After Throbbing Gristle announced on June 23, 1981, that “The Mission Is Terminated,” they initially split into two. Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti had an offer waiting from Rough Trade to launch their new project Chris & Cosey. Tutti remembers:
Because TG was all about honesty and truth, I found there was a lot I couldn’t be honest about regarding the fact that I’d left Genesis, because it had to be publicly upheld that he was okay still. I found that a real problem, so when TG split, it was great for me because I had that honesty back again, and I wasn’t promoting something that was untrue.1
In Chris & Cosey’s music, a heavy sonic reverberation in the relative absence of high harmonic frequencies conveys a mild claustrophobia, which is impressive, given how sparse their arrangements are—often just one or two synthesizer patterns in minor keys over a two-beat drum pattern. The singing is undeniably melodic, though, and the rhythms are rooted in dance. In an unambiguous recognition of industrial music’s tension between the politics of pop and its pleasures, Carter says of the dance excursions that had begun on Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats:
It was ironic at the beginning. It was more an experiment to see if we could do it, because none of us were trained in any sort of musical way other than a few piano lessons. Then when we did that and it worked, we said okay, this is quite enjoyable doing this. Let’s actually do it. That was when we left and did Chris & Cosey.2
The band’s 1981 album Heartbeat embraces a human vulnerability amid its quiet, cavernous mechanized looping. In the song “This Is Me,” Carter and Tutti alternate singing “Here I come. I’m gonna get you,” seemingly drawing new meaning from the ambiguous line each time. The effect is a little reminiscent of the open-endedness in the lyrics to Throbbing Gristle’s “Still Walking.” Tutti explains, “It was still ideological for me, but in terms of relationships, after everything we’d been through with TG—it did get ugly. That came into the songs we did as Chris & Cosey. That’s why the lyrics had double meanings.”3 This kind of songwriting built on the work of previous incarnations of the genre, opening up an established set of industrial lyrical themes as poetic metaphors for personal experience.
In 1982, Chris & Cosey scored an underground hit with “October (Love Song),” but despite the signifiers of pop, their songs were more atmospheric than catchy. As Mick Fish puts it, to many industrial fans “without P-Orridge’s mischievous intent, Chris & Cosey were too tame an outfit to confront, nor were they able to display any pop potential despite becoming friendly with the Eurythmics.”4
Carter recalls, “We could see the end of TG coming—all of us could—so we were planning what to do post-TG.” Shortly before the breakup, Genesis P-Orridge explained in an interview, “I think that the technology has been explored and the roots of blues music and slave music has been explored, and now we’ve done the Industrial music. We have to go beyond into where man meets space. I don’t mean cosmic like Tangerine Dream, I mean inside the head.”5 Here P-Orridge indicates the beginning of his next project, Psychic TV. Its origins date back to 1979, when P-Orridge, Tutti, and Monte Cazazza conceived of “giving a public and media illusion of a large, well organized, disciplined and meticulously accessorized ‘anti-cult.’”6 Indeed, they’d all shared a strong interest in both the paramilitary and the occult.
P-Orridge recruited Alex Fergusson, Scottish guitarist of Alternative TV. P-Orridge had originally played drums with Alternative TV in 1976 and had maintained a friendship with Fergusson throughout Throbbing Gristle’s run. Around this time, Fergusson moved in next door to P-Orridge in the semilegally reclaimed artist squats on Beck Road in London’s Hackney borough. Their first musical composition together was “Just Drifting,” which began as a poem P-Orridge had written for his newborn daughter, Caresse. Visiting P-Orridge’s flat, Fergusson noticed the verse on the water heater and within a day had set it to music on his acoustic guitar. A few months later, Christopherson, ever easygoing and diplomatic, agreed to join the project, even as he maintained his friendship with Carter and Tutti.
On the surface, Psychic TV’s music was a departure from all things Throbbing Gristle: it was lush, melodic, hippyish, and usually beat-driven. Carter says, “A lot of the feeling in Throbbing Gristle came from the tension between the four members,” but Psychic TV was less inwardly focused and more of an open, communal affair.7 The first album, Force the Hand of Chance, featured contributions from Marc Almond of Soft Cell, body piercing guru Alan Oversby (“Mr. Sebastian”), and postminimalist composer Andrew Poppy. These appearances, along with the presence of postpunk über-producer Ken Thomas, were paid for in part by WEA (Warner Brothers), with whom Stevo Pearce, owner of his own label—Some Bizzare—had brokered a record deal for the band. Psychic TV’s later endeavors continued the movable feast, involving Throbbing Gristle’s soundman Stan Bingo, Z’EV, David Tibet of Current 93, Geoffrey Rushton (later John Balance) of Coil, filmmaker Derek Jarman, gay icon Quentin Crisp, and P-Orridge’s first wife Paula (Alaura O’Dell), to whom he was impulsively married on a day trip to Tijuana a month before Throbbing Gristle’s split. Over time, members would leave, not always happily. Christopherson and Rushton departed in early 1984 to found the band Coil. Rushton politely explained that they “found things getting too autocratic and one lined.”8 Tutti suggests, however, that the split was due to a bad falling out: “It was worse for Peter than [Carter and Tutti’s split with P-Orridge] was for us. We had no idea what had gone on afterwards, but he said, ‘Believe me, it’s worse for me.’”9 Fergusson left the band in the late 1980s (to be replaced by American Fred Giannelli), and following the breakup of P-Orridge’s first marriage Paula’s name was removed from rereleases. She later said, “I think Gen needs to look at his motives for excluding me … his own illusion is not only cheating me [and] the public, but also our children.”10
Psychic TV was conceived of as a fully multimedia project, integrating music (most of the early composition and production was Fergusson’s work), video (handled by Christopherson), and a philosophical propaganda wing, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY). TOPY eventually took on a life of its own as a visible religious movement. In its questioning of consensus reality and in its ties to discordianism, chaos magick, and the Ordo Templi Orientis, TOPY surely deserves its own study (Thee Psychick Bible is a good primer), but its story increasingly deviates from that of industrial music. It was one thing to buy and enjoy a record; it was another entirely to correspond with an organization that many perceived as a cult (ten thousand members at its peak), conducting rituals concerned with the mysticism of the number twenty-three. P-Orridge’s raison d’être revealed itself to be an esoteric study in culture jamming (eventually including popularizing body piercing, championing acid house music, and embarking with his second wife Lady Jaye on the gender-erasing surgical art project Pandrogyne). As such, Psychic TV was happy enough to be rid of the “industrial” label. By the time the band released their 1985 out-of-nowhere pop hit “Godstar,” it was clear that between P-Orridge and industrial music’s fan base, one party had moved on. As for which, that depends on whom you ask.
The most consistently beloved and “industrially” relevant of the ex-Throbbing Gristle excursions was Coil, a mystic project launched by Geoffrey Rushton, who adopted the name John Balance. When he was a teenage zine journalist (writing under the name Scabmental), Balance met Christopherson while interviewing Psychic TV; they became very close and Balance joined the ensemble for a while, during which time he was romantically involved not only with Christopherson but apparently also in a brief, triadic relationship with Genesis P-Orridge and bassist Sharon Beaumont (who used the name Mouse). Coil began chiefly as Balance’s solo side project, and a cast of friends contributed early on, including Christopherson, Jim G. Thirlwell, Marc Almond, Gavin Friday (of Irish goth act the Virgin Prunes), and John Gosling (whose Zos Kia project Balance was also involved with, and with whom Coil split their first release, the 1983 Transparent tape). But after leaving Psychic TV following a gig at the second Berlin Atonal Festival on December 2, 1983, Balance and Christopherson began working together on Coil more dedicatedly. In mid-1984, they invited Stephen E. Thrower, a penpal friend of Christopherson’s since 1979 (via his Throbbing Gristle fandom) to join them in the studio (playing drums, brass, and woodwinds) as they recorded Coil’s full-length debut Scatology.
The album was quite the big-budget affair for industrial music. As Balance remembers, “On Scatology, we hired a Fairlight 2 and we had a mixing desk upstairs in the middle of the room, and we said ‘We’re going to do an album.’ We just went to work every day and we went to finish it in other studios.”11 Scatology indeed bears the sound of 1984’s not-yet-perfected technology: on tracks like the instrumental opener “Ubu Noir,” there’s a lo-fi strangeness in the sample of a large orchestral ensemble looped and triggered until it seems small, and the inconsistent echo applied to the song’s sounds gives it a strange sense of unreal space; similarly, the gated reverb on the drums of the album’s single “Panic” would sound at home on a Phil Collins album. Far from pop, though, Scatology uses samplers to create a bombastic, brassy flair. Its tracks are divided between dire, Wagnerian vocal pieces such as “Tenderness of Wolves”—which comes off like a druidic take on Laibach and Foetus—and little excursions into FM synthesis, a new kind of electronic soundmaking popularized by Yamaha’s 1983 DX7 synthesizer.
Scatology resonated at its release (and still does) because it was at once a step away from the postmodern, the prankish, and the punk. While Chris & Cosey were exploring Carter’s fascination with ABBA, and while Psychic TV increasingly became a personal mouthpiece for P-Orridge, Coil proudly politicized their identity as self-declared gay, pagan men, a combination illustrated in the subtitle of their 1984 EP How To Destroy Angels: “Ritual music for the accumulation of male sexual energy.” Their spiritual practice was exceedingly important in their music: less cultish and chaotic than TOPY, and more grounded in an Albionic arcane.
It necessarily calls to mind the early-twentieth-century magician Aleister Crowley. Occult historian Francis King writes, “With the exception of Aleister Crowley and his followers I know of no western occultists—either ‘black’ or ‘white’—who used homosexual acts as magical methods of gaining power.”12 Though Crowley’s interest in occultism was preceded by his same-sex desires (and it may well have served as a justification of them), his conflation of the two is instructive. Like so many points of entry in industrial music, this is reminiscent of Artaud’s desire to pull people out of themselves—ek-stasis. As scholar Hugh Urban explains, “Crowley found in sexual magic the most intense experience of transgression, the overstepping of conventional taboos, as a means to unleash an ecstatic, liberating power.”13 As with Psychic TV, not all Coil’s listeners related immediately to their religious leanings, but amid the outbreak of AIDS, Coil’s sexuality had obvious ramifications that affected their music’s creation and reception. Their terrifying ultra-slow cover of “Tainted Love” from 1985 was framed by a mournful video of a man on his deathbed, confronted by a blasé leather-clad biker—a former lover? Death?—played by Marc Almond, whose Soft Cell popularized the song. Intercutting these scenes are closeups of Crowley’s maxim “Love is the Law, Love under Will,” chiseled in stone. Unlike nearly every other industrial band of the era, when Coil sings of death (as they especially do on their 1986 LP Horse Rotorvator), they do so with a real and fearful, first-person closeness. In John Balance’s 2004 obituary (he died after falling from his balcony), The Guardian put it, “In the mid-1980s, gay pop was coming out of the closet, but Coil were the first resolutely queer group; their words dealt with desire, disease, dirt, death and drugs, and their collages sounded dark, dank and dangerous.”14
Coil gets much deeper coverage in David Keenan’s book England’s Hidden Reverse. Their legacy, though, is one of ever hinting at a secret world, an unspoken, unspeakable way of being. This perception was unintentionally fueled by the notorious difficulty of finding their records, which was due to poor distribution and sour dealings between them, Stevo Pearce (whose Some Bizzare label distributed several of their early albums), and Dimehart Ltd., a publishing company run by Einstürzende Neubauten’s Mark Chung.* Coil explored acid house music on their album Love’s Secret Domain and in a set of unreleased recordings made around 1997 for Trent Reznor’s Nothing Records; later, they plumbed ambient soundscapes on their exquisite 1999 Musick to Play in the Dark, and eventually they achieved a kind of critical respect that few industrial bands maintained beyond the early 1980s. In an illustrative reversal, Karlheinz Stockhausen namechecked them as among his favorites. As is so often the case in pop music when an act’s critical respect is so disproportionate to others in its genre, Coil in its later years was frequently treated by some writers as too good to be industrial—again, the old cliché of “transcending the genre.” During the mid-1980s, however, not only were they a central lattice in industrial music’s widening net, but they were vital in the development of a largely English esoteric underground.
Unlike America or West Germany, England’s culture, history, finance, and government are ultimately centered around one city. Northern England had been able to foster a postindustrial “outsider” sensibility on account of its not being London, but once the northern scenes and sounds caught the attention of the big city’s record labels and music journalists, London quickly became home to a large number of industrial acts in the early and mid-1980s. It’s telling that Throbbing Gristle’s members moved there from the north before the band even began.
In 1980, both Jim G. Thirlwell of Foetus and Graeme Revell of SPK relocated to London from Australia, and with the members of Throbbing Gristle they formed a small community of like-minded performers.* Included in this cadre—more a clique than a scene—were also Nigel Ayers of Nocturnal Emissions and Lustmord’s Brian Williams, who joined up with SPK early the next year. To this day, Williams still works with Graeme Revell on film soundtracks.
SPK’s musical origins are outright punkish; Australian musician Ian Andrews writes that they “emerged out of the extremely abrasive guitar and electronic noise post-punk typified by [Australian] groups Voigt/465 and Primitive Calculators,” and indeed at their first gig in 1978, they covered “Panik” by French synthpunk act Metal Urbain.17 Initially a duo, SPK was formed by Revell and Neil Hill at a psychiatric hospital in Sydney, where they were nurse and patient, respectively. This relationship led the culturally curious Hill to research the Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv, a radical group of patients and former caretakers in Germany from whom SPK would initially take their name and inspiration.* The Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv believed that individual sickness was a proper and revolutionary response to a sick modern world, and that curing or isolating the ill served only to hide the evils of capitalism. Founded in 1970, the group disbanded a year later and was largely absorbed by the Red Army Faction. SPK’s embodiment of the movement is most clearly enacted in their 1979 song “Slogun,” which chants, “Kill, Kill, Kill for inner peace! Bomb, Bomb, Bomb for mental health! Therapy through violence!”—a lyric lifted decades later in KMFDM’s “Rubicon.”
As discussed, SPK eventually veered heavily toward pop, but the band’s sound was decidedly clanking, droning, metallic industrial music when the first LP was recorded in the midst of the 1981 Brixton riot.** Customers who bought Information Overload Unit received with it a political pamphlet and a capsule of semen.20 Revell illustrated his polymorphous artistic tendencies and simultaneously demonstrated that the I-word was in the subcultural air by February 1981 when he said, “I don’t want to be labeled as futurist, just like I don’t want to be labeled with Industrial.”21
Whitehouse was also based out of London and was at the center of a small group of bands who made sheer noise—usually blisteringly high-pitched and rhythmless. Some tracks featured distorted vocals screamed over them, usually barely coherent. The style is called “power electronics,” but like many gradients within the noise continuum it’s often grouped within industrial music when most broadly defined. Whitehouse’s ceaseless scream is annoying when played quietly, but overwhelming when played loudly—and extreme volume was always a part of noise gigs.
The power electronics faction, which also included such acts as Ramleh, Con-Dom, the Grey Wolves, and Whitehouse side projects Consumer Electronics and Sutcliffe Jügend, has been more consistently grouped by its politics and iconography than by its music. Occasionally similar in sound and paratext to Boyd Rice’s NON project, Whitehouse and groups like them consistently invoked extreme violence, social Darwinism, and fascist-derived politics. Some of these acts have claimed this was all done in irony. Gary Mundy of the band Ramleh explains:
At the time, this all fitted in with the audience-baiting and obnoxious attitude of the band—deliberately taking opposite standpoints just because it was irritating to do so. We enjoyed getting up people’s noses and found it amusing to be accused of things which were simply untrue. We were never a racist or right-wing band. Indeed, no members of Ramleh ever had any affiliation with any political party, but this kind of game is ultimately futile and childish and I became more aware of the danger involved and decided to call a halt. We had made our point although, I guess, it’s very easy to see why nobody understood it … there was no right-wing viewpoint to any of the stuff—we made an error in judgment in testing out the bounds of offensiveness.22
Fascism and racism vis-à-vis industrial music receive an extensive discussion in Chapters 13 and 14, but it suffices here to say that when sometime Whitehouse member Philip Best advertised Ramleh’s 1982 Onslaught through his tape label Iphar as “a cassette of agonizingly dominant hate, sheer contempt … The first in the new Iphar era of White Power,” then simple irony cannot adequately account for the possibilities in this music.23* Nor, however, is it easy to read these bands’ constant conflation of fascism, murder glorification, and extreme pornography as unblinkingly earnest, as Mundy’s quote indicates; to their apologists, the idea of a supposedly genuine evil so consistent and totalizing simply strains credulity, especially when its reach is limited just to music. At any rate, Whitehouse and the apparently right-wing noisemakers of the early 1980s are constantly derided as having missed the critical message of acts such as Throbbing Gristle, Laibach, and SPK, instead latching onto only their violent imagery at face value. Whitehouse were frankly hated by many of their contemporaries, despite having worked in their early days (when the band was called Come) with Daniel Miller of the Normal (and founder of Mute Records) and Jim G. Thirlwell. In more recent years, Whitehouse frontman William Bennett has gradually shifted his image, with the help of some sympathetic publications, to that of an elder statesman of noise music. He has accomplished this in part through an alarming self-awareness, using his post-2000 records as a platform to critique noise, its fans, and its opponents, shining a thousand-watt strobe on his own political shortcomings and paradoxes, offering ceaseless questions with no possible answers.
Similarly interesting in their exploration of noise were the New Blockaders, who in their 1982 manifesto declared themselves to be “anti-music, anti-art, anti-magazines, anti-books, anti-films, anti-clubs, anti-communications.”24 Their recordings and performances—songless, endless, grinding noise—are demonstrations of their total nihilistic purpose. By refusing meaning itself (and by also refusing to participate in either the social aspects or the imagery of early 1980s industrial music), they have managed to remain a willfully obscure and impenetrable artifact. As Paul Hegarty, author of Noise/Music: A History writes, it “was never about listening.”25
Prerequisite across early 1980s English subcultures was a disdain for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whose conservative economic and labor policies went hand-in-hand with the ruling classes’ regressive and repressive views on all things social, sexual, and artistic. The industrial scene was far from Thatcher’s only pop critic: punk band Wah! recorded “The Day That Margaret Thatcher Dies (A Party Song)” and Morrissey’s “Margaret on the Guillotine” is a minor indie classic. This sentiment can serve as a common thread, helping to connect industrial music’s distant political corners. Whitehouse, whose name is a smearing cooption of anti-pornography activist Mary Whitehouse, crosses paths with socialist act Test Dept. when the latter title a brassy song “Long Live British Democracy Which Flourishes And Is Constantly Perfected Under The Immaculate Guidance Of The Great, Honourable, Generous And Correct Margaret Hilda Thatcher. She Is The Blue Sky In The Hearts Of All Nations. Our People Pay Homage And Bow In Deep Respect And Gratitude To Her. The Milk Of Human Kindness.”
One of the great metal-banging acts, Test Dept. was among London’s most important industrial groups of the 1981–1985 era. Originally a six-piece band, Test Dept. included Londoners and Scots, gay and straight men, drama students, unemployed artists, and a few trained musicians who (as so often) decided to set down their instruments to create a new noise with the junk they found lying around. Like Einstürzende Neubauten, the band staged many site-specific performances that relied on their surroundings: under a railway arch at Waterloo station in 1983, at Cannon Street Mainline station, in an underground parking lot. The theatrics might easily have been considered “atmosphere” by some spectators, but don’t overlook the importance of that idea: “atmosphere” describes a dialogue between a performance and its surroundings, and so a good atmosphere means this dialogue is consonant, or at least interesting. Test Dept. was committed to these ideas, having endured a police raid at their unlicensed “November Reprisal” performance in 1983. Band members were arrested and their instruments were confiscated.
Music critic John Gill remembers the band’s live show:
A band who had given us a tape of their music, crashing industrial gamelan music battered out of steel springs, oil drums, sheets of metal, vast tanks, drills and buzzsaws, had invited us to one of their performances. The precise address of the concert had to be kept secret. They hired industrial premises—railway arches, warehouses, industrial depots—under the guise of anonymous charities in case the owners and the authorities got wind of what they intended to do in, and sometimes with, this property. …
As they drummed up metal thunder on an adventure playground’s worth of industrial detritus, violent electronic noise was bled into the mix and grainy Russian revolutionary films were projected on to band and stage. … The smell of oil was everywhere, and when they began applying cutting machinery to their instruments, producing volcanic spurts of sparks 20 feet across, people stubbed out cigarettes and backed towards the door.26
More important than the audacity and the access to structural percussion that site-specific performances allowed was their role in the band’s ongoing commentary on the collapse of England’s industrial age. As the band themselves say, “We feed off the corpse of British ‘culture’ … Utilising the waste of a dying civilization to create a new pure and honest music.”27
It’s fitting, then, that Test Dept. squatted and rehearsed among a community of antiestablishment punks and ex-hippies living in a row of old houses on Nettleton Road in New Cross. Author Tony Allen argues that in living thus among the waste, squatters such as Test Dept. in fact saved London’s industrial age architecture: under the city’s late 1960s policies, those buildings would have been torn down to make room for highrises had they not been occupied.28
With Test Dept. more than nearly any industrial act of the era, every action was political—not merely in a punkish negation, but in unambiguous, partisan terms. The band, who preferred to identify collectively, declares, “We wanted to make very direct, confrontational music that used ideas driven from deeply rooted social and political issues.”29 They continue, stating that people have “seen what the Conservative government has done to this country and [Test Dept.] have become increasingly relevant through that. If there had been a socialist government it would have been a completely different story.”30
The band’s socialist agenda took them so far as to join in the 1984–85 UK Miners’ Strike in solidarity with the workers. They recorded an entire album, Shoulder to Shoulder, with a choir of striking miners from South Wales. Actions like these caught the attention of the leftist press, and by the end of the 1980s Test Dept. were receiving more performance and collaboration requests from arts groups (including the Royal Scottish National Orchestra) than from industrial venues and labels. By 1989, they were staging massive events such as Gododdin, in which “hundreds of tons of sand, dozens of trees and wrecked cars, and thousands of gallons of water” flooded an abandoned car factory in Wales, paying elegy to a lost valuation of human labor.31 “The God in Britain now is efficiency,” the band laments.32
Test Dept.’s unambiguous political tone and their earnest, literal take on “industrial” music may ultimately have led to their somewhat lesser standing in the industrial canon than, for example, Einstürzende Neubauten, to whom the press compared them constantly, if only superficially. Even in their much later concession to dance pop, “Pax Americana,” Test Dept.’s members can’t quite bring themselves to use political signs in a cryptic, classically “industrial” way: after they chant, “We love Saddam Hussein,” the band starts reciting William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” that most modernist of all verse. In doing do, they suggest by proximity that at the time (late 1990), any understanding of the coming Gulf War was only fragmentary, and to suppose otherwise was to commit intellectual colonialism—even as armies and governments enacted military imperialism.
It’s true that their music is occasionally overripe with nineteenth-century English brass choirs and sloganlike admonishments of “a government that conspicuously favours its wealthy, its corrupt, its immoral citizens, but denies basic human rights to the majority.” But Test Dept.’s musical commitment to change and its members’ postdisbandment investments in social and political progress through art suggest that the group’s significance has as much to with their development of a musical and political mission as it does with banging on drainage pipes.
South London was also home to the band Portion Control, a trio of John Whybrew, Ian Sharp, and Dean Pianvanni, who lived and recorded at Kennington Road, just a quick tube ride away from Test Dept.’s stomping grounds. Portion Control had begun as a band in 1979, and their first recordings, the Gaining Momentum cassette, saw the light of day in 1981. A combination of analogue synth noises, found object drumming, and a Greengate digital sampling card powered by an Apple II gave much of their earliest work a sound that blends innocuously with the moodier moments of Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle, although there were also inspired aberrations like the hip-hop infused track “In Pursuit of Excellence.” At times, Portion Control demonstrated a gift for gritty, teeth-grinding distortion, not unlike Esplendor Geométrico. What makes the group important, though, were two things: first, by the time they made songs such as “Bite My Head” and “Chew You To Bits” in 1982 and 1983, they were using verses and choruses—“Our punk grounding meant we often worked within conventional song structures.”33 For better or for worse, this element of pop songwriting was becoming gradually more pervasive within industrial music. Second, Whybrew’s singing style quickly developed into an animal sneer that was more expressively theatrical than were his contemporaries in the scene, but also more focused than the unhinged wailing that characterized songs such as Throbbing Gristle’s “Discipline.” It was a bestial and confidently nasty growl from a tight throat through a drippy echobox. The sound is an unignorable precursor to the work of Skinny Puppy. As Bill Leeb of Front Line Assembly writes:
It made you feel you were witnessing a total transformation of human liquid form to a devastating alien. So barbaric, cold and hard, but a thing of brutal beauty. What hard, pure clean sound with devastating vocals. I have never ever heard such vocals. At first I wasn’t sure whether it was a monster being tortured or a total maniac trying to tear the world apart with his voice.34
Portion Control never reached the same level of popularity as many of their contemporaries, even despite landing a session appearance on John Peel’s BBC Radio 1 show. Portion Control, like many of London’s bands from this era, instead found their most enthusiastic audiences in the Benelux countries. As Whybrew says, “The whole industrial, wild planet electronic music movement was always small in England with most bands playing across Europe for any recognition at all. The movement was about obscurity.”35
There were rumblings elsewhere in England too. Ben Ponton of the group Zoviet France made droney, quiet, cut-up noise from acoustic samples of homemade instruments and started releasing records in 1982. He recalls:
We never felt we were in the industrial tradition which was very much the contemporary movement from which we sprang. It was round about that time where everybody seems to have arrived at the same point and started lots of things, like Nocturnal Emissions, and what Throbbing Gristle were doing, and Test Dept.’s early days, and everybody else … 23 Skidoo. We were aware of what everyone else was doing, but because we were in Newcastle, which is quite a cultural island in itself, we didn’t feel any bonding to that at all, we didn’t feel any attachment to it. We saw ourselves as very isolated and very much out on a limb. It didn’t worry us, we were quite happy in that situation, quite happy to continue fiddling about with the ideas we had. We didn’t feel that we had to conform to any kind of preconceptions about what we were doing at all.36
The power of geography persists here. This kind of isolation similarly allowed Essex teenagers Douglas McCarthy, Vaughan “Bon” Harris, and David Gooday to bring in musical and conceptual ideas from far outside the London-Manchester-Sheffield axis in creating their band Nitzer Ebb in 1982.
The three schoolmates shared a socialist worldview and a passing fancy for the occult, and although it’s tempting to suppose they embarked on music out of these interests, the reality is that their first love was skateboarding. From there, Harris says, “Music was very closely knit with skateboarding culture. It was only a matter of time before we segued into music.”37 Their hometown of Chelmsford was a decidedly third-rate city in the eyes of Londoners, and so the band members’ exposure to postpunk entailed not only musical excitement but a risky, cosmopolitan flair with midnight trains and immersion in an older, cooler set. “When we saw these groups, we were 13 or 14 years old. You’d go to one of these shows and people were just beating each other up in the name of dancing. Just having fun. That release was something we wanted to tap,” says lead singer McCarthy.38 The youth of Nitzer Ebb’s members almost certainly played a role in their interpretation of this music. For them, it was no information war; it was the logical extension of dancing, skateboarding, and sex; “we were pretty much preoccupied with expending energy.”39
Despite their status as one of the premier industrial dance bands of the 1980s, Nitzer Ebb eschewed drum machines for much of their career, instead basing their live and studio setup on only a Roland SH101 monophonic synth, an incomplete drumkit, and a microphone (they would later expand their sound and also use drum machines). The band’s early live gigs—enormously and immediately popular—were reminiscent of Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft, with McCarthy’s ultramasculine shout and Harris playing hype man over the quarter-note kick-snare alternation of the drumkit. A rowdy showmanship was needed to cover the time between songs, during which Harris literally had to reprogram the band’s next number from memory. He says:
There was a built-in sequencer in the SH101, so in fact on stage, I had to pull the main plug out and program each song before it played because it could only hold one song in memory. I managed to get this down to thirty seconds, roughly. We would play a song and then stop. I’d pull out one cable, plug in the headphones, program the bassline, switch back over again, and then press Play.40
Nitzer Ebb’s songs throughout their career have been based on simple loops of the sort that one could indeed program quickly, but Harris maintains this wasn’t because of the technology: “I think we chose the means to fit what we wanted to achieve. We were very interested in funk and disco taken to a further degree.”41 Despite choosing repetition consciously as a musical device (as opposed to stumbling upon it technologically), Nitzer Ebb built their loops and designed their songs improvisatorily:
That’s the blues connection right there. It’s complete instinct. It was a desire to express youthful angst and emotion and those were the sounds. If you press this key after that one, that’s how I’m feeling. It wasn’t any preconceived thing. Later on I actually went back and I did study music and I understand a lot of theory now, and it’s interesting to go back and look at what we did and see how close to blues it is.42
England’s postpunk scene was fond of Jamaican reggae and dub—important African diaspora styles that found their way into industrial through such artists as Mark Stewart and Adrian Sherwood—but very few industrial acts openly acknowledge roots in blues-derived musics. Between these nods to disco, funk, and blues, we can hear in Nitzer Ebb a pleasure-based use of pop’s rhythms and harmonies at work. In their 1984 song “Isn’t It Funny How Your Body Works?” Douglas McCarthy’s words serve up a typical industrial juxtaposition of “a hammer and stars, a sickle and stripes,” but melodically, he repeatedly bends the third scale degree—a hallmark of the blues. All this happens over the synthesizer pattern’s alternation from C to F and back, emphasizing the plagal cadences that separate blues from classical music. Their 1983 song “Tradition” from their Basic Pain Procedure demo tape has identical features (and is even in the same key).
With some care not to oversimplify the meanings and contexts of blues inflections, we might argue that Nitzer Ebb, through these musical signs (and bolstered by their youthful, bodily exuberance) helped offer an alternative to the meditative (if loud) music of Coil or Einstürzende Neubauten. Nitzer Ebb employed the same propaganda savvy that guided Throbbing Gristle and Laibach—“We tended to mix and match from both political extremes and different political eras to confuse the issue … the system is not designed for our benefit”—but Nitzer Ebb was ultimately instrumental in developing electronic body music, a separate strain of industrial music that would become the genre’s dominant form from the mid-1980s to the present.43 Although SPK’s “Metal Dance” and other acts’ excursions into pop language were heard by most as embarrassing concessions, audiences interpreted Nitzer Ebb’s disco angst (at least through the 1980s) as uninhibited and natural, as if there were no other way it could have sounded.
A lot of this had to do with their fixation on the body: though acts like NON and Factrix had attempted to drown out conscious thought through overbearing noise, early EBM (and indeed bands such as Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft) attempted to do more or less the same by highlighting, disciplining, and exhausting the body at the expense of explicit intellectual discourse. McCarthy pants and wheezes throughout Nitzer Ebb’s songs, suggesting exercise, sex, and physical overload. Their chant of “Let your body learn—let your body build” not only indicates that the body possesses subconscious understanding but suggests that access to this understanding can be something instinctual and animal: let your body learn—don’t make it learn.
Whether Nitzer Ebb’s members realize it or not, this idea is in line with the philosophical approach called phenomenology, which argues among other tenets that all our knowledge is derived from our perception, and that all perception is necessarily mediated through our bodies. Music can play an interesting role in the whole equation because it foregrounds the body in its creation and reception—the physical exertion of singing or strumming, and the act of dancing or playing air guitar, respectively.
The sounds of electronic music aren’t the sounds of arms pounding or throats singing, though, and so it can short-circuit listeners’ assumptions about the bodies of its performers. Traditional rock music favors a working-class body with callused hands and a whisky-rough voice, and by denying this particular brand of physicality the body of electronic music was easily heard as lazy, weak, undisciplined, and effete. The criticism in the 1980s and 1990s that electronic musicians were fake or talentless, then, is a response to a perceived threat against a specific bodily identity as encoded in sound—an identity within a narrow range of class, gender, sexual orientation, and race. As Front 242’s Patrick Codenys says, EBM was “a reaction to the fact that people say electronic music is just for faggots behind keyboards … EBM takes exactly the opposite angle and says, Listen, this can be as fast and physical as you guitar guys.”44 If we recall how electronic music demands that we learn new relationships between the body and sound, then this physicality in Nitzer Ebb and Front 242 can teach a different sort of body. As phenomenologist and dance theorist Alva Noë writes, “The body is the substrate of our understanding. But as we learn to do new things, as we learn to use new tools, we extend and transform our body, just as we extend and transform our understandings. Electronic music doesn’t take the body away. It gives us a new body.”45
As we’ll soon see, the particulars of this new body retain certain rockist features—maleness and whiteness, to be sure—but they recast other parts of identity, and these changes are closely connected to industrial music’s historical place within modernism. As scholar Deniz Peters explains, “The hopes of this modernist aesthetic were on the machine, not only on the noise machines make, but, just as importantly, on the mechanistic production of sound; that is, the hopes were tied to the image of the generation of sound using a perfectly suited, untiring and infallible body. …”46*
Nitzer Ebb thus heard in disco and funk’s pleasurable bodilyness the Burroughsian possibility of returning to a state unmediated by language, uncontaminated by the separation of mind from body that so much western Christianity and culture has relied on; they heard a physical state of being that was prior and immune to mind control—integrated and impregnable.** With an emphasis on pleasure and an eye toward the transhumanist improvement of the body through cybernetics, this is a more optimistic take on dance rhythms than Laibach’s insistence that in response to the beat’s unifying power audiences must reenact their own submission in order to cleanse themselves of it. A vital issue implied in these two approaches to pop rhythms within industrial music is whether bodily pleasure is a personal empowerment or a collective opiate. As with industrial music’s ambivalent view of technology, the ambivalence it displays regarding this bodily pleasure only increases the tension over the issue. It’s a central question to keep in mind throughout the next chapter, on the origins of electronic body music.
ICONIC:
Chris & Cosey – “October (Love Song)” (1982)
Coil – “Panic” (1984)
Nitzer Ebb – “Warsaw Ghetto” (1985)
Psychic TV – “Just Drifting (for Caresse)” (1982)
Scraping Foetus Off the Wheel – “I’ll Meet You In Poland, Baby” (1984)
ARCANE:
23 Skidoo – “Porno Bass” (1982)
Portion Control – “If I Could Spit” (1982)
SPK – “Twilight of the Idols” (1983)
Mark Stewart – “Hypnotised” (1985)
Test Dept. – “Hunger” (1983)