Pop music's dark side: The Residents

The question 'Who are the Residents?' stirred much speculation. One persistent rumour maintained that they were the post-break-up Beatles rejoining in secret for neo-Dadaist mischief-making. This probably stems from the fact that early on the group toyed with calling themselves The New Beatles, while their 1974 debut, Meet the Residents, featured on its front cover defaced portraits of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starr from Meet the Beatles.

To the Residents, the Fab Four symbolized everything bad and everything good about pop: its tyrannical mind-controlling ubiquity (Lennon's 'we're bigger than Jesus' comment) but also the experimental potential of psychedelia.

All these conflicted feelings came together on their 1977 single 'Beyond the Valley of a Day in the Life' - a piece also known as 'The Beatles play the Residents and the Residents play the Beatles' - which featured 'samples' of The Beatles' wilder moments woven into an eerie audio collage. At various points you hear Lennon singing, 'Don't believe in Beatles' (from his first solo album) and issuing this wan apology to their global audience: 'Please, everybody, if we haven't done what we could have done, we've tried'.

The Residents - Beyond the Valley of a Day in the Life 1977

The Residents had already released The Third Reich N Roll in 1976: a darkly comic satire of post-Beatles pop as totalitarianism, with American Bandstand presenter Dick Clark dressed as Hitler on the front.

The sidelong 'Swastikas on Parade' is a medley of defiled sixties hits overlaid with blitzkrieg sound effects - air-raid sirens, dive-bombing Stukas, machine-gun fire. In its sleevenotes the Cryptic Corporation (the organization that looked after the band's affairs) describes the record as a 'tribute to the thousands of little power-mad minds of the music industry who have helped to make us what we are'.

The Residents - Swastikas on Parade 1976

Evolution of Throbbing Gristle

Once audience start to expect an extreme experience, though, it's time to flip the script. TG's first major swerve came shortly after Second Annual Report, an ultra lo-fi affair, recorded using a Sony tape-recorder, a single condenser microphone and an ordinary blank cassette. In contrast, the single "United" was almost glossy enough to pass for pop: this disco-inspired designed for 'people to fall in love to' (according to the Industrial press release) might have been chart material if not for its slightly defective groove and P-Orridge's runny vocals.

Throbbing Gristle - United 1978

"United" was the first in a series of danceable electropop tracks somewhere between Giorgio Moroder and Cabaret Voltaire: the pulsating porno-disco of "Hot on the Heels of Love", featuring Cosey Fanni Tutti's breathy whisper; the eerie, shimmering propulsion of "Adrenaline" and its flipside "Distant Dreams (Part Two)".

Throbbing Gristle - Hot on the Heels of Love 1979


Throbbing Gristle - Adrenaline 1980


Throbbing Gristle - Distant Dreams (Part Two) 1980

In a typical TG twist, "United" reappeared on D.o.A. speeded up so fast that its four minutes were reduced to sixteen seconds of bat-squeaky treble.

Throbbing Gristle - United (D.o.A. version) 1978

D.o.A. confounded expectations in other ways, too. It contained archetypal TG songs like "Hamburger Lady" (a nauseous churn of whimpering, agonized sound inspired by the true story of a burns victim unrecognizably charred from the waist up) but also 'solo' tracks like the Abba-meets-Kraftwerk rhapsody of Chris Carter's "AB/7A" and P-Orridge's unexpectedly plaintive and personal "Weeping", made using four different types of violin sound. 

In his most piteously crumpled voice, P-Orridge mumbles accusatory lines like 'You didn't see me weeping on the floor/You didn't see me swallowing my tablets' - a reference to his suicide attempt of November 1978, when he downed a huge quantity of antidepressants and steroids before going onstage at the Cryptic One Club, and woke up in intensive care. The target of his jabs was Cosey Fanni Tutti, who'd left him for Chris Carter, which makes "Weeping" industrial music's equivalent to Fleetwood Mac's intraband break-up anthem "Go Your Own Way".

Throbbing Gristle - AB/7A 1978


Throbbing Gristle - Weeping 1978


Fleetwood Mac - Go Your Own Way 1977

Around this time, TG embarked upon an experiment in totalitarian psychology that got a little out of hand. A ragged tribe of itinerants had set up camp in the wasteland behind their Beck Road home and a neighbourhood crime wave appeared to coincide with their arrival. Recoiling from the squalid lifestyle of the itinerants, TG nicknamed them 'subhumans'. Two singles emerged from this playing-with-fire phase. "Subhuman" featured a caravan image on its cover and lyrics like 'You make me dizzy with your disease/I want to smash you and be at ease'.

Throbbing Gristle - Subhuman 1980

"Discipline" came in two different versions. The first, recorded live at Berlin's S036 club, effectively documents the song being written onstage. Given the theme-of-the-day by Cosey a few minutes before going onstage, P-Orridge improvised a series of barked commands: 'I want some discipline in here'. Eleven minutes long, the track starts shakily, then gathers cohesion, as if undergoing the very regimentation process it proposes. The beat sounds like a jackboot moistly pulping the infirm and lowly underfoot, while gruesome shearing sounds conjure an abattoir atmosphere.

Throbbing Gristle - Discipline (Berlin) 1981

The later version, recorded in Manchester, is much tighter: P-Orridge declaims, 'Are you ready boys? Are you ready girls? We need some discipline in here' like a cross between scout leader and Fuhrer.

Throbbing Gristle - Discipline (Manchester) 1981

On the single's front cover, TG pose in front of the building that once served as the Third Reich's Ministry of Propaganda, while the flipside features the slogan 'Marching music for psychic youth'.

Joy Division and Martin Hannett's production

Joy Division began life as Warsaw - to most contemporary ears, a fairly undistinguished, punk-inflected hard-rock band. "Digital", the group's first recording as Joy Division, sounds not a million miles from Black Sabbath's "Paranoid": a dark, fast pummel, a full-tilt dirge fusing pace and ponderousness.

Joy Division - Digital 1978


Black Sabbath - Paranoid 1970

Joy Division's use of Nazi imagery stemmed from morbid fascination; and as such, was often in questionable taste. On the mini-album Short Circuit: Live at the Electric Circus - a document of the Manchester punk scene - singer Ian Curtis can be heard screaming at the crowd, 'Do you all remember Rudolf Hess?'

Joy Division - At A Later Date (from Short Circuit: Live at the Electric Circus) 1978

In June 1978 the group self-released their first record, the Warsaw EP An Ideal for Living. The sleeve featured a drawing of a blond-haired Hitler Youth drummer boy and a photograph of a German stormtrooper pointing a gun at a small Polish Jewish boy.

Curtis was also intrigued by the mass psychology of fascism - the way a charismatic leader could bewitch an entire population into doing, or accepting, irrational and monstrous things. The early song "Walked in Line" is about those who just did what they were told, committing crimes in a 'hypnotic trance'.

Joy Division - Walked in Line 1979

Curtis' doomy baritone and obsession with the dark side often got him compared to Jim Morrison. Indeed, The Doors were one of the singer's favourite bands. Joy Division's "Shadowplay" is like "LA Woman" turned inside out, the latter's rolling, virile propulsion reduced to a bleak transit across a city that could hardly be less like sun-baked southern California.

Joy Division - Shadowplay 1979


The Doors - LA Woman 1971


"Digital", Martin Hannett's first Joy Division production, was titled after his favourite sonic toy, the AMS digital delay line. His most distinctive use of the AMS digital delay was subtle, though: he applied a micro-second delay to the drums that was barely audible but which created a sense of enclosed space - a vaulted sound, like the music was recorded in a mausoleum. Hannett also wove subliminal shimmers deep into the recesses of Joy Division's records. And he loved the occasional extreme effect: on the debut Unknown Pleasures, he miked up the clanking of an antique lift for "Insight" and incorporated smashing glass on "I Remember Nothing".

Joy Division - Insight 1979


Joy Division - I Remember Nothing 1979

Hannett demanded totally clear and clean 'sound separation', not just for individual instruments, but for each element of the drum kit. "Typically on tracks he considered to be potential singles, he'd get me to play each drum on its own to avoid any bleed-through of sound", sighs drummer Stephen Morris. "First the bass-drum part. Then the snare part. Then the high hats". Not only was this tediously protracted; it created a mechanistic, disjointed effect. "The natural way to play drums is all at the same time. So I'd end up with my legs black and blue 'cos I'd be tapping on them quietly to do the other bits of the kit that he wasn't recording". 

This dehumanizing treatment - essentially turning Morris into a drum machine - was typical of Hannett's rather high-handed attitude to musicians. But the disjointedness certainly added to the music's alienated feel. You can hear it on one of the high points of the Hannett-Joy Division partnership, "She's Lost Control", with its mechano-disco drum loop, tom-toms like ball-bearings, a bassline like steel cable undulating in strict time, and a guitar like a contained explosion - as if the track's only real rock-out element has been cordoned off.

Joy Division - She's Lost Control 1979