Bobby Caughron 
Industrial glam kingpin Raymond Watts aka PIG will reissue a remastered and expanded version of his 1996 album ‘Wrecked’ via Metropolis Records on 7th March. His fifth full-length record, the remastering has been made by Tom Hall at Abbey Road, while its reappearance coincides with UK live dates to promote the 2024 studio album ‘Red Room’. The PIG live band currently includes En Esch (ex-KMFDM, Pigface) and Jim Davies, formerly of Pitchshifter but best known for his acidic and acerbic guitar lines on several chart hits by The Prodigy. Davies co-wrote many of the songs on ‘Red Room’.
Whereas the recently reissued ‘Sinsation’ (1995) had originally been released on Nothing Records (the label established by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails), its follow-up saw a switch to Wax Trax!, the leading ‘90s exponents of industrial rock.
“Revisiting ‘Wrecked’ for remastering was a sobering experience that left me shaken,” states Watts. “I recalled a period when I was stirred to a creative frenzy of crisis and desperation while searching for beauty. Although I can still hear glimpses of it, the bonfire of my hope was more an expression that was savage and twisted.”
Following the desperate burning that had resulted in ‘Sinsation’, Watts considers it more “a yearning, grinding plea for liberation that manifested in ‘Wrecked’, a tomb I had built for myself and my troubles that only the very bravest would dare enter.”
The original press release for ‘Wrecked’ had described the album as “a nihilistic slash and burn, a scrapbook of manifestos and suicide notes written in dried blood.” In the cold light of day almost three decades later that description still holds true. ‘Wrecked’ features contributions from former KMFDM members Günter Schulz and Steve White, as well as Julian Beeston (ex-Nitzer Ebb, Cubanate).
Watts has enjoyed a stellar career since starting out as a pioneering member of the mid-1980s industrial rock scene. As well as releasing fourteen albums as PIG, he has toured with KMFDM (he was a member of the band in their early days), Nine Inch Nails and Einstürzende Neubauten, written music for fashion and film for Chloe, Marios Schwab, Halston, The Row, as well as creating the sound design for the exhibition ‘Punk: Chaos to Couture’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Watts also collaborated with the late fashion icon Alexander McQueen, who commissioned him (with John Gosling) to embellish the serene instrumental track ‘Inside’ (from the 1999 PIG album ‘Genuine American Monster’ album) for the soundtrack to ‘Plato’s Atlantis’. The show was reprised after McQueen’s untimely death in as the finale of ‘Savage Beauty’, a posthumous retrospective that broke all records at both The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum.
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