EXCLUSIVE: SKINNY PUPPY – The ABORT Interview (ISSUE 14 Preview)
November 30th, 2009 Filed under: 21 & Under With..., Exclusive! by admin
(Photo- Scott Alexander)
ABORT Magazine’s Grimm Culhane and Skinny Puppy’s lead singer Ogre share a beer and reminisce about the band’s 26 years of electro-industrial existence. Discussing everything from early shows to their latest marketing strategies, from Syd Barrett to the SPV Records insolvency, the boys even find time to share a laugh amidst the ongoing struggle of the Vancouver Downtown Eastside.
Grimm Culhane: Alright, this is Grimm Culhane for ABORT Magazine. We’re here once again with Ogre…
Nivek Ogre: Yep
ABORT: Of Skinny Puppy…
Ogre: Yes.
ABORT: Good seeing you again.
Ogre: You too.
ABORT: Its been a while since we last talked.
Ogre: A year. Almost a year to the day.
ABORT: That long ago? Wow. How have you been? You look great.
Ogre: I’m doing very good, yeah.
ABORT: Busy?
Ogre: Yeah, busy. I did another film in the last year since I talked to you. I did a movie called 2001 Maniacs – Field of Screams. Its the sequel to the remake of the Herschell B Gordon Lewis movie Two Thousand Maniacs!
ABORT: And who’s directing that?
Ogre: Tim Sullivan, who did the remake with Eli Roth, did the original with Robert Englund. In the sequel Robert doesn’t return, but Bill Moseley plays Mayor Buckman.
ABORT: You work a lot with Bill Moseley seems to me, besides your work with ohGr and the film work.
Ogre: Well, we became friends. We go hiking together.
ABORT: He seems like a really nice guy, well rounded, educated and smart.
Ogre: Really well educated person, extremely intelligent and also very down to earth and a pleasure to be around. He gave me so many amazing tips and support and within the 2001 Maniacs – Field of Screams there’s a real kind of camaraderie there that shows in a lot of ways. It was my first role where I was actually doing dialogue and so he was very helpful just from a comfort level. So yeah, we see each other about once a month.
ABORT: Now we’ve got to talk about Skinny Puppy. You’re on tour right now, In Solvent See. Does that have anything to do with the record label?
Ogre: (chuckles) Yeah it does actually. I mean its intertwined and we’re trying to make the best of it, but SPV went into insolvency right towards the end of our recording cycle with them and so we were left in a place of turning in a record to what should have been a reunited and stronger label by August. What happened instead is they went into insolvency. The insolvency court took over and they’re trying to basically sell the label to Sony and in the mean time it left us between a rock and a hard place. Basically all bills before the insolvency are not being paid and everything after the insolvency is business as usual and business as usual means it was supposed to be resolved August 2nd and its gone on till now and there’s no resolve. We were left in a place where we either turn in the album we were working on, deliver it to the void, or try something else.
We tried a number of different things to accommodate the whole situation. One was we were going to turn in a pseudo Metal Machine record and we actually finished that, but there was some disagreement between all of us as to even turning that in as a Skinny Puppy product, so it’s become an ohGr album only because we had started moving in this direction of working on a noise record and we had 4 days of very creative, incredible time in the studio with Mark (Walk), my co-writer. We ended up with a record that just didn’t work out with the scope of the band, so we took it as an ohGr record.
At that point we recognized that the whole insolvency issue was going to take a long time and so we decided that instead of focusing on a new album release we’d work on a single and do a tour that was more… not necessarily retrospective, because its actually turned out to be a very intense, odd sort of combination of all of our music along with some very strange theatrics. In a sense we’re embracing the while idea of the antiquated music system, the antiquated ideals in America and our own decrepitude in the sense that we’ve been around for 26 years. We’re approaching it that way and we’re going to release a single based on the idea of insolvency. We’re going to put up stock certificates which range from 20 dollars to $2.4 million (laughs). The idea being that you choose whatever you want, what you want to buy in at, and the idea of our company, Insolvency Inc., is that you will invest in us, we will take your money and spend it and you’ll never lose less than zero.
Both: (Laugh)
READ THE ENTIRE INTERVIEW IN ISSUE 14 OF ABORT Dec. 09
WANT MORE EXCLUSIVES? CLICK HERE
Copyright © 2004-2009 ABORT Magazine. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction of this publication, in whole or in part, in any form or medium without express written permission from Abort Media Publishing Corporation (AMP Corp.) is prohibited. All use is subject to our Terms of Use.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
