Justin Broadrick

Justin Karl Michael Broadrick (born 15 August 1969) is an English musician, singer and songwriter. He is best known as the lead singer and a founding member of the band Godflesh, one of the first bands to combine elements of extreme metal and industrial music. Following Godflesh's initial breakup in 2002, Broadrick formed the band Jesu.

He was briefly in the English grindcore band Napalm Death when he was a teenager in the mid-1980s, writing and recording guitar for their debut album, '' Scum''. Broadrick has also maintained a parallel career as a producer, producing records and remixes for groups such as Pantera, Isis, Mogwai and Hydra Head labelmates Pelican. Since the 1990s he has worked with Kevin Martin as Techno Animal making various genres of electronic music and hip hop. Since 2012, he has been releasing hard techno music under the solo moniker JK Flesh. Broadrick has set up record labels such as HeadDirt, Avalanche Recordings, Post Mortem Productions (briefly renamed Uprising Productions), Lo Fibre and Heartache.

Biography

Childhood and first recordings (1969–1983)

Broadrick was born on 15 August 1969, in a council estate of inner Birmingham. For the first four years of his life, Broadrick was raised by his mother Gabrielle Fern (a.k.a. Lucy Nation) and stepfather Robert Fern (a.k.a. Bob Allcock) in a hippie commune in Shard End. In the late '70s, Broadrick's mother and stepfather were members of Anti-Social, a band infamous for live shows involving blood and faecal matter, as well as for soliciting people to commit suicide via guillotine live on stage. Anti-Social were dubbed "the world's most violent rock group" and released one single, ''Traffic Lights/Teacher Teacher'' which is now one of the rarest UK punk record releases. During a period of heroin addiction, Broadrick's biological father was mostly absent from the family home. According to Broadrick, his maternal grandmother from Germany was a "witch" who was into the occult and black magic.

By the age of ten, Broadrick was surrounded by the punk-rock that his parents listened to. "There was Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, but it was always the stuff that wasn't so standard that grabbed me. I was always playing things like Lou Reed's ''Metal Machine Music'' when I was about eight! Stuff like Can, the weirdest parts of Pink Floyd, Hendrix", says Broadrick. "The first thing I probably heard out of the house, when I was about 11 years old, was Crass", says Broadrick. Shortly after seeing them as his first concert, he recorded his first demo tape at the age of 11. "By the age of 12 I fell into early industrial music, stuff like Throbbing Gristle, Whitehouse". Broadrick began to play with his stepfather's guitar, who was then into Roxy Music and Brian Eno.

In 1982, he started publishing tapes with his friend Andy Swan, who had a synthesizer. The first name they went under was Atrocity Exhibition, named after a Joy Division track (which, itself, takes its name from a book by J. G. Ballard). Their first recording was titled ''Live in the Studio'' and was the first catalogued release on their cassette label Post Mortem Rekordings. Shortly after, the project was named Smear Campaign, after a Nocturnal Emissions track. This was the name they went under at their first live performance on 7 July 1984 in The Mermaid in Birmingham. Promptly after the show they settled on the name Final. Final was then inspired lyrically and musically by acts such as Throbbing Gristle and Maurizio Bianchi. "We were pretty heavily into the whole industrial tape culture and fanzines of the very early '80s", Broadrick says. The project developed to embrace the power electronics subgenre of industrial music in 1983, releasing material by them and other industrial projects on Post Mortem Rekordings (which was renamed Uprising Productions in 1985) such as Family Patrol Group, Mental Health Act, Ashenden, The Grey Wolves, Con-Dom, Death Magazine 52, Fern and Un-Kommuniti. Final went under numerous lineup changes during its lifetime, including musicians like Philip Timms, Daniel Johnson, Paul Neville, Nicholas Bullen, Graham Robertson and Guy Pearce. "I had about 50 Final releases over about a year and a half", he says. Other project names Broadrick recorded under included Last Exit, Crusade and Dead Pulp. Broadrick also had a short-lived progressive punk band called The Blakk Korridor with Diarmuid Dalton and Dan.

Fall of Because and Napalm Death (1984–1986)

In 1984, Broadrick joined the group Fall of Because G. Christian Green and Paul Neville (musician)">Paul Neville