How did TG, creatures of the sixties and its various liberation movements, succumb to this fascination with fascism? In truth, there’s a slippery zone in which anarchism (or at least that libertine and libertarian brand of anarchism less about workers’ councils than a near solipsistic individualism and a lawless hedonism that brooks no constraints) flips over into a curious appreciation and affinity for certain aspects of Nazism. The meeting point is that whole gnostic side of Nazism that concerned the pagan and primordial. P-Orridge’s investigations into cults and secret societies had led to books that dealt with the Nazi inner circle’s obsessions with occultism, alchemy, and the quest for the Holy Grail.
There was also a potentially totalitarian undercurrent in sixties counterculture itself, latent in its very quest to recover the “lost totality” (as the situationists dubbed it). In their book Mindfuckers, journalists Robin Green, David Felton, and David Dalton coined the term “Acid Fascism” to describe the syndrome of figures like Charles Manson. At the end of the sixties, as the utopian energy of flower power turned sinister, Manson was just one of several charismatic sociopaths who preyed on the drug-damaged children of the counterculture, inducting them into surrogate families where the group-mind was essentially identical to the father figure’s warped worldview. TG were fans of Manson’s. P-Orridge’s obsessions were leading him toward the concept of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, the cultlike organization he would build around his post-TG band Psychic TV. A Throbbing Gristle gig in Manchester at the end of 1980 was the first to be described as “a Psychic Youth Rally.” Earlier that year, P-Orridge signaled his new sense of himself as a shaman with TG’s fourth album, Heathen Earth, improvised live in the studio with a small audience of friends and associates. Recording a single performance in front of “initiates” was an attempt to create an atmosphere of ritual and ceremony in which magic—“aural and philosophical,” stressed P-Orridge—could take place.
By the spring of 1981, the tensions within TG caused by Tutti’s breaking up with P-Orridge made the band unworkable. P-Orridge also felt that the group had outlived its usefulness. Throbbing Gristle, he believed, had moved beyond the agrarian blues roots of rock and created a new kind of music (or antimusic) appropriate to postindustrial society. The next step, he told a radio interviewer, was “to go beyond into where man meets space. I don’t mean cosmic like Tangerine Dream, I mean inside the head.” The very fact that TG had built up a substantial audience that accepted what they did (by Heathen Earth, Industrial Records’s turnover had reached the point where it was one of the largest independents in the U.K.) was a sign it was time to move on.
Virtually from scratch, TG had constructed a new genre, an entire subcultural field, partly composed of peer groups (like minds already pursuing a similar path, such as Cabaret Voltaire, Non, SPK, Z’ev, Clock DVA, some of whom released records on Industrial) and partly of outfits directly catalyzed by TG (not just in the U.K. but in places as far afield as Yugoslavia, Australia, and Japan). The remarkable thing about Throbbing Gristle’s legacy is that they almost single-handedly created one of the most enduring and densely populated fields of postpunk music, despite having a rather disdainful attitude toward music per se. TG’s music, in a sense, was best understood as a delivery system for their ideas, a hangover from COUM’s previous existence in the world of conceptual art. TG knew exactly what they were doing and told the listeners in meticulous, hyperarticulate detail. Indeed, if one took TG’s stance literally—the music as a means to an end, a vehicle for the transmission of information—there was a sense in which one might as well skip the records and just read the eloquent interviews with the disarmingly pleasant P-Orridge.
BY THE TIME TG ANNOUNCED that “the mission is terminated,” P-Orridge had come to feel that industrial was turning into a distinctly unsavory scene. If that was true, though, it was largely TG’s fault for propagating the notion that the extremes of human existence are somehow more real or artistically valid than the middling areas. For P-Orridge, the most blatant example of a group who’d “misunderstood” TG was Whitehouse, an outfit he abhorred. The subtle distinction between the two groups was a thin line—between a neutral or ambivalent presentation of horror, atrocity, cruelty, and an unambiguous and blatant reveling in evil—easily crossed by many industrial fans and musicians.
In the liner notes to Whitehouse’s debut album, Birthdeath Experience, leader William Bennett promised that “this is the most brutal and extreme music of all time.” Whitehouse used a Wasp synth to generate noxious noise and recorded everything in the red zone for maximum distortion. They disregarded rhythm, melody, and structure, severing all ties to any previous musical genres and in the process spawning an “ears are wounds” microgenre of industrial later called “power electronics.” Bennett’s goal was to “cut to pure human states,” which in his mind meant violence and sexual violation, conveyed in tuneful ditties such as “I’m Coming Up Your Ass” and “Cock Dominant.” The name Whitehouse came from the porn mag Whitehouse (itself cheekily named after a famous matronly antiporn crusader), but Bennett’s group actually preferred ultra-hard-core “specialist” publications such as Tit Pulp and Shitfun, both of which inspired songs of the same name. Other favorite topics were fascism and serial killers.
When Bennett talked of his “vision of a bludgeoning, tyrannical sound,” the words caught the flavor of his entire worldview. An expert on the Marquis de Sade, he’d probably have concurred with the virulent antihumanism of Minister Saint-Fond from Juliette, who dreamed of establishing a neofeudal system that treated an entire class of people as animals. “I affirm that the fundamental, profoundest, and keenest penchant in man is incontestably to enchain his fellow creatures and to tyrannize them with all his might,” declared de Sade via Saint-Fond. “A bent for destruction, cruelty, and oppression is the first which Nature graves in our heart.” At their live “aktions” (a nod to the Vienna Aktionists), Bennett would scream things such as “It’s your right to kill, it’s your fucking nature” and, after roughly fifteen minutes of skull-splitting noise, crowd ruckus, flying bottles, and bloodshed, the police would usually arrive and pull the plugs.
Playing with Whitehouse at some of their early aktions was a character named Steve Stapleton, who was moonlighting from his own group, Nurse with Wound. The latter made a de Sade–inspired album in collaboration with Whitehouse called The 150 Murderous Passions. Most of the time, though, Nurse with Wound’s music was more playful. Indeed, Stapleton rejects the term “industrial” altogether, claiming NWW only got pigeonholed as such because their first album’s cover featured bondage-and-fetish imagery from the magazine Latex and Leather Special. But the group’s postrock approach to abstract noise sculptures and found-sound collages does make their music fit loosely into the industrial category, even if the content does not.
If NWW had a spiritual avatar, it wasn’t de Sade but another French writer, Lautréamont, author of the 1868 Gothic prose poem Maldoror. NWW’s 1979 debut, Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella, took its title from one of Lautréamont’s deliberately absurd similes, whose dream-logic incongruity led to his being embraced by the surrealists as an illustrious precursor. Chance Meeting gleaned a five-question-mark rating in Sounds rather than the usual five stars, because reviewer John Gill wasn’t totally sure whether its seemingly arbitrary concatenations of noise constituted pure genius or sheer nonsense.
Musically, Stapleton’s prime crush was Krautrock. He actually lived in Germany for a while, working as a roadie for minor kosmische bands such as Kraan. A legendarily vast and esoteric list of experimental music, ranging from free improv through Europrog to musique concrète, was included on Chance Meeting’s sleeve. If that album sounded a bit shapeless (it was recorded in six hours by a bunch of semimusicians who’d never played together previously), by 1982’s Homotopy to Marie Stapleton had developed a genuinely idiosyncratic way of organizing noise, using the studio as an instrument to create darkly enchanting
soundscapes as gorgeously grotesque as a Quay Brothers animation.
One thing most post-TG industrialists shared was a resolutely Nordic approach to rhythm. At best this meant metronomic pulse-grooves in the Moroder mold. At worst it meant clunky and portentous march beats. A few industrial bands embraced contemporary black dance music, though, and two of the best, Sheffield’s Clock DVA and London’s 23 Skidoo, were TG protégés. Clock DVA was Adi Newton’s band after he got kicked out of the Future. After an initial phase of abstract sound experiments using tape loops and cut-ups, Clock DVA released White Souls in Black Suits through Industrial. Culled from fifteen hours of improvisation, the album was an attempt, says Newton, “to record that moment when intuitive magick occurs, what the surrealists describe as pure psychic automatism.” The funk influence—James Brown, the Pop Group—kicked in with DVA’s second album, Thirst. “That’s what we’re after—more edgy, nervous energy sort of funk stuff, body music that flinches you and makes you move,” Newton told Melody Maker.
All scowling basslines and moody, sick-inside saxophone, Thirst was released in 1981 on Fetish, a label set up by Rod Pearce, a TG fan who put out Gristle’s final single. Fetish also released records by 23 Skidoo. Drawing on a handful of black precursors (the cocaine-spiked voodoo funk of Miles Davis’s On the Corner, the Last Poets’ fire-and-brimstone oratory, Fela Kuti’s hard-trance polyrhythms), Skidoo conceived of funk as a sinister energy, an active metaphor for Control, groove as trap and treadmill. Their 1981 mini-LP Seven Songs topped the indie charts and still sounds bloodcurdlingly intense. It opens with “Kundalini,” a malevolent tumble of hand percussion, guitar feedback, and guttural chants. On “Vegas El Bandito,” seething slap bass and brittle-nerved rhythm jostle with lost-in-endless-fog trumpet (an industrial motif invented by Cosey Fanni Tutti, who played cornet on several TG tracks). Best of all is “Porno Bass,” in which industrial finally makes a long overdue antifascist statement. Bass drones reverberate in cavernous murk, through which drifts the aristocratic voice of loathsome Hitler groupie Unity Mitford, taken from a radio interview. Dropped into the middle of an album that’s thrillingly steeped in trance rhythms and black funk, Mitford’s railing against pop music’s “senseless reiteration” as “the sign of a degenerating race” is implicitly exposed as Aryan paranoia.
23 Skidoo’s Alex Turnbull says that although they owed a lot to TG practically (P-Orridge let them rehearse at the Death Factory) and intellectually, they were more inspired musically by intensely rhythmic groups such as A Certain Ratio. Throbbing Gristle severed itself completely from the music of the African diaspora: jazz, R&B, funk, reggae. Skidoo allowed black America into industrial. They let the rest of the world in, too. Fans of Can’s “Ethnological Forgeries” series and Holger Czukay’s panglobal borrowings, Skidoo played the first WOMAD world music festival in July 1982, composing a special set that combined ethnic trance rhythms with a barrage of urban musique concrète. “Instead of using pleasant ‘world music’ sounds, we used city noises, gas canisters, explosions,” says Turnbull. “A third of the crowd fled immediately, but the ones that stayed were like, ‘Wow, that was absolutely unexpected!’”
Part of the WOMAD set made up side one of their next album, The Culling Is Coming. Side two’s chime-fest of tuned gongs indicated a drift eastward toward the music of Bali. After an expedition to Indonesia, 23 Skidoo recorded 1984’s Urban Gamelan. The vibe is a sort of humid disquiet—imagine Apocalypse Now: The Day After. By this point, Skidoo were interested less in Gristle-style extreme noise terror and more in the idea of using repetition to gently induce “a kind of trance, that idea of reaching ecstasy through the music.” Coincidentally, around this time, a drug called Ecstasy was making its first appearances in the industrial scene.
23 Skidoo and Clock DVA were atypical TG offspring. The vast majority of second-wave industrialists favored either abstract noisescapes or metronomic Teutonica. Deeper into the eighties, Gristle’s spawn became ever more legion: Lustmord, Nocturnal Emissions, Death in June, In the Nursery, à;grumh…, Controlled Bleeding, Laibach, Skinny Puppy, Severed Heads, Front 242, Last Few Days,:zoviet*france:, Merzbow, and the list goes on. Most shared their progenitor’s antirock (even antimusic) bias and content-laden, concept-driven slant. Just like the Velvet Underground (one of the only groups TG acknowledged as an influence) it sometimes seems as though everybody who heard Throbbing Gristle started their own band.
CHAPTER 9
CONTORT YOURSELF:
NO WAVE NEW YORK
AROUND THE SAME TIME Throbbing Gristle embarked upon their antimusic mission, a movement of bands similarly dedicated to razing rock history and starting from Year Zero was emerging in downtown New York. Dubbed No Wave, these groups—Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Mars, DNA—wanted to create from a tabula rasa mind-set in which all the accepted notions and rules of musicality had been expunged.
As with Throbbing Gristle and the other U.K. industrialists, the primary spur for the No Wave groups was their contempt for punk rock’s traditionalism. One of the first articles on the CBGB scene, represented by bands like the Ramones, Television, Patti Smith, Blondie, the Heartbreakers, et al., pinpointed the way punk couched itself as a return to something lost. Written in 1975 by James Wolcott and headlined A CONSERVATIVE IMPULSE IN THE NEW ROCK UNDERGROUND, the Village Voice feature celebrated the scene based around CBGB and Max’s Kansas City for creating a feeling of local community in opposition to a mainstream rock culture that had now degenerated into just another branch of showbiz, with its own aristocracy of untouchably remote stars. But the musical translation of this egalitarian impulse involved ditching the entirety of the 1970s so far—not just the pomposity and pretension, but the ambition and experimentalism too—and going back. “Punk is just real good basic rock & roll…real basic fifties and early sixties rock,” declared no less an authority than Nancy Spungen.
How different were the Ramones’ leather jackets and cult of all things teenage from the fifties revivalism in America’s pop mainstream, things like Grease and Happy Days? The Ramones’ bracing blast of speed and minimalism served its purpose in showing up the flabby, flaccid indulgence of mid-1970s rock, but within two albums the band had exhausted their point. Elsewhere, the Heartbreakers’ refried Chuck Berry was barely more advanced than British pub rock—Dr. Feelgood on an IV drip of smack rather than lager. Even the scene’s most adventurous band, Television, drew heavily on late-sixties music, their quicksilver dual-guitar interplay steeped in the West Coast acid rock of the Byrds, Country Joe and the Fish, and the Grateful Dead.
The No Wave groups, in contrast, defined radicalism not as a return to roots but as deracination. They were united less by a common sound than by this shared determination to sever all connections with the past. Musically, they ranged from Teenage Jesus and the Jerks’ stentorian dirges to Contortions’ jazz-scarred thrash funk, from Mars’ guitar-flagellating cacophony to DNA’s dislocated grooves. Scour the history of rock and you’ll find only a handful of precedents for what the No Wavers did: Velvet Underground at their least songful and most punishingly abstract noise oriented; Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music; Yoko Ono’s primal screech and John Lennon’s guitar gougings for the Plastic Ono Band; the avant-blues convulsions of Captain Beefheart. But crucially, the No Wave groups acted as if they had no ancestors at all. In stark contrast to the U.K. industrial outfits, the No Wave bands staged their revolt against rock tradition using the standard rock instrumentation of guitar, bass, and drums. Occasionally they leavened this restricted arsenal with horns or keyboards, but they were always basic sixties-style organs, never synthesizers. Curiously, it was as though the No Wavers felt that the electronic route to making a postrock noise was too easy. It was more challenging, and perhaps more threatening, too, to use rock’s own tools against itself. Which is why No Wave music irresistibly invites metaphors of dismemberment, desecration, and “defiling rock’s corpse.”
Ironically, a traditional blues and country tec
hnique, slide guitar, provided No Wave with some of its most disconcertingly novel noises. As used by three female guitarists—Connie Burg in Mars, Lydia Lunch in Teenage Jesus, and Pat Place in Contortions—slide offered musical novices the quickest way to generate startling sounds. It wasn’t necessary to learn how to hold down chord shapes on the guitar strings. “Who wanted chords, all these progressions that had been used to death in rock?” jeers Teenage Jesus’ front woman, Lydia Lunch, No Wave’s raven-haired queen. “I’d use a knife, a beer bottle…. Glass gave the best sound. To this day I still don’t know a single chord on the guitar.”
As well as shunning electronics, the No Wave bands never really embraced the sound-warping possibilities of the recording studio. It was in small clubs at overwhelming volume that No Wave was most effective. The handful of studio recordings that survive the scene (most of them originally made by Charles Ball and released on his New York independent label Lust/Unlust) are like footnotes to the live experience. Along with the sheer sonic assault, No Wave shows often involved physical aggression as well. James Chance, bandleader and singer/saxophonist in Contortions, turned gigs into happenings by attacking the audience—jostling, slapping, legendarily grabbing a girl by the hair at one show and biting another woman “on the tit” (or so he claimed in an interview).
“James was like a Jackson Pollock painting, such an explosive personality,” says Adele Bertei, Contortions’ keyboard player. “And he had a strong masochistic streak. So he’d jump into the crowd and start kissing some girl. The boyfriend would push him off and a fistfight would ensue. Our bassist George Scott and me would leap offstage and get into the melee. Then we’d all get back onto the stage with blood running down our faces—James being the worse for wear always because he’d get the brunt of it, plus he’s so tiny.” Partly sensationalist, calculated to procure the band notoriety and press attention, these tactics were also impelled by the perennial avant-garde urge to physically shatter the performer/audience barrier, to turn a spectacle into a situation. It worked. The shows started to sell out. “A big part of it was the art crowd,” says Pat Place. “The violence plus the noise element made our shows something like performance art combined with music.”
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