(Throbbing Gristle/Psychic TV)
Arguably the creators of industrial music, Throbbing Gristle were far more concerned with the deconstruction of music and live performance than delivering cohesion, and gender-neutral P-Orridge, suffering with leukemia, reflects on the entire journey.
I was a huge fan of Brian Jones, and I grew up buying every Rolling Stones single the day it came out. Then he was murdered, and I went to see the “new” Rolling Stones in Hyde Park on July 5th, 1969. There were half a million people there, and it’s still the worst show I’ve ever seen. It was impossible to get anywhere near the stage, and we were way back in the trees. When they started playing, it was so fucking shambolic that people started leaving. Within twenty minutes, I was able to walk to the very front of the stage.
They had boxes of white butterflies that they released to symbolize Brian’s rising to heaven. All the boxes had been left in the hot sun, and almost all of them died. The roadies were chucking them into the air to make it look like they were flying. It was really gross and embarrassing. If you see video footage of the show, it doesn’t show how many people walked away in disgust. There’s a deathbed confession by the foreman who was working on Jones’s house, and he admitted he killed him. He had grown to hate Brian Jones because Jones treated him like shit. He got sick of it one night and held Brian under water until he died.
The first real rock gig Throbbing Gristle ever did was supporting Hawkwind, featuring a young Lemmy Kilmister, at Bradford, St. Georges Hall in 1971. It was a benefit for hippies who had been caught smuggling hash, and I was already into my “anti-rock” music ideas. I brought a dwarf with me to play lead guitar, who’d never played before that night. We had Cosey Fanni Tutti dressed as a schoolgirl, strutting around and firing a starter pistol in the air. Our singer was a surfer from Bridlington who stood on a surfboard atop a bucket of water on stage.
Everyone was getting into bigger and better drum kits at the time, like Pink Floyd, who had a huge setup. For my drum kit, we just took a bunch of stuff and piled it together. The performance was the guy on the surfboard making up lyrics, the dwarf trying to get sounds out of his guitar, the gun going off, and me piling drums and cymbals into this massive mess that couldn’t possibly be played. It was like twenty drums, and I sat down in the middle of it all, throwing expanded, polystyrene granules in the air like snow. That was the show! The hippies were completely baffled and silent the entire time.
In the mid ’90s, I got a phone call from Nik Turner of Hawkwind, asking if I wanted to perform on a tour with the band. I agreed to be keyboard sampler and did three West Coast dates with Nik. We were in the dressing room the night of the first show, and I said to him, “You probably won’t remember this, but we actually did a gig supporting you in 1971.” Nik said, “You were the one with the snow! You fucking jammed all of our effects pedals!” He told me it took them ages to clean them out and get them working again.
The first Throbbing Gristle record was an indie album, released in 1977, called Second Annual Report. We were the first to put out an album without a label. Side Two was a film soundtrack, which was one long twenty-three minute track called “After Cease to Exist.” When you watch the movie, you get the title, and then it’s blank, which is actually black film. The music keeps going, but there’s nothing to watch. After ten minutes, when you’re thinking, “Oh God, this is one of those weird, experimental films,” there’s suddenly five minutes of imagery, which included a fake castration of our bandmate Chris Carter.
Our other bandmate Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson was part of the Casualties Union, and they were a group of performers that would act injured or have fits for authorities who were practicing for emergencies. He was taught how to make incredibly realistic cuts and blood, and we did a fast-edit cut of fake castration. We thought everyone would realize it was obviously fake, but lots of people thought it was real. It upset a lot of people but, thankfully, no one tried to have us arrested for showing a snuff film.
The weirdest Throbbing Gristle gig was when we were invited to play for the students at the Architectural Association in London. In the early days, we tried to tailor each gig for the venue—to do something different every time. One time we found a bunch of huge mirrors made of mylar that we put across the front of the stage, so all the audience could see were reflections of themselves. Another thing we liked to do was put halogen lamps across the front of the stage. We’d turn them on full blast so the audience was blinded and couldn’t see anything.
For the Architectural Association, we were trying to come up with something uniquely architectural that we could do for a stage. There was a triangular yard between three buildings at the Association, and we built a twenty-foot cube of scaffolding that we covered in tarps. We put all our instruments inside, and we put our PA system flat on the ground, pointing straight up. We had cameras inside the cube operating on closed-circuit TV because we noticed there were TVs all through the Architectural Association.
When we went to play, if you wanted to see what we were doing, you had to stay in the building and look at the TV monitors, but there was no sound feed. If you wanted to hear what we were doing, you had to go upstairs and hang outside a window, or go onto the roof and look down. The students went nuts, and there was a riot. They smashed down a door into the yard, and somebody actually ripped out a toilet, and dropped it down from the roof. Luckily, it hit the scaffolding and didn’t kill anyone.
It was a remarkable example of a really unexpected response. They were furious and enraged that they couldn’t see and hear the performance at the same time. They wanted a proper show. It got really scary as the students were hurling down all kinds of crap onto us. We weren’t into shocking people—it was always about the reaction. That’s what was interesting to us—breaking down the traditional structure of what people consider a rock ’n’ roll show.
With Throbbing Gristle, none of us were trained musicians. We all agreed that we never wanted to become a traditional rock band, and we wanted to create something new and different. We wanted to constantly evolve. Our basic methodology—one we still use today—is to decide on a project, then strip away everything we don’t need or can’t have. That’s how we created industrial music, which was through a process of reduction. We were doing it because we were curious, and we decided that we liked the sounds we were making. We jammed every weekend for the whole of 1975. Our first album was recorded on cassettes, and it broke the old rock-and-roll system.
It was the idea that anyone can be in a band, and anyone can create fascinating music. You can create any emotion you want to express without knowing how to play. Those glue-sniffers the Ramones said to learn three chords and start a band. My answer to that was why learn any chords at all? Drugs never played into our creative process. We had our ’60s psychedelic experiences, but during the Throbbing Gristle time period, we didn’t do any drugs. It’s ironic that we had this really decadent image in the public eye, but we were really as pure as the driven snow.
The makeup of our audience was mostly eccentric punks. The first concert TG did was in a pub for twenty people. The local newspaper reviewed the show, and I’ll never forget the headline: “Even an ape with severed arms could play the bass guitar better than Genesis.” Isn’t that great? I wear it as a badge of honor. We also discovered orgone accumulators around that time. Orgone is that beautiful smell after a lightning strike in a storm. It’s negative ions that produce that smell, and it’s poorly labeled because negative ions are good for you. Positive are bad.
We got an electrician we knew to build us a giant negative-ion generator. It took huge voltage, and it was very dangerous. It had a grill of wires in the front, and a fan that blew the ions through. When it was on stage, we put out a sign that read, “Do Not Touch. This can kill you!” Of course, people tried to put their fingers in it. It would crackle, and blue sparks would fly everywhere. It was amazing. I wish I still had it.
In TG, we only ever played for sixty minutes. We had a digital clock on stage, and no matter where we were in a song or improvisation, we stopped immediately. We never did encores because it felt like another rock ’n’ roll cliché that we weren’t interested in following. One of the first TG shirts I wore read: Rock and Roll is for Ass Lickers. I wrote on my guitar: This Machine Kills Music. We hated when live bands sounded just like their albums.
One reason TG stopped was that our shows were beginning to feel regimented. They stopped being loose, and we didn’t want to be one of those bands that toured all the time, like Pink Floyd. We were just starting to get recognition, but we didn’t want bigger and bigger audiences. We didn’t want hit records. We wanted to change the fucking world.
The most outrageous moment in my career was probably a Psychic TV show at Thee Mean Fiddler in 1989. We were doing our rave-era music and had a great arrangement with certain venues, where they would turn a blind eye to the psychedelic aspect of what we were doing. We had friends that had access to quite a good amount of psychedelics and MDMA. They’d come to concerts and give it away for free. That night at Mean Fiddler, I decided to experiment with chemicals during the concerts. I dressed in three different outfits to match each drug I took.
One was a pair of white pajamas, that under blacklight read, “Yes.” Under normal light it read, “No.” The next was a very psychedelic, flower-child jacket under the pajamas. The other was just a gray, nondescript shirt. Every third of the way through the concert, I took a different drug. We played for about six hours, so every two hours, it was a different drug and different outfit. The first drug was MDMA, which was very high-grade, pharmaceutical ecstasy. The next was magic mushrooms, followed by LSD tabs.
There’s a video of the show, and there’s an amazing moment with a close-up of my face, with my eyes rolled back in my head. You can only see the whites of my eyes, and I look like a zombie. The anchor was the music, and we had a following at the time of people who would get naked and dance on stage. They were all going mad, doing weird dances in the nude. My daughter Caresse was there, dancing with her mum. It was a fantastic, beautiful experience.
When it was over, we packed up, but I was still completely out of my tree. We walked out to the cars and realized that none of us were capable of driving. I certainly couldn’t, as I was way out there. People started shouting, “I can’t! I’m on acid!” Or, “I can’t! I’m still rolling!” When all was said and done, it was decided that I was the safest one to drive, and I drove everyone home. One by one. I’d say to the person in the passenger seat, “Tell me if the light is green or red.” By some miracle, I got everyone home safe.
There was a point where I stopped learning anything with drugs, and I put them down. I’ve got leukemia now, and I’m fighting to stay alive. The last thing on my mind is tripping. I get tired very easily now, which is normal with leukemia. My kidneys completely failed a few months back, which was really scary. I was in the ICU, and they stuck a tube into my jugular vein, which went into a dialysis machine. I just had to lie there, with this thing sucking my blood out, cleaning it, and putting it back. I was incredibly close to death, and I’m only sixty-eight.
What’s important to me now is getting as much done before I’m not here. I do what I do, whether or not the outside world gets it. People trust me to be honest, and that will always warm my heart.