New music from a long-silent source

This is probably one for the old people. Remember when Ministry wasn't the Jesus Built My Hotrod Ministry, and was the I Wanted To Tell Her new wave band?

They're back.

Well, no, they're not. But the question 'I wonder if Al Jourgensen would rather that the world forgot about the synthpop years' has been soundly answered. It's 'no, he's not ashamed of those years', as for Record Store Day the archives have been opened, and this is out for the first time:

Ministry ends, and this time it's final

Sure, Ministry have wound up operations before - they stopped work towards the end of the last decade, picking up again in this - but this time it sounds like Al Jourgensen really is wrapping up for good. He told Noisey why:

Tragically, Ministry's final creative hour with [Mike] Scaccia came right before they broke for the holidays. Three days after leaving the Ministry sessions in El Paso, in the early hours of December 23, Scaccia suffered heart failure onstage while performing with his other band, Rigor Mortis, and was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. Scaccia’s death both devastated and motivated Jourgensen.

“Mikey was my best friend in the world and there’s no Ministry without him,” he says. “But I know the music we recorded together during the last weeks of his life had to be released to honor him. So after his funeral, I locked myself in my studio and turned the songs we had recorded into the best and last Ministry record anyone will ever here. I can’t do it without Mikey and I don’t want to. So yes, this will be Ministry’s last album.”

The last album is titled From Beer To Eternity, which is a pun which would, frankly, embarrass a late-period episode of Only Fools And Horses.

Rockobit: Mike Scaccia

Mike Scaccia, founder member of Rigor Mortis, has died after collapsing on stage.

Scaccia was playing with Ministry - who he joined in 1989, long after that band had abandoned their synthpop roots and more than met Scaccia's death metal halfway. He appears to have suffered a sudden heart attack brought on by heart disease.

Al Jourgensen posted a message on the Ministry website:

I JUST LOST MY LIL' BROTHER AND MY BEST FRIEND - THE 13TH PLANET COMPOUND IS DEVASTATED,COMPLETELY IN SHOCK AND SHATTERED. MIKEY WAS NOT ONLY THE BEST GUITAR PLAYER IN THE HISTORY OF MUSIC, BUT HE WAS A CLOSE, CLOSE, CLOSE PART OF OUR FAMILY - AND I JUST LOST A HUGE CHUNK OF MY HEART TODAY. OUR LIVES ARE FOREVER CHANGED. LIFE WITHOUT MIKEY IS LIKE ORANGE JUICE WITHOUT PULP - KIND OF BLAND. I HAVE NO WORDS TO EXPRESS WHAT THIS GUY MEANT TO ME, MY FAMILY, MY CAREER....EVERYTHING!
GET TO KNOW HIS LEAD PARTS - FOR THEY ARE IN THE PANTHEON OF MUSIC! UNFORTUNATELY, MOST OF YOU DIDN'T GET TO KNOW MIKEY'S SOUL -WHICH IS IN THE PANTHEON OF HUMANITY. HE IS MY HERO, MY FRIEND AND MY IDOL. MIKEY WAS ALWAYS BESIDE ME - MY RIGHT HAND MAN - THROUGH THICK AND THIN, THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE UGLY AND THE BEAUTIFUL.
REST IN PEACE MY BROTHER, MY FRIEND, MY HEART. PLEASE PRAY FOR MIKE SCACCIA AND JENNY, HIS WIFE AND THEIR CHILDREN, AND HIS FAMILY.....AL

Scaccia was also, sometimes, a member of Jourgensen and Jello Biafra's sideproject Lard, getting a co-writers credit on Mangoat:

Mike Scaccia was 47.

Al Jourgensen collapses, cancels

Ministry were playing Paris last night, only they didn't make it through the set. Al Jourgensen collapsed. There's a statement:

MINISTRY frontman Al Jourgensen collapsed onstage during the live MINISTRY performance and was rushed to hospital via ambulance where he was examined by numerous physicians and diagnosed to have had a full-system collapse due to extreme dehydration and heat exhaustion intensified by the lack of ventilation on stage at the venue. Doctors confirm via blood tests conducted that Jourgensen's alcohol blood levels were well below normal and no narcotics were found in his system.

"As a result, MINISTRY has cancelled today’s appearance at the L'Etaples, France Rock En Stock festival in order to allow Mr. Jourgensen a few days rest to recuperate and receive additional medical attention in Switzerland. Jourgensen fully intends to complete the remaining shows on the MINISTRY 'DeFiBriLlaTouR' European leg.

"Jourgensen extends his most sincere apologies to his devoted Parisian fans who displayed so much love, respect and concern for him before and after the MINISTRY show."

It's lucky Al made it - can you imagine how grim it'd be if you called your tour the Defibrillato(u)r and ended up needing one?

Let's wish him well and enjoy perhaps his finest moment:

Downloadable: Holy Ghost

Here's something you might never have expected to live long enough to see: a cover of early-era Ministry's I Wanted To Tell Her. Dome by Holy Ghost, and yours for nothing more than a quick interact with a widget:

Al Jourgensen screws chicken; gets screwed

Unhappiness over at Ministry towers, with Al Jourgensen launching a lawsuit against film producer Edward Bates.

Bates' Gigantic Pictures is distributing a film, Fix, about Jourgensen; Al says he never agreed to the final version of the movie. He wants a quarter of a million dollars and final say over what's in the film.

Not clear if, under the Al-edited versions, the scenes of him having sex with a roast chicken and offering "a bite" to Warners executives will remain in the movie.

I suspect Al is probably keener on trying to supress this sort of thing:

Jourgensen hooks up with Front Line Assembly

Front Line Assembly have announced, sort of, their album plans - Improvised Electronic Device is going to turn up later this Spring. With a special guest:

l Jourgensen has collaborated with Front Line Assembly on the track "Stupidity" providing lyrics and vocals. Al Jourgensen also arranged and mixed the track in his studio

He also made the tea, and washed the antimacassars after the recording session.

Obviously, given that tomorrow is the first day of Spring, "later this Spring" could be any time in the next three months.

Jesus meets Ministry

Duane Denison - late of the Jesus Lizard - and Paul Barker - bassist with Ministry have come together to make a new band, USSA. They've got a debut album ready to run - The Spoils - on the new Fuzz label.

Fuzz is interesting - if you'll allow us to quote from the press release:

Fuzz is a new breed of music company -- integrating a next-generation music label, a powerful artist promotion platform, and a feature-rich interactive community that engages artists and fans to promote, discover, share, review, influence, buy and sell music. “With the record industry in such flux, Fuzz is not your average, ordinary label,” explains Denison. “The label is just part of what they do. It’s also a community. You don’t necessarily have to be a ‘Fuzz artist’ to put up a Fuzz page. At the same time, the website advertises for their artists. It’s an interesting collection of people they have working for them – people from the tech world and the music world. To me, that’s what you have to do now.”

It's nice to see people trying something different, although we're not entirely sure if you boil down the overstatement this comes to very much more than a site with a messageboard.

Rockobit: Paul Raven

The death has been announced of former Killing Joke bassist Paul Raven.

Born in Wolverhampton in 1961, Raven played bass for Kitsch, a proto-Dogs D'Amour, but his first big break came when he joined Killing Joke, taking over as Youth quit. He stepped down from the band in 1988, rejoining for the band's 1990 Extremities, Dirt & Various Repressed Emotions album. Raven stayed on when the band dropped Jaz Coleman and morphed into Murder Inc. A 1992 Killing Joke reunion saw Youth return, but when the Joke revived in 2003 Raven again took on the bass.

A busy man, Raven also found time to be part of Prong and Godflesh, but perhaps achieved his greatest success after a meeting with Al Jourgensen led to him joining Ministry, a role he relished as it allowed him to bring his political side more to the fore:

"For me politics and punk rock went together. That has been handy about my association with Al and his Bush bashing. I have tried to keep my musical roots intact. I have lived in America so long I feel entitled to state my opinion. 'Maybe I can put a foot on George Bush's ass on his way out of the White House'."

Raven - who was working on a solo project, Mob Research - died of an apparent heart attack in a village on the France/Switzerland border.