Martin Clive Atkins is the post-punk-to-industrial drummer of the Bureau's catalogue and the connecting figure across the lines through which late-1970s post-punk mutated into the 1980s-1990s industrial release. The drumming runs through a portion of the period's canon: the rhythmic infrastructure of Metal Box alone placed Atkins at the centre of one of the most-influential records of the late 20th century; the simultaneous presence on the Killing Joke Extremities, Dirt, and Other Repressed Emotions catalogue and the Ministry The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste tour and the Nine Inch Nails Wish Grammy session connects three of the primary working positions through which industrial music achieved its 1990s mainstream visibility. The Bureau files Atkins at Tier I on the depth of the session and member catalogue, the foundational role in Pigface (one of the period's most-developed open-membership-collective projects), the Invisible Records 350+ album catalogue, and the Chicago museum that has later become the period's archival institution outside the records.
Atkins was born in Coventry in 1959 and has consistently described himself as a working drummer from the age of nine. The pre-PiL biography is the catalogue's least-documented section but is the technical foundation the later PiL audition relied on: a decade of working drummer experience in Coventry / English bands across the early-to-mid 1970s. The PiL audition story is among the better-circulated pieces of Atkins biographical material and one the Bureau holds as representative of his later method. Public Image Ltd, John Lydon's post-Sex Pistols band, had been losing drummers at a rate that left the project effectively unrecorded; Atkins called Virgin Records every time PiL lost a drummer, across eighteen months of what later interviews have framed as near-obsessive persistence. He was the band's sixth drummer in eighteen months when the audition came through. The audition was, characteristically for the period, the studio recording of the track Bad Baby, which later appeared on the Metal Box album.
The PiL period is the catalogue's historical foundation. Atkins had three separate stints with the band across 1979–1985 and contributed to Metal Box (the rhythmic-and-dub infrastructure that later became one of the most-influential post-punk records), Flowers of Romance (1981), Commercial Zone (the 1984 bootleg with eight alternate tracks from the This Is What You Want... era) and This Is What You Want... This Is What You Get (1984); his first live show with the band was recorded and released as the live album Paris au Printemps (1980), captured at the Palace, Paris, on 17-18 January 1980. Period and later fan / critical consensus consistently regards Atkins as PiL's best-known and best-period drummer; the foundation of this assessment is the rhythmic infrastructure of Metal Box, which provided the dub-influenced post-punk groove that the album's later reputation was built on. The intermediate period of Brian Brain (Atkins' own project, run alongside with the PiL stints) included a single that entered the alternative charts during the PiL US tour and a later 1985 EP recorded at Planet Sound Studios New York for Atkins' own short-lived Plaid Records label.
The 1985–1990 period is the catalogue's second major working window and the one that produced the Pigface infrastructure. Atkins left PiL for the last time in 1985 after the world tour; the immediate post-PiL period included the revived Brian Brain EP and a documented financial low-point during which Atkins worked as a landscaper before founding Invisible Records in Chicago in 1988 with wife Leila Eminson. The 1989–1990 Ministry tour is the catalogue's geographic turn point: Atkins toured with Ministry on The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste programme as dual drummer with Bill Rieflin (captured on the live album / video In Case You Didn't Feel Like Showing Up) and relocated permanently to Chicago in the wake of the tour. The Killing Joke position followed almost immediately: Atkins joined as drummer for the 1990 Extremities, Dirt, and Other Repressed Emotions album, managed the band during the same period, and designed the live-show scenery and some merchandise. The Nine Inch Nails session work the same period included drumming on the Grammy-winning Wish (the track from the 1992 Broken EP) and an appearance in the Head Like a Hole video. The 1989–1992 cluster of working positions, all running concurrently, is the catalogue's most significant working window and the foundation of Atkins' reputation as the most-connected drummer of the post-punk-to-industrial release.
Pigface is the catalogue's sustained project. Atkins founded Pigface in 1990 during the Ministry tour as an open-membership industrial supergroup / collective: rotating-door membership rather than fixed line-ups; rehearsals optional; anyone in the touring circle could walk onstage for a single show or session. The founding small group was Atkins, Bill Rieflin (Ministry), William Tucker, Nivek Ogre (Skinny Puppy), Chris Connelly (Revolting Cocks / Ministry), and En Esch (KMFDM); Steve Albini engineered the début album Gub (1991), recorded in less than a week. Over thirty rotating-door musicians have performed across the Pigface catalogue, including Trent Reznor, Genesis P-Orridge, Jim Thirlwell, Lydia Lunch, Lesley Rankine, David Yow (Jesus Lizard), Paul Raven, Mary Byker, and members of Silverfish, Front Line Assembly, Devo and GWAR. Atkins' own framing of the working principle, repeated across the later interview record, is "not giving a fuck" about line-up consistency: the project would integrate any willing collaborator from the touring circle for any specific show or session, and the resulting catalogue would document whatever the rotating-door working unit produced.
The Pigface recorded catalogue is anchored by Gub (Invisible, 1991), Welcome to Mexico... Asshole (the 1991 live album assembled from DAT recordings of the first tour), Fook (1992), Notes from Thee Underground (1994) and Washingmachine Mouth (1994). The later Pigface releases include A New High in Low (1997), Easy Listening and Truth Will Out; the project has continued through to 2026 with sporadic releases, sporadic live performances, and a 35th-anniversary milestone in 2025. The Bureau notes Pigface as one of the post-1976 release's most-developed examples of the open-membership rotating-door supergroup format and the structural parallel (in working principle, although not in stylistic vein) to the TAGC open-membership collective the Adi Newton catalogue documents. The two projects produced substantively different outputs (Pigface as live-spectacle / record-cycle industrial rock; TAGC as multimedia-installation / psychoacoustic research), but both adopted the position that fixed line-ups are not required for sustained catalogue production under continuous operator control.
The Atkins catalogue includes The Damage Manual (1999–2000, the short-lived "supergroup" with Jah Wobble, Geordie Walker and Chris Connelly that ended acrimoniously over Atkins' proposed US-tour schedule and album mixing), Murder Inc (with Walker, Paul Raven and Connelly), Rx (the Atkins-produced collaborative project with Nivek Ogre that produced the 1998 Bedside Toxicology album), and Opium Jukebox (2000–2002, four albums of instrumental cover tunes performed in Bhangra style; the catalogue's most-divergent stylistic idiom). The 2006 Beijing relocation programme produced a Invisible-roster signing of Chinese bands and recording material for a later Pigface album, and remains the catalogue's most significant non-Western recording programme.
Invisible Records, founded 1988 in Chicago by Atkins with wife Leila Eminson, is the catalogue's most significant contribution outside the drum chair. The label has released 350+ albums across the Pigface, Damage Manual, Murder Inc, Opium Jukebox, Rx and Brian Brain catalogues plus signings including Sheep on Drugs, Test Dept, Chemlab, Meg Lee Chin, Sister Machine Gun and KMFDM affiliates. The label has placed material across the Miami Vice 1980s reissue, Showtime's Queer as Folk, and Robert Altman's The Company film score. Mattress Factory Studios (Chicago, 1996 onward) is the recording infrastructure for the Invisible catalogue and the Pigface continuation; the studio also operated as a working space for Chicago industrial-cluster catalogue including Ministry adjacencies, Skinny Puppy session work and the Damage Manual recordings. The Atkins-related industrial-cluster infrastructure (Invisible + Mattress Factory + the Pigface rotating-door network + the Underground Inc affiliated-label group) constitutes one of the more single-operator post-1988 industrial-music positions in this archive.
The 2007 onward teaching and pedagogy programme is the catalogue's third major position. Atkins published Tour:Smart in 2007, the music-business-pedagogy book of the catalogue, and later taught at Columbia College Chicago (The Business of Touring), Madison Media Institute, Lebanon Valley College, SAE Chicago (former department chair for a music-business programme he designed there), and the University of Southern California. Later the current position as music-industry studies coordinator at Millikin University, Decatur, Illinois. The 2021 opening of the Museum of Post Punk and Industrial Music in Chicago documents the history of both genres with 3,000+ items and ephemera, including Trent Reznor's handwritten lyrics for Pigface, Atkins' own drum set, vintage Skinny Puppy rarities, and a Chicago post-1980 industrial / post-punk material catalogue. The museum is the monument the Atkins position has produced outside the records, and the catalogue's most-archival institution.