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Steve Albini was a button-pushing musician of uncompromising brilliance

The alt-rock producer and music legend leaves behind a legacy of controversial provocation but uniquely daring music

For most of his musical career – and apparently for years before it – he cut a wilfully confrontational, provocative and polarising figure: as Michael Azerrad noted in his peerless history of American post-punk alternative rock, Our Band Could Be Your Life, a lot of what Albini did “implicitly screamed ‘hate me, please!’” There were the spectacularly abusive columns he wrote for fanzines in his adopted home town of Chicago, the subject matter of the songs by his band Big Black, and even the way their records were packaged (Albini stuffed razor blades and fish-hooks into the sleeve of their debut EP Lungs; 1987’s Headache featured a cover photograph of a shotgun suicide victim whose head had split in half). On the other hand, post-Nirvana, he became a kind of go-to guy for big artists wishing to demonstrate a certain edginess and conversance with underground cool or wanting to cock a snook at their major label paymasters: he worked with Jimmy Page and Robert Plant – one suspects at the latter’s behest – on 1998’s Walking into Clarksdale, and with the grunge-lite band Bush. Along the way, he worked with a succession of acclaimed alt-rock luminaries – Low, Mogwai, Plush, Will Oldham, Nina Nastasia, the Manic Street Preachers, Joanna Newsom – as well as a couple of his formative influences: the reformed Stooges and Cheap Trick, whose He’s a Whore Big Black had covered.

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