a brief chat with them while all around they were setting up the Easter 'Pure'. Ironic, perhaps that Pure the album and Pure the club could not be further apart if they tried.

As has become obligatory in these days of pre-packaged interviews we asked how they were received abroad having just finished a European Tour with Prong.

Justin
It was up and down, when it was bad it was really bad. It was bad because it was the most I have ever done in Europe, me personally I have done more in America than I have done in Europe.

In America it's brilliant, our biggest market. I think that contrary to popular belief, people are more open minded in America. There are so many more people as well. It really took off. As you are probably aware, bands like Skinny Puppy and Ministry are absolutely massive in America, huge. They are on a level of like Depeche Mode in England or something.

In the US this summer Godflesh were to support Ministry, but ended up with Skinny Puppy, we asked how this all came about.

Justin

We know Al Jourgenson really well and he was desperate for us to play. He was really into the bill of ministry and Godflesh being the most explosive this and that. (The Cocks gig) was a mental show. When we played with them Jourgenson said that he had already been up for a week of no sleep and that he had been taking all sorts of shit through the week. We had to like pick him up to play that night, he was literally collapsed. He's seriously into bingeing, we stayed with him in Chicago and he took us to all of his bars and he dished out and paid for drinks all night and got completely wasted, I threw up everywhere. He is definitely a headfuck merchant, he has got worse and worse throughout the years. I have some finished tracks from the new album, and they are a bit different, they are very metallic sounding.

How do you account for the vision of the man possessed on stage, and the man sitting before me?

Justin

We are quite the opposite to what is personified on stage. Every band has it's own way of dealing with shit and if they play this kind of music, or even just any extreme music, maybe they are like that full time, maybe not. Like we always say, people like Rick Astley are probably the biggest wankers in the world. They probably come off stage, and wanna kill kids. With us, its the contrary, on stage we are executing the whole other persona, in regular social conditions we are pretty straight forward.

Do you have a problem being on Earache, whose bands are notorious for having long hair or leather jackets, neither of which apply to you.

Justin

We used to have those problems before Robert joined, but we do get a death metal audience, they do actually like Godflesh and there's nothing stopping them. You saw them tonight, there were loads of death metal heads headbanging the whole way through. Half of our record sales are to death metal heads, which is why we do so well in the states.

I understand that you used to have problems sleeping?

Justin

I still have those problems now, the only was I can nullify it is by smoking as much dope as possible whereas that inspires another avenue of thought, like paranoia. I have managed now to get to sleep, when I was younger I couldn't.

At this point Robert joined in the conversation

Robert

I think everybody suffers from it, businessmen probably have a really hard time going to sleep. There is such a claustrophobic atmosphere in this country now. It is very hard to come to terms with exactly what is going on. The most impressive thing for us was coming back from Europe to another Tory government. It is like, you sit around, do what you do, and after that, everything phases you.

Justin
It is really environmental. My lyrics are always a product of our environment and the weaker the environment gets the more extreme the music gets, and the more extreme we get, but socially we are still at one with each other, we can still manage to breathe and live, because it is so important to keep breathing and living but we still have the music to execute those feelings. Being a musician, the way things are now if you are mostly motivated by pure emotion, then it's like it has got to get stronger.

Robert
We don't live and breathe like other people, because we hate the human race.

Do you find the sad state of the UK, an inspiration.

Robert
I can never see anything about this country being an inspiration. It's the ultimate British attitude, as much as you moan, you never do anything about it. That is why the Tories are back in power. All these people moaning about it, but when it comes to the crunch, they are still fucking here.

Justin
That does inspire, ignorance in England inspires enough hate...it inspires all kinds of emotions and eventually leads to pure hate and then there is a block being formed.

Robert
We don't want to get on a message crusade though, everything we do is strictly for our own purposes. For other people to use and abuse in their own terms. It doesn't matter whether people see exactly eye to eye with our first intentions of how we should sound. But at least they have gone out there and made up with their own mind.

Justin
It is quite selfish, everything we do is quite selfish, very selfish opinions on the world. To us they appear very logical. You don't need to fuck with things, the environment etc. We can just recognise things are we are just using them the way we see fit.

Have you knowingly inspired anyone?

Justin
We had a couple in Germany, which is really bizarre. These people had interpreted us wrongly, they were like: there is something there so take it and well we don't know what to do with it. There is nothing there, it is just that it should inspire you to do anything, however small. There was this woman in Frankfurt who came up to us and said: I know what you are dealing with, I could feel it the whole way through your set, the emotion. But it is too human now, what can I do with it? I was like, "I don't know."

Robert
She was a freak, she was just standing there with here eyes rolling. She claimed that she was not on drugs, but I don't believe that...

Justin
She said that she didn't need drugs to understand in what was going on. I said I need drugs to understand what's going on, Why don't you?

I find the irony of an album called Pure which is so completely polluted, is this purity a childs' vision of purity?

Justin
That is one thing, the way I especially felt when I was younger because I had such a completely alien upbringing to everyone I knew at the time, anyone of my own age. So I felt a really obscure kind of purity, it was independent of any one of my own age group so it was quite enjoyable because I was treated on a different level from everyone else. I didn't have to put up with the banalities of the same age group. There is a feeling when you are young - there is another facet when I was a lot of environments when I was between the ages of 6 and 12 when there was a lot of drugs going around.

I read that your father was a heroin addict?

Justin
That wasn't meant to be in the press, that was a really bad mistake. The whole issue with that was that I wasn't trying to sensationalise it, what I was trying to say to the guy was he wanted to know all the extremities, so I dished him out all the extremities and I don't know whether he was suitably impressed or what but he chose to print those as headlines. I wasn't trying to say to him 'Wow', I was trying to say 'This is crap, but it isn't that bad' because where I come from it isn't as destitute a picture as is painted by the media. We said a lot more important things than that. They were trying to put in as many extremities as possible. The band isn't just about extremes, we are extreme, to us it is a very comfortable extreme which is more true than saying that my father was a heroin addict and that is where it comes from. I never even knew my father was a heroin addict, my mother divorced him because he was , but now he is a businessman, that wasn't printed. It's just the way shit goes, it's the generation that I was born into. It's quite straight forward. However, it was quite a bizarre upbringing, my folks used to smoke dope and tell me not to tell anyone in my own age group what they were doing.

Robert
It took me ages to work out what my Dad's Chillum was for, however that is the biggest problem, people don't seem to realize that when you are in a band that sometimes your biggest foe is the press. Whether it is good or bad. If it can be god, they can get something totally arse about face that works totally against you, makes you sound like you are some kind of conceited fucker. All we are trying to do is be honest and I don't think that there are that many people in the music business being honest and when they do, when they get the wrong end of the stick, and you read it, it's like christ knows what people must think of us. They must think we're complete arseholes.

Justin
I think that generally the attitude towards us is that we are completely fucked. We can go to other countries and there are so many misprinted, out of context quotes and it's like 'That's completely wrong'.

Robert
When I was in Loop, people used to think that I was tripping all the time, that I just gobbled acid all the time and that I had no concept of reality whatsoever. While I would like to think that I have a stronger concept of reality than a lot of those bands. The worst thing about it in the big music magazines, they all wanna be the music fan. I absorb music, I live music. But the thing is that they don't understand it, they are just stupid, they swallowed their thesaurus in the morning and puked it up for dinner. They don't understand music. They don't live music. The music press nowadays don't give a fuck about what they are writing about, they just want to say, "I went out to a party w/ blah blah blah from Primitives and blah blah blah from this." They talk more about themselves than the band, and that is not just sour grapes, that is the truth.

Justin
Slavestate should have received far more acclaim than it did, in my opinion it was a seminal hardcore dance track, I'm sure in the States it would have fit in well in the clubs.

Robert
Yeah, the problem over here with the dance music is- Now I have nothing against dance music. What I call dance music is funkadelic, Sly Stone and James Brown. Now that's dance music, not this fucking sack of shit with some wanker standing in his garage pressing a button for ten minutes. That's bollocks, it's not dance music, it's some bloke who works in Tesco's making bleepy noises on some shit synth. It is all the machines. They're not even producers. The worst thing is that suddenly DJ's have become more important than the bands. You get cunts like Mark More, no hopers. He is just somebody who mixes some records together, samples the shit out of them and has a hit and everybody claims him as some kind of demi-god. He knows what's happening. He's got his finger on the fucking pulse and he hasn't got a fucking clue. is Andy Weatherall going to have a job in the next couple of years? I hope not. He's a no hoper.

You seem to have a larger female audience than the bulk of bands in your genre, why do you think that is?

Justin
A lot of the regular Death Metal bands really alienate the female aspects of their audience, but with Godflesh I think it is the opposite. Most shows we play is really balanced. It is not deliberately macho music. With Death metal it is all very 'Yes, we're male and we can rip you're virgin guts out', its just comic book shit. They are not dealing with anything real, they a living in some metal world with Thor and his woman clutching his dick. We are just open to people. We are just trying to look at things on a completely level plane. We have very close ties with Death Metal, we are very regimented as Death Metal is, but there is still enough scope for it to be appreciated, it's very sexual music. While death metal sort of grinds on a very macho level Godflesh has a very sexual throb to it, it's just physical.