Industrial music is unremittingly urban, a sonic mirror to a world of dehumanizing brutality. Innocence figures only as something to be defiled. As for pastoralism, suffice to say, when Throbbing Gristle posed on an idyllic grassy cliffside overlooking the English Channel for their album 20 Jazz Funk Greats, it was a sick joke - Beach Head being a favourite leaping-point for suicides.
The song "Persuasion" was composed during a gig at Notting Hill's squat venue Centro Iberico. Just before going onstage, leader Genesis P-Orridge asked bandmate Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson what he should sing about today and receive the reply 'persuasion' (people being cajoled into doing things - sexual things - against their will being one of Sleazy's obsessions). P-Orridge ad libbed lyrics about a guy pressurizing his partner to be photographed for the 'Readers' Wives' section of a porn mag.
Throbbing Gristle - Persuasion 1979
The 'classic' TG of "Slug Bait" and "Hamburger Lady" sounds like a corroded, ailing Tangerine Dream: cosmic rock for a universe in the process of winding down.
Throbbing Gristle - Slug Bait 1977
Throbbing Gristle - Hamburger Lady 1978
TG also made some pure, unabashed space music, like "After Cease to Exist", which took up the whole second side of the debut album Second Annual Report with its diffuse wafts of wavery-toned, early Pink Floyd/Syd Barrett guitar. It features some found speech - a pathologist discussing the murder of a teenager, a victim of a 1970s ring of homosexual paedophiles who operated in hostels for runaway boys.
Throbbing Gristle - After Cease to Exist 1977
The logo for TG's label Industrial Records 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 Poland.
Yet, even as they made wildly melodramatic and insensitive generalizations, Throbbing Gristle also flirted with fascist imagery. The group's logo was based on the 'England Awake' lightning-flash insignia of Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists.
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| Throbbing Gristle's logo |
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| Insignia for the British Union of Fascists |
On the flipside of TG's first single, "United", was "Zyklon B Zombie", a parody of 'blockhead punk' that imagined the ultimate punk act as sniffing Zyklon B poison gas instead than glue.
Throbbing Gristle - Zyklon B Zombie 1977
Two later singles featured Holocaust cover imagery - a towering mound of human skulls (on "Subhuman"), and walking frames taken from the elderly and the infirm before they were shunted into the death chamber (on "Distant Dreams (Part Two)").
TG's investigations into twentieth-century atrocity were studiously dispassionate. presenting the information without moral judgement. But there's a fuzzy line between anguished awareness of horror and morbid fascination - bordering on identification - with evil. TG constantly teetered on the edge.
This ambiguity became even more pronounced with TG's fixation on paedophilia and the abduction, rape and murder of children. Five months after their second album D.o.A.: The Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle, TG released the single "We Hate You (Little Girls", with P-Orridge practically foaming at the mouth as he shrieked lines like 'I hate you little girls/With your little curls/And your pretty dress/And your little breasts'.
Throbbing Gristle - We Hate You (Little Girls) 1979
Psychopathology fascinated TG from the start. One of their earliest pieces, "Very Friendly", concerns the mid-sixties exploits of Manchester's Ian Brady and Myra Hyndley, the infamous 'Moors Murderers', who sexually tortured and murdered children. P-Orridge's lyrics focus on the killing of a non-minor, the young homosexual Edward Evans. His attention to both the grisly details and macabre incongruities of the murder salvage "Very Friendly" from mere muck rolling - the 'German wine' with which Brady plies the hapless victim; the way blood spatters the Church of England prayer book and the TV screen image of broadcaster Eamonn Andrews; the 'bits of bone and white brain' that plop on to 'the hearth just near the brush they used to sweep the chimney, and there was lino on the floor, which was lucky'.
Throbbing Gristle - Very Friendly 1976
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