We spoke to Trent Reznor to ask some of the questions no one dare ask! Like, Why did you fancy Courtney Love? and more…

He’s cut the booze and blow out of his life, he gets mobbed by fans leaving his own gigs and he’s in no mood to license a Loony Tunes Nine Inch Nails cartoon…

I must have read a million interviews with you, and yet I still feel like I know nothing about you. How is that?
Reznor: “Well, I feel like I’ve been brutally honest in interviews. And, I’m not the one asking the questions. I get people bugging me saying, ‘You keep on saying the same things’ and I have to say, ‘Well, I get asked the same questions and I am telling the truth. There’s only so many ways I can spin things to make them sound interesting.’ Part of it also may be that I’ve poured my soul out in the music that I’ve written. Emotionally I’ve given more away than I’ve felt comfortable with. Aspects of my life that are to do with music making I’m willing to talk about, but other aspects I want to keep to myself for a couple of reasons. One is to stay sane and the other, of equal importance, is I do think there is a value of having some mystique.”
Hammer: What question do you wish journalists would ask that you’ve never been asked?
Reznor: [long pause] “The question you just asked!”

Read what the metal community have to say about the Nine Inch Nails hiatus here.

Yes, you have a massive female following. Do you consider yourself a stud?
Reznor: [laughing] “I don’t even know how to respond to that. Would I rather see nothing but dudes when I look out into the audience? Not particularly. Let’s say specifically in the terms of music, the role of metal has traditionally been dealing with male angst, teenage angst, perhaps something that helps define the individual through aggression. There is an element of that in the music I’ve made. But also there is a confessional element that might attract female fans. It’s weird. I look out into the audience now and I see a really big mish-mash of people. The same guy in Crow make-up who was there 10 years ago; he’s still there and he’s still the same. There are older people, normal looking people. Then there’s the goth contingency. Actually, I left the Brixton Academy last night to go back to the hotel and I only had two steps between the venue and the car that was going to take me there. And it was like Dawn Of The Dead! [Starts laughing] People were pushed up against the windows of the car. All the fans looked like zombies as well!”

Trent, would you allow Warner Brothers to do a Looney Tunes cartoon parody of your band called March of the Porky Pigs?
Reznor: [After a painfully long pause] “No. I probably won’t be doing that.”
Will you run out of ways to appear in your videos without us actually getting a good look at you?Reznor: “I’ve got a few more tricks up my sleeve, so not just yet!”
Hammer: Well, you’re an artist and obviously you have complete control over how you want to present yourself to the world. What process do you go through to get your ideal promo video together?
Reznor: “Well, I’ve thought a lot about my answer to this because the truth of it doesn’t sound very arty. But the fact of the matter is that when we finish a record we have 20 songs that we whittle down to a listenable 12 or 13 tracks. I open it up to discussion to some confidantes around me and see what the consensus is. If everyone agrees that a certain three or four songs are the best then I take that into consideration when I come up with the final sequence. This time around I have some people at Interscope that I trust and who I think are good at their job, which is to get singles played on the radio. This is stuff that I just don’t care about because I don’t listen to radio. So I say to them, ‘What is going to make your life easier?’ I look at that more as marketing.
“When it comes to videos, well, they’re a pain in the ass because I can’t do them myself. What you fall into as a band with the resources to hire a director is drawing from this shortlist of arty, good directors, and it’s not hard to work out who they are. You kind of rely on them to have a clever idea. It’s weird, you work your ass off to get your song sounding great and then you rely on a young director who is trying to get a movie career off the ground to present your song. The last one we did with David Fincher [The video was for ‘Only’, Fincher is the director of Se7en and Fight Club] whose work I greatly admire. Looking at that video now, it’s mostly computer generated. I’m pleased with the result but it is more like marketing than art.”

Name three people who got clean and still make good music and name three people who got clean and no longer make good music.
Reznor: “It would be hard for me to do that because I haven’t really kept tabs on who is… Well, I know what she’s driving at. I think I can only answer it from my perspective. It seems pretty clear to me that the role of drugs and alcohol in my life is not a creative one. It wasn’t like I was thinking, ‘I need an idea so I need to get fucked up.’ I’m not saying ideas didn’t come from me being in that state and the places it can take you but generally my reason for getting high was that it made me feel better about myself. It was to help me get through the day or to help me to go on stage or to help me get through an interview or just to get up in the morning. It very definitely hindered my ability to create for the last few years that I was using. I wasn’t able to think. I have heard people say that heroin is inspiring but I don’t know – that wasn’t my thing. I can tell you that alcohol and cocaine don’t lead to great song writing.”

Do you know how pedantic, condescending, combative and generally unwelcoming your fans are on NIN message boards?
Reznor: “I have noticed that, yes! [starts laughing] I actually had to make a deal with myself to stay off the goddamn internet for a while because I was on a quest to not feel shitty about myself. For example, when I was embroiled in a law suit with my ex-manager [John Malm] – who was my best friend for a long time – I found myself envisioning me beating the shit out of him. I was getting really pissed off and no good came of it; there was no rational thought and there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t change the situation. I chose after a while to say, I’ve got competent people around me who can handle things like this. Just let me know when I need to know something. I couldn’t believe how much better I felt on a day to day basis. This [principle] really applies to the internet. Getting wound up about 12-year-old kids writing behind the ‘armour’ of being anonymous on the internet and talking shit about you… it’s like, ‘Go fuck yourselves guys!’”

Why do so many of your collaborations not bear fruit?
Reznor: “Good question. There’s a different answer for all of them, probably. With Rob Halford [Tapeworm], I liked what he did on that record, but I wasn’t really involved other than I liked the project. I think he just got cold feet. He’d gone back to Judas Priest and no longer cared to stand behind [the project]. It’s his call and I don’t blame him. With Zack de la Rocha, we made some great music together but he just wasn’t ready to put out a record. With Maynard James Keenan we both half heartedly kicked into this thing under the false impression that it was democracy and the end result was mediocrity. I wasn’t going to put out a record that was half baked. Because that’s what the music we made was, it was half baked.”

You’ve talked about NIN going in and out of fashion. Having just about sold out every gig on the tour, would you say you were cool again?
Reznor: “It’s hard for me to be the judge of that. I would hope that we’re not looked at as a relic. I’m just trying my best to do what we do.”

I travelled to Germany to see you in Oberhausen at the Area 4 Festival. As you played ‘Starfuckers Inc.’ you started talking to the crowd, but I couldn’t hear what you said. It seemed to be something about sausages but me and my sister just couldn’t make it out.
Reznor: “Somehow God was speaking through me in a trance like state [starts laughing]. Germany has been a rough place for us because of the spectre of Rammstein and their flame throwers. We were playing our asses off and it was one of the mildest, meekest audiences ever. When we get to ‘Starfuckers’ sometimes people joined in the chant but [at the festival the questioner refers to] it was like being in a library. I think I said, ‘Shhh! Quiet! Keep it down! All your little tummies are filled with sausages!’”

What attracted you to Courtney Love?
Reznor: “Nothing ever attracted me to Courtney Love. Do you know, in fact I don’t even want to say that name.”
Hammer: Were you aware that when she first started going out with Kurt Cobain, Julian Cope [80s pop star and former Love lover] took out a full page advert in the NME saying ‘Free Us From Nancy Spungen-Fixated Heroin A-Holes Who Cling To Our Greatest Rock Groups And Suck Out Their Brains’?
Reznor: “[Laughing] Excellent! I vaguely heard something about that.”

Read what the metal community have to say about the Nine Inch Nails hiatus here.