Name Chris Connelly
Best Known For Being a former member of Ministry, the Revolting Cocks, Finitribe, a long and blissfully erratic solo career, sometime author.
Current City Chicago.
Really want to be in Edinburgh, picking up where I left off when I moved away in 1988.
Excited about My new album Doo Wop in the Dark: A Portrait of Lou Reed.
My current music collection has a lot of Extremely experimental music, obscure ‘70s pop, punk (1977/78 only) post-punk, jazz, reggae.
And a little bit of Weird gospel.
Preferred format I favor CDs, they sound great to my ears, and a lot of reissues have tons of extra stuff, and as far as new titles, the CD is always about a third of the price of the record, although I buy a lot of vinyl was well. I very rarely stream music, but I will buy and download from band camp regularly.
5 Albums I Can’t Live Without:
1
Station to Station, David Bowie
I bought it when it came out after hearing “Golden Years,” which I also played on repeat. This album has stayed with me for 50 years now, and it has not once lost any of its power or its layered intensity. I still keep hearing things I had never heard, and I keep finding hidden meanings in the amazing lyrics. It moves from a futuristic rock to freezing disco and despair and back again. Genius.
2
The Drift, Scott Walker
The Drift is a sprawling double album that sounds beyond three dimensions to me. The extreme sounds coupled with incredible melodies bring you into a crepuscular nether world where we meet Elvis, Mussolini and his wife, Al Jolson, Milošević among others. It’s a strong anti-fascist record that requires the listener to aggressively listen over and over again. It’s a landscape, horrific and penetrating of human nature, but it’s extremely beautiful, like a Francis Bacon painting. I first heard Scott when I was a kid and his band The Walker Brothers had a hit with their awe-inspiring cover of Tom Rush’s “No Regrets” in 1975. His deep croon reminded me of Bowie so it stayed with me, but it wouldn’t be until his surreal ‘80s album Climate of Hunter that I would become obsessed.
3
D.o.A: The Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle, Throbbing Gristle
I first heard the bone-chilling track “Hamburger Lady” by Throbbing Gristle on the much-adored “John Peel Show” on BBC Radio One late at night when D.o.A. first came out, I had seen the name Throbbing Gristle in the music press but assumed they were one of the many punk bands out there in 1978. I went out and bought it from the little Virgin Records on Frederick Street in Edinburgh the following Saturday morning. It started with a loop of an extremely insistent and intrusive bleeping sound for two minutes that segued into something that was almost a song, but more like a punk song from a strange dream, no drums, just assaultive bass and guitar peppered with electronic squeals and someone howling over the top. The record passed through passages of strange recorded conversations, melancholic violin, bubbling synth, and slabs of sheer noise. A revelation indeed with a non-sequitur glossy album cover, this album started me on a journey I still tread to this day.
4
Strictly Personal, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band
Obviously, I carry a great love for Trout Mask Replica but I find that this album (and it’s sibling Mirror Man) are just as rewarding. It is said that after the recording (this was his second album) Beefheart disowned it because of the barrage of psychedelic effects poured on top of the mix, but it’s also been said that the Captain was complicit in this decision at mixing time, and it’s honestly hard for me to believe that he wasn’t, such is the control he exercised over his output. When I first heard this album, I imagined a studio in a dusty California desert at twilight with the sound of two guitars echoing into the night, the song “Kandy Korn” is just bliss to me, with its coda that you never want to end, almost monastic backing vocals over the top of the twin guitar interplay, the out-of-control bad trip fury of “Son of Mirror Man — Mere Man,” it’s psychedelic blues-rock that escaped from an asylum and is now ranting its way down a road through the Mojave. This was Beefheart’s second album, following Safe as Milk, it is radically different than the somewhat safe confines of the first album, it’s maniacal, yet brilliantly played by the band, the flanging, echo and phasing just add to the party in my opinion. Wonderful!
5
Street Hassle, Lou Reed
This is one of those albums where the cover looks like the music, a portrait of Lou Reed with his trademark shades, a single red light in the background. (Was it a traffic light? Was he on the streets of New York?) Appearing in 1978, right on time to whet my already gigantic appetite for any “cool” punk from NYC or America in general, I had already had Television, Richard Hell, Johnny Thunders, and was now looking to Teenage Jesus, Theoretical Girls, and of course, the New York album. Street Hassle sounded unstable, his voice was frantic and shaky, the harmonies were beautifully and audaciously wrong sounding, as were the guitars, and strangest of all….was that an audience? Yes, essentially this is a live album with studio overdubs, which makes it even more ludicrous and insane sounding. The words are sarcastic, spiteful and angry, they sounded like conversations from movies, Taxi Driver and the like, diatribes from lowlifes, criminals on dark street corners and sleazy bars looking for opportunity and hiding from the law. Street Hassle has grown with me, as I got older and discovered people like Hubert Selby Junior and the noir writers I adore, I have come to appreciate this and Lou Reed’s other writing a lot more. But at the time it was the right album for me, romanticizing the streets of New York in the mid ‘70s.
