Justin Broadrick was 15 years old when he first changed the landscape of heavy metal. A social misfit inspired by anarcho-punks Crass and the sonic terrorism of industrial originators Throbbing Gristle, he was conscripted into Napalm Death as guitarist in 1985. He appeared on the first side of their 1987 debut album, Scum, a record that helped lay down the template for grindcore, and has remained a lodestone for adrenaline-fuelled agitators ever since. “Ninety-five per cent of the A-side of Scum was my music,” he says. “I was sitting in my bedroom in a council estate in Birmingham, writing riff after riff after riff. I was a weird machine. If I think back to it, it was always this endless river of sound. I have to stop myself from creating. You see how many projects I’ve got, it’s ridiculous. And for me, it’s the tip of an iceberg. I would release way more if I knew I wasn’t suffocating people with my music.”
We’re having coffee in central Oslo, a few hours before he’ll terrorise audiences at the city’s Inferno Festival with Godflesh, the hugely influential band he has been at the centre of, on and off, for the past 35 years. Lanky, with a tufty beard making him look like an urban wizard, the 53-year-old is a dynamo of effusive, gregarious energy, as if an endless amount of information is constantly whirring in his brain. Justin may be one of the underground’s most prolific musicians – Napalm Death, Head Of David, Fall Of Because, Final, Techno
