Even if they'd never met, Justin Broadrick and Kevin Martin would still have been kindred spirits. Both have traced restless creative paths along the cutting edge of modern music; both now make music far removed from their original manifestations; and in both cases - Broadrick composing colossal dream-rock as Jesu, Martin carving apocalyptic dancehall as the Bug - they are releasing their most acclaimed and most accessible noise to date.
For all their musical parallels, however, Martin reckons they could have been ships that passed in the night. "We've made completely opposite journeys through our lives," he says, sitting in a cafe across from his studio in east London. "Justin grew up in the grittiest, grimiest parts of Birmingham, and now he lives on the north coast of Wales. I spent my teenage years in Weymouth, a seaside town. All I knew was sea and grass, so I'm happy getting lost in concrete now."
"We lived in one of the really revolting areas of Birmingham, a terrifying, bleak shithole," agrees Broadrick, speaking from his studio in the wilds of Abergele, where he can see a grazing cow from his window. "Thanks to my music, I've managed to escape that environment."
Broadrick's mother and stepfather were musicians, playing in a hippy band called Maniac. "They were failed musicians, really," he laughs. "I remember bringing my first Black Sabbath album home; they were disgusted. 'Sabbath?! They're just a shitty local band who made good!' Typical inbred local envy."
Surrounded by guitars and reel-to-reel recorders, Broadrick demoed his first track at the age of 11, shortly after seeing his first gig - by the anarchist punk collective Crass. A year later, he was buying cassettes of industrial music at Birmingham's Rag Market and attending early shows by Whitehouse, pioneers of ear-splitting "Power Electronics". Suitably inspired, he started his own cassette label, Post Mortem Recordings.
It was at the cassette stall that Broadrick met Nick Bullen; only a year older, Bullen played in his own punk group. "He gravitated towards the more brutal, confrontational stuff," says Broadrick, "And I was one of the few like-minded people he knew, so I was soon playing guitar in his band, Napalm Death."
Now a successful, internationally renowned metal phenomenon, Napalm Death started out as Crass acolytes with a penchant for hardcore punk and the early thrashings of Metallica and Slayer. Their residencies at the Mermaid, a pub on Birmingham's Sparkhill estate, earned them a reputation for playing one-second "songs". The venerable John Peel was an early and influential fan.
Broadrick would feature on side one of Napalm Death's 1987 debut album, Scum but, by the time it was released, he had left to become drummer for another set of local Peel favourites, the just as noisy but much slower Head of David. Aged only 16, he was touring across Europe, before being kicked out of the group. "Apparently the singer thought I was insane," Broadrick laughs. "I was into the whole confrontation thing, a bit out of control. They still lived with their parents."
Cast adrift, he bought a drum machine. "I wanted to play guitar again, and scream. I was listening to Big Black, and to Public Enemy and Eric B & Rakim, this ghetto music that was as funky as it was hellish. I wanted those huge, monolithic drums, behind really brutal guitars."
This would be the blueprint for his next group, Godflesh.
For Broadrick, Peel had been a crucial early champion; for Martin, stranded in Weymouth, Peel's radio show was a crucial lifeline to the outside world.
"I saw more violence in Weymouth than I've seen anywhere else," Martin shivers. "There was an army base, a naval base and an RAF base; three different kinds of nutter to spend the weekends beating the shit out of each other. My friends were all outsiders: rockabillies, punks, mods, hip-hop people."
Martin gravitated towards the post-punk music played on Peel's show, groups such as Public Image Ltd and Throbbing Gristle. "They seemed to be questioning everything, which appealed to me, because I thought nothing made sense. My family life was all-out warfare between my parents; my dad was a wife-beater and a child-beater."
Martin escaped to London, settling in Brixton, where he ran the Mule Club at a pub nestled next to the police station. Promoting shows by Napalm Death, Extreme Noise Terror and Godflesh, Martin was running a strictly not-for-profit operation, with all the door money going to the bands. He regarded using his group, GOD, as the resident support act as recompense enough. "The intention of the group was to express my repulsion at the horror and tedium of everyday life," Martin remembers, "To mix free-jazz and noise-rock. We were supremely loud; at our final show, there were 12 people onstage, and me screaming my head off and playing saxophone through an array of effects pedals. I just needed to get that shit out of my system. It was like therapy."
Martin booked Godflesh for their first ever gig; they soon became regulars at the Mule Club. "He put us on with such regularity, because we enjoyed each other's company so much," says Broadrick. "Kevin was mental back then, playing sax like a punk John Coltrane, and screaming his head off."
Broadrick produced GOD's first album in 1992, and subsequently often joined the group onstage and in the studio. He focused most of his energies, however, upon Godflesh, who were swiftly perfecting their fusion of metallic riffs, industrial noise and electronic rhythms. An early American tour, supporting Napalm Death and playing to long-haired metal kids, was greeted with derision. "People didn't get it at first, couldn't believe there was music this slow, this brutal, this cold, made by machines," he says. "But within a year or two, the same people who'd been calling us shit were loving it."
As the decade wore on, Godflesh's music became more experimental, Broadrick throwing jungle breakbeats and ambient drones in among the riffage, and then applying his remixing skills to more conventional metal bands, such as Pantera and Isis. "I was alienating our audience," he smiles. "But I couldn't help it; I was excited by too much other music, and wanted to bring these ideas into Godflesh."
More of these ideas filtered into Techno Animal, an industrial hip-hop project he'd begun earlier in the decade with Martin, offering the latter a chance to unshackle himself from the group format and experiment in the studio. "We saw it as some magical laboratory, where all sorts of sorcery was possible, continually surprising and shocking ourselves," says Martin. "We were stretching parameters. Rock music seemed finite by comparison, in love with the past, closing all these doors to possibility."
Martin's transformation into the Bug followed an experience at a soundclash - where two competing sound systems play against each other. "It was at some warehouse in the East End. No stage, the audience penned in between these two sound systems, lit only by a single bulb above each mixer. It was the most deafeningly visceral sound," he remembers, still awed. "You either let it rearrange your internal organs, or you got out of there." Between 2001 and 2004, Martin's collaborations with soundsystem veteran the Rootsman yielded a series of 7in singles that cemented the Bug's sound, Martin building deafeningly overdriven and vicious rhythms behind Dancehall a capellas sourced by Rootsman. The tracks were collected together as Killing Sound in 2006.
Broadrick, meanwhile, was moving in a completely different direction. The last track on Godflesh's final album, 2001's Hymns, was called Jesu, and its title would prove to be Broadrick's salvation. Feeling stifled by the expectations of his audience, Broadrick's passion for Godflesh was waning and he suffered a nervous breakdown en route to a planned tour of America.
"I woke up the morning we were supposed to fly to America, and it was like a classic Brian Wilson moment," he says. "I couldn't move. I couldn't do it any more. I just knew this was all wrong now. I split the group on the day of its first date in America, which cost me lots of money and lots of friendships. My life just imploded, crumbled on every level. In response, I began making music that was really emotional; I could pour my heart out through this stuff."
With Jesu, Godflesh's pulverising industrial noise was recrafted as a machine of loving grace; 2007's Conqueror moved at glacial pace, Broadrick's colossal guitars tolling aching melodies, his serrated bark now a caressing sigh. It was heavy, yes - but it was affecting. "I've always been drawn to melancholic pop, melodies that would move me to tears, ever since I was a little kid," Broadrick says, "I always wanted to do something like that, but never felt skilled enough as a musician to approach 'proper' songwriting. But I discovered my own way of doing it, and it became the perfect platform for me to begin again."
The Bug's new album, London Zoo, is also the result of a traumatic experience: Martin's three-year struggle to produce an ambitious project on a meagre budget. By the sessions' final stages, skyrocketing rents in London meant Martin had to live in his studio, without a shower or kitchen, and was suffering as a result. Those tensions inform London Zoo, but the album takes a step back from the Bug's early sonic extremism to create a more nuanced sound.
"I wanted to make an album that faced up to fucked-up truth of living in London right now," Martin explains. "I could have made a total noise record and said, 'This is London.' But London isn't just that, it's full of beauty, as well as retarded ugliness. I wanted both."
As with Broadrick, Martin's is a career characterised by a near bloody-minded commitment to pursuing his own muse, never compromising in his mission to discover his own voice, an endeavour now repaid as the likes of Thom Yorke, Massive Attack and Grace Jones queue up to work with the Bug. "I'd be a fucking liar if I didn't say it was a thrill," he admits. "But what makes it most thrilling is, I know in my heart I haven't compromised one iota. Art is increasingly becoming product, and everything I do is the antithesis of that. That's why I struggle; if I wanted an easy life, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing."
· London Zoo by the Bug is out now on Ninja Tune. Jesu's most recent album, Conqueror, is available on Hydrahead. The Godflesh compilation In All Languages is available on Earache