Throwback Files: The Bug

Thirteen years ago, I interviewed Kevin Martin aka The Bug about his London Zoo album.

A couple of days ago when I was doom-scrolling on Twitter, I noticed that the British musician Kevin Martin had announced the release of a new album under his The Bug alias. The album, titled FIRE is due for release through Ninja Tune on the 27th of August and will feature guest appearances from his longtime allies Flowdan, Roger Robinson, Moor Mother, Manga Saint, Hilare, Irah & Daddy Freddy, and newer faces such as Logan, Nazamba and FFSYTHO. It’s also the third part of a trilogy that began back in 2008 with the release of an album called London Zoo. At the time, I interviewed Martin for a now-defunct New Zealand-based music magazine called Rip It Up. In light of the news about FIRE, I thought it might be worthwhile to re-share that interview from thirteen years ago. Read on.

The Bug Interview (Rip It Up Magazine, 2008)

Mid 2008, with the release of his exuberantly apocalyptic re-imagining of life in London town, London Zoo, Kevin Martin aka The Bug, for the first time in his fifteen year career as a saxophonist, bassist, DJ, producer and remixer, found himself in the right place at the right time; artistically speaking that is.

Sifting together the mercurial sands of dancehall reggae, industrial noise, dubstep, grime and punk, through London Zoo Martin presented a conglomeration of the different strands of reggae music’s impact on every British street subculture to emerge over the last three decades. Concurrently, alongside his ragga vocalist co-conspirators Warrior Queen, Flowdan, Ricky Ranking and others, he flipped this into a template for unapologetically crossbred “beats’n’noise” protest music for the new millennium.

Aside from securing Martin the hat-trick of genuine artistic victory, undeniable manifesto of intent, and solicitation of almost academic critical acclaim, London Zoo (his third solo release under The Bug moniker) drew Martin’s music to the attention of the always artistically vital, Trent Reznor, affording Martin the opportunity to, “spread The Bug virus across America, and discover a mutual admiration,” through taking part in an extensive US tour near the end of 2008 playing support to Nine Inch Nails. “Sometimes the audience got it, sometimes they didn’t,” Martin admits. “But there was enough love there to think, this was really worth doing. Once, during the tour he said we should contact each other about working together; so there may well be something in the pipeline.”

Though this hook-up may seem unexpected to dancehall reggae and dubstep focused fans of Martin’s music, for those familiar with his extensive past catalogue as a member of jazzcore pioneers God, Industrial hip-hop architects Techno Animal, and noise rock/free jazz outfit Ice, the pairing seems not one iota short of overdue, and the bass heavy, punk dancehall snarl of London Zoo more then aptly appropriate for now

“I think it’s a refinement of what I was doing [earlier in my career],” he offers. “If anything what changed with London Zoo is I decided to be more focused on my song-writing and tried to investigate choruses and melodies, although I used to have an aversion to both.” 

Raised in a “shitty town on the south coast of England,” Martin exists within a longstanding family tradition of musicianship, and has never had any qualms about throwing the rulebook away. “My father was a musician and my grandfather was a musician. Music was all around me,” he recalls. “My mother would play very disgusting heavy metal albums all the time, which almost put me off guitars for life. Then when I was 14 I started making music on a friends four track, but to call it music is probably an exaggeration; it was experimental sound really. I basically got into music by listening to punk music really, Joy Division, Discharge, stuff that was anti structure, anti social, and had a great big fuckoff attitude.”

As those familiar with the history of the development of English music are well aware, for many aurally baptised during the eighties end of the UK punk rock spectrum, punk rock went hand in hand with ska, reggae and dub. And those adventurous individuals such as Martin who chose to follow these different musics’ splitting threads more often then not ended up as disciples of ragga, bashment, jungle, drum and bass, garage, 2-step, industrial, grime and dubstep in the late nineties and early 2000s.

For Martin, as I alluded to earlier in the piece, this appears to have been the artistic arc of development, except like many of his contemporaries; the music wasn’t the be all and end all. No, that quality of influence can be shared equally with was what was occurring around the music; on a social and cultural level.

“My family was pretty fucked up,” he admits. “My old man was a cunt... I hate family structure because of my mother’s suffering, [and my suffering]. Hence I was drawn to quite extreme music. When I heard punk music for the first time it made me question everything and gave me an opportunity to see that there were other ways of thinking. I think that it was through listening to those forms of music, and actually reading loads of interviews with musicians at the time, when interviews were actually about information as opposed to selling t-shirts as they are now, that drew me to film, photography, art, literature, [disciplines] which were all crucial in my development.”

“Music has always been my alternative universe to this fucked up world, and [for me] its all about getting hold of information in anyway you can that is contrary to the middle mass of nothingness... I think that through trying to understand our environment as opposed to just absorbing everything, I’ve been very often drawn to things that are anti, as opposed to social... [In saying that,] the fifteen years I’ve been in London has been the time I’ve been making music properly, and London itself is probably the most major influence on me actually. This city does leave its mark on you. Musically it’s an incredibly fertile city, so many influences and inspirations... I love and hate this city, that’s what I tried to put across [to the listener] with London Zoo.”