Industrial metal pioneers Ministry have recently completed what could well be their penultimate world tour. With one final album planned for release in 2026, it’s thought the band will make one last trek around the globe before frontman Al Jourgensen hangs up the ‘ol skeleton mic stand for good. He told The LA Times earlier this year that the final Ministry record will be out “by June 2026". "Then we’ll hit the road for one last world tour," he added, "starting next September.”
Regardless of what happens next, it’s been an incredible career from Al and co., one that started back in 1981 with Ministry making gothy synth pop, before morphing into the grinding, thrashing, noisemakers that we all now know and love.
Of course, Uncle Al has cleaned up his act these days, but back in Ministry’s heyday, he was quite the unpredictable personality, not least due to his rather...er...all-encompassing relationship with substances. It was something that led to pure turmoil during their mainstream breakthrough years of the 1990s, crystallised by one infamous night in Nottingham in 1996, when a heroin-hungry Al’s no-show nearly caused a riot at one of the UK’s most prestigious rock venues.
Having found themselves the most unlikely of crossover success stories in the aftermath of 1992’s platinum-certified Psalm 69 album, Ministry were hot shit; the album reached the top 30 of the US and UK charts, they'd bagged headlining slots at the travelling Lollapalooza festival and heavy MTV rotation for their singles Jesus Built My Hotrod and N.W.O. Jourgensen found himself positioned as another hero for the alternative generation. Basically, it was going well.
Except Al’s drug use was totally uncontrollable: on August 29, 1995, he was arrested for heroin possession, let out on a $70,000 bail and was eventually given a five-year probation sentence.
“We were just junkies,” Al told Metal Hammer in 2024 of that period. “We didn’t really enjoy our success. We were just waiting for our dealer to turn up at the studio. We ‘made it’, but we were completely falling apart as a band.”
The result of this disarray was the bands sixth studio album, 1996’s Filth Pig. Despite it being, hilariously, their highest-charting album in the US, peaking at number 19, this was a slower, noisier, heavier, sludgier effort, utterly bereft of hooks, melodies or anything even remotely capable of crossover success. It was almost immediately rejected by their fans.
"Everyone hated Filth Pig,” Jourgensen said in the 2013 book The Lost Gospels According to Al Jourgensen. “They all wanted Psalm 70, and I gave them an electronic-free record full of gun-in-mouth dirges of nothing but pain. Aside from the cover art, the humour was gone. All that was left was misery.”
If the fans' reaction to the album wasn't bad enough, even the band themselves dreaded going out and having to play those songs live.
“I still had to tour the fucking thing,” Al added. “Which went down in history as the interminable, intolerable, absolutely depraved Sphinctour.
Throughout 1996, Ministry toured the album, becoming more unreliable and more miserable the longer the tour went on. Having been on the road since March, the band turned up on UK soil in July to do two dates, at London’s Brixton Academy and Nottingham's Rock City. It was on the second night that things really kicked off.
The rumour was that Jourgensen, now completely hooked on heroin, had refused to go onstage until he had got his fix. This proved to be something of a problem for his crew to obtain, and so Ministry’s fans waited and waited...and waited some more. In a packed venue, during a summer heatwave.
As the story goes, sometime after midnight, the restless crowd got so pissed off that they started taking their frustration out on the venue.
“It’s 100% true!” Al told Hammer in 2018. “I don’t think the venue was ever the same after that, the kids got pretty pissed off. I remember walking through the building having just done a shot, so I was good and high. I walked into a scene of the crowd coordinating an effort to rip the bar off the floor – they were literally ripping the whole place down. The bar was later used as a battering ram to storm the stage.”
An overreaction? Well, considering that it was 2am by the time Al’s people found him his hit, maybe those present had a right to be a bit miffed.
“I believe we went on when everything in the city, maybe the country, had shut down," he recalled.
Ministry did manage it make it onstage alive and were able to perform a 13-song set, which culminated in a cover of Black Sabbath’s Supernaut. “It was certainly one of the top five rowdiest crowds we’ve ever had," Al insisted.
If that only just breaks the top five, you’ve got to wonder where the other four were. San Quentin? Did they play Millwall vs. West Ham game?! Still, Al was good enough to accept that the near-disaster was all his doing...sort of.
“It was definitely my fault. My bad, I’ll take the rap!” he conceded to Hammer. Then, he changed his tuned. “Actually, you know what, it wasn’t my fault! My dealer should have been there. It was his fault, as a matter of fact But that was rock in the 90s.”
Well, whoever’s fault it was, make sure you take the chance to see a clean, sober and reliable Ministry on their final tour. Just don’t feel the need to get there super early.
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