Throbbing Gristle - first exposure

 the first time I heard TG, when the stuff was reissued on CD as part of Mute's The Grey Area programme of reissues (so circa 1990?)

written for Melody Maker, but for some reason unpublished - mislaid? 

THROBBING GRISTLE 

THE SECOND ANNUAL REPORT

20 JAZZ FUNK GREATS

D.O.A - THE THIRD AND FINAL REPORT

HEATHEN EARTH

MISSION OF DEAD SOULS

Industrial/Mute

     For those of you for whom "Psychocandy" is the dawn of pop time, it'll be hard to comprehend how unimaginably different the scene was when I was a nipper. Post-punk, we lived in a culture of confrontation, not consolation.  Today, rock groups aim to immerse us in 'dreamtime', simulate the effects of drugs; back then, the goal was to wake us up from our mass culture sleep, rouse us from our zombie addiction to TV and pop.

     Throbbing Gristle were all about confrontation: "confronting all assumptions", testing the outer limits of their audiences' tolerance. They began as an "art-rage" collective called COUM, whose "Prostitution" show at the ICA made front page headlines only a few months before punk. Stepping sideways into music, they modelled themselves as a corporation in order to expose the industrial nature of the pop biz.  Demystification was their modus operandi and raison d'etre (c.f. the mysticism and mystique of 1991 rock).  Live, TG played "disconcerts". The 'music' was a mirror of a world of unremitting ugliness, dehumanisation, and brutalism.  They took the degradation and deterioration, maiming and mutilation, of sound to nether limits that even now have yet to be under-passed. ("Second Annual Report" was recorded on a Sony Cassette Recorder with condenser mike to get a deliberately thin, compressed sound.)

     Along with Cabaret Voltaire, TG invented the "industrial" sound: synth-drones and squelches; hissing, programmed percussion; tape-loops and found sounds; hideously mangled, effects-ridden guitar; creepy vocals. Sometimes TG sound like Loop or Hawkwind liquidised into an ambient puree then played at 16rpm. Later ("20 Jazz Funk Greats", parts of "Heathen Earth"), they explored a different but equally disorientating kind of sound, leaving the noisome aural effluent for clinical, arid, ultra-pristine electronic music. "Tanith" is morose mood muzak, with vibes and a clammy 'jazz' trumpet like an android version of Miles Davis; "What A Day" is a lurching electro-dirge with vocals that whinge in a preposterous Cockernee accent; "Adrenalin" anticipates the serene sterility of ambient house.

     TG also coined the gamut of "industrial" obsessions:serial killers, conspiracy theories, subliminals and brainwashing, etc. Above all, they coined the industrial attitude, a sort of gynecological drive to probe reality and expose the visceral mess behind the facades of everyday life. I use the word "gynecological" because Woman was the privileged victim of all this vivisection: "Slugbait" is a corny tale of a "wicked boy" who pulls a foetus out of a seven months pregnant mother and chew its head off; a later version of the same song features a taped confession by a girlchild-murderer; "Hamburger Lady" goes into gruesome forensic detail about a real-life burns victim.  There's even a song called "We Hate You (Little Girls").  Whatever the ethics of TG's intentions, their work was always going to be easily adopted by twisted retards, pervs and teenage ghouls.

     TG's work did occasionally, perhaps inadvertently, create "beauty" (e.g. the derelict, industrial blues of "Weeping"). But because the aim was to reflect/amplify the monochrome horror of it all, too often these records are simply unendurable, a deadening dead end.  Eventually, Genesis P. Orridge seems to have come to the same conclusion. First, there was "hyperdelia": Psychic TV's rediscovery of colour and flamboyance as expressed in the kaleidoscopic sounds of acid rock and incarnated in the dandyism of Brian "Godstar" Jones (adorning rather than reflecting reality). Then there was "techno acid beat", Jack The Tab's response to the fact that TG's "death factory" of electro-drones and trance-pulses had resurfaced (in acid house) as a pleasure factory.  An orgasmotron, in fact. 

In view of these subsequent developments,  perhaps TG should be remembered as a necessary, but necessarily transitional phase (minimalism, reductionism, negation) before the return to affirmation and expansion. TG will endure, as Jon Savage puts it in his liner notes, as "a reference point and a shudder", but probably not as something people actually listen to much.