The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

I once met a girl who called me The Bug. She also called me Buggy, Bugsy and the Royal Bugness. Once - and only once - she called me Bugger. Needless to say I fell head over heels in love with her and when we split up, more than five years later, I locked myself away in a squalid flat in Peckham for three weeks so as to concentrate my misery as much as humanly possible.

It’s an experience with which the real Bug, known to his folks as Kevin Martin, would no doubt empathise, spending as he did the last two years bolted into a studio in Hackney, his mind slowly dissolving at the same time as his latest record was taking shape. There are differences, of course: during my own isolation I was forced to endure nothing worse than the sounds of the old man in the flat above me having sex once in a blue moon, or the occasional brown mouse jumping out of my toaster. For Kevin, however, it was a whole other world of hurt.

“I actually ended up living in the studio to save money, and it was an extremely bleak period,” he says. “There’s a methadone clinic four doors down, and the locks on my building were regularly smashed off by junkies looking for a place to convene. The first time my ex-girlfriend came to visit, she pushed open the door and there was a guy slumped in the corner of the room, blood rolling down his arm and a needle in his vein. Another time I found a middle-aged woman with her trousers down and some guy crouched between her legs shooting heroin into her groin. And in January of this year, I opened the door to the lift and found an enormous human turn on the floor.”

Dark days indeed, but the end, as they say, justifies the means. When I finally staggered blinking into the sunlight after my own break from the big world, I had nothing to show for it save for a handful of crap poems and an irony-free empathy with songs like ‘Back For Good’. Kevin, on the other hand, emerged clutching the master mix of London Zoo, a spine-crushing follow up to 2003’s Pressure. The album offers a similarly rich collision of vocal-driven dancehall, dubstep and crashing electronica, albeit with a bleaker, more apocalyptic outlook than previous efforts: on the cover an enormous bug is shown hovering over a London, a skull in one hand and an Uzi in the other, the streets below lined with barbed wire and illuminated by a nuclear sky.

In keeping with such a figurehead, the majority of vocal collaborations on London Zoo lean towards the more vitriolic end of the spectrum. Opener ‘Angry’, for example, brings out the devil in legendary Brixton soundboy Tippa Irie - best known for the upbeat ‘Complain Neighbour’ and cheerful mid-eighties chart-topper ‘Hello Darling’ - who spends the tune almost choking on his loathing for everything from ozone depletion and suicide bombers to the plight of the African people. ‘Murder’, meanwhile, sees Ricky Ranking taking a paranoid potter through the blood-soaked streets of Brixton; Roll Deep’s Flow Dan rustles up a manic ode to being erased from existence on ‘Warning’; and the inimitable Spaceape lets loose a tireless tirade against irredeemable cunts everywhere on ‘Fuckaz’, which has also been remixed by the mighty Kode9.

“Working with Spaceape was incredible,” says Kevin. “There’s a potency and a bite to his lyrics that’s lacking in so much of what I hear these days. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but it feels as if the music I love the most - hip hop, ragga, reggae - has been increasingly shit these last few years, reduced to little more than product and accessory. I’m looking around for people that have a militancy and intensity to them, both in music and in life generally - whatever takes you away from the boredom of day-to-day existence.”

Another thing endearing Kevin to Kode9 and Spaceape is the fact that they are, in his own words, ‘freaks’; artists refusing to sit quietly in any one genre and ruffling more than their fair share of feathers with their determination to break new ground. It’s a definition that’s as easily applicable to Kevin himself, a softly spoken, Weymouth-born white boy who has conquered everything from ambient techno to full-on noise terror in a range of collaborations with Justin Broadrick of Godflesh (Techno Animal, Ice and God); released tracks on labels as diverse as Virgin and Hyperdub; been asked to remix artists as far flung as Thom Yorke and Grace Jones; and who is now taking dancehall to places its founding fathers could never have imagined existed.

“I definitely feel an affinity with freaks,” says Kevin. “I’ve never really been comfortable with group instinct or the herd mentality. There are too many behavioural patterns that you’re expected to conform to if you want to fit in. Maybe it’s because I’m a selfish only child, but I never feel content being stuck in one particular cage or style. And that’s why I love London - the whole city is like a freak colony, filled with people following non-aligned trajectories in the pursuit of things other than profits.”

As such, London Zoo is a reflection of the crazed variety of London life that is at once brimming with doom and yet touched with a delicate beauty. You’ll find a tender love song amid the smoking ruins - ‘You and Me’ featuring poet Roger Robinson - albeit one swamped with static and uncertainty, as well as an instrumental, ‘Freak Freak’, written for those lonely 4am drives around a city that has suddenly become the most sublime and soulful place on earth. It’s impossible, says Kevin, to live in London and not channel all the suffering and spiritual unease loitering beneath the surface, but it’s just as impossible not to end up mirroring a poignant sense of belonging.

“A lot of people have picked up on the bleakness of London Zoo, but ultimately it’s a bipolar record,” he says. “We live in pretty terrifying times - economically, ecologically, in terms of war and famine - and I wanted the record to reflect that sense of dread, of living on borrowed time. But, equally, I wanted it to reflect the lust for life that such a threat brings out in people; the condemnation of death and the constant drive to live every day to the fullest.”