STEVE ALBINI/ALL TOMORROW'S PARTIES 2002,
Sunday Times, Sunday March 10, 2002

I don't accept that aspiring to mainstream success is natural," says Steve Albini. "By the time I was 10, I realised it didn't matter what people thought of me. I have to look at myself in the mirror when I shave in the morning. I'd rather not look at a coward or someone who was exploiting people."

As the provocative frontman of the controversial noise band Big Black, Steve Albini was the conscience of the 1980s American underground scene, famous for not even taking calls from major record labels. From the late 1980s, his day job as the cut-price producer of important albums, including the Pixies' Surfer Rosa, Nirvana's In Utero, PJ Harvey's Rid of Me and Low's Secret Name, brought him a different kind of renown.

Next month, Albini's current band, Shellac, will host the fourth All Tomorrow's Parties festival, for which they have drawn up the programme. It's an inspired pairing. All Tomorrow's Parties, held at a Pontin's holiday camp in Camber Sands, East Sussex, has defied received wisdom, proving that rock festivals need not be appalling. The three-day event offers indoor stages, working toilets, an absence of corporate sponsorship, chalet accommodation, and a nearby
miniature-golf course (recommended by the British miniature-golf international Andy Miller). Albini's lifelong commitment to defying the music industry makes him the festival's perfect public face, and his stewardship promises a fascinating line-up.

Albini was a weak and miserable child, saved by 1970s punk. Michael Azerrad's history of the American hardcore-punk scene, Our Band Could Be Your Life, includes a scene from Albini's university days in Chicago that it's hard to resist investing with significance. For his
fine-art course, the campus's most unpopular geek stood behind a Plexi-glas wall and insulted passers-by, who were invited to throwthings at him. A bowling pin prematurely shattered the screen and perhaps saved Albini and his onlookers from performance-art martyrdom.

Twenty years on, Albini's status as a professional artist is still threatened by his status as a professional irritant. The 1980s probably wasn't the ideal time for him to launch Big Black. In a world where the singer-as-seer notion blossomed, Albini's attempts to write and perform in the personas of American archetypes gone sour perhaps seemed confusing. Over a relentless, pounding backing, Big Black gave voice to the bored arsonists of Kerosene, the redneck
driver of The Power of Independent Trucking and the child-abusers of Jordan, Minnesota. Albini seemed genuinely surprised by the protests that greeted his next project, named after a genuine Japanese superhero, Rapeman.

"There's no way it can be okay for Quentin Tarantino to make violent gangster movies, but not all right for someone to write songs with similar content," Albini says with a tinge of world-weariness. "At least if people are arguing about my subject material, it means there's some subject material there. I think I'm normal. I'm a regular guy. I can listen to a song that says Please Worship Satan, and to one that tells the fable of the devil going down to Georgia to
play a fiddle. I think the average listener gets it. People who criticise the average listener, and put themselves on an intellectual plane above them, eventually betray themselves as the fools they are."

Like all great satirists, Albini is motivated by righteous disgust, though to admit it would be too close to self-aggrandisement. Instead, he concludes: "You can sing about something revolting to reinforce the fact that you don't like it. That seems to me to be a good and moral thing to do."

Today, the outlet for Albini's frustrations is Shellac, a trio playing a superevolved version of hardcore punk, with unparalleledsensitivity to the power of silence, space and structure. The band opened its last London show with an exquisitely interminable reading of the song Didn't We Deserve a Look at You the Way You Really Are, defiant in its refusal to develop into any recognisable rock shape.

"You're talking about the Long Slow Boring Song, yes?" he asks when I mention the gig. "People coming to see us probably know we're likely to drag it out. We're not trying to put people off. The experience of playing it is hypnotising. Improvisation is a facet of the band. We like indulging ourselves. The audience are invited to be part of the experiment."

Moral anxieties inform even Albini's day job as a producer. It's a a title he's uncomfortable with. His curious mixture of humility and dogmatism means that he prefers the term "recording engineer" and refuses to take any credit for the distinctive sonic aesthetic he has defined. "We're not selective about who we work with," says the man who was even persuaded to record Page and Plant, whom older readers will remember from Led Zeppelin. "There's isn't a signature sound to the records we've worked on. We see ourselves essentially as employees of the bands we record. If they're happy with the project, it's probably down to them."

He is, however, happy to endorse the acts he's booked for the Camber Sands art-rock jamboree, describing the bill as "a menu vouched for by people the public have a reason to trust". Unlike most aspects of the current music scene, All Tomorrow's Parties matches Albini's high expectations. "We played ATP in 2000, and we were charmed by the concept. They asked us about curating it, and we've booked people we admire and respect."

Shellac's guests for the festival, this year running twice on two successive weekends, are a certain kind of music fan's wish list, with sets from Blonde Redhead, the re-formed Breeders, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Low, Rachel's, Shipping News, Smog, Zeni Geva and
dozens more left-field innovators. The US art-rock pioneers Mission of Burma will be present, as will their British counterparts Wire and the Fall.

All Tomorrow's Parties, and Shellac themselves, prove that it is possible to operate outside the normal channels and still be a success. When Nirvana finally pushed alter-native rock onto MTV in the early 1990s, they opened a sluicegate for sounds derived from the 1980s underground, but Albini maintained a polite distance. He's not opposed to mass acceptance, it's just that the compromises involved are not ones he's prepared to make.

While Albini's work has been championed by rock music's equivalent of an intellectual elite, he is keen not to appear elitist. "I have an innate suspicion of the notion that regular people won't get what we're doing. I'm regular people, and I know there's nothing about me or my aesthetic that makes me special," he insists. "But pandering to a certain kind of mass sensibility shortens your options, which is not something you can do while remaining an artist."

When rock musicians start describing themselves as "artists", it's usually time to consign them to idiot island. But after two decades of consistent nonconformity, Steve Albini has earnt the right to the epithet.