A couple of weeks ago German director Wim Wenders was at Reckless Records’ Wicker Park store, shooting footage for a documentary on music scenes around the world, and between takes he decided to do a little record shopping. One of his purchases was a new box set of CDs by Chris Connelly, who happens to be the store’s manager. “He actually bought the box first, and then recognized my face from it,” says Connelly.
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By the early 90s, though, Connelly had also launched a solo career: inspired by Scott Walker, David Bowie, and Robert Wyatt, he began embracing more eclectic orch-pop, glam, and singer-songwriter fare. The box set Wenders bought (one of a limited edition of 500 copies) collects his late-period solo discs for Invisible: 1997’s The Ultimate Seaside Companion (Revisited), 2001’s Blonde Exodus, 2002’s Private Education and the two-disc odds-and-sods set Initials C.C., 2004’s Night of Your Life, and a signed copy of last year’s Lounge Ax, Bottle, Elsewhere–’94-’01, a mix of unreleased live and studio material. “It’s a nice appraisal of my tenure with the label,” he says. “Putting it together was like looking through an old photograph album.”
“He approached me and Ben, but he had the ideas pretty firmly realized,” says Kinsella. “He knew he wanted to make a record of these new songs that were really long and repetitive, that gave you time to sit and lose yourself in them. He was also excited about making a couple of the songs more like collages or abstract sound pieces. Mine and Ben’s job was really just to get him where he wanted to go.”
Connelly is currently shopping the album, which wrapped up around the same time he was finishing another project: a memoir of his early years in Chicago’s industrial-music scene. The book, tentatively titled “Concrete, Bulletproof, Invisible & Fried,” is due in February from SAF Publishing, a British company that has released books on the Soft Machine, Shirley Collins, and Suicide. Connelly describes it as part band diary, part fish-out-of-water tale, written in the spirit of Michael Winterbottom’s Factory Records biopic, 24-Hour Party People. “That movie brought humor into a musical situation that was viewed as very pompous and serious,” he says. “Similarly, what Ministry and the Revolting Cocks did was viewed as very serious and bloodcurdling and strict, but it was so goofy and so silly at the same time. I wanted to show that side as well.”
