Adrian Belew has opened up on his 1990s collaboration with Nine Inch Nails, admitting he had no idea who the band were before heading into the studio with Trent Reznor.
Alongside his work with King Crimson, the prog electric guitar great also carved out a prolific session career, working with a huge list of big-name artists from the likes of Paul Simon and David Bowie all the way to Tom Tom Club and Talking Heads.
His collaboration with Nine Inch Nails, though, is up there as one of his more adventurous partnerships. In the early 1990s, when Trent Reznor was putting together the project’s second record, The Downward Spiral, Belew was brought on board to provide guitars.
However, when he received the call, he needed to be convinced by his manager before he was fully onboard.
“I had no idea who Nine Inch Nails were. To be honest, my manager had to talk me into this one,” Belew remembers in an interview with Vulture. “He said, ‘No man, these guys are doing really well. They’ve got a big following. You should go check it out and talk to this guy named Trent Reznor.’
“I was in Los Angeles and had my gear, so there was no reason not to. I drove up to this house, and it was very strange-looking. It had a big electric fence around it and every single window was blacked out, but it looked like a farmhouse.”
Belew’s early reservations quickly evaporated, and before long he was deep in Nine Inch Nails territory. So deep, in fact, that he can’t recall the ins and outs of the sessions. He can’t even remember how long he was in the studio with Reznor.
“I went in and we started working right off the bat. I don’t even know how long I was there – they brought in food and we never left, we just kept plowing through music.
Trent wanted me to check out all of his songs and would ask, “Is there anything you’d like to do in this? Is anything inspiring you?” He was pretty quiet, but quietly intense. He had a group of guys around him, kind of like his own posse who did different things. That became The Downward Spiral. I later found out the place we were recording was the Sharon Tate house.”
The collaboration proved to be so effective that plans were mooted for Belew to join Reznor for a Nine Inch Nails tour: “I was going to go on tour with them, but Trent changed his mind, so that didn’t work out,” Belew reveals. “I think it was for the better. But I still love him.”
Belew’s resumé isn’t short of A-list collaborators. He also once worked on one of Mariah Carey’s Number One hit singles – but, as he once told Guitar World, he had no idea about the song’s success until a fan once asked him to sign a copy of the CD.
