[kj] OT: Throbbing Gristle

[nicholas fitzpatrick]

As there was a lot of talk about these on here recently I cut and pasted 
this. It's from The Guardian in 1999. Good to see a reference to the Leather 
Nun in there!


>>>1999 Guardian Newspapers Limited
The Guardian (London)

March 12, 1999
HEADLINE: Uneasy listening;
They were unspeakable, unlistenable and had daft names. But they were one of 
the most influential British cult bands ever. Simon Ford reassesses 
Throbbing Gristle

BYLINE: SIMON FORD

Throbbing Gristle are the cult band to beat all cult bands. With their 
stupid name, often unlistenable records, unmentionable acts, and fast and 
short life, the group broke every rule in the rock industry book. The late 
Tory MP, Nicholas Fairbairn, called them 'The Wreckers of Civilisation'.

Today, much of the fascination with TG lies in their status as a precedent 
for today's 'culturepreneurs', those artists that work in a variety of media 
and business environments. TG were more than a rock group, they pioneered a 
new paradigm in cultural engineering that involved art, fashion, music and 
economics.

It all started back in 1969 in Hull when Genesis P-Orridge (born Neil 
Megson) founded COUM Transmissions just after dropping out of university. 
COUM (pronounced 'coom' or 'come') was a band - of various size and 
personnel - that played improvised and chaotic sets in the clubs, pubs and 
streets of Hull. P-Orridge summed up COUM's early musical philosophy with 
the slogan 'The future of music lies in non-musicians.' One of those 
non-musicians was P -Orridge's partner at the time, Cosey Fanni Tutti (born 
Christine Newby).

Gradually COUM's musical performances became increasingly theatrical and 
they began to apply for grants from the Arts Council as performance artists 
rather than musicians. The main influence on COUM's work at this time came 
from the Fluxus artists who in the 1960s set out to ridicule the privileged 
art establishment and consign traditional artistic practices such as 
painting and sculpture to the dustbin of history. Art, both groups believed, 
could be mass -produced and utilise sound, ideas, and everyday objects.

In 1973 P-Orridge and Tutti left Hull and moved to Hackney in East London. 
Here, they were joined by Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson whose interests 
tilted the group further towards the investigation of transgressive sexual 
practices, many of which the group enacted in public as performance art. 
Also informing their work by this time was Tutti's experience as a 
pornographic model for magazines such as Fiesta and Men Only. For Tutti 
there was never a distinction between her day job and her art work and 
photographs from the magazines were eventually displayed as part of COUM's 
infamous exhibition, Prostitution at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 
October 1976.

Prostitution ran for just one week but it created a massive outcry in the 
press. 'Mr Orridge is prostituting Britain - and sending us the bill' cried 
the Sun . In all the exhibition was the subject of at least 100 newspaper 
and magazine articles, questions were asked in Parliament, and 'Genesis 
P-Orridge' and 'Cosey Fanni Tutti' briefly became household names. What the 
papers could not countenance was that pages taken from pornographic 
magazines were being exhibited as art. For Tutti there was no problem: the 
sex industry was an important area of serious artistic research.

Prostitution was COUM's retrospective - their farewell to the art world. It 
was also an opportunity to launch a new band, Throbbing Gristle, formed out 
of the basic COUM unit of P-Orridge, Tutti, and Christopherson plus a 
newcomer, Chris Carter, a recording and synthesiser expert. TG played at the 
opening party of Prostitution.

The distinction between COUM and TG was, on one level, quite simple: the 
band operated in the music industry and COUM operated in the art world. The 
group members refused to respect the boundaries between these two fields. 
They found the art world elitist, hypocritical and out of touch, while the 
music industry, although not much better, at least promised a wider and more 
responsive audience.

TG never toned down and aestheticised the most intense and ugly aspects of 
its work. If anything TG produced work even more obscene and shocking than 
anything that COUM achieved. The music on its first album in 1977, Second 
Annual Report, oscillated between gentle, if ominous, free-form 
instrumentals, and excruciatingly loud rhythms accompanied by manically 
delivered lyrics filled with violent imagery.

Rather than as a form of entertainment, the band approached music as if it 
was research. They wanted to produce sounds that directly affected 
physiological and psychological change in the listener. This was distinctly 
uneasy listening. In the knowledge that no label would give them the 
autonomy they required, the members of TG formed their own independent 
record label, Industrial Records. This not only allowed them total control 
over their own product - from production through to marketing - it also 
allowed them to lay the foundations for a new genre of music, which they 
labelled Industrial music. The company was launched with the slogan 
'Industrial Music for Industrial People', but the irony implied - that 
Britain was a manufacturing power in terminal decline - is often missed.

Industrial Records was eminently post-industrial, and expressed its 
contemporaneity through a bewildering array of postmodern strategies: 
pastiche, stylistic pluralism, appropriation, and shifting identities. It 
was a sensibility summed up in TG's 1978 single release United/Zyklon B 
Zombie where, as the press release revealed, 'a disco-based song that people 
could fall in love to' was coupled with a song about the Holocaust, based on 
the Velvet Underground's feedback-heavy I Heard Her Call My Name.

Industrial Records soon became the focal point for a developing network of 
what Carter called 'electronic garage bands' and released seminal material 
by Monte Cazazza, Leather Nun, SPK, Clock DVA, and Cabaret Voltaire and also 
William Burroughs's early spoken word experiments. Through the development 
of this subculture IR created an alternative economy and support system. 
They saw the increasing fragmentation of mass culture in the late 1970s as 
an opportunity to create a new audience. This audience would be more than 
consumers; they would also be producers in their own right, reproducers of 
the subculture. Once the subculture reached a certain critical mass it would 
become virtually self-supporting, with resources circulating and being 
exchanged within the community. TG and IR marketed themselves as fiercely 
independent and unafraid to dwell on unsavoury topics. Included in TG's 
repertory was a song about the child murderers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady 
called Very Friendly and a song about a burns victim called Hamburger Lady. 
Given TG's 'difficult' subject matter and disturbing graphics (the company 
logo was a photograph of a crematorium in Auschwitz), it was obvious that 
they never sought the kind of mass appeal enjoyed by other electronic bands, 
like as the Human League. All they required was that each record covered its 
costs and enough was left over for the making and releasing of the next.

Each subculture required its signature 'look' and for TG this meant the full 
-scale adoption of urban camouflage uniforms made for them by the 
Paris-based fashion designer Lawrence Dupre. In one sense this can be read 
as the return of the repressed. The avant-garde reverting to its roots as a 
military vanguard, an elite core of shock troops. P-Orridge had always seen 
himself as being at war with authority. Now the members of TG were taking 
further and further the trappings of that authority for what they considered 
their own subversive ends.

Rather fittingly, considering their anti-commercial ethics, TG and IR ceased 
trading at the peak of their critical and financial success and announced on 
June 23, 1981 with a postcard: 'Throbbing Gristle: The Mission is 
Terminated'. During its lifetime the group released four albums and only 
five singles, but there was a feeling within the group that they had 
achieved everything they set out to do.

Like COUM in the art world, they had achieved industry recognition. The 
commercial success of the group, with a turnover of A150,000 between 1980 
and 1981, was also becoming a problem. The Industrial subculture they had 
encouraged had grown well beyond their control - TG was in serious danger of 
becoming popular.

There were other reasons for disbanding. Personal and working relationships 
within the group had reached a state of open conflict. P-Orridge and Tutti's 
relationship had long since deteriorated as she and Carter became lovers. 
The only reason for keeping TG together would have been financial, but given 
the group's principles this was never on the agenda.

Ultimately the termination of 'the mission' at this stage guaranteed TG's 
immortality. The number of records and CDs sold after TG and IR ceased 
trading quickly outstripped those sold while they were a going concern. A 
key factor in this was the stockpile of recordings amassed during the 
group's six years of existence. This 'raw material' coupled with the 
willingness of labels to release it and the willingness of hard-core 
completists and successive generations of new fans to buy it means the group 
now boasts a formidable and ever-expanding discography.

TG's cult status has also been helped by the success of Industrial music, 
the genre it helped to establish. From the eighties into the nineties, bands 
including Einsturzende Neubaten, Ministry, and Nine Inch Nails have helped 
ensure Industrial music's continued presence in, and relevance to, the 
contemporary music scene. Other traces of TG's subversive and often humorous 
antics can also be found in a wide variety of new up-and-coming bands from 
the teeth-clenching wall-of-sound of Mogwai to the wilful experimentalism of 
the Male Nurse.

Perhaps the most significant reason for TG's continued renown is its status 
as the precursor of the various band members' subsequent projects. There is 
no greater illustration of the extraordinary depth of talent marshalled by 
TG than the innovative and distinguished music that the group members 
continue to produce: P-Orridge with Psychic TV, Christopherson with Coil, 
and Carter and Tutti with Chris & Cosey. As for COUM, art history has just 
begun to come round to matching the group's own high opinion of themselves. 
It has recently been featured abroad, in France and the US, in museum shows 
chronicling 1970s performance art. But COUM still awaits official 
recognition in the UK.

The memory of COUM and TG lives on because nothing is more threatening to 
authority than an uncompromising anti-commercial ethic combined with a 
pathological love of the extreme. What both projects demonstrated above all 
was that there was life for the avant-garde outside the art world support 
systems of public funding and private patronage. The creation of audiences 
and new markets could support all manner of activities, some more extreme 
than those supported by public institutions. From the late 1970s on, the art 
world and the music industry would always be at least a couple of steps 
behind the radical subcultures that now proliferated.

Simon Ford's Wreckers Of Civilisation: The Story Of COUM Transmission And 
Throbbing Gristle is published by Black Dog, price pounds 19.95