Image via Divine Enfant
To understand where Martin Rev is now requires understanding where he came from. In the mid-1970s, as one half of the pioneering electro-punk duo Suicide, Rev and vocalist Alan Vega presided over a series of live shows that regularly devolved into apocalyptic nightmares of carnage and physical abuse. People threw axes, wrenches and broken bottles at them. Vega used to cut his face with glass to freak out the audience. Police sometimes had to be called in to teargas their crowds. On a 1978 tour in support of The Clash and Elvis Costello, the pair recorded an infamous live album called 23 Minutes Over Brussels. The name came from the length of time it took the attendees to start rioting.
By normal standards, this would be considered urban warfare. These guys were literally doing battle with their audiences. Listening to songs like “Cheree” and “Sweetheart”, it’s hard to imagine anyone having this reaction to their material, but it was an almost nightly occurrence.
Rev is 76 years old now and still performs regularly. His last solo studio album, the 34-track Demolition 9, came out in 2017. Rev lives in his birthplace, New York City, which, according to him, hasn’t changed much. For our Zoom call, he appeared in a dark room lit by a single bulb wearing his signature giant, wraparound shield frames. These are a style choice, he explained, but they serve a practical purpose as well. “I always wear some anti-glare glasses if I’m on the screen more than a few minutes.”
Rev speaks in a grizzled baritone, following loose, digressive trains of thought. It’s fun listening to him recount stories. He’s open and friendly. You’d never guess this is the guy who endured all those bloodbaths years ago.
Suicide’s legend speaks for itself. They were the first act ever to use the phrase “punk music” in their promotional material. Bruce Springsteen named them as an influence (he was channeling Alan Vega when he recorded “State Trooper”. He later covered “Dream Baby Dream” and wrote a touching tribute to Vega on the news of his passing). Suicide never had a hit record or a Top 10 single, but they’ve long been critically revered and influenced nearly every artist of the post-punk explosion (and beyond). You can hear their DNA in songs like “Being Boiled” by The Human League, “Shoo Be Doo” by The Cars, “Psycle Sluts, Pt. 1 & 2” by John Cooper Clarke, “Satellite” by TV on the Radio, “She’s Mine” by Alex Cameron and “Grid” by Perfume Genius.
Suicide’s sonic concept was unique. They’re the only synth group I’ve ever heard that sounds like they were forged in the fires of the earth – a primitivism that should contrast with their sleek, futuristic, cold-blooded, lunar, space-age instrumentation. But somehow, Rev’s stark, minimalist beats and Vega’s tortured shouts come together to form a totally integrated whole. They achieved a surprising amount of stylistic range in their music. What other group could move in the span of a few tracks from the syrupy-sweet love ballad “Cheree” to the sadomasochistic murder-suicide fantasy “Frankie Teardrop”?
The first Suicide album was an audio portrait of New York’s lower depths, its grisly album cover of stenciled lettering and blood-red smear against a pure white background establishing them as some of the city’s foremost musical anti-heroes. Always transgressive. Never trendy.
Rev’s solo career has been similarly far-ranging and often includes re-workings of material from the Suicide era. He’s delved into electronic classical music on albums like Stigmata, bubblegum pop on Strangerworld and screaming atonal feedback noise on Demolition 9. He leads a regular kind of life now and seems at ease with the past, operating just out of step with the mainstream. It’s an inspiring thing.
Anyway, that’s all I’ll say, because I can’t think of too much to say about Martin Rev that he doesn’t say for himself. But while you’re listening to this music, remember that people endured axe blades being thrown at their heads in order to release it. And ask yourself what it might mean to have survived this long. – Jackson Diiani
(This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.)
I want to start with your background – what can you tell me about studying under Lennie Tristano?
Martin Rev: Oh. Refreshing question compared to what I’ve been getting. Well, Lennie Tristano was – I went to him when I was fifteen and I guess I’d say he was my first jazz teacher. Outside of my brother, actually, who showed me a lot of things before that. How to put together chords and whatnot from fake books. So I stayed with Lennie for two years. He had a very unique method of teaching – of course, he had a very unique method of playing and view of jazz and music as a whole. And it was wonderful. He taught – his lessons were, as most of his students would know – his ex-students – ten to fifteen minutes. That was the whole lesson. He did a few things each lesson that were prepared during the week and you played those for him when you got there. And I had a very short, like, audition when I first went to his pad, his place, and he meets you, and he had a big, old private house with several pianos, I think. A couple of floors. So he asked me to come in towards the front door. It had a little side-room with an upright piano and he asked me to play for him. And I did. ‘Course I wasn’t in any way even close to accomplished, but I was playing at that time for several years on my own. So he gave me a lesson, told me when to come in and it went from there.
What career direction do you think you would have taken if you hadn’t become a musician?
Martin Rev: You know, I can’t even imagine, because music was on my mind since I was – I started learning when I was about six or seven. And I was consciously into it as something I might probably do as a so-called career from like eleven to twelve and from then on. So who knows? I could’ve been anything. Thankfully, I wasn’t any of those things, because nothing would have been like music to me. And I just feel the same way every day now. There was nothing else I ever would have wanted to do – would never, ever want to do, if I come back. God forbid. But I probably could have gone into finance. I have a feeling I might have gone into finance. I could have easily gone into – not easily – possibly science and maybe even math, but nothing comes near to it in my mind. I have other interests that I don’t mind getting into just for my own pleasure.
When you first started working with Alan Vega, do you feel like it unlocked anything creatively for you to have a collaborator? Do you think you would have written the same type of material alone?
Martin Rev: There were certain necessities involved with Suicide, and at that point, I would have been probably happier to stay with improvised music for a longer time. I had a group at the time, my own group, Reverend B, and we were doing free jazz and we did a few shows, did some gigs – that’s where I met Alan, actually, the place where I started to do a couple of shows. And there would be anywhere from five to seven to eight, nine musicians all playing free […] I may not have gone quite the minimal route which I did when I realized for the vocal end – for the vocal music that we were doing – that needed something else and I didn’t know what it was. I went into the place where I always practiced, I walked into the school downtown, NYU, and they had these practice pianos all over the place on a certain floor and I walked into one I used to use while I was downtown and in five minutes, I had – I heard it, I found it. It was ‘Rocket USA’ right there, that was the first one. So in terms of the timing and the intensity and the sense of honing it into a vocal world, and then eventually, of course, the rhythm machine became a necessity for me, because I didn’t want to go the route of a regular band with drums and guitars. So yeah, everything was fortuitous in a way. You know, every event, in a way, shapes it.
What were some of the challenges of trying to translate your early live material onto a record?
Martin Rev: The really early live material was not recorded. We started playing maybe six years before any recording at all and seven before the red star record, which [is how] most people refer to the first Suicide record – so the live stuff then was much more in the world of free, electronic-oriented jazz. I was playing drums also, so that’s drums and keyboards at the same time. We also started very early with another visual artist who used the electric guitar to make sound for the first year or two. Then he left to pursue film. But it was all, like, sound, you know, like, we’d have, like, maybe four, five tracks at the most. Each one would have, like, a different theme or word-order kind of thing and the rest was all screams. Alan was screaming through all of it […]
Were you playing keyboards and drums at the same time? Or were you looping things on the keyboards?
Martin Rev: Looping? No, there wasn’t any looping then. Everything was live.
How were you playing the keys and the drums?
Martin Rev: If you remember, you know, like, when you hear ‘Rocket USA’, say, most of it is a bassline. So I would play a lot of these things with one hand. You know, I was playing Suicide with one hand for many years. Except some of the – ‘Cheree’, ‘Dream Baby Dream’, occasionally things where I’d use chords, but even those sometimes, I would use chords with one hand and have a free hand with the other. So with that free hand, especially when I’m hitting, you know, a ‘Ghost Rider’ or a ‘Rocket USA’ kind of thing, I have another hand free and that free hand could be playing a snare on two and four, playing the ride cymbal. Four beats or eight beats if you want, sixteen. So I was able to add a drum track at the same time.
Okay.
Martin Rev: There wasn’t any – we had no equipment to do any kind of – no synthesizer, I never had a synthesizer, this was pre-computer. There wasn’t any looping too, sequencing. And on the records of course, everything was played live.
I’ve always heard about Suicide’s early concerts turning into riots, but I feel like I’ve never gotten a clear explanation of why. Were you guys deliberately whipping the crowds up into a frenzy? Or was it just a natural reaction because the music you were playing was so unconventional at the time?
Martin Rev: No, we weren’t deliberately doing it. The reaction of just the first few seconds of sound already created an atmosphere and in many ways a resistance that made you play with more intensity into the audience. Unless you were just going to get off stage. Alan was, at that point, a visual artist and he wanted to perform after seeing Iggy Pop – Iggy and the Stooges […] so in his case, certainly, as soon as he heard that resistance, he would provoke. And I would sometimes add to that and we’d work off each other. But basically I was doing it for the sound, because the sound seemed to be provocative on its own. The intensity, the volume, the electronics of it. And the fact that there were no traditional instruments to hold onto for the audiences that were used to a band. That was the first time when this comes out – it’s stark. Only two guys doing it. And playing right into them, straight […]
What was it like working with Ric Ocasek? He seems like a well-rounded, supportive ally both in and out of the industry.
Martin Rev: Exactly. Well, that’s what he was. He was a very well-rounded – intelligently well-rounded – person. Sensitive, a really intelligent musician. A very astute commercially-oriented musician, but at the same time, he and The Cars became big fans of ours. So that was a big surprise. For a band that big, that made it that big in the commercial world. So anytime we worked together, it was always a pleasure, because Ric was just a brilliant guy who loved us and we loved him and we could talk to him and he’d talk to us. And he loved producing. He was learning from The Cars’ producer – I believe it was Roy Thomas Baker who produced them several times. And he got a certain kind of sound from us. We still had to be Suicide. That’s the thing. Ric’s orientation – everybody’s different – Ric was Ric, we were us. And he knew that well. So he tried to feed in everything that he knew. You don’t even have to try. You just do. And he would give it his joy and expertise in terms of the production booth.
Both you and Alan Vega seem to employ a lot of Christian imagery. Alan’s art obviously featured a lot of crucifixes and you have an album called ‘Stigmata’. What can you tell me about the religious imagery in your work?
Martin Rev: That’s a good question too. Well, Alan when I first met him was wearing these large crucifixes around his neck, which always felt – crucifixes always kind of horrified me anyway. Especially when they were full paintings of Jesus on the cross. Some of those paintings in religious homes… they’re so horrific to me, they’re like horror. The blood and all. And large crucifixes, man, it was like – the big, white plastic things, six inches long. He got into that at a point when I first met him when it was a time in his life that was very significant. Okay, that takes a little explaining, I don’t know if you want to go into that. For me, the stigmata comes from a love and reverence I’ve always had for music, per se. But music that came out of the church, to me, is incredibly relevant. The history of music. I mean, we’re talking about Bach, Vivaldi. All the Gregorian – not to give them more credit than is due, but there was a point in history – Renaissance and before – where if you didn’t have the church to foster and preserve and pay the composers, you didn’t have music. Same thing with the visual arts. So I wanted to reflect on – as I saw that album evolving, I didn’t say at first ‘I’m going to reflect on this’, but when I saw where it was going and then I remembered everything I’d heard – Vivaldi’s ‘Stabat Mater’, which was a very incredibly great beautiful little piece to me, I started hearing ‘oh yeah’ and I started going back and looking at the way words are used and whatnot and I saw ‘this is a direction’. And stigmata related to certain things too. In my personal life and also in general in one’s personal life. Like a wound that never heals, you know? But it’s also, of course, it’s very tied into the whole mass and crucifixion scene.
Music critic Lester Bangs wrote the liner notes to Half Alive, one of your compilation albums, and I know you originally got the phrase “punk music” from an article he wrote about The Stooges. What was your relationship like with Bangs?
Martin Rev: Lester, we knew – and I’ll just speak for myself – very little. I mean, we met him, he passed unfortunately very soon after, probably after those notes. I don’t know how much longer he was around […] I saw him once at a show we did with a whole bunch of groups. I think it was B-52s, Blondie and whatnot. We did it at a place called Irving Plaza in New York. And I remember in the dressing room, Lester came in and he said something to me, I don’t remember exactly what it was. And we talked for a second. But we knew also somewhere from before and certainly after he wrote those notes how Lester felt, where he placed us. And it was at a time where we were still very, very controversial for the press. Lester was not part of that press, obviously. You know, that established press. Rolling Stone.
In general, do you read the things people write about Suicide?
Martin Rev: As little as possible. But I do. I find myself – you know, if it gets – anything about myself I’m even more sensitive about it in that way, because it’s ongoing now. They may be writing about a show I did last week or an album that just came out. Suicide’s a little easier in a sense, because it’s part of what I did […]
I know you performed with M.I.A. on Letterman in 2010. How was that experience? Did you like the way she used the Suicide sample?
Martin Rev: Yeah, I did. It was sincere. And it was heartfelt in a sense that she really, obviously liked it. She wasn’t trying to parody it, obviously. She wasn’t trying to illustrate herself through looking like she’s something she wasn’t and didn’t have to be. Like, to say ‘oh, look how cool I am, I’m using this to be more radical’. And I liked what she did, the theatrical things she did with all her friends and cousins on the performance. And the way she put that together, because I met her to rehearse. The day before is when we first met and rehearsed the thing […] then when she got up and did that show, you know, that was her idea. I saw what it was. But she didn’t have it together. The night before she just had it in her mind and she got that whole thing together. You know, it was great. She’s a brilliant kid. Brilliant. But she wanted to confuse the cameraman to not know who was M.I.A. You know, to have all these look-alikes. And she did. They were all look-alikes. Until maybe towards the end they realized who maybe it was, but they were all going to sing with a mic and they were all going to hold mics. Brilliant. So, no, I had nothing but respect for her.
Do you have a favorite song that samples or covers Suicide?
Martin Rev: There’s been a whole lot of them, to say the least. I can’t say offhand I have a favorite. Henry Rollins did a great ‘Ghost Rider’ with Black Flag. But a favorite? I can’t say offhand. Now, maybe in an hour or two if I’m thinking about it. I very rarely, if ever, have a favorite cover song of a song that I really dug the original. When the original was really good, great, like something from any age, from the fifties, sixties. Somebody could do a really good job covering it. Not always. But it never, of course, replicates or repeats it to me. So, I can’t really see that or hear that right now.
“Frankie Teardrop” appeared on the soundtrack to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s ‘In a Year with 13 Moons’. Since then, Suicide has continued to be featured on a lot of film/TV soundtracks. Why do you think the music has translated so well to that medium?
Martin Rev: […] it’s not totally indicative of a certain period. So it works also in terms of a dramatic or human dramatic kind of thing. But it can accompany those kinds of more – like, you can use the greatest rock song – and you do, it gets used all the time. But certain ones, let’s say from the fifties – if you use something like Elvis, it’s going to ring of that period, right? Of Elvis. Or if you use doo-wop, it’s incredible, but usually it’s going to be with a film that has a scenario of that time and that period. It can be a great film, of course. Even if you use a jazz track, it’s a track to a culture and a cultural phenomenon. And I think Suicide maybe because it hadn’t been exploited – which is a word I was using for M.I.A., she wasn’t looking to exploit us in any way – but it hadn’t been exploited for so long in any way and it was different enough, so now, it wouldn’t hit people so quickly as being from a specific cultural thing […] there’s a gentleman – I can’t remember his name right now, but I can find it, if necessary – who did a feature, an article, interviewed me for Suicide in film. And all the Suicide tracks, solo tracks, all kinds of things. TV, film. And man, I was amazed when he wrote that and sent it to me.
I mean, it was like, ‘wow, so many films, it’s incredible’. The list goes on and on and on […] I just saw this on the plane, ‘Love Lies Bleeding’, because people were telling me they saw ‘Whisper’ at the end. The track ‘Whisper’, the song – the instrumental. I think instrumentals are also – and I’ve been told that sometimes by the record companies that we work with – they work very well with movies too. They’re also more… They leave room, they leave space, they leave air. Not to corner it or ground it in a specific cultural entity. Not that that’s bad at all, if that’s what you want to do. So it’s interesting how that worked and how it was used. But yeah, that’s another thing that just happened and I don’t know – it wasn’t planned on in any way, and people told me for years, like, older people too sometimes, ‘oh, you should try to get into this soundtrack world, because it’s a great world. And try to send your stuff to directors and whatnot’. And I’d say to them and myself, ‘man, it doesn’t work that way’. First of all, I’m not a soundtrack composer, per se. And most of the stuff that soundtrack composers write – and if they do it for a career, it’s fine for the movie, but it’s not the greatest of music ultimately on its own. I’m not that kind of artist or musician. To say one’s better than the other. So I never went for that. It just happened.
On the final Suicide album, American Supreme, it seemed like there was some hip hop influence – record-scratching, sampling, etc. Were you guys listening to any hip hop artists at the time?
Martin Rev: We had heard hip hop artists now for several years at that time. They were in the environment. You couldn’t escape – you wouldn’t want to escape anything new and relevant. Which rap and hip hop were. From the eighties on. Nineties especially. And the technology had changed now. We’re in a digital world, we’re in a sampling world – 2001, I guess we’re talking about, as far as when we started to cut that record. So it was just part of the environment, like the way house and jungle and techno was part of the environment a little earlier on, like on the record before that, which was done in the late eighties, early nineties – ‘Why Be Blue?’ So you heard some of those influences. But it was never a matter really of saying ‘hey, I want to do a house song, I want to do a hip hop song’. It’s like, oh yeah, you do something and then you say ‘oh, that sounds hip’. Because you know the world around you now, you go ‘wow, I’m reflecting on shit I’ve heard that’s around me’. And so that was – ‘American Supreme’ was part of that world. Plus we did it differently, because I gave all the tracks first to the studio to work with and already pre-recorded all of them.
I didn’t want to do an album like bands always did and we always did, like ‘let’s go into the studio and cut an album’. It wasn’t giving me incentive. And we never did it. It wasn’t enough incentive, obviously, for both of us. So I had an idea. Let me pre-cut the basic tracks or riffs, ideas for a whole bunch of things, give them to Alan on a CD, and while he’s in the studio working on his solo shit, and while I’m going where I’m going, and going back to Montreal, where I was spending a lot of time, he could have that and work with that in his time, put lyrics to the ones he likes and whatnot. And then when he’s ready, he can get a hold of me, and I’ll come in and hear what he did and I’ll put a few things around it, just to kind of emphasize around where he put lyrics and whatnot. So that’s how that happened and it was more – we never worked that way and it was more fresh, so it gave me the impetus to do it.
A song like “One Track Mind” off your album Strangerwold kind of pushes the limits of what can conceivably be called a song. It’s almost a musique concrete experiment. How do you approach making something like that?
Martin Rev: I’d like to hear it while we’re talking. [he pulls the song up]
So, as the French say, ‘je m’en souviens bien’. I remember it well. So I came up with the lyrics. In this case, I didn’t go right for the rhythm track – if I did, I took it out at some point in the process and went for a more electronic rhythmic vocal. And there was a rhythm track in there, but it comes in later and underneath. Different space. You know, I was always looking for different spatial arrangements – vocal arrangement vis a vis vocal-instrumental arrangement. But the way you described it – Jackson, how did you describe it?
I said it sounds almost like a musique concrete experiment. Like Steve Reich and John Cage used to do – manipulating tapes – more than a piece of music that could be played on, like, a keyboard or a drum set.
Martin Rev: Uh huh. Okay. Yeah. Actually the vocal was – it sounds like it could be sampled or a tape over it because of the way it’s processed. But no, it was done live. And I added everything after. Well, not that much, obviously.
How has your opinion of the original Suicide albums changed over the years? Do you still listen back and feel the same way you used to?
Martin Rev: The first album lives up to it for me. It’s what it was then. The second album is what it was then. The third album is what it was then. They’re all different degrees of value, of course, but I haven’t lost – the only thing I felt – the fourth album, ‘Why Be Blue?’, I felt immediately that it needed more input and we couldn’t give it at that time, for whatever reason. And I feel that was the most lacking of Suicide identity […] I haven’t listened to it in a long time. No reason why I shouldn’t, because I get ideas from listening to these things too. But I don’t listen to my old stuff that much. Solo or anything else.
Who’s making music these days that interests you? Is there anyone making music right now that strikes you as Suicide-esque?
Martin Rev: I’m not the right person to really answer that, because I will admit my ignorance of all the groups – I’m sure there are a lot of groups that are Suicide-esque in one way or another. And there are a lot of groups making great music in one way or another, for them. And there was a group – I’d have to search and get their name again too, which I could if you like, but I liked – I thought they were doing some really good stuff. Two-man group. A cabaret-style kind of thing. [Traume Novelle]. But see, I don’t spend so much of my time really listening to what’s happening all the time around me. Like, many musicians do. So I’m not that versed in it […]
What’s your current music schedule like? Do you still perform regularly?
Martin Rev: Yeah, generally I’m performing all the time, but in my own selective schedule. So I pick the times and the gigs I want to do and the periods I do want to go out. So like, in November, next month I’m going out again, doing three shows. May after that in ‘25, I’m doing a couple of shows. Last May, I did a few shows too. And then, in between that I’m working on my own and I’m traveling for my own benefit, my own recreation. Like in summer and winter. I’m also working with a VJ – a beloved VJ, you might say, very close to me – Divine Enfant, a beloved video artist, she’s not just a VJ, but she’s a brilliant video artist. A brilliant artist, a collage artist, incredible collage artist and vidéoaste and mind. So we do all the gigs together. She does the projections on all the shows. She’s been doing all the shows I’ve been doing, and hopefully, will continue that.
I didn’t want to do an album like bands always did and we always did, like ‘let’s go into the studio and cut an album’. It wasn’t giving me incentive. And we never did it. It wasn’t enough incentive, obviously, for both of us. So I had an idea. Let me pre-cut the basic tracks or riffs, ideas for a whole bunch of things, give them to Alan on a CD, and while he’s in the studio working on his solo shit, and while I’m going where I’m going, and going back to Montreal, where I was spending a lot of time, he could have that and work with that in his time, put lyrics to the ones he likes and whatnot. And then when he’s ready, he can get a hold of me, and I’ll come in and hear what he did and I’ll put a few things around it, just to kind of emphasize around where he put lyrics and whatnot. So that’s how that happened and it was more – we never worked that way and it was more fresh, so it gave me the impetus to do it.
A song like “One Track Mind” off your album Strangerwold kind of pushes the limits of what can conceivably be called a song. It’s almost a musique concrete experiment. How do you approach making something like that?
Martin Rev: I’d like to hear it while we’re talking. [he pulls the song up]
So, as the French say, ‘je m’en souviens bien’. I remember it well. So I came up with the lyrics. In this case, I didn’t go right for the rhythm track – if I did, I took it out at some point in the process and went for a more electronic rhythmic vocal. And there was a rhythm track in there, but it comes in later and underneath. Different space. You know, I was always looking for different spatial arrangements – vocal arrangement vis a vis vocal-instrumental arrangement. But the way you described it – Jackson, how did you describe it?