The voice that walked out of the machine. Connelly sang on some of the loudest records Wax Trax! ever pressed, then spent thirty years proving he was a crooner all along.
The Edinburgh start matters, because it explains the exit. Connelly grew up on Bowie, Roxy Music and T. Rex before punk arrived, and his first band, Rigor Mortis, was a teenage punk outfit that mutated into Finitribe, a group whose spoken-word samples and raw synthesisers pointed it toward the same territory Wax Trax! was mapping in Chicago. The meeting that changed his course is almost too neat to be true but is well documented: carrying a Finitribe tape to the label's London office, Connelly ran into Jourgensen and the Revolting Cocks circle, cut a demo that afternoon, and changed course. By 1988 he had left Finitribe and moved to the United States.
What followed placed him at the centre of the American industrial scene at its commercial peak. As a lead voice of the Revolting Cocks he co-wrote and fronted the band through Beers, Steers & Queers (1990) and beyond, and as a contributing vocalist he appears on the two Ministry albums that carried the genre furthest into the mainstream, The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste and Psalm 69. He was, at the same time, part of the looser experimental circus of Pigface, the rotating collective run by former Public Image drummer Martin Atkins on his Invisible label, which brought him alongside Geordie Walker of Killing Joke and a long list of others.
Then the turn. In 1991 Wax Trax! released Whiplash Boychild, a solo debut that sounded like nothing the label had issued: avant-garde song structures, glam phrasing, and a debt to Scott Walker and Bowie that owed nothing to the chain-link-fence aggression audiences expected from the dreadlocked RevCo frontman. The follow-up, Phenobarb Bambalam (1992), was darker and more introspective, with Atkins involved; Shipwreck (1994) reached back to his early love of glam. As Wax Trax! collapsed into its Chicago parent and then faded, Connelly kept working, guesting on KMFDM's XTORT in 1996 and recording a stark a cappella reading of Wire's A Mutual Friend for a covers compilation.
The distinction the industrial world was slow to grant him is that he was never only a screamer. The solo catalogue, which now runs to dozens of records, is the work of a songwriter in the tradition of Cohen, Cave and the later Scott Walker, and it is where his range actually lives. He has returned to his sources directly, recording an album of Throbbing Gristle interpretations, and has set the geography of his childhood to music on records like Pentland Firth Howl and New Town Nocturnes. In 2008 he published Concrete, Bulletproof, Invisible and Fried, a memoir of the Revolting Cocks years that remains one of the better first-hand accounts of what the Wax Trax! touring machine was actually like from inside it.
Connelly settled in Chicago, worked for years at Reckless Records, and has stayed active without interruption, moving between solo albums, collaborations such as The Joy Thieves, and published writing. He is a useful figure to file precisely because he complicates the category: an industrial-rock name whose own music keeps insisting it is something else, and whose career traces the arc of Wax Trax! itself, from the London office to the long afterlife.