Northern England was both the center of the European industrial revolution and the birthplace of industrial music. From the early nineteenth century, coal and steel works fueled the economies of cities like Manchester and Sheffield and shaped their culture and urban aesthetics. By 1970, the region’s continuous mandate of progress had paved roads and erected buildings that told 150 years of industrial history in their ugly, collisive urban planning—ever new growth amidst the expanding junkyard of old progress. In the BBC documentary Synth Britannia, the narrator declares that “Victorian slums had been torn down and replaced by ultramodern concrete highrises,” but the images on the screen show more brick ruins than clean futurescapes, ceaselessly flashing dystopian skylines of colorless smoke.1 Chris Watson of the Sheffield band Cabaret Voltaire recalls in the late 1960s “being taken on school trips round the steelworks … just seeing it as a vision of hell, you know, never ever wanting to do that.”2 This outdated hell smoldered in spite of the city’s supposed growth and improvement; after all, Sheffield had significantly enlarged its administrative territory in 1967, and a year later the M1 motorway opened easy passage to London 170 miles south, and wasn’t that progress?
Institutional modernization neither erased northern England’s nineteenth-century combination of working-class pride and disenfranchisement nor offered many genuinely new possibilities within culture and labor, the Open University notwithstanding. In literature and the arts, it was a long-acknowledged truism that any municipal attempt at utopia would result in totalitarianism. The theme dates back to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1924 post–October Revolution novel We, Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis, George Orwell’s postfascist Nineteen Eighty-Four of 1949, and the art of George Tooker, whose 1950 The Subway illustrated urban technology’s underbelly of sadness, paranoia, and disconnect. During industrial music’s first years, the wider trope would hit fever pitch with J. G. Ballard’s 1975 novel High Rise, David Cronenberg’s film of the same year Shivers (also titled They Came from Within), and George Romero’s 1978 zombies-in-the-mall think piece Dawn of the Dead.
In intellectual and artistic circles of the late 1970s, it was almost universally understood that industrialization was artistically and personally limiting. In 1977, French economist Jacques Attali wrote a book called Noise: The Political Economy of Music, which is arguably the most influential piece of Marxist musicology of the last fifty years; in it, he argues convincingly that even though industrialization and capitalism originally gave rise to the middle classes who enabled musicians to support themselves, the musicians ultimately became commoditized, and through repetition—both structurally in their music and in the mass industrial reproduction of their recordings—their art lost its meaning and instead began to reinscribe corporate power.
Young artists in 1970s northern England didn’t need science fiction or academic theory to feel the weight of institutional power and cyclicity. Musician Martyn Ware of the Human League and Heaven 17 frames it in terms that are both industrial and spatial: “It really forced you into a choice whether you were gonna accept being a small cog in a relatively small wheel or whether you were gonna try and burst out of there.”3 It’s worth asking here not just how Ware and other musicians burst out but how they even recognized that doing so was a possibility.
Writing of industrial music, noise scholar Paul Hegarty asserts, “Modern, technologized industrial society controls our minds, acting as a limiter on expression and attainment of potential.”4 The trouble with mind control, of course, is that the controlled are unaware of it. One function of industrial music is that it seeks through caricature and cut-up to correct this by exposing the face and the methods of this institutional control. Taking a cue from Burroughs, some think this reframing is a metaphysical act; Genesis P-Orridge writes, “No matter how short, or apparently unrecognizable a ‘sample’ might be in linear time perception, I believe it must, inevitably, contain within it (and [make] accessible through it), the sum total of absolutely everything its original context represented, communicated, or touched in any way.”5 Similarly, the Hafler Trio writes, “A well-made sound recording of a place (or a person or a thing), nevertheless, contains a fragment of the ‘soul’ of that place (person or thing).”6 This approach suggests that when an artifact of social control is cut up, its source is magically disrupted. A less supernatural explanation, however, is that in sampling and cutting up, the disruption of time brings the voice of control to the fore while shedding its content. In this way, it can serve as an all-points bulletin to alert listeners to the insidiousness of its source.
If the likes of Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle experienced the surrounding signs of northern England’s industrialization as limiting, then we shouldn’t merely hear their music’s burnt-out soundscape as just a vague reflection of the city, assuming that somehow geography “shapes” music. Instead, we can understand the industrialness of their music as a specific reaction against the perceived control, as an attempt to disarm it by postering its sonic mugshot onto freely traded cassette tapes and through club PA systems. That these bands came from industrial cities also makes sense, as they were closest to the real signs of industrialization, authoritarian control, and their negative effects. Not only were the old steel mills hellish and the new highrises faceless, but together they contributed to a lurking cultural and financial depression—one that the government attempted to answer with ubiquitous offices that arose to employ a generation of laid-off workers and despondent students. The government’s presence on every street was the up-close reality to which English industrial music responded.
In considering industrial music within industrial geography, let’s forgo the conventional wisdom of beginning the narrative with Throbbing Gristle—for whom Hull and London were as much a base as Manchester—and instead look to the city of Sheffield and its progeny Cabaret Voltaire and Clock DVA.
Cabaret Voltaire—and indeed Sheffield’s modern pop legacy—starts with Chris Watson, born 1948. Introverted and gifted in all matters technical, Watson had come to idolize Brian Eno, a philosopher king of tech geekery and the keyboardist for Roxy Music, whose concerts Watson had twice attended as a student. Watson experimented for two years with tape decks in a loft at his parents’ house in the suburb of Totley with the goal of “making music without musical instruments,” and by the time he met fellow Eno devotee Richard Kirk in 1973, he had already begun building oscillators from mail-order kits.7 Watson’s work as a telephone engineer helped pay for this do-it-yourself electronics habit. Watson and Kirk together began dedicatedly creating and mixing weird noises, initially just exploring technology and sound aesthetically, but eventually they confirmed a mutual desire to create something more out of the clatter. Kirk recalls, “Any kind of noise looped up would do the job more or less. And then we’d perhaps record some percussion, slow it down or speed it up to make it sound a bit disturbing or whatever, a bit different,” to which Watson adds, “The loops would become songs. We would produce these tape collages, oscillator sounds, found sounds.”8 Kirk played a cheap clarinet and eventually took up guitar “because we didn’t want to be completely arty and obscure.”9 In late 1973, they recruited singer and sometime bassist Stephen Mallinder, a buddy from Kirk’s days as a troublemaking fourteen-year-old skinhead in the late 1960s.
Cabaret Voltaire, who took their name and much of their inspiration from Dada and surrealism, presented themselves as aloof and foreign, so much that NME journalist Andy Gill wrote in 1978 that “Cabaret Voltaire could have been spawned in any city, and quite probably in a non-urban area, too. The geographical locus counts for little in the nexus of possibilities which brought about Cabaret Voltaire.”10 But even though experimental sound art is itself not an exclusively Sheffieldian notion, Gill mistakes the high-concept Dada behind Cabaret Voltaire’s name for the preconditions of their music. It’s telling that Mallinder was recruited because, according to Kirk, “Mal was the only person we knew who didn’t have a Yorkshire accent and we thought, ‘Oh we might as well get him to do some of the vocal stuff.’”11 Similarly, faced with the lack of recording studios and electronic equipment commercially available in Sheffield, they stepped outside the typical channels of rock self-development and formed an uneasy alliance with Sheffield University’s music department. The faculty couldn’t tell if the youngsters were academics in training or just punks, but they nevertheless allowed the trio to use its small electronic studio, which included an EMS VCS3 synthesizer. These moves weren’t taken with indifference to Sheffield, but in spite of Sheffield. Just as Burroughs tells the story of shutting down an unfriendly restaurant by going into the building and playing back a previously taped recording of its spatial ambience, Cabaret Voltaire’s early sampling and playback is an urban tour of provocation. Watson explains, “We’d go round to people’s houses on Friday and Saturday evenings with a couple of portable tape recorders and listen to the tape loops. Sometimes we’d set up in pubs or in doorways, even public toilets. We’d go to places like the Buccaneer, Wapentake and pubs on West Street.”12 Sheffield music historian Martin Lilleker reports that the band drove around town blasting Sheffield’s own sounds from speakers mounted on top of a friend’s van. They would jump out of cars to play high-volume tape loops at the city’s unsuspecting pedestrians, interested not just in the sounds but also “in seeing what kind of reaction we’d get. It attracted attention,” says Watson.13 The disruption at the core of Cabaret Voltaire’s musical prankishness relied on the assumption that Sheffield needed a shakeup.
Even if Cabaret Voltaire could have come from somewhere else, Sheffield could not have become an electronic music Mecca without them. By 1982, Sheffield bands accounted for 5 percent of the market share of UK singles, though the city’s population made up only 1 percent of the nation.14 Considering this disproportionate chart representation alongside the admiration, affection, and wonder that the city’s younger electronic acts felt toward Cabaret Voltaire, one understands that the title of their 2002 best-of, The Original Sound of Sheffield ’78/’82, is no exaggeration. Instead, it hints at a double meaning: Was Cabaret Voltaire’s music merely the original instance of a style that came to be synonymous with Sheffield, or did they tap into and amplify an essential sonic specter of the city—its original sound?
Their practical influence on the other musicians of the city is clear in the performing and recording opportunities they offered. In 1977, using Watson’s money, Cabaret Voltaire set up their own recording studio on Portobello Street on the second floor of a development called the Western Works, which had over time served as a cutlery plant, a World War II air raid shelter, and the meeting space for the Sheffield Federation of Young Socialists. In this repurposed old building, they oversaw some of the earliest recordings by Clock DVA, the Human League, 2.3, Hula, and New Order. Kirk told one urban historian, “Western Works [was] like Andy Warhol’s Factory on a fifty pence budget.”15 Indeed it was a social space, but as Simon Reynolds writes of it, “You could record-it-yourself and spend as much time fine-tuning as you liked.”16
This idea is absolutely essential to the sound of Cabaret Voltaire. Their days of rehearsing in the Watson family’s attic and their early anarchic borrowing of the University of Sheffield’s electronic lab had guided the band to a belief in the importance of sonic detail. Watson recalls the fine-tuning allowed by owning a studio made their work “more like composition than songs,” adding, “We were interested in the sounds themselves.”17 In this respect, Cabaret Voltaire established a blueprint for industrial music: throughout all eras of the genre, the home studio is the experimental compositional space. In a city more affluent than Sheffield, owning a studio would have been not only unaffordable for the band but effectively redundant, given the availability of rental establishments elsewhere.
On first glance, it can seem a little tough to reconcile the trio’s high-minded, almost scientific approach to sound experimentation with their punkish public antics and raucous live performances; for example, their first concert in May 1975 ended in a fistfight with the audience that sent Mallinder to the hospital. But the honing they did in the studio served as the groundwork for the sounds that, to Cabaret Voltaire’s ears, managed to bypass the tired cultural pathways of music’s recent past—something that not even punk could do in its amped-up reboot of the 1950s teddy boy scene. This meant that a lot of audiences heard the band’s sounds devoid of associative baggage, and thus with a certain visceral immediacy. Mallinder explains, “We try to be very spontaneous, because that’s the way people listen to music. We try to be as immediate as possible, and not just try out some all engrossing philosophy and concept.”18 This possibility appealed especially to young Sheffielders wanting to shake free of not just the enveloping specter of nineteenth-century industrialism but their parents’ belief—hardened by World War II—that England should be grateful for its institutions of labor, finance, and patriotism, even as they crumbled in plain view.
And so Cabaret Voltaire’s first major success was the bratty June 1979 single “Nag Nag Nag,” of which biographer Mick Fish writes, “A perfect post-punk ball of fuzz, it summed up a kind of nihilistic desperation. After all who hadn’t turned round to their boss, their teacher, their mother at some time or another and thought, ‘nag, nag, nag’.”19 It wasn’t the band’s first release; they’d made some tapes that Kirk had circulated in mail art communities, and Throbbing Gristle had wanted to sign them to Industrial Records but couldn’t afford to as they’d just released their own The Second Annual Report in 1977. Instead, on Throbbing Gristle’s recommendation, Cabaret Voltaire signed with Rough Trade in early 1978. There’d been an offer from Manchester-based Factory Records too, but Rough Trade bought the trio a four-track Revox tape machine (in lieu of an advance), which was enough to win them over. They released Extended Play, a four-song set featuring live favorite “Do the Mussolini (Headkick!)”—not to be confused with the later, greater “Der Mussolini” by Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft—but that debut release essentially served to feed the fans already made hungry by Cabaret Voltaire’s reputation as an audacious live act. “Nag Nag Nag” changed the game despite its poor reviews and earned the band new devotees by selling ten thousand copies, including plenty in France and Belgium. Says Mallinder, “People wanted us to do a disco version. People called for it live. Maybe it was quite a significant record for other people; maybe we just hit a nerve, but for us it was just another track.”20
Part of the single’s nagging appeal was the constant 1300-Hz sizzle in its electronic timbres that sounds more like a dental suction tool than a synth or guitar. It plays an intimate, plasticky horror atop the Selmer drum machine’s hokey wooden beat. Mallinder’s voice is run through heavy distortion, which decentralizes his humanness both through its mechanized timbre and its near-total negation of verbal comprehensibility; he is no longer a singer in a band, not merely an implicitly radical megaphone barker, but part of an aggravation machine, turned equally on its audience and itself.
A few months later, the band’s full-length debut Mix-Up came out on Rough Trade, reaching number twelve on the UK indie charts. The same grating sound palette pervaded songs such as “No Escape” and “On Every Other Street,” but the band was clearly moving toward something moodier and more serious than the petulance of “Nag Nag Nag.” Invoking the I-word, Sounds magazine called it “muddy, grey, industrial swamp music.”21
Outfitting their Western Works studio more elaborately with each paycheck from Rough Trade, Cabaret Voltaire’s members were dedicated and efficient tinkerers. Their next releases attracted progressively wider listenership: 1980’s The Voice of America reached number three on the indie charts, even as its title track samples a 1966 recording of a Memphis law enforcement deputy instructing his troops before a Beatles concert, “We will not allow any dancing, running up and down the aisle. Is that clear with everybody?” The tactics they’d applied to Sheffield’s local banality—identifying and ridiculing the inscribed social order with its own sonic output played back—were starting to go global, inspired by their November 1979 tour of America. One last full-length with Rough Trade in 1981, Red Mecca, took on the escalating conflict between Islam and the west, sleekly smearing washes of noise over funky rhythms. Recorded again at Western Works, the album was an indie number one, and despite a grand conceptual stage it still sounds relentlessly rooted in a sense of locality. The songs “Sly Doubt” and “Landslide” treat drum tracks with an ultrafast echo effect that sonically places them in cramped, hard-walled spaces: a city. “Spread the Virus” cuts in the sound of screeching car tires amid Kirk’s jazzy woodwind bleats. The delirious expansion and compression of sonic space and the juxtaposition of the city’s quotidian bustle with Islam’s ancient transcendent otherness constituted “the most complete and chilling musical representation of Eighties’ Britain yet produced,” according to Andy Gill in the NME.22
Within months of the album’s release, Watson—the most technical and conceptually experimental of the group—left the band to focus on a career in sound recording for media. Stevo Pearce (more about him in a few chapters) signed the remaining duo to his Some Bizzare label and leveraged a licensing deal with Virgin. The £50,000 advance that Kirk and Mallinder landed for their album The Crackdown would eventually help them upgrade their own studio, but the deal was in exchange for recording the LP in London and, as Kirk recalls, “maybe put[ting] the vocals a little higher in the mix and not processed so you can hear them.”23 The band’s albums on Some Bizzare would be their best sellers, but many have commented that even as Cabaret Voltaire’s star rose, the man-machine dynamic so vital to their sound and so prototypical to later industrial music faded from their records. Listening to the single version of “Just Fascination”—remixed by KC and the Sunshine Band’s producer John Luongo—one hears the group amid new surroundings. Mallinder now lived permanently in London (though he still kept a residence up north), and the nightclub as a physical space increasingly reverberated in the band’s ethos. As the industrial specter of the urban receded in the duo’s output, it became clear that any Sheffield their music responded to was a different city.
A belief that industrial music widely shares with several radical twentieth-century practices of art, spirituality, and academic theory is that reality itself is no more than a tacit, perceptual consensus, and as such it can duly be shaped by perception, making art a two-way street: it changes the world by reflecting alternative perceptions of it. This tenet of perceptual reality is most famously articulated in the maxim “Nothing Is True; Everything Is Permitted,” attributed by Burroughs to the eleventh-century cult leader Hassan-I Sabbah. Accordingly, Cabaret Voltaire’s early music not only perceived and responded to Sheffield’s reality but clearly shaped it too. In light of this, let’s back up a few years again to see some other important musical reactions both to the industrial condition of Sheffield and to its first electronic sons, Cabaret Voltaire.
As early as 1975, Sheffield’s plugged-in young musicians saw Cabaret Voltaire as a formidable artistic and social part of their own surroundings; to the brooding, raincoat-clad teenagers at haunts like the Beehive, Watson in particular was understood to be an eccentric genius of sorts. Never aloof among the city’s nonconformists, the band readily gave out favors, eventually recording and mentoring younger acts. As Martyn Ware recalls, “Cabaret Voltaire were very generous people in terms of their time and their encouragement for other people around. They were almost like the godfathers of that scene at that time. In fact they were. They encouraged creativity in everybody around them.”24 Kirk is brasher about the situation: “Basically, we were the fucking coolest people in Sheffield.”25
Despite its proximity to Leeds and Manchester, Sheffield was in many ways an isolated city, a fact that both situationally highlighted Cabaret Voltaire’s coolness and more or less necessitated their generosity. From a musical standpoint, two municipal factors had set the city on a unique course. First, as Andy Gill explained in 1979, “Unlike any other city of comparable size Sheffield lacks the basic machinery for indigenous musical growth.”26 For much of the 1970s, there were no high-tech studios, and the only real gig in town was playing northern soul at working men’s clubs. This condition effectively isolated the city’s musicians—hence the need for establishing Western Works and offering friendly access to it.
Second, as a municipal study in Geoforum states, the Sheffield City Council was beginning “to look to cultural and media industries as a new growth sector,” hoping to attract investors in the wake of industrial business going south.27 In their openness to new creative endeavors, they’d made a strange and fortuitous move in February 1973 by approving a proposal by actor Chris Wilkinson and his wife Veronica to create Meatwhistle, a theater and arts space for the city’s youth. The anarchic, post-hippy project attracted a regular crowd of about forty offbeat teenagers, who between 1973 and 1977 improvised with art, promiscuously formed and dissolved impromptu bands, abused cameras (purchased by the city), enjoyed activities with titles like “Spray-On Theatre” and “Twinkie Hour,” and occasionally put on actual plays. Meatwhistle was a creative breeding ground and an adolescent reprieve from adult supervision; as such, its artistic output skewed toward gross-out aesthetics and us-versus-the-world conspiracy theories.
Taken together, the city’s artistic isolation and these teenagers’ cross-breeding and mutation seems a recipe for evolution. Indeed, Meatwhistle churned out bands that eventually became the Human League, ABC, and most importantly for this book Clock DVA, all of whom made music in awe of and under the tutelage of Cabaret Voltaire. One could argue that without Meatwhistle and the scene it fermented, Cabaret Voltaire may well have lacked the local support and momentum to succeed (though the University of Sheffield’s punkish student group the Now Society also boosted the band).
Among the Meatwhistle ensembles that managed to last longer than a single rehearsal, a few gathered a local following and a legacy. Musical Vomit, for example, is cited by a handful of writers as having prefigured punk’s flaunting of ineptitude and crassness; Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex saw them play in 1974 and later called them “the very first punk group in Britain.”28 More important was the boldly named band the Future, whose lead singer, Adi Newton, would go on to found Clock DVA. Primarily active in 1977, the Future was an experimental electronic act whose presentation and concept was better defined than its music, which was mostly an echoey field of analogue zips and thumps (courtesy of Ian Marsh and Martyn Ware), occasionally punctuated by Newton’s sneering vocal commentary. A song such as “Pulse Lovers” compels with its mantralike repetition, and this earned the band some real interest from record companies: on two-day trip to London in 1977, the Future met with nine labels, and both Island and Virgin showed some interest, but ultimately the verdict was that more real songs were needed. Not long after that, the band kicked Newton out over money, musical taste (he wanted a broader sonic palette, but without pop influence), and Ware’s perception that Newton was mercurial and paranoid; a press release later declared Newton was “deleted due to malfunction.”29 Ware and Marsh then teamed up with Meatwhistler Philip Oakey to create the Human League, who flirted distantly with industrial aesthetics on such early recordings as “Almost Medieval,” “Being Boiled,” and “The Black Hit of Space” before becoming pop stars a few years later with the mega-hit “Don’t You Want Me.”
Newton was born Gary Coates but had been dubbed Adi—short for Adolph—by his friend Glenn Gregory (who himself later became the singer of synthpop act Heaven 17). Like Cabaret Voltaire’s Kirk and Mallinder, Newton had been a very young skinhead in the early 1970s before that identity assumed racist connotations. Naturally attracted to the esoteric, Newton’s worldview and aesthetics blended vintage European surrealism with a tough-guy aesthetic derived from his fondness for the Marlon Brando motorcycle gang movie The Wild One. He and most members of the Sheffield scene had initially latched onto electronic music with the Moog-driven score to A Clockwork Orange by Wendy (then Walter) Carlos. Beyond its striking new sound, the electronic score was cinematically combined with a cityscape where the ultramodern barely hid a postindustrial decay. To a young English audience, the film—set in England—all but declares in its totalitarian voice that this will be the music of the future.
An art student, Newton explored deeper, though: “My interests came from people like İlhan Mimaroğlu, John Cage, and so on”—records that he was able to acquire from Rare and Racy, a local oddball store.30 But beyond the academic work of early electronic music and beyond punk’s aggressive yet ultimately conservative musical language, Newton “wanted something more intense, paranoid and totally out of control. Something that couldn’t be marketed but could still exist. A sort of totalitarian underground music.”31 When he and his friend Stephen James “Judd” Turner launched Clock DVA, it was “just so screwed up—junk and violence and tape recorders, big kicks. Sex and magic in an industrial setting, the whole incongruity was brilliant.”32 Joining Newton and Turner was a semirotating cast of musicians on guitar, saxophone, and drums; over the years, at least seventeen members have passed through the band, many of whom have been revisionistically excised from the official history.
Early on, Clock DVA recorded and locally distributed a series of homemade tapes, which were often based around long hisses of white noise, distorted bass guitar, and a barely audible rhythm loop. Newton and Judd were insistent that they were on to something, but some of their bandmates grew frustrated with the inability to tell one “song” from another—their first recordings from early 1978 were indeed somewhat anonymous, collectively referred to as “six therapeutic tape loops.”33 The band’s first live concert in July 1978, opening for the Human League, was reviled in the local press and by all accounts was made up of little more than the band’s wandering improvisations and some arbitrarily constructed tape loops almost completely drowned out by Newton’s vocals, which had been run through a delay unit that bounced his words back in endless repetition until the noise was incomprehensible gibberish.
Shortly after, however, their studio work began taking on a distinctly jazz-inflected atmosphere, with tracks such as 1978’s “Alien Tapes” using the pitch bending of a variable speed tape machine to sound something like trumpet falls, while Turner’s overmodulated bass verges on the funky, even in the absence of a drum track. A sample reminiscent of a foghorn suggests a low, industrial meditation on John Coltrane. Through a series of concerts in 1978 and into 1979, they turned down the reverb and upped the anger: “DVA believe that the audience have played the role of the passive observer for too long and so we are attempting to change that situation both musically and visually. Sometimes I attack the audience. And I usually swear at them,” Newton boasted at the time.34 The musical channeling of this energy was earning them a reputation for “hardly enjoyable music, but … strict, disciplined, haunting, compelling stuff, of the Dadaist vision,” as Chris Westwood wrote in ZigZag magazine’s November 1978 issue.35 Their gear-smashing tendencies seemed at odds with the strangely static nature of the sound—there was no drummer in the band until the summer of 1979—and the music bore little resemblance to punk, which never had much of a foothold in Sheffield to begin with.
Some of their antics were directly in response to their physical surroundings: an August 1978 gig at the Penthouse had a particularly uninterested audience and an uncooperative soundman and bouncers, so the band smashed the fluorescent lights of the club into shards—the audience loved it. Newton explains:
We wanted to try to open things up because there were a lot of restrictions at that time. The club owners, the promoters were very cautious about what they promote or they were concerned about new music or groups or how they could exploit it in a way, so in many ways we had to take control ourselves.36
Rather than respect the system of Sheffield’s conservative and isolated club scene, they confronted it.
There was a kind of independence of operation, a kind of outsiderness almost, in that we would do things ourselves. We would try and do everything ourselves. We’d try and organize concerts, we’d do the posters, we’d do the films. … It was very difficult for us to find places to play live.37
Clock DVA’s habit of looking in vain for gigs and then attempting to incite a riot once finally given a show seems paradoxical, but it mirrors their simultaneous entrapment within and rage against Sheffield. It also may have reflected the personalities involved, agitated by other urban realities including heavy drug use. There are stories about Turner in particular stealing from druggists, lying about his name to landlords and police to avoid arrest, and overdosing repeatedly in the spring of 1979. Newton recalls, “The way we were living seems an idiotic, fucked-up existence. But at the time it made sense. It was the only sense. But without those foundations DVA wouldn’t mean anything.”38
Interestingly, as their music became more beat-driven (due to the addition of drummer Roger Quail in July 1979), Clock DVA’s shows grew less violent and more traditionally musical and arty. Newton began dressing like a priest onstage, and those early hints of jazz were more fully realized with the addition of saxophonist Charlie Collins, whose echo-soaked squeals suggest a nighttime city sadness on songs such as “Non,” summoning New York through English smog. On 1979’s “Brigade,” recorded for a compilation of local Sheffield acts, the band sounds practically like a polished pop group, mixing dancepunk and psychedelic guitar solos. Clock DVA’s focus edged away from the electronic roots of the Future and indeed away from what the term industrial conjures today, but even as this happened, their critical and popular star was rising. Sheffield zine NMX wrote:
They’ve changed from being one of the more unfashionable and even despised bands around to being the darlings of everyone who claims any connection with Sheffield music, sold out gigs at the Blitz and everyone suddenly saying they’ve always been into the Clocks. Their sound has gone through a complete transformation, from Leagueish simplicity through dark, barely rhythmic cacophony to the present blend of noise and melody, an overpowering mix of guitar and sax over a pounding beat. …39
Newton and Turner were branching out in other ways too. They played London in the summer of 1979 and had made contact with Throbbing Gristle, whose Industrial Records was starting to release tapes by acts they deemed worthy. “I wrote to [Genesis P-Orridge] because I liked what they were doing … this idea of the industrial and the magic all these ideas. I wanted to try to get into one piece and I devised a long track called, ‘Genitals & Genosis’ which was about all those kind of elements.”40 While the “Genitals & Genosis” recordings wouldn’t see daylight until 2012, Industrial Records did release the first full-length tape for Clock DVA, White Souls in Black Suits, in December 1980. They had improvised for fifteen hours into a mobile recorder and then mixed and compiled the best cuts at Cabaret Voltaire’s Western Works, with Chris Watson even contributing to one track.
Before that album even came out, Clock DVA’s connection to Throbbing Gristle had already led to a higher-budget deal with Rod Pearce, whose Fetish Records was pressing and distributing vinyl for Industrial Records and whose roster would soon include other early industrial acts like 23 Skidoo and Z’EV. In September 1980, Clock DVA used their advance from Pearce to go to Jacobs Farm, a twenty-four-track studio in Surrey, where they recorded a batch of songs they’d been honing live. Co-produced by Ken Thomas and much less improvised than White Souls in Black Suits, the resultant album Thirst was spacious and clattering, rather than claustrophobically squeezed onto two-track tape. Newton’s voice is at times even melodic, following Collins’s saxophone over riffs on tracks such as the distinctively Sheffieldian “North Loop.”
Thirst’s original liner notes feature a short piece by Genesis P-Orridge called “The Lion in a Cage,” a title that evokes Clock DVA’s combination of urban rage and imprisonment. The essay frames this sort of music as speaking a hidden, private truth from within a surrounding, public oppression, offering “rituals collective yet private, performed in public but invisible. White souls stripped bare to reveal bleeding yet hopeful sadness. The rites of youth. Our alchemical human heritage, encased like a cadaver in a black suit.”41 Here the public sphere precludes truth, expression, and yes, the soul: consider that in Newton’s own liner notes to White Souls in Black Suits, he writes, “We have adopted chance, the voice of the unconscious—the soul, if you like—as a protest against the rigidity of straight line thinking.”42 The music responds not only to the particulars of Sheffield but to the enforced border between private and public that cultural hegemonies, codes of behavior, and authority bodies depend on. It is a music of place.
Released in early 1981, Thirst sold a hundred thousand copies, a number that amazed all involved.43 For a moment, Newton was bigger than Cabaret Voltaire, bigger than the Human League—acts who’d both mentored and mocked him alike. Sounds magazine gushed:
Thirst is the best album I have heard since [the Fall’s] Dragnet or [Joy Division’s] Unknown Pleasures. … [It] shares with those albums a provincial, coming from nowhere, arrogance. Clock DVA come from Sheffield. This is a lucky break!!! If they’d have come from London they would be on CBS or 4AD and Thirst would have sounded like fourth division [Talking Heads’] Fear of Music.44
But Clock DVA didn’t come from London, and probably couldn’t have. This music was necessarily shaped by the Hells Angels that Newton buddied up with, the frustration with venues and audiences that led to his violence against them, the invaluable tutelage of Cabaret Voltaire, and—going back to the beginning—the municipal Meatwhistle project whose openness birthed the Future and a creative, questioning youth culture. And finally, the city’s drug culture had one more adjustment to make to the group. On May 11, 1981, Newton and Turner fired their bandmates, with replacements already waiting in the wings, but a few months after that, Newton fired Turner, too. Depressed, Judd Turner died of a heroin overdose in August. Sheffield musician Martin Fry (of ABC) recalls, “It was terrible, crap drugs and no money. When I saw the film Trainspotting I thought this is Judd. It very much reminded me of the late Seventies in Sheffield. It taught me a fundamental lesson. He was only 22 or whatever when he died.”45
Clock DVA went on to sign with Polydor in 1982 after six months of negotiations. The next year they released Advantage, whose crisp production left critics cold and whose sales—far below Thirst’s numbers—left the new record label underwhelmed. Adi Newton quit his own band while on tour in France in 1983, effectively ending the project.
Cabaret Voltaire and Clock DVA both had careers beyond this point; Newton rebooted his band with a decidedly updated “industrial” sound in the late 1980s. Similarly, there were other bands in Sheffield who made a name in the industrial scene: In the Nursery would release records through WaxTrax! a few years down the road, Hula used percussion and live films to simulate sensory overload, Prior To Intercourse was a BDSM-themed performance group, the Anti-Group was a lower-profile but higher-concept project of Adi Newton’s, and Chris Watson later helped create the Hafler Trio. In the dialogue between geography and art, however, the particular time and place of Sheffield in the 1970s and early 1980s produced an urban experience that crucially imprinted and solidified a conceptual, practical, and musical set of values onto its creative citizens—a set of values that industrial music unmistakably assimilated into its story.
First, some basics.
Throbbing Gristle is by essentially every account the first industrial band, their roots predating even Cabaret Voltaire’s early tape experiments. Over the summer of 1975, the group’s future members began improvising informally with traditional rock instruments, electronic gear, and tape, recording long jams of mostly beatless sounds and wordless textures, which they would later edit and treat as source material for yet further recordings. All this was happening in a basement studio called the Death Factory on Martello Street near central London, a fact geographically incongruous within a chapter on northern England—though this detail will be addressed soon enough. (A titillating aperitif: members Cosey Fanni Tutti and Genesis P-Orridge fled northern England for London in 1973 for fear of being arrested in gang-related roundups.)
Tutti and P-Orridge, along with members Chris Carter and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, declared Throbbing Gristle’s official inception on September 3, 1975. It’s a peculiar and stilted thing to formalize the launch of a rock band, especially one with months of jamming already on tape. But Throbbing Gristle’s inorganicism and self-importance were among its strongest assets. Their talent for high-concept thinking gave rise to a calculated, articulated, and well-documented ideology. They designed and carried out a formidable and unified public presentation. Through hard-earned connections in governmental arts councils, the entertainment business, and post-hippie subculture, Throbbing Gristle’s members organized a financial support system that allowed them shortly after their official formation to launch the label Industrial Records. Initially a tape-only endeavor, Industrial Records eventually grew into a prestigious vanity imprint that gave releases to like-minded industrialists such as SPK, Clock DVA, Cabaret Voltaire, Monte Cazazza, and Burroughs himself.
In spite of the foursome’s collective intelligence and savvy, they purposefully selected instruments and musical constraints that would highlight their individual ineptitude. When punk and other genres flaunt performers’ incompetence, the intent is usually to convey an underclass cultural authenticity. For Throbbing Gristle, however, incompetence wasn’t just a way to resist the constraints of supposed correctness; it was a means of achieving an unpremeditated encounter between performer and music—an immediacy that the band imbued with psychic qualities unrelated to an external audience.
Throbbing Gristle’s work is conceptual and process-oriented, just as Chapter 2 suggested with its analyses of “Still Walking” and “Final Muzak.” For this reason, the band is less often evaluated on the strength of its recordings than on the music’s conceptual groundwork and execution. Throbbing Gristle’s sound ranges from gray droning on 1977’s The Second Annual Report to eerily tongue-in-cheek mutant disco on 1979’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats, but to the untrained ear it’s all intensely difficult listening. A given Throbbing Gristle record does little to prepare listeners for the next, as the band reveled in confounding expectations. The 1978 single “United” is an engaging, ABBA-influenced synthpop excursion—an attempt at a soccer anthem, in fact—but as a promotional teaser for the arrhythmic, overmodulated panic of The Second Annual Report and its tracks such as “Maggot Death” (given wider release that same year on Fetish Records), “United” is just plain false advertising.
Meaningful understanding of industrial music history means grasping Throbbing Gristle as more than their music, more than compositional process and artistic antagonism. Other acts, even some before Throbbing Gristle, had those attributes. Instead, the band’s significance and impact is better understood in light of its members’ backstories, both in the years immediately prior to 1975 (which we’ll discuss presently) and in a broader, more personally formative sense (which we’ll address after that).
At the quartet’s formation, each member was already an adept veteran of the arts. Carter had played bass in a rock band in the late 1960s, but his real expertise lay in electronics: as a teenager, he started a rock show lighting business where, by designing, controlling, and automating light rigs, he furthered his tech enthusiasm. In the early 1970s, he was touring England with various bands as an engineer and a musician; he built and played his own synthesizers. He additionally had a background in photography and graphics. Christopherson was also gifted with graphic design and electronic know-how. The son of a Cambridge professor, he’d begun to work in 1974 as a designer and photographer with the Hipgnosis art group, of Pink Floyd album sleeve fame. Genesis P-Orridge (born Neil Andrew Megson) had drummed in psychedelic rock bands since the mid-1960s and by the decade’s end was immersing himself in poetry and the art worlds of zine printing, Fluxus, and the mail art scene. After dropping out of Hull University in June 1969, P-Orridge joined an Islingston-based kinetic arts group called Transmedia Exploration, who combined improvisatory theater, anarchic reimaginings of circus arts, and the event-based works of the Vienna Aktionists but didn’t stay long. Returning back north to Hull and wanting to launch a more ambitious and otherworldly endeavor, P-Orridge and his friend John Shapeero conceptualized a new project in the autumn of 1969 under the mysterious title COUM Transmissions, a phrase that had spontaneously come to P-Orridge in a spiritual revelation of the sort to which his psychic medium grandmother had taught him to be open. In the final weeks of that year, P-Orridge met the quick-witted Christine Carol Newby, an eighteen-year-old anarchist hippie and Hull native, whom he dubbed Cosmosis. A natural social leader and a quick learner in art and music, she nearly immediately involved herself with both P-Orridge and, after first helping with some behind-the-scenes work, eventually joined COUM. With help from artist Robin Klassnik (who would also secure the Death Factory home base for Throbbing Gristle), Cosmosis took on the name Cosey Fanni Tutti. Though Carter is often cast as the technical brain behind Throbbing Gristle and Christopherson as the emotional (if pervy) heart, Tutti and P-Orridge were essentially the face and the voice of both COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle.
In its first years, COUM developed from a chiefly musical and theatrical ensemble to one concerned with public “happenings” and clownish surrealism. They performed on college campuses, in nightclubs, and in public parks, unlicensed and sometimes unannounced. However, the group became progressively better networked within, and more aware of, the national arts scene and beyond, building up a fan base to boot. This growth was such that right as the collective was starting to land shows in galleries and receive both consistent arts council funding and broader media exposure, P-Orridge and Tutti, along with members with names like Foxtrot Echo and Fizzy Paet, became increasingly convinced that improvised dance and harmless rehashings of absurdism were ineffective, unoriginal, and unchallenging.
An important factor in this sense of revolutionary desperation was that by 1973 the hippie movement had fizzled, failing to deliver on its promise of radical change. In bitter fury both at the hippies and at their shared corporatist, traditionalist enemies, young idealists all over the west looked increasingly to extreme measures. For their part, COUM moved beyond the art world’s politeness. They studied propaganda and began sloganeering with radical, pornographic postcards and manifestolike advertisements—a testing ground that later helped Throbbing Gristle hone a heartstopping pseudo-fascist visual vocabulary. Later in 1973, COUM angered police when they embarked on vandalism-themed projects, assisted by some friends in the Hells Angels (this is why P-Orridge and Tutti skipped town for London). Nudity and garbage soon became staples of live actions, and P-Orridge’s mail art turned nasty as he began sending rotted meat through the post (in what he calls an undeclared gross-out contest with Monte Cazazza). Tutti began posing for pornographic magazines in late 1973. Despite, or more likely, because of the group’s increasingly confrontational and audacious moves, they garnered ever more praise and attention, traveling and performing in Germany, France, and eventually the United States.
COUM’s biggest moment came well after the launch of Throbbing Gristle. The October 1976 Prostitution exhibition at London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts was intended as a critique of the body, capitalism, and pornography. The ensemble’s new obsession with the body was unambiguously influenced by Christopherson—it’s part of why he was called “Sleazy”—but Prostitution was most visibly Tutti’s project, and her pornographic portraits in high-art frames were centrally featured (though kept in wooden boxes by law—viewers had to sign a waiver to see them). The showcase included other artists’ work too, including four sculptures (“Tampax Romana”) that P-Orridge made using bloody tampons. In person at the ICA, the exhibition was acknowledged as boundary-pushing, but the British press, whose central audience was decidedly not the ICA crowd, fixated on the shock of the exhibition, with more than one hundred published articles excoriating the alleged moral decrepitude of COUM Transmissions and the travesty that British taxpayers were supporting smut. Most famously, Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn shrieked, “These people are the wreckers of civilisation.”46
Taken as a directional step toward sexual critique and personal deprogramming, Prostitution served as preparation for the even more extreme performances that COUM brought to America a month later. Although band biographer Simon Ford parenthetically wonders at the truth of P-Orridge’s account of their Los Angeles performance, the published script is, even in highly excerpted form, a radical exercise in revulsion:
6). Genesis takes another syringe of blood from his testicles and injects it back into his forearm. He does this repeatedly, also injecting a total of seven black eggs with his own blood. He is stood on a square of sharp black nails and ice.
7). Cosey opens thee lips of her cunt wide and pushes in her fingers, masturbating.
8). Genesis fills a spinal syringe with milk, another with blood. He takes each in turn and injects all their contents in turn up his anus. He pisses into a large glass. As he squeezes out thee last drop he farts and blood mingled with milk shoots out of his arse.
9). Cosey slithers through all thee liquid towards him, lapping it up, rubbing it into hereunto.
10). Genesis vomits trying to swallow a 10 inch steel nail.47
Give all that a moment to sink in, and in the meantime consider how this kind of extreme action functions politically. Shock here is the fallout of a metaphorical dérive: COUM wanders the territory of instinctual prurience, hoping to stumble upon some limit, to locate the unwritten, authoritarian laws of taste, decency, order, and humanity by exceeding them. Therefore, in searching for total freedom, they employ every excess, because they must identify and dismantle every law. Once laws are known, COUM and Throbbing Gristle détourn them, flipping them on their head, reducing a text’s content to a cut-up’s alleged representation of pure structure through nonsense. Some easy examples of this include Throbbing Gristle’s military costumes in 1977 and their overwhelming attack on the audience in their song “Discipline.”
Returning now to the graphic 1976 Los Angeles performance, consider how Cosey Fanni Tutti cites the importance of honesty in her work: “If I give off the genuine feeling … maybe people will receive that, assimilate and understand it and give meaning to the work in their own way. Then I’m happy, because I’ve given them something that is honest, my work is based on total honesty, people can run with that.”48 Although Tutti remains convinced of the baseline political program that Throbbing Gristle and industrial music developed, in the end she recognizes and values that her instinctual navigation of sonic and social territory ultimately says as much about her as it does about the territory. If the music provides no catharsis, then she’s simply not interested. Tutti’s performance seems extreme because it presumes that only outside of the hegemonically controlled territory of behavior can one find honesty—that mythical, uncontaminated condition beyond cultural mediation and separate from class-based “authenticity.”
P-Orridge is much the same way, explaining in 1978 that performances like the one in Los Angeles are “a means of deconditioning myself psychologically. I believe all bodily and all erotic functions of the human being, both male and female, are both natural and interesting. I hate shame.”49 He clarifies, “I get NO masochistic pleasure from my risks, but I do get the satisfaction of facing up to my fears and relinquishing inherited, and to me false, taboos and neuroses in a way that offers a system of revelation and education to a percentage of bystanders.”50 By admitting that only “a percentage of bystanders” would grab hold of this music, P-Orridge implicitly delimits the band’s public efforts. In a 1979 letter, he explains,
if TG is trying to do anything specific, it’s trying to de-condition people’s er responses, demystify creative, musical activity and life too, and most of all it’s er trying to make people think for themselves, decide for themselves and direct their own lives by their own values and experiences, by experience learned BY THEM from life and not second hand, unproven experiences handed down by education and religion and dogma politics.51
The people to whom P-Orridge refers, however, were nearly always in reality already a few steps down the path of like-mindedness, having discovered the band through galleries and the tape scene, and usually not at rock clubs. Dismissing as futile the notion of offering revelation and education to a wider public, Throbbing Gristle was strictly a take-it-or-leave-it affair; if they couldn’t do the service of awakening England en masse, then they at least served the revolutionary purpose of dividing those who were in from those who were out. Over time, this earned them a reputation as the ur-industrial, ur-noise act. Commonly perceived as a musical extreme beyond which no artist or audience could venture, they’ve thus sold hundreds of thousands of records.
Looking closely at the individual histories and experiences of Throbbing Gristle’s members helps us see them as more than noise technicians, algorithmic composers, or pranksters. Over time, Tutti and P-Orridge in particular came to believe in the need to cast off false inheritances that were politically the agents of control structures and personal impediments to honest self-knowledge. The political and the personal are joined here. P-Orridge, in renaming himself and staging self-destruction, lays his inborn identity at the altar of freedom, because identity itself is necessarily a known plot—something finite, defined, and thus externally governed in the most literal sense. Likewise, Tutti seeks through performance to explore “that intangible space between your internal feelings and the world around you.”52 This is the border between the self and everything else, usually hidden, but like all borders it is revealed in transgression. Both she and P-Orridge are concerned with bypassing, even destroying the ego, the last defense of internalized control machines. Attempting this kind of sublimation reveals a commitment to the politics of deprogramming—in this case, practically wiping the metaphorical hard disk clean—but it also reveals in reverse that these musicians knew the totalizing role that their environment had played in shaping who they were. To this end, let’s come back to musical geography and again look at northern England, this time through Throbbing Gristle’s eyes.
“It was just an ordinary day in Manchester,” begins “Very Friendly,” the first Throbbing Gristle song to which Genesis P-Orridge put lyrics.* On this ordinary Mancunian day that he narrates—October 6, 1965—Ian Brady and Myra Hindley killed seventeen-year-old Edward Smith with an axe to the head. It was the last chapter in a killing spree that was dubbed the Moors Murders, on account of Brady and Hindley’s burying their adolescent victims in nearby Saddleworth Moor. Throughout the young couple’s ensuing trial, British tabloids electrified the public’s prurience, dramatizing Brady and Hindley’s taste for orgies, pedophilia, sadomasochism, and Nazi iconography—not entirely unlike the newspapers’ posed outrage over the Prostitution exhibition. Within months of the couple’s arrest, author John Deane Potter had breathlessly written and published a whole book on the killers—complete with photos—hotly capitalizing on the brand new True Crime genre that Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood had birthed just a year earlier. Gleeful with indignation and woe, journalists ensured that in English popular culture the infamy of Brady and Hindley would rank second only to Jack the Ripper.
Tabloid sensationalism emphasizes to readers the strangeness and monstrosity of criminals, painting them as unrelatable. By conflating strangeness with evil, this coverage by extension reassures readers that if they are normal people, then they are morally good people. Propagating this normative-is-desirable idea is smart business for the media: the public gets to read about thrilling perversity in the name of strengthening civic and moral conformity, while the press rakes in money selling papers. Everybody wins.
Written ten years after the trial’s public frenzy, “Very Friendly” does little to sensationalize the crime narrative. Nazism, for example, makes no lyrical appearance (although “German wine” makes four). Instead, when P-Orridge repeats that Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were “very friendly,” his biting, inverted suggestion isn’t just that killers can be perfectly normal but that normativity—a desirable trait, as media sensationalism tells us—may just as well be a path to evil and monstrosity. This comes through especially in the contrast between the relative deadpan in which P-Orridge intones the story’s more brutal details and the increasing hysteria with which he whoops that blandest of compliments, “very friendly.” Never mind suspecting that the nice, quiet neighbor might be a psychopath; you should take a close look at yourself.
Throbbing Gristle acts out this critique musically and lyrically. P-Orridge focuses on little banalities, like the couple’s dog. Such flat recollection of details would be funny if it weren’t so chilling—“Bits of bone and white brain landed onto the hearth, just near the brass brush that they used to sweep the chimney”—and indeed, a wry humor accompanies dread in a vast amount of the band’s work. Tellingly, P-Orridge notes that throughout the axe murder, Hindley’s TV is tuned to “This Is Your Life,” a clever warning that there’s a little Myra Hindley in all of us. Twice in the opus, P-Orridge focuses by name on the suburb of Hyde, both painting the ordinary Manchester day with local color and dropping a subliminal reminder of a certain Dr. Jekyll, who in all his upstanding decorum nonetheless nurtured a monster within. Sonically, the song is typical of early Throbbing Gristle, which is to say that it’s a chunky, jittering mess of distorted bass and echoing drones. As a function of the track’s eighteen-minute duration, though, the noise becomes absolutely normative; it is the state of things. Remarkably, beneath P-Orridge’s narrative, this noisy state gets perceptually relegated to the background over time; the listener becomes entirely inured to its ugliness.
We can tell that this is an important part of how the song works, because in the final three minutes, the sound gives way to a repetitive texture in D-flat major (courtesy of Peter Christopherson) that is arresting, even lovely. This arrival upon pitched musical material is striking chiefly because it defies expectations: the listener by this point has come to assume noise as the baseline state. The moment verges on beauty despite P-Orridge’s seemingly endless repetition of a panicked phone call to the police in which he stutters, “There’s been a m-m-m-murder.” Throbbing Gristle obtain this strange splendor by again cloaking the song’s horror in banality: by the end of “Very Friendly,” somehow, just as a major key has become stranger than noise, a speech impediment is more sensational than killing a boy tied to a chair. In Throbbing Gristle’s output, works like this are not evil glorifications of aggression. Nor are they holy lamentations, as some have supposed, of an alleged cultural desensitization to noise and violence via reenactment. Instead, “Very Friendly,” like many other works by Throbbing Gristle, offers a wide-angled critique of the assumption that being “normal” is desirable, and by extension, the music condemns the public attitudes and institutions that reinforce the idea.
Beyond the factual geography of the Moors murders, it’s worth asking why P-Orridge maps this exceedingly broad critique of normativity so specifically to Manchester, especially when it was the northeast city of Hull that shaped Throbbing Gristle in so many other clear ways (the band’s name and the song title “Five Knuckle Shuffle” are both local slang, for instance). To begin with, Manchester is where P-Orridge was born in 1950. He spent his early years there, “in the shadow of war, without the light of peace,” as he sings in a 2001 autobiographical piece called “Manchester.” Though the city is culturally luminous today, this shadow of war still looms in P-Orridge’s recollection.
Manchester was blitzed, like London, by the Germans. Around where we were, in Victoria Park in Manchester, were all these holes from bombs, collapsed buildings—the war zone. It definitely had an impact on me. Being a precocious little so-and-so, [I] can remember thinking, what the fuck did people do this for? At the end of the street were prefabs—lots of those little chunky houses that they built to house people whose homes were blown up. That’s my memory of Manchester, the decay and destruction.57
There are a few ways that Mancunians in the 1950s and 1960s reconciled the cognitive dissonance between the normal-is-desirable assumption and the city’s new state of dilapidation. Many who’d known Manchester before the 1940s saw the war’s ugly damage as cause for mourning, the disgracing of a metropolis once austere, if not classically beautiful. This older set’s understanding of their new surroundings was rooted in the past: postwar Manchester, in its tragic damage, simply could not be normal. Others were thankful just to have come out of the war alive, and they took a proletarian pride in putting the past behind them and getting back to work. To these future-minded opportunists, Manchester meant work, family, and stability; it was definitionally normal, and thus desirable. However, perceiving Manchester like this required people to sustain willful blindness to the city’s undeniably ugly scars—that is, until they’d saved enough to move into a new development outside town.
Young Genesis P-Orridge—back when he was Neil Megson—took neither of these approaches, perceiving that Manchester’s ruination at the time was both undeniably its normative state of affairs and certainly undesirable. It was ugly. The logical conclusion was to reject the premise of normal-as-desirable.
The assertion here is not that Manchester itself forced on Genesis P-Orridge some revelation of nonconformity or negative aesthetics when he was still a child; indeed, if one believes P-Orridge’s well-rehearsed and charming conversational yarns, he emerged from the womb a druid and a dandy. Rather, the point is that P-Orridge’s boyhood understanding of his urban surroundings testifies that he was never clouded by reverence for conformity and normality—an attitude that in stereotype and reality alike both fed into and derived from the British class system.
His father’s work as a traveling salesman took the family from Manchester, but the city’s shadow loomed again in the mid-1960s, when P-Orridge was attending Solihull Public School. In his four years there, as band biographer Simon Ford writes, “nobody spoke to him because of his Northern accent.”58 Years after leaving Manchester, he spoke its language, marking himself with his thin voice. In P-Orridge’s words, Solihull “crystallised my hatred of authority, the British class system, the Royal family, privilege, hypocrisy, cruelty—the entire bag of tricks.”59
It was thus at a moment of raging against authority and class, of facing daily ostracism on account of his Mancunian roots, and likely by extension of foregrounding his antinormative, anti-aesthetic Manchester memories that a precocious Megson read about Ian Brady and Myra Hindley killing Edward Smith and at least three other kids, and burying them by the A635 road east of town. To this budding, nonviolent hippie with a kinky streak and clandestine literary tastes, the notion that Brady’s bisexuality and taste in books were to blame for axe murder and sexual assault simply didn’t compute. Hidden in plain view were far more likely causes: the 1940 Christmas blitz and a host of lesser blows still haunted the old streets and the new buildings of Manchester, and every citizen who ignored them or denied hearing their ghostly wail only incited them to shriek louder. An unwritten code of normativity still hung over England, silencing sexuality and declaring all things German as beyond the pale. These realities don’t downplay the evil that Brady and Hindley committed; nor do they excuse murder, sexual assault, or Nazism. But viewed systemically, might not the pressure within such a consensus of denial cause the occasional overheating?
Again, the political and personal converge: for P-Orridge, the public articulation of nonconformity as evil would have hit close to home. While he was figuring out his disdain for authority, he found that on a colossal scale, authority now fixed its crosshairs on him for simply being who he was, for liking what he liked, and indeed, for seeing something undesirable and ugly in the geographic and cultural terrain of England. The secret terror of being hunted by the widest, most diffuse sort of authority is a life-changing one; it fueled the entire career of William S. Burroughs, for example. It also arouses the nagging suspicion that normality’s justification is wholly circular—that it exists simply to squash and assimilate any abnormal behavior. Given the first chapters’ discussion of hegemony, it’s easy to connect this idea back to Marx, Debord, and Burroughs.
P-Orridge poignantly illustrates this assimilation with his familial memory of this murderous, ordinary day in Manchester.
When the story started to break that there were some serial killers in the Manchester area, my parents would tell me, “You can’t go out anymore, not after six.” Our whole lives changed overnight into being really controlled and intimidated with severe paranoia and fear. “If you don’t do as you’re told, you’re going to get killed!” Our parents got all weird on us and we couldn’t do what we wanted anymore.
There’s something suggestive in Brady and Hindley, to me, about the end of childhood. It doesn’t just come from growing up, but it happens because people who have power over you say, “Now it stops. You can’t play in the fields where the derelict building is anymore. You can’t play football there anymore. You can’t have bonfires. You can’t have treehouses. That’s all over. If you don’t agree, we’ll take your bike away.”
It’s a hell of a thing to happen overnight, all because of something someone else has done. It seemed very abstract. So my first ever song was about the interplay between the media and society, parental control, and childhood, and the way all those things are arbitrary. Childhood is given by someone else, and can also be taken away, in every sense.60
Here, by demanding even with the best intentions that children behave within a code of normative propriety, adults privilege safety over self-discovery, ridding their children of childhood, and rendering them no longer children but assimilated adults.
This sort of insight and commentary is available to Throbbing Gristle because unlike, say, John Cage, their sonic mission was not one of revealing hidden beauty in the unbeautiful. Instead, by emphasizing the categorically undesirable, the closest they can hope to achieve is the destigmatizing of ugliness-as-ugliness, just as “Very Friendly” strives for. Ugliness is equated with the irrational and the indefensible, both in the teeth-clenching experience of listening-as-endurance and in the suffocating banality of unchanging textures.
“Beauty is the enemy,” intones P-Orridge on cEvin Key’s 1998 song of that title. He continues, “Acceptance of ugliness is the redemption of sanity,” empowering ugliness as both a musical directive and a reframing of all it touches. The sanity that Throbbing Gristle seeks to redeem is not one of reason or beauty. The normativity they seek to dismantle is not to be replaced with a new standard, for that would be just as tyrannical. Instead, the ever-shifting absence, the ugly, the noise is that which reveals the dangerous instinct to impose control through beauty, the oppressor, the killer inside.
Throbbing Gristle’s ideologies are deep and worthy of more time than this chapter can offer. However, they are also pervasively influential in every era of industrial music, having reverberated as background noise over the decades, occasionally roaring to crescendo, radiating from one geography into others. Their fuller articulation similarly echoes through the rest of this book.
ICONIC:
Cabaret Voltaire – “Nag Nag Nag” (1979)
Cabaret Voltaire – “Yashar (John Robie remix)” (1982)
Clock DVA – “4 Hours” (1981)
Throbbing Gristle – “Hamburger Lady” (1978)
Throbbing Gristle – “Discipline” (1980)
ARCANE:
Wendy Carlos – “Timesteps” (1971)
COUM Transmissions – “73 Vibrant” (1971)
The Future – “Blank Clocks” (1977)
Hula – “Feeding the Animal” (1982)
Thomas Leer and Robert Rental – “Perpetual” (1979)