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NINE Inch Nails rocker Trent Reznor can’t wait to return for a show in Scotland this month because he expects the fans in Glasgow to be as hard as nails.

Trent is bringing NIN to play a show at Glasgow’s SSE Hydro on May 20, one of just six UK dates for the band.

And he hasn’t forgotten an early show that sparked into violence.

Trent said: “You know what I remember most of all is playing in a dingy low-ceilinged club and my security guy, who was an a**hole, got the sh** beaten out of him by some other, bigger roughnecks.

“Any stereotype of a violent and rough bar fight in Scotland came to life.

“That was pretty breathtaking.

“So I’m look forward to playing there.”

Trent’s Glasgow gig is taking place almost five years after what many considered to be a farewell show at T in the Park.

Relaxing at the home he shares in Los Angeles with his wife, Mariqueen Maandig and their two young sons, Trent said: “I was thinking that same thing actually.

“Around that time in my life I just felt ‘I've done this, I know how to do this, it doesn’t feel broken, but at the same time the list of creative things I’d like to do is growing and I never get to them because I’m constantly in a Nine Inch Nails tour schedule’.

“It was starting to get comfortable and routine for me. And I feared that.”

While many of today’s corporate rockers would have carried on regardless, Trent put Nine Inch Nails on ice – it may have been the best decision of his career.

He got married to Mariqueen in 2009 and had two sons called Lazarus Echo and Balthazar, now two and three respectively.

He also formed the band How to Destroy Angels with Mariqueen and Atticus Ross.

Ross and he collaborated on the soundtrack to David Fincher’s 2010 film The Social Network, which won the pair a Golden Globe and an Oscar for Best Original Score.

They also won a Grammy last year for the soundtrack to Fincher’s American adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

“I jumped into some avenues that were unexpected,” Trent said.

“I got involved in the films, had a family and I started a new band throughout that process and it sparked creativity and I felt inspired by working with David Fincher.

“The reinvention of working with people really ignited me.”

Soon he was ready to return to Nine Inch Nails, leading to the release of last year’s Hesitation Marks album.

“I started wondering what it would feel like to write some Nine Inch Nails material,” Trent said.

“So I tried a couple of things with no expectations or pressure that lead to the Hesitation Marks album.

“Someone asked me if I wanted to tour.

“I thought about it and did a bit of rehearsing.

“It felt fresh and it felt interesting and I thought I could do something that warranted doing – not for nostalgia purposes, but to push ahead and try new things.”

His artistic integrity is a rare commodity in today’s music business and he agrees.

“Having seen a lot of bands on the current festival runs that we are on, I would agree with that,” Trent said.

“When you see a lot more excitement generated from the dance tent, I do think a staleness has permeated [rock music].

“A pretty conservative nature has crept into music and I don’t mean sonically.

“I get the sense that a lot of bands today are designing themselves to get a good review in the hip blogs and that is probably the safest and most cowardly thing you can do as an artist.

“If you have something to say, then say it. Express yourself and break the rules.”

He added: “What I try to straddle is paying attention to what is happening in the outside world to some degree and at the same time becoming insular and really trusting my own voice and my own sense of what is right and appropriate.

“I don’t hear tons of that going on right now.

“I’m saying this as an old guy.

“You start to morph into the guy you railed against when you were younger.

“But I’m being true to who I am now.

“I have thought about the nostalgia aspect of Nine Inch Nails, because I am not completely objective.

“I’m me and I’m seeing life through my eyes.

“But it’s sometimes hard for me to see how others see me.

“What I don’t want to realise tomorrow is that I have been this clown pretending to be someone half his age and thinking, 'how did that happen?'

“I try to be mindful to keep myself in a place that feels artistically uncomfortable, unsure and makes me think and shoots me into some place new rather than resting on past achievements.”

This from a man who spiralled into the abyss after his second album, The Downward Spiral, took off in 1994.

The album had been recorded in the mansion where film director Roman Polanski’s actress wife Sharon Tate was murdered, but the commercial success only led at the time to what he described as an unending bottomless pit of rage and self-loathing.

“I don’t feel like I’m the same person I was when I was 26 or 27, but I know who that guy was,” Trent, now 48, said.

“He felt like he didn’t fit into any situation.

“Getting a record deal and being able to scrape out a living in a band, touring around the country, didn’t make everything OK.

“Travelling from show to show, in a city I’d never been to with songs I wrote in a bedroom didn’t fix me.

“But writing Downward Spiral was taking that to an extreme.

“Some of it became fantasy to the brink of caricature.

“I felt it was a way to get it out of my system, to cathartically get it off my chest. -

“Unfortunately, the story I wrote on that album came true after that.

“That was who I was at that time and I was deeply in that headspace.

“It felt like a way to exorcise that out of my soul.

“Unfortunately, in the search for salvation I bottomed out and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Having turned his life around, he now enjoys being a dad, an industrial rock icon and a composer – he recently scored Fincher’s adaptation of the best-selling novel Gone Girl.

But since he settled on his boys’ names ahead of the births, Trent admits he would have had one more battle on his hands – with his in-laws – if he’d had a daughter.

“With those names, the boys are going to have to learn how to fight,” Trent laughed.

“The in-laws are fine with it.

“The children were going to be stuck with those names regardless.

“But if there was a female, we were going to have a punch-up for sure.”

I ask if fatherhood has changed him and Trent softens.

“It’s been a profound change as a human being and one I think I was ready for.

“Looking back, and I was thinking about this as you asked me about Downward Spiral, a lot of what I see today are new musicians who feel like their lives have been designed to be entertainers.

“They went to the right performing arts school. They are already entertainment career-type people.

“That’s not who I was.

“I wasn’t equipped for life, let alone any element of fame.

“When I got any reward, or success, or fame, or anything, it made it worse, because I didn’t know how to interact with people.

“It led me down the solutions, that I chose, of drugs and alcohol and self-hatred eventually.

“Emerging through that, because I think life

is a process, hopefully of learning, I look back and wish I could have saved some time and have condensed that five years into a couple of months.

“But it lead me to a place where I feel pretty good about myself now.

“Entering into fatherhood profoundly changed me in a sense.

“It’s another piece of the puzzle but it’s not all about me and it’s OK that it’s not all about me.

“That’s what I never understood when I was a younger musician.

“I felt like maturity, or any lessening of rage, was about surrender, giving up and settling.

“But it’s not that.

“That’s the kind of thing that, when an older person tells you, the younger person rolls

their eyes.

“As I’ve done and as I imagine the readers are doing right now.

“But that’s just the process I’m discovering.

“I look into my kids' eyes and I know what my job is.

“Hopefully, guiding these two little guys into being great people.

“It’s far above performing onstage with Nine Inch Nails.”