The Beginning and End of Pop
THE BERLIN REUNION FESTIVITIES OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL POP GROUP OF THE ’70S: THROBBING GRISTLE
By JENS BALZER
Berlin greeted the New Year with a collective bleeding of the ears. Powerful blasts of pulsating noise gleefully popped open one vein after another. Under the steeple-high sky over the stage of the Volksbühne on Rosa-Luxemburg Platz, a crowd, both moved and rendered lame by the sound, pressed up to the stage, frenetically cheering on the four performers: two motionless noise-makers at their computers; a strict-looking woman with a guitar and riding boots (she was once a well-known porn model); and a singing bar slut covered with tattoos and scars who was once a man.
Throbbing Gristle was performing on a Berlin stage for the first time in 25 years. On New Year’s Eve, they played the first of two concerts, the highlight of Berlin’s Throbbing Gristle reunion festivities.
Throbbing Gristle was the most exciting and influential pop group of the ’70s; they made a mark on the musical goings-on of their era like no other band. They drove the music out of pop music, reducing it to its essential core: its engagement with signs, codes, and iconography, the destruction and realignment of identities. With their mix of ear-shattering noise, incomprehensibly bizarre, border-crossing self-presentation, and their utterly morally questionable confusion of worldviews and accompanying systems of signs, Throbbing Gristle has remained influential to this day.
Genesis P-Orridge (the singing bar slut) and Cosey Fanni Tutti (the guitar-playing porn model) originally met in the early ’70s in a hippie commune which focused on the complete “deconditioning” of being, the dissolution of all regulations and rites around which human existence is usually oriented. “We lived in a building near London with neither walls nor doors,” P-Orridge recalled in Berlin. “When you went to the bathroom or took a shower, you did it in the middle of this huge room and everybody could watch you. Everything was public. There was no private sphere.” Regular meal times or recognizable sleeping rhythms weren’t allowed either. “We wanted to know what was left of a person when you took away all convention,” says P-Orridge. It was about total deconditioning.
In COUM Transmissions, the group that evolved from the commune, P-Orridge and Tutti announced an enactment of the “freed” body and its sexuality and consciously threw themselves to the drive to break taboos with the most radical intent. They copulated on sharp-cornered metal sculptures, ate maggots and used tampons and regurgitated with exuberance over their blood and semen-smeared bodies. “We wanted to know what the real borders were and which borders had simply been driven into us culturally.” With Throbbing Gristle, founded in 1975 with Chris Carter and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, P-Orridge, and Tutti applied this strategy of deconditioning, the investigation of their own bodies and its real borders to musical means. With synthesizers, tape machines, and all sorts of electronic devices melded together, the quartet explored the psychic and physical effects of sound. “We wanted to know how sounds effect the body,” says P-Orridge. “We read a lot of material about sonic warfare and the manipulation of the subconscious via sound. We were interested in African and Asian music, in music that aroused trance-like states. And in fact, there were a lot of people who described the music of Throbbing Gristle as physically effective. Our audiences were often ecstatic and there was a lot of crying. In London, one girl told me it gave her an orgasm.”
Others were repelled by this ecstatic yet coldly machine-like noise. Even for punks who liked to think of themselves as about as shocking as it got, shocks and overwhelming acoustics like these went too far. Still, a cult quickly sprang up around the band, a fanatic clan of fans – a phenomenon that both fascinated and alienated Throbbing Gristle. Their answer to the cult came in the form of increasingly para-militaristic, quasi-fascist album designs and performances, which could be seen again in the exhibition “Industrial Annual Report” accompanying the Berlin concerts in the Kunst Werke on Auguststrasse – with album covers, cassette cases, fanzines, flyers and posters, most of them from the years 1978 through 1980.
On view here, for example, were the various designs for the Industrial Records logo. In order to draw out and accentuate the fascist core of the worship of pop music heroes, Throbbing Gristle looked to the design of the British fascists’ symbol. “Our model was David Bowie,” says P-Orridge. “He had this enormous influence on his fans. He was practically a guru for them, but he always insisted that he’d never make use of his power. We were different. We wanted power so we could use it. We saw the whole thing as a social experiment. Can you take this sort of enthusiasm that pop idols spark and concentrate and direct it?” The painstakingly ordered files the band members kept themselves were also on display at the Kunst Werke: a plethora of note cards with fan profiles, among them, Ian Curtis (of Joy Division) and Moritz R. (of the German art group Der Plan). A second system of files kept track of every single performance, noting the location, date, playlist, length, and a sort of scale of satisfaction by which the musicians could rate their own performance from one to ten points.
After exactly 24 concerts, Throbbing Gristle, at the height of their success, disbanded in 1981. Cosey Fan Tutti, whose sexual self-exploration had led her to become a professional porn model in the ’70s, reemerged as a conceptual artist and carried on making music with Chris Carter under the name Chris & Cosey; Peter Christopherson founded the imminently influential avant-garde duo Coil with musician John Balance and worked as a film and music video director; with his new band, Psychic TV, Genesis P-Orridge became one of the central figures of the then-blossoming rave movement. During the same period, he founded a new cult called Temple ov Psychick Youth that primarily became known for its glamorous group sex orgies with pierced genitals. In the early ’90s, P-Orridge began remaking himself as a woman with hormone treatments and breast implants: the most recent project in his ongoing exploration of identity, which he carried out with his life partner, Lady Jay, who, in turn, remade herself as a man. “We developed a concept of “pandrogyny,” of positive androgyny: a new level of human self-creation, and therefore, human evolution.”
In the spring of 2004, Throbbing Gristle reunited for a concert in London. The film that came of it was screened before the New Year’s Eve concert in the Arsenal Kino in Berlin. On New Year’s Eve, in the Volksbühne, they presented the first album they performed on together in 24 years: Part Two, a ferociously exhilarating noise, but one which – and this is what’s exciting about it – never slips into the masculine domination chest-thumping of later industrial acts such as Einstürzenden Neubauten, Ministry, and Nine Inch Nails, who evolved from the cult surrounding Throbbing Gristle, a stance the band always distanced itself from.
The industrial sound of Throbbing Gristle today is neither masculine nor sadistic, but instead, in a wonderful way, “pandrogynous” and deconditioned. It doesn’t merely mow the listener down, but answers and questions, hesitates and directs. How uniquely the delicate ringing and chirping from Peter Christopherson’s sampler blends into the rest; how beautifully the magnetic fields hum as Chris Carter guides them over a pocket Theremin. And over it all, Genesis P-Orridge reigns in red pumps and a hot skirt of metal plates, emitting his contradictory utterances at his admirers: Be afraid. Don’t be afraid. Follow me. Don’t follow me. Get it together. Aren’t you ashamed of your togetherness – it makes you unfree.
Between this pathos and reflective distance, the discourse and the indescribable overwhelming of the listener, there is Throbbing Gristle, now just as it ever was – not a contradiction, but a dialectic: a dramaturgy organizing the order of things. Today, just as back then, Throbbing Gristle brings forth nothing but the essence of pop: the freeing of signs and the brutal lunge into the storm of signs; the freedom of art and the drive necessarily inherent in every act of setting something free.
