Waiting for Help From Above

Throbbing Gristle : Hot On The Heels of Love

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In December of 1979 the British Industrial music group Throbbing Gristle released 20 Jazz Funk Greats, an album that consisted of 13 tracks that were anything but jazz funk. Unless you knew who Throbbing Gristle were, you'd have no idea what you'd be buying and that was part of the point, says Cosi Fanni Tuttu:

We did the cover so it was a pastiche of something you would find in a Woolworth’s bargain bin. We took the photograph at the most famous suicide spot in England, called Beachy Head. So, the picture is not what it seems, it is not so nicey nicey at all, and neither is the music once you take it home and buy it. We had this idea in mind that someone quite innocently would come along to a record store and see [the record] and think they would be getting 20 really good jazz/funk greats, and then they would put it on at home and they would just get decimated.

What shoppers got instead is an album featuring lyrics like “I’ve got a little biscuit tin/To keep your panties in/Soiled panties”. Pitchfork voted the best industrial album of all time. Brandon Stosuy writes:

 Just as the listener is getting used to living in Jazz Funk’s disemboweled music box, the band serves up the shiny, thumping electro disco of “Hot on the Heels of Love,” anchored in Fanni Tutti’s breathy whispers, a dance-floor snare, and delicate vibraphone notes. They founded their own world—creating a cracked framework for industrial music, populating it with their own squalor and later side projects, and then tearing it apart with a smile.

Discrediting Myself For You

Throbbing Gristle : Weeping

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In December of 1978 the industrial music pioneers Trobbing Gristle released D.o.A: The Third and Final Report. Fall asleep with this album playing on your headphones and you may wake up screaming.

Pitchfork describes the album as "a nauseating masterpiece, and an essential recording". AllMusic states that the album "finds the group assembling collages of computer noise, cassette tapes on fast forward, looped feedback and tape hiss, surreptitiously recorded conversation, threatening phone calls, and much more, all to a grand alienating effect, the sound of a gray day in a British tower block after all the drugs have run out."

It didn't help matters that a photo of Genesis P-Orrdige used as the album cover a photograph he'd taken of a friend's daughter exposing her knickers while playing. The band would split acrimoniously, dealing with the same kinds of fractious relationships as Fleetwood Mac. In their wake they would leave a discography that would influence the likes of Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode.

Who Are These Weirdies?

Throbbing Gristle : Slug Bait (ICA)

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"We were absolutely antithetical to rock'n'roll at that point. We really didn't care if anybody liked it, or if we sold any records. Mark Perry of Sniffin' Glue famously said, 'Learn three chords now form a band'. I said 'Learn none at all'. To play chords was to plug into the tradition at some level."

-Genesis P-Orridge, vocalist to Mojo

On November 4, 1977 industrial rock pioneers Throbbing Gristle released The Second Annual Report, a disturbing collection of psychopathic slurring embedded in dense, improvised synthesized sounds. Throbbing Gristle's success led the band to create their own Industrial Records label from which they issued music by bands like Cabaret Voltaire and Clock DVA.

Keith Baldock was the unwitting music journalist who wrote an early review of the band:

One may have asked in passing : “Who are these weirdies?” I still don’t know who they are, or why they should have attracted such publicity, and I went out of my way to see them perform at the Nag’s Head pub in High Wycombe on Friday. 

 Well, I say perform because just at the moment I seem to be lost for words to describe what went on.

 I make no apology for saying I am a lover of heavy, noisy. Jarring, ear-splitting music. I’m young and strong and I can take it. 

 But I had a job to keep my pint in my stomach as I listened to the muck which was Throbbing Gristle’s claim to fame.

 An ape with his hands severed can thump just as violently on a bass guitar as Genesis did. I thought that was bad, but then he picked up his electrified violin and suddenly the place was full of agonised cats. 

 I can’t be sure that he was trying to sing, and I couldn’t make out every word he screamed into the microphone, but it sounded like I should have ignored the man and gone home. 

 Our photographer gave up early. I wish I’d followed him. 

 But I waited, and watched dumbfounded as Cosey Fanni Tutti bared both her chest and her ignorance of music, and Genesis poured artificial blood over his head then spat it onto the stage. 

 At least he did stop playing for a while — but only to shout obscenities at the audience and to throw a table across the hall. 

 Then he invited half a dozen youngsters from the catcalling and jeering audience onto the stage, and he handed them the instruments. They sounded better than Throbbing Gristle, even though they couldn’t play a note. 

 Those youngsters paid 75p to go into the hail to listen to the stomach churning travesty of music which Throbbing Gristle was oozing into the Nag’s Head. 

 The landlord, Mick Fitzgibbon, told me that the youngsters were about ready to throw Genesis P. Orridge, plus his equipment, bodily through the door.
 “I’ll never have them back here,” he said. “The kids were threatening to punch the promoter, and I don’t blame them.”

 However Gig Reserves, the promoters want to make amends to customers of theNag’s Head. They promise that next weekend’s band, Phil Ram, is good, and not to be missed. I think I’ll go along to make sure.