by Alex; Ogg
But of course, to a large degree, Miller was the bands. “Exactly. There was interest in Frank, but that was slightly different, because that was his life and career and I couldn’t make those decisions for him. We went together to see CBS, Muff Winwood was really interested in it. It was great in a way, but we were enjoying doing it on our own, and we wanted to keep it so that it wasn’t driven by commercial considerations. We were doing it for fun. We were learning a hell of a lot. I knew nothing about the music industry. Nothing. Zero. And I still like to think I don’t know as much as I should know, which is a good thing. People say to me, ‘Daniel, you should be thinking out of the box.’” Miller can’t resist paraphrasing the famous Monty Python sketch. “In my day, we couldn’t afford a box to think out of – box were a luxury!”
By the time Miller had committed to the Fad Gadget record, almost a year had elapsed. “Yeah, there was about a year, I guess, between 001 and 002. Then there was a flurry of releases. Then I was off and running in the sense that, mentally, I’d made that leap, that I was happy to be a label.” If the Fad Gadget arrangement hadn’t worked out as well as it did, that might not have happened. “I think if it hadn’t been good fun I wouldn’t have gone on with it. I don’t know about success. It was more about it being good fun at that point. Nobody was making any money, and the goal was to learn and to enjoy the experience of putting out a record, and just make enough money to get the next record pressed.”
The Fad Gadget and Silicon Teens releases were further important staging posts in the development of an indigenous post-punk electronic genre. Miller has remained adamant down the years that this was not just predictable, but a ‘historic inevitability’. “I knew it was going to happen. And the Silicon Teens was a concept – it was a total lie obviously, but it was billed as the world’s first all-electronic teenage pop band.” There was also a little mischief to be made by hiding the group’s identity, leading to an irate exchange with an NME journalist demanding that Miller ‘own up’. But there was also a serious edge. “I knew that at some point, and it came very quickly actually, you’d get a generation of kids that had a choice when they decided they wanted to make music. They wouldn’t just automatically buy guitar, bass and drums, they could choose to buy a synth. And that, conceptually, is what the Silicon Teens was.” Was it that the technology was so enabling, it had to be the next step? “Yeah. And it was exciting, because I loved electronic music. I was 26 or 27 by that time. I’d been listening to four guys with guitars, bass and drums for 18 years or something. And I loved all that shit. But by 1977/78 it was enough. And pub rock killed that – I didn’t listen to English or American music for about five years, because it was shit as far as I was concerned. I only listened to German music. Not because ‘it’s got to be German’, but because that was where the only interesting music was coming out, with a couple of notable exceptions. And I was bored with it, I thought this has got to move on. Between 1963 and 1977, it’s not that long, there had been incredible changes in music. But then it felt like it had stopped and hit a brick wall. And nothing much was happening. I had enough passion about music to think, let’s push it forward, let’s get to the next bit.”
Miller recognises the importance of records like PiL’s ‘Public Image’ and other harbingers of the post-punk dialectic, but insists “that was a bit later [than the immediate punk explosion]. By the end of 1978 when my single came out there was tons of interesting music out there. All that stuff started to come in. Throbbing Gristle made their first single, Cabaret Voltaire made their first single, Human League, OMD, plus all those other guys – Gerry & The Holograms. Brilliant. Who is Gerry? Who are the Holograms? Who knows! They made one fucking great single. And bands like Tuxedomoon came over. Joy Division was slightly different, and even though it wasn’t electronic, it was coming from a similar place. It was all getting very exciting. And it was a historic inevitability. That’s not even in retrospect, at the time it felt like that. It’s not just looking back and going, ‘Ah, I can see now why that happened.’ It actually felt like it was happening at the time. I’d talk to people like Robert Rental, people I was hanging around with like the guys from Wire, whom I became really friendly with early on and loved. They were a great example of a band who didn’t sound like they looked – they didn’t sound like the instruments they were playing. We would just hang out and talk about it in the pub, just on a very casual basis. And it was very much – this is what’s going to be happening.”
Those changes were reflected by the content of fanzines like Sheffield’s NMX, which was loosely associated with the university’s Now Society and its attendant manifestos, as well as Stevo of Some Bizzare’s Futurist chart in Sounds and the work of Throbbing Gristle’s Industrial Records. A network was building. For example, by April 1979 Throbbing Gristle would be hosted by NowSoc, and there was also a crossover with the emergent tape-trading scene. NMX would sell live tapes of NowSoc performances featuring editor Martin Russian’s band They Must Be Russians, alongside the Extras, 2,3 and Cabaret Voltaire, for the bargain price of £1.50. “But none of these people were new romantics, that happened a bit later,” Miller is immediately at pains to point out. “And yes, there were loads of manifestos about.” Historically, early 1981 was the breakthrough year for the new romantics, but that was a movement orchestrated almost exclusively by major labels, which can legitimately be seen as a retrenchment following the unruly mess created by punk and post-punk.
It is not hysterical to locate the fulcrum of the emergent electronic movement as the South Yorkshire city of Sheffield. Certainly many of the most influential post-punk, but equally importantly, post-guitar records, emerged from there (Cabaret Voltaire, Human League, Vice Versa, etc). It has been said that ‘there were no punk bands at all’ in Sheffield, the city which, by dint of the location of so many synth/keyboard-driven artists, became the perceived base of a type of ostensibly serious electronic music. The quote itself comes from no less an authority than Phil Oakey of The Human League (whose polemical stance was such that, before he joined the band, they had a song entitled ‘Destroy All Guitars’). But that statement, accepted as truth without query, ignores the input of bands like the Stunt Kites, the Negatives and, to a lesser extent, the Extras. Missing the point that post-punk was generally fashioned in sympathy with as well as in reaction to punk is a mistake. Miller, like McGee (Creation), Alway (Cherry Red), Mills and Watts-Russell (Beggars/4AD) and even Carroll and Armstrong (Chiswick/Ace), all recognise punk as the enabling force that spurred them to pursue their own musical vocations. In fact, if any of the new breed of independent labels had true claim to antecedence of that crucial moment, it was Throbbing Gristle’s Industrial label.
Established in 1976 by Throbbing Gristle, Industrial housed the explicitly ‘non-entertainment’ sonic experiments of band members Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Chris Carter and Peter Christopherson. The intention was to provide a platform for the openly confrontational works of Throbbing Gristle, who specialised in acts designed to inflate the moral hubris of mainstream media, although they claimed not to seek shock value per se, but were ‘interested in those things personally’. “We wanted to re-invest rock music with content, motivation and risk,” they would write in the sleevenotes to TG CD 1. “Our records were documents of attitudes and experiences and observations by us and other determinedly individual outsiders. Fashion was an enemy, style irrelevant… We wanted to also investigate music as a Business phenomenon and propose models for entirely new and innovative modes of commercial operation.”
Variation in accepted methods of ‘operation’ also extended to the group’s musical vocabulary. Industrial Records were among the subjects addressed by Robert Worby in his essay, Cacophony, “The punk sound was constructed with loud, noisy guitars, industrial music maintained the noise but used an extended instrumental palette. The tape recorder became a commonplace musical instrument rather than a documentary tool and musicians were credited as playing ‘tapes’… Throbbi
ng Gristle and Industrial Records were extremely influential in the creative climate that flourished during the punk era and beyond. The enthusiasm for sonic exploration and experimentation, within an ethos that said ‘anyone can do it’, encouraged many young pop musicians to question notions of conventional musical structure – melody, harmony, rhythm – and search for other structures, other ways of putting sounds together.”
“In my view,” notes Christopherson, aka Sleazy, “Industrial Records was set up as a kind of ironic comment on the music industry, rather than being part of it. Especially as it was started in 1975/1976, the days of The Sweet, Abba, prog rock etc, before indie or punk had even been thought of or named (in the UK at least). I think the first Throbbing Gristle album was already out when I took the first photos of the Sex Pistols, even before they played their first gig – or certainly before they were signed. Throbbing Gristle always were proud to be outsiders who did things simply for the fun (and artistic purity) of it, rather than as a business or to make money. This usually incurred the wrath of audiences and the incomprehension of actual industry folk – we were so far ‘out of the box’ that there WAS nothing to compare us to. There was no pigeonhole that suited or applied to Throbbing Gristle. Obviously the industrial genre was only established because record shops didn’t know where to rack our records.”
Rather than being influenced by any forerunning independent labels, Industrial actually benefited from Christopherson’s association with majors. “I was working for mainstream labels, designing and shooting album covers with design group Hipgnosis, famous for its work with Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Genesis etc, at that time. So I had some inside knowledge of the industry, printing plants etc. The staff all wore suits and ties, and had to be caught before their extended lunches to obtain any decision, because after lunch they were all too drunk to decide anything. Ironically it was the money I was making from that, that financed the start of Industrial Records.”
“In the beginning we all felt a ‘corporate style or voice’ was totally appropriate for our highly non-corporate approach to life and music,” Christopherson states. “During the life of the first incarnation of Throbbing Gristle, that largely remained intact, and held good, so strong was our bond and shared understanding of Throbbing Gristle’s method and philosophy. At that time Genesis and Cosey lived together in Hackney in East London, so their house became a kind of hub for the Industrial cottage industry. Cosey had the most aptitude for paperwork and accounts, whilst also following her alternate persona as a self-aware erotic dancer. Genesis took care of the day to day operations, duplication of cassettes etc, as well as keeping track in some way of ‘the bigger picture’, writing to interesting and useful people, making tea and being generally the most outgoing of the four of us. Chris and I, though we led lives less solely concentrated on Throbbing Gristle, went to the house as often as we could, usually several times a week or more. It was rare that any significant decision about the band was made without the input of all four members and it was always democratic. Where there was a specific affinity – such as mine for design and graphics or Chris’s for technical things and manufacture of specialist electronics, we certainly made use of it.”
Other artists on the label included Clock DVA (specialists themselves in media inversion), the Leather Nun (glorying in sexual perversion and display) and Monte Cazazza (an artist whose entire output was dedicated to a thorough exploration of the geography of ‘outrage’). There were also collaborations with beat author William Burroughs and Derek Jarman (via Elisabeth Welch, whose ‘Stormy Weather’ appeared on the soundtrack to The Tempest). It was Cazazza who gave them the slogan ‘industrial music for industrial people’, though the more telling alternative was ‘Music From The Death Factory’. The packaging of these releases explored similar themes – why is society so irked by graphic projections of sexuality or violence, when it accepts a deluge of tacitly similar and often deliberately titillating examples of the same in newspapers, magazines and video/TV? A prime example was Industrial’s own logo, a monochrome photograph of the Tate Modern art museum which many were convinced was the chimney at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The group relished indulging in such games of duality; the idyllic, chocolate box cover of their 20 Jazz Funk Greats album saw them pictured on Beachy Head, the noted suicide black spot.
Distributed by Rough Trade from the summer of 1977 onwards, Industrial’s collective releases had great impact, many selling out quickly. But the label was abandoned when Throbbing Gristle disbanded in 1981. Thereafter the catalogue lay dormant aside from reissues on Mute, although it has been revived in recent years. “It was important to us not to become pigeonholed,” Christopherson continues. “We were horrified when some other artists who did not seem to be doing the same thing as Throbbing Gristle at all became classified as ‘industrial’. Irony, humour, a low threshold of boredom with what we had done before, and the confounding of audiences’ prior expectations were cornerstones of what we did, so when we felt people were already expecting, and would be unfazed by, whatever unexpected thing we might do, we stopped.”
“Both Mute and Some Bizzare were the products of easier times, even though only a few short years later,” he continues, “when ‘do-it-yourself’ had become fashionable and desirable. And even then they only embraced Throbbing Gristle (and its offshoots) when they were proven to be selling as much as many small bands on major labels, but without any promotional business machinery, middle management, press office, A&R etc. Whereas they were trying (boldly) to do the traditional thing in a new way, Industrial was not. Industrial was not on the same page, or possibly even in the same book!” Given that the venture was so determinedly non-commercial, was it a surprise when Industrial’s records sold in the quantities they did? “Perhaps naively, no,” he reflects. “I was not surprised. I felt we were doing something so much more potent and important than the latest Mud or Sweet single, that it stood to reason that people would be interested – not everyone to be sure, but enough to make it a viable concern. Since commercial success was not our goal, only honesty mattered. We did what interested us most acutely, and consequently that power, that concentration, was committed to vinyl, and to every part of the way we ran the business. If it felt that potent to us, how could it not to others, and even if it turned out we were the only people in the world that were interested, what did that matter? Although the personal agendas of the four members of Throbbing Gristle may have changed over the years, I hope the principles of making sound purely for our own enjoyment, without the slightest regard for the prevailing trends or business sense, that we started back then, remain with Industrial today.”
Fetish Records is also of note here, another London-based imprint whose catalogue featured The Bongos, Snatch, Throbbing Gristle, 23 Skidoo, the Bush Tetras, 8 Eyed Spy and Clock DVA. In essence, a meeting point between New York’s No Wave troublemakers and the harder/more challenging end of the UK’s electronica/industrial spectrum. Formed by Throbbing Gristle fan Rob Pearce in 1979, it garnered significant press and almost had a hit single in the form of 23 Skidoo’s ‘Seven Songs’. The most distinctive aspect of Fetish’s output was Neville Brody’s ‘human decay’ designs, typically hand-crafted and then re-photographed, offsetting the disturbing subject matter with contrastingly vibrant colour schemes. After being sacked from Stiff’s art department, Brody was able to enjoy total freedom of expression at Fetish, before subsequently becoming The Face’s art director in its glory years. Indeed, such was the label’s focus on style that in the summer of 1982 Fetish launched a line of t-shirts, featuring designs by Malcolm Garrett, NME illustrator Ian Wright and Brody himself. However, at the same time Pearce would retire from the label, announcing that it would be taken over by ex-Beggars employee Steve Marshall. But the imprint had fizzled and stalled by 1983. Pearce, who went into management, was murdered in Mexico in 1987.
The aforementioned Some Bizzare, at the other end of the scale, was employing electronica to tackle the charts with
the seedy, Cabaret-informed Soft Cell. Founder Stevo had played a role in Mute’s history but is worthy of note in his own right. While Stevo had no problem affiliating Some Bizzare to whichever of the majors flashed the most ample cheque, his modus operandi was quantifiably ‘independent’; and his self-billing as a ‘music industry anarchist’ was little short of exaggeration. However, his tastes were easily differentiated from the more orthodox, worthy dialogue of the punk-influenced ‘anarchist’ bands, focusing instead on a series of artists who were, almost, as flamboyant as he was.
Having left school in East London aged 16, unable to read or write, Stevo (Steve Pearce) took a training placement with Phonogram and started working as a mobile DJ, notably at the Chelsea Drugstore on King’s Road and subsequently The Clarendon. He was almost certainly the first mobile DJ to play records by Throbbing Gristle, and would legendarily dance nude while mixing samples of Mickey Mouse over Cabaret Voltaire records. The Clarendon nights led to him being invited to submit a ‘futurist’ chart to Sounds. This, in turn, led to a Some Bizzare compilation album, featuring artists who ‘broke down barriers’. It was intended to highlight the talents of a raft of bands who had posted demo tapes, which he thereafter licensed to majors. That policy of recording an artist then negotiating a deal with companies such as Virgin or Phonogram for the masters, thereby accessing their distribution muscle and mitigating costs, made him, effectively, the Joe Meek of the 80s.
Yet Stevo could have taught Meek a thing or two about misbehaviour. Tales of his interaction with major label bigwigs are legion – often contemporaneously recalled in the then still entertaining Smash Hits pop glossy, which flourished during the new romantic boom. He insisted on a weekly delivery of sweets as part of a deal with Phonogram, signed Test Department sat astride a rocking horse named Horace, and concluded a further deal with Soft Cell via an emissary – a teddy bear dressed as Robin Hood. Stevo was only 17 when he signed off on a management contract with the latter. He delighted in keeping CBS’s Maurice Oberstein waiting for a meeting, hopping tube trains and insisting he follow him – a stark contrast to The Clash’s cap-doffing genuflection to the same mogul. Indeed, in playing the role of maverick for both fun and advantage, Stevo’s penchant for mind games scared the music industry to an extent that rivalled the more prosaic rebellious gambits of many of the punk generation. Specifically, after delivering The The’s Soul Mining album to Phonogram, ostensibly his paymasters, he then sold it on to both Warners and finally CBS – a move of consummate arrogance that outdid McLaren and the Pistols at a stroke.