Relentless

What constitutes suffering for your art? Quite a few things actually, but having an axe thrown at your face is definitely one of them. It happened to Alan Vega, a man best known for laying down sinister, caricatured howls, screams and tales of American dreams over Martin Rev's repetitive, skeletal electronics as Suicide, one of the most influential bands of the last 50 years. But they're so great, then why the axe?

Suicide emerged out of the New York art scene in the 70s and released their eponymous debut album in 1977. If the music on that was hard to swallow, their live shows were even more so. Eschewing the traditional setup of drums, guitars and singer, Vega and Rev plumped for synthesisers and thunderous rhythms and were routinely booed — or forced — off stage. Let it be known, though, that if you ever need to remove Alan Vega from a stage you'll need more than an axe: he continued with that solo performance in 1985 despite the medieval weaponry narrowly missing his head.