He is best known for his work in several post punk bands including Nine Inch Nails, Public Image Ltd, and Ministry.
Martin Atkins is an English drummer, session musician, and author most well known for his work in several post punk bands including Public Image Ltd, Nine Inch Nails, and Ministry. Currently residing in the Chicago area, Martin is now teaching music production classes at Millikin University.
Keep reading to learn more about the eventful and enthusiastic life of Martin Atkins!
1) What can you tell us about the classes you teach at Millikin University?
I’ve been teaching for almost 20 years, so within the music business program now it’s a new BA/BS. I try and keep the classes real because you can study how the record industry used to be and it’s important to do that, but I like to let the class know like, “Look what I was doing this morning, look what happened last week, and look what I think is gonna happen two months from now,” and I involve them in those things. I find that in the classroom I’m pretty nice, but outside of the classroom if somebody messes up, I usually know exactly where something is leading to so you might see me fire somebody for a small thing. I think students need to learn in a safe environment, but I think it’s also important that they know that the things that they ask for latitude for within the classroom, they won't even be able to say the words out loud before they’ve shut the door in the very intense, cut throat, frightening, dangerous, entrepreneurial music business we are in now. So I keep my classes real. We have a real record label and we just produced something called a lathe cut record which is very expensive to do but they create these kind of collector editions. Each one of the 20 has its own unique artwork and we’re doing that as an “NFT” which is just a brand new thing in the art and music world right now, Non-fungible tokens with cryptocurrency. I’ve taken students on the road with my band in a tour bus. We are opening a museum with students helping. We are just trying to keep it real for everyone and create opportunities.
2) I have to ask, what was it like working with Johnny Rotten?
It’s difficult to understand now what things were like in 1978. I mean It’s difficult for me to go back, and I was there. But Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols absolutely set fire to the music business, to all kinds of institutions, upset people talking about the queen, “God save the queen she ain’t no human being.” Not the best lyric ever but certainly inflammatory and confrontational. So to find myself in a band with him was pretty crazy. I mean here's this guy that was on the front pages of newspapers, and not just music press but regular newspapers, on the news, sent to jail, police raiding his apartment, and there I am. It was electrifying, it certainly kept me on my toes every inch of the way, and I think made it easier for me to be in a band with Jaz Coleman, the singer from Killing Joke, or Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails, or Al Jourgenson from Ministry. All notorious lunatics! None of it seemed frightening or unnerving or stressful to me after being in a band with Johnny Rotten. It’s one thing to be on stage with him, but walking through an airport with him, people would just walk into walls and freak out. He was a very notorious and famous individual back then. He’s lost a lot of his ferocity now but he certainly was a mover and a disrupter back in the day.
3) What is one of your most vivid memories you have from touring?
Well there’s a few. Just getting to go to Australia, Japan, and all over Europe. Actually how I ended up being in the United States was a tour with Johnny Rotten and Public Image Ltd. in 1980. That tour was crazy. We had Warner Bros. money which turned out to be our money and they were just letting us spend it. So instead of playing every night we would only play every three nights and instead of everybody in the band being crammed into one room we each had our own suites. It was just ridiculous. Then we did Dick Clark’s American Bandstand in Hollywood which was a crazily iconic show from the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. So that first tour was crazy but honestly every tour that I’ve been on like Killing Joke in Europe, Ministry in 1990 where there was a cage between the band and the audience which you would think was there to protect the band from the audience, I think it was there to protect the audience from the band, I mean that was just crazy. So there's been a lot of moments, a lot of good moments.
4) What can you tell us about the books you have written? What Inspired you to start writing?
I’ve written since I was young. I wrote a poem in class when I was around nine and the teacher made me stand up and said, “Everybody should be writing like this!” which just made everybody in the class hate me. I wrote for Boston Rock Magazine in the early 80’s and I was always writing lyrics for songs, co-writing lyrics or writing my own lyrics. I started to write my memoir almost 20 years ago from now and then I started to teach which I was teaching about touring and I was like, “Ok well where is the textbook?” and there wasn’t one so I created my own classes, wrote material each week and then expanded on it and made the book for touring called Tour Smart. At first I thought teaching was the opportunity and then I thought, “Wait, writing this book is kind of an opportunity.” But then I started on a 10 year path of public speaking where I would keynote Melbourne, Australia’s music week and I went to Norway five times, I went all over the world like South America; Medellín and Bogotá, Colombia; Santiago, Chile just speaking about the music business and talking to ambassadors and representatives of trade delegations. I just started to write because I needed a book for my classes and then I put the book out myself. Then it seemed like I should write another book and then a third one and currently I'm working on my fourth book. It actually seems like I’m writing as a service to give ideas, material, and examples to other people. I’ve found I learn the best when something like writing a book causes me to stop, think for a bit, lay out my materials, join the dots together, and then present it for somebody else but I’m actually also learning the lesson as I do that.
5) What is your favorite breakfast food?
Well that kind of cycles. Sometimes it’s just granola and sometimes if I’m somewhere speaking and breakfast is included at some crazy rooftop restaurant, it’ll be the entire left side of the menu. It just depends.
6) What is one of the most rewarding things to come out of your music career?
There’s a few things really. This last year I’ve done probably around 90 zoom seminar events. Some of them have been instructional workshops on how to screen print, touring and things like that but some of them have been what I call memory events where it’s the 30th anniversary of this album or the 40th anniversary of a tour or whatever and we are coming up on the 40th anniversary of Public Image Ltd. on American Bandstand. Just presenting on these subjects and giving people a chance to press talk on their mics and say hi and sometimes we will get some drunk lunatic from Scotland screaming but it’s been great to connect with people. It’s been good just sharing things with fans and sharing lessons with people. That has been really rewarding. But also my band Pigface is 30 years old so now when we do a show, couples will come to the show with their children that were conceived on or around the Pigface show 20ish years ago. So I get to meet people's children and it’s great to be able to do that. We had an event a couple weeks ago, it was the 40th anniversary of the first single put out under the name Brian Brain and we had a zoom call and four people from England who were involved with the band were on the call. There was this girl called Anne-Marie and we slept on her floor as did members of the band U2, just everybody slept on Anne-Marie’s floor. All of these people from all over the country and all over the world were in on this call. It was really great to connect with everybody. There’s so many rewarding things at the moment and it’s difficult to just pick out one thing.
7) If you could only listen to 3 songs for the rest of your life, what would they be?
One of them, if I could listen and watch, would be Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” but the Thomas the Tank Engine version. It’s amazing if you like Michael Jackson and Thomas the Tank Engine. It’s Thomas the Tank Engine clips chopped up by somebody to the song “Thriller.” It’s really fantastic. Next I might say “No More Tears” by Ozzy Osbourne. We actually listened to that 28 times in a row on a tour bus and I think also three bottles of Jägermeister were involved. And the third song would be maybe something by Tool because Danny from Tool plays in my band Pigface. Maybe a song from Killing Joke. Yeah a song from Killing Joke called “Love Like Blood” for very personal reasons. I used to do backing vocals on that along with the bass player who's no longer with us. We sang that song all over Europe. Music isn’t just music, it’s music in the context so I just think about 8,000 people in an open air stadium in Portugal, just a triumphant show singing that song, everybody in the audience singing as well. So yes, those three songs. That would of course change tomorrow, but those are the three songs today.
8) Do you have any exciting plans for the rest of 2021?
Yes. I was a fan of Johnny Rotten and a fan of Public Image Ltd. and a fan of Killing Joke and Nine Inch Nails so I’ve always kept things kind of to an extreme. I’ll have posters, I’ll have cassette tape recordings from the front of house, newspaper ads, pages from the itinerary, hand typed notes from an old typewriter saying “Meet at Johnny Rotten’s house at 9:45 for flight to Paris.” I managed some of these bands as well so we have all the photographs, all the itineraries, all of the receipts, and all of this crazy stuff. So I just announced a few days ago that I’m opening a museum. It’s called The Museum of Post Punk and Industrial Music but it could honestly just be called “Things that Martin has been involved with.” Sandy Powell made my first three suits and now she did the costumes for The Wolf of Wall Street and Hugo, I mean she wins Oscars for her costumes. But in 1980 nobody knew that, least of all me and least of all her. I have those suits, I have the receipt for the fabric from the store on the Portobello road in London signed by her. Like why do I still have all this stuff? I have 6,000 square feet in Chicago. It’s in the middle of this really exploding area and people are freaking out. People are offering to donate their collections and to lend me elements from their collections. It’s the wildest, craziest thing I’ve done. Because we were talking about my classes before, what a great way for students to become an intern, learn how to promote events in a museum, archive material, archive audio and video, create presentations, look at contracts and paperwork. That’s the most exciting thing. I’ve done some shit but this is by far the most exciting thing I’ve done.
9) How did you go from being a drummer to working in education?
Ok there might be people in this position who would be like, “Well intellectually it seemed like the move,” but actually for me it was a complete accident. You know I’ve had my own record label since 1988 and my own band, Pigface and I would put these big tours together where we would take two or three other bands with us so there would be two busses. We would create all of the promotional material like a sampler CD with all of the bands with two tracks each and information and posters and postcards and it was a lot of work. My office was two miles down the street from Columbia College Chicago which is where I started teaching by accident. I went to Columbia College to get some interns to get some free help so I put together a presentation for their faculty saying, “You should give me some students for free and here’s why, this is what I’ve done, this is what we do.” Somebody from the faculty said, “When can you start?” and I said, “Four students can fit in my car right now, lets go!” and they said, “No, no, no, when can you start teaching?” and I actually said, “Teaching what?!” and they said, “Teach this! Touring!” Honestly I left school when I was 16 and I didn’t have any qualifications other than having done this all my life. I have my masters degree now. This is where my training of being in a band with Johnny Rotten and all of these lunatics come into play. So I thought what’s the craziest thing I could do next? Say yes! So I said yes and I thought surely I would have six months to prepare so I asked, “When is the first class?” and they said, “Saturday,” and so I said, “Ok well how long is it, like an hour?” and they said, “It’s a seven hour master class every Saturday,” and I just said, “Yeah great.” I’ll tell anybody that will listen, always say yes to everything because I wasn’t saying yes to teaching, I mean like I was, but I didn’t know at the time that I was also saying yes to an education for myself, writing my first, second, and third book, I was saying yes to traveling all over the world to speak because of my books and because of my teaching. I was saying yes to a masters degree eventually, putting together curriculum, putting crazy classes together that really pushed students to the limit. I was saying yes to all that I just didn’t know it. So it was just a complete accident.
"My advice to people in bands would be that this is gonna be a long journey. There are no quick fixes. I’d say that it takes seven years to become an overnight sensation."
10) Do you have any advice for upcoming and newer bands?
Well yeah I’ve got three books of advice. Remember I said earlier how crazy it was to stand with a couple and their now 22 year old daughter? It took me until quite recently to realize that this isn’t a smash and grab four year thing. I think my dad told me who was a managing director of a textile company that he thought music was crazy and it was a crazy thing for me to do. He said, “Make the most of it because you’re gonna have two years!” Less than the career span of a modern day soccer player, I think you get to the age of 32 or 35 and that's really it and you’ve gotta look at doing something else other than playing. But here I am, 61. I’ve been doing this since I was nine. I don’t think I was ever a complete asshole but when I was younger I was very shy which caused me to drink to try and overcome my shyness and to have a certain kind of false swagger and bravado. But really I’m sure people said, “Martin Atkins, what an asshole!” So it’s true of a lot of things, I wish I knew then what I know now. My advice to people in bands would be that this is gonna be a long journey. There are no quick fixes. I’d say that it takes seven years to become an overnight sensation. I saw the band U2, who I don’t know if they're playing anymore but if they did they’d be playing stadiums, play to 17 people and when you see them interviewing it’s like, “Oh it was crazy!” But no it wasn’t crazy. It was five years of sleeping on Anne-Marie’s floor and playing to 17 people and to keep going and keep going and keep going. So that’s what I would say. It’s a long journey. learn how to do as much of this as you can yourself. Because I think that makes you a more interesting person and more of an artist that I would want to see. I think Taylor Swift is a great example. Yeah she writes great songs and does good stuff but she did her own social media from the age of like 12 I think. It’s those additional skills that elevated her to a career where she became more “signable”. So add a bunch of skills to the skills you think you do need. And I would also say some artists think or believe or are told to think that if they are just a little bit better on their instrument then that will open doors for them and it won’t. You can’t be shit on your instrument but you also don’t have to be amazing. Don’t spend an extra two hours each day trying to be amazing thinking that will open doors because there’s already somebody more amazing than you. If you start to add skills like social media, video, graphics, screen printing, all of these things to your skillset, that’s what will carry you forward. That would be my advice.
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