Rip It Up and Start Again

by Simon Reynolds

  Founded in September 1975, Throbbing Gristle threw themselves into the project of conceptualization and sonic research. During the week, Carter, a technical whiz, built speakers, effects units, and synthesizer modules. He cobbled together a unique gizmo for Sleazy to play. Nicknamed the Gristle-izer, it was a sort of musique concrète mechanism or primitive sampler. Its one-octave keyboard triggered an array of cassette machines, each loaded with found sounds ranging from TV and movie dialogue to everyday conversations surreptitiously recorded by a roving Sleazy. The group’s own vocals were heavily processed, with Carter feeding them through a chorus echo that allowed him to speed them up and slow them down, or make them sound slimy or wobbly. Carter also adapted the conventional instruments like the bass and guitar, feeding them through relays of multiple effects. All of these treatments transformed the guitar and bass into sound-synthesizing machines. Unlike with proper synthesizers, though, extracting noise from the guitar and bass involved an element of hands-on physicality, and this gave TG’s sound a uniquely pummeled and percussive feel.

  It seems no coincidence that TG formed in 1975, the same year that Lou Reed released the infamous Metal Machine Music. But where Reed talked of his intricate tapestries of white noise as a form of modern classical composition, TG’s approach was more “rock,” in the literal sense of wanting to rock the listener to the core. Their quest was to create a total-body experience, immersive and assaultive. They jettisoned songs, melody, and groove in favor of the overwhelming physical force of sound itself. “People think music’s just for the ears, they forget it goes into every surface of the body, the pores, the cells, it affects the blood vessels,” P-Orridge argued. The group’s interest in “metabolic music” led them to investigate military research into the use of infrasound as a nonlethal weapon, where certain frequencies trigger vomiting, epileptic seizures, and even involuntary defecation. TG’s own basement became a “chaotic research lab,” with P-Orridge and Carter exploring the perceptual and physical effects of high and low frequencies, distortion, and extreme volume, using themselves as guinea pigs. P-Orridge recalled, “We had moments when we had tunnel vision, couldn’t walk or stand up straight and so on from certain frequencies we hit.”

  The whole band was very much an experiment, a conceptual exercise in seeing if they could be accepted as a rock band while pushing rock’s boundaries of form and content to the absolute limits. In one interview, P-Orridge recalled the steps in the band’s initial conceptualization process. “Let’s give it a really inappropriate name [‘throbbing gristle’ being Yorkshire slang for an erect penis]. Let’s not have a drummer because rock bands have drummers. Let’s not learn how to play music. Let’s put in a lot of content—in terms of the words and the ideas. So normally a band would be music, skill, style and all those other things. We threw away all the usual parameters for a band and said, ‘Let’s have content, authenticity and energy. Let’s refuse to look like or play like anything that’s acceptable as a band and see what happens.’”

  Throbbing Gristle’s official public launch took place in October 1976 at the opening party for Prostitution, a COUM exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts that the group saw as their swan song. COUM’s last gasp turned out to be their finest hour, at least in terms of media attention. Located in the heart of London—a short stroll from Buckingham Palace, the House of Commons, and the National Gallery—the ICA represented a threshold, the place where art’s radical fringe collided with high culture. The centerpiece of Prostitution was photo documentation of Tutti’s work as a model in some forty porn magazines. This, plus the exhibition of used tampons, made Prostitution a perfect flash point for growing public concern about the subsidized avant-garde, what the Arts Council was supporting with taxpayers’ money at a time of recession and public-spending cuts. Conservative politician Nicholas Fairbairn denounced Prostitution as “a sickening outrage…. Public money is being wasted here to destroy the morality of our society. These people are wreckers of civilization!” Taken aback, COUM found themselves Public Enemy Number One in the newspapers, the subject of apoplectic headlines and smear stories in the tabloids and a symbol for declining standards in the more sober newspapers. The furor even reached the House of Commons, where questions were raised by members of Parliament.

  The Prostitution controversy rivaled the media panic about the Sex Pistols’ swearing on TV some months later. Some soon-to-be-famous punks attended Throbbing Gristle’s ICA gig, but P-Orridge and crew were skeptical about punk’s credentials as radical music. To them, punk was too rock, too musical in fact. P-Orridge believed that Sniffin’ Glue’s exhortation “Here’s three chords, now start a band” conceded far too much to traditional musicality. “It starts with chords. They’re saying, ‘Be like everyone else, you gotta learn to play.’ You can start with no chords. Why not just say, ‘Form a band and it doesn’t matter what it sounds like or whether you even make a noise, if you just stand there silent for an hour, just do what you want’?” TG, he underlined frequently, was “anti-music.” During one gig in early 1977, P-Orridge poured scorn on the jeering punks in the audience: “You can’t have anarchy and have music.” During the cacophonous performance, Tutti bared her breasts and Genesis poured fake blood over his head. He then invited half a dozen members of the audience onstage and handed them instruments.

  P-Orridge believed that “you should approach any instrument the way a child will.” He picked the bass because it was the instrument he was least qualified to play. Tutti, likewise, chose the guitar because it was the one she was least attracted to. She never learned to play chords, but used a slide to generate hair-raising glissandi or just bashed the strings, using the guitar as a rhythm instrument and—via a battery of effects—a source of abstract noise.

  Apart from the rhythm tracks built by Chris Carter, TG songs were written live, in the studio or onstage, with only the vaguest musical guidelines discussed in advance. P-Orridge generally improvised his words after briefly consulting the band about possible lyrical topics. The song “Persuasion,” for instance, was composed during a gig at Notting Hill’s squat venue Centro Iberico. Just before going onstage, P-Orridge asked Christopherson what he should sing about today and received the reply “persuasion,” one of Sleazy’s obsessions being how people are cajoled into doing (sexual) things against their will. P-Orridge ad-libbed lyrics about a guy pressuring his spouse to be photographed for the “Reader’s Wives” section of a porn mag.

  There were upsides and downsides to TG’s fixation on spontaneous composition/combustion. A practice continued from their performance art days, TG exhaustively documented every show and eventually released all of them. Listening to these live recordings, you encounter passages of astonishing intensity—molten, distended sound-shapes like solar gas festooning off the surface of a star, strafing streaks and zaps from some audio battle zone. But inevitably TG developed an arsenal of riffs and tricks—gouging bass blasts, pounding surges, upward-careening arcs—as predictable as any musical language. As with free jazz and improv, for all the commotion and turmoil, the palette of sound colors could start to feel somewhat samey.

  Sixties free-music outfits like AMM, a Zen-influenced British group that reputedly inspired Pink Floyd, were implicitly spiritual, yearning to recover the lost “totality.” Stripped of romanticism, TG’s music simulated the soul-destroying rhythms of Fordist mass production. Carter compared the group to a “sound assembly line.” TG named their label Industrial Records. The word “industrial” signaled the production-line quality of the way they churned out noise. “Records” had a dual meaning, signifying not just LPs and singles but the idea of files and documents. TG saw their releases as a series of dispassionate reports on “the savage realities of fading capitalism.”

  P-Orridge also saw TG as a form of science fiction. “We’re writing about the future by looking at today,” he proclaimed. Although P-Orridge cut off his hair in 1977 as a symbolic act of severance with the hippie era, the “classic” TG
of “Slug Bait” and “Hamburger Lady” actually sounds a bit like a corroded, ailing Tangerine Dream, cosmic rock for a universe in its winding-down phase. TG also made some pure, unabashed space music, such as “After Cease to Exist,” which took up the whole second side of their debut album, Second Annual Report, with its diffuse wafts of wavery-toned, early Floyd/Syd Barrett guitar.

  During the late seventies, the East London borough of Hackney, where TG lived and worked, was one of the most deprived inner-city areas in the U.K., with bad housing, rising unemployment, and endemic street crime. It was a fertile environment for the neofascist National Front, who maintained a strong presence throughout much of East London. This backdrop of resurgent fascism added an edge to Throbbing Gristle’s ambiguous fascination with Nazism. Calling their studio the Death Factory was partly a nod to nearby London Fields, where victims of the plague had been buried, but its more obvious evocation was the concentration camps. Industrial Records’s logo was a deceptively benign-looking leafy lane with what looked like a factory at the end of it. In fact, it was a photo of Auschwitz taken by P-Orridge during a trip to visit friends in Poland. Holocaust imagery featured on the covers of the singles “Subhuman” (a towering mound of human skulls) and “Distant Dreams (Part Two)” (walking frames taken from the elderly and infirm before they were shunted into the death chamber). Genesis P-Orridge explained this morbid obsession in an NME interview, arguing that TG’s slogan “Music from the Death Factory” was “a metaphor for society and the way life is. Everybody lives in their own concentration camp. What we’re saying is, be careful, because it’s not far from one to the other.” Yet even as they made wildly melodramatic and tasteless generalizations, Throbbing Gristle also flirted with fascist imagery. The group’s logo was based on the “England Awake” lightning flash insignia of Sir Oswald Mosely’s British Union of Fascists.

  TG constantly teetered on the edge between an anguished awareness of horror and an unwholesome obsession—bordering on identification—with evil. This ambiguity was most pronounced in the group’s use of pedophile imagery. “Very Friendly,” one of TG’s first songs, concerns the midsixties exploits of Manchester’s Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the infamous “Moors Murderers” who sexually tortured and murdered children (although P-Orridge’s lyrics in this song focus on the killing of a homosexual young man). D.o.A: The Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle, their second album, was covered in dubious imagery of prepubescent girls, including an inset photograph of a blond-haired girl reclining on a fur rug with her underwear showing. On the single “We Hate You (Little Girls),” P-Orridge practically foams at the mouth about loathing “your little curls…and your little breasts.” P-Orridge saw his lyrics as a continuation of the way the Velvet Underground had expanded rock songwriting to take on taboo areas such as sadomasochism and heroin. Ideas of the criminal as artist and psychopathology as freedom also had a long pedigree stretching back to De Quincey, via Bataille, Dostoyevsky, and the Marquis de Sade. In Bomb Culture, his classic 1968 account of the emergence of the British counterculture, Jeff Nuttall pinpointed the Moors Murders as a pivotal moment. The demon lovers’ “beyond belief” crimes convinced many bohemians that society was going insane, while others recognized that Brady, a de Sade fan, put into gruesome practice such radical art maxims as “Take your desires for reality” and “Everything is possible and nothing is forbidden.”

  In this spirit, TG’s gigs were sadistic assaults on their audiences, not just barrages of noise, but of lighting, too (convulsive strobes, high-power halogen lamps aimed in people’s faces). Once audiences start to expect an extreme experience, though, it’s time to flip the script. TG’s first major swerve came with the single “United.” Following Second Annual Report, an ultra-lo-fi affair recorded using a Sony tape recorder, a single condenser microphone, and a home-stereo cassette, “United” was almost glossy enough to pass for pop. This disco-inspired song designed “for people to fall in love to” (according to the Industrial press release) might have been chart material if not for its slightly defective groove and P-Orridge’s dribbly vocals. “United” was the first in a series of danceable electropop tracks somewhere between Giorgio Moroder and Cabaret Voltaire, including the pulsating pornodisco of “Hot on the Heels of Love” (featuring Cosey’s breathy whisper) and the eerie, shimmering propulsion of “Adrenalin” and its flip side, “Distant Dreams (Part Two).”

  In a typical TG twist, “United” reappeared on D.o.A. sped up so fast that its four minutes were reduced to sixteen seconds of bat-squeaky treble. D.o.A. confounded expectations further. It contained archetypal TG songs like “Hamburger Lady” (a nauseous churn of whimpering, agonized sound inspired by the true story of a burn victim unrecognizably charred from the waist up) but also “solo” tracks like the Abba-meets-Kraftwerk rhapsody of Chris Carter’s “AB/7A” and P-Orridge’s unexpectedly plaintive and personal “Weeping,” made using four different types of violin. The latter is industrial music’s equivalent to Fleetwood Mac’s intraband breakup anthem “Go Your Own Way,” its inspiration being Cosey Fanny Tutti’s dumping of P-Orridge for Chris Carter. In “Weeping,” the line “you didn’t see me swallowing my tablets” refers to the heartbroken P-Orridge’s suicide attempt in November 1978, when he downed a huge quantity of antidepressants and steroid tablets before going onstage at the Cryptic One Club and woke up in intensive care.

  As the rift within TG widened, P-Orridge spent more and more time with Monte Cazazza, an extremist performance artist from San Francisco who had become a sort of unofficial fifth member of the band, and a real soul mate/mentor to P-Orridge. They’d first made contact through the mail art circuit, which involved sending people handcrafted, intricately designed works through the postal system (P-Orridge liked to mail Cazazza dead animals). Early in TG’s existence, Cazazza helped the group with conceptualization and strategy. He even coined the term “industrial music”—“sort of as a wisecrack originally, ‘industrial music for industrial people,’” Cazazza recalls. “I didn’t mean for people to take it so seriously!” The first non-TG release on Industrial Records was Cazazza’s 1979 single “To Mom on Mother’s Day.” Its flip side, “Candyman,” concerned a murderer of boys called Dean Corll who ran a candy factory in Texas.

  Cazazza spent much of 1979 in England, bolstering P-Orridge’s damaged morale. An avid reader of survivalist literature and books about weaponry, Cazazza turned TG on to military imagery. The group started wearing camouflage gear. Their April 1979 shows in Derby and Sheffield began with a sequence sampled from a U.S. Army training tape featuring the distinctive firing sounds of various high-tech weapons, such as grenade launchers, recoil-less rifles, antitank guided missiles, and the flamethrower of an armored personnel carrier. TG had always attracted a certain kind of fan that was genuinely fanatical, and P-Orridge began to see the potential for creating a quasi-paramilitary cult. Through Industrial Records’s newsletter, he invited fans to become TG agents: “Do you want to be a fully equipped Terror Guard? Ready for action? Assume Power Focus. NOTHING SHORT OF A TOTAL WAR. NUCLEAR WAR NOW! Then send for a catalogue of available weaponry and regalia, survival kits and clothes.”

  Around this time, TG embarked upon an experiment in totalitarian psychology that got a little out of hand. Hopped up on survivalist reading matter, the group turned their East London home into a fortress complete with black-painted windows, barbed wire on the garden wall, and a burglar alarm system. A ragged tribe of itinerants had set up camp in the wasteland area behind their street and a neighborhood crime wave appeared to coincide with their arrival. “The police wouldn’t do anything for us, so we just decided we had to get these people out of there,” says Cazazza. “They were sort of making our lives hell and we fought back in an interesting manner.” TG waged sound-war on the unsavory nomads, beaming infrasonic frequencies at their encampment and causing the travelers considerable distress, with symptoms ranging from headaches and anxiety to disrupted sleep patterns and nightmares. Eventually, the t
ravelers packed up their caravans and moved out, convinced the area was cursed.

  The entire episode seems like a consciously undertaken journey into the dark side of paranoid psychology, the protofascist mind-set of scapegoating and persecution. P-Orridge was fully aware that these “gypsies” (as they were popularly, if inaccurately, called by hostile townspeople throughout the U.K.) were uncomfortably close to the Romany wanderers rounded up by the Nazis and exterminated as “vermin.” Recoiling from the squalid lifestyle of the itinerants, TG nicknamed them “subhumans.” Yet two great singles emerged from this playing-with-fire phase. “Subhuman” featured a caravan image on its cover and the couplet “You make me dizzy with your disease/I want to smash you and be at ease.” The other, “Discipline,” came in two different versions. The first, recorded live at Berlin’s S036 club, effectively documents the song’s being written onstage. Given the theme of the day by Tutti a few minutes before the band went on, P-Orridge improvises a series of barked commands. Eleven minutes long, the track starts shakily, then gathers cohesion, as if undergoing the very regimentation process it proposes. The beat sounds like a jackboot moistly pulping the infirm and lowly underfoot, while gruesome shearing sounds conjure an abattoir atmosphere. The later version, recorded in Manchester, is much tighter: P-Orridge declaims, “Are you ready boys? Are you ready girls?/We need some discipline in here,” like a cross between scout leader and führer. On the single’s front cover, TG poses in front of the building that once served as the Third Reich’s Ministry of Propaganda, while the flip side features the slogan “Marching music for psychic youth.”