COSEY FANNI-TUTTI THE THROBBING GRISTLE NOISENIK
Between 1975 and 1981 Throbbing Gristle troubled eardrums, shattered preconceptions and changed lives. Much like the Velvet Underground before them their influence far outweighed their popularity. TG’s influence on contemporary electronic music from experimental production techniques and the making of their own samplers to independent promotion via their own Industrial Records label is still felt today.
photo: Industrial Records Ltd.
When dubbing Throbbing Gristle ‘The Wreckers Of Civilisation’, the late Tory MP Sir Nicholas Fairbairn couldn’t have provided the guerrilla media / music / art troupe with a better manifesto. Ex-stripping porn star and one of the founders of the band Cosey Fanni Tutti explains more: “He came to the opening of our ‘Prostitution’ show at the ICA way back in ’76,” which featured pornographic photographs of Cosey taken from the pages of the x-rated magazines she modelled for at the time. “He saw the magazines and he saw what we were doing (using tampons, blood and strippers) and there was a picture of him in the newspaper with his hands under his armpits looking really huffy and that was the quote that came out. He thought it was disgusting. But subsequently he was arrested for indecent exposure shortly afterwards.”
Unlike most of their punk peers TG deployed their music as a sonic weapon, attacking the apparatus of the music industry and the notion of the rock band. “We used to have white lights shining on the audience’s eyes so they couldn’t look on us as icons and a mirror at the back of the stage so if they did see anything they could just see themselves. It was much more complex really, although it was a very simple set up. We also picked quite unusual venues like the Crypt before it was a club and in Winchester we did the Hat Fair, which was really funny. That is where the song ‘We Hate You Little Girls‘ came from because there was a row of little under 10 year old girls sat crossed legs at the front. But the reaction of the audience was quite violent at times to be honest. They used to come racing on the stage attack us and throw chairs.”
They also played one infamous gig at the Public Boarding Oundle School “One of the pupils wrote to us and asked us to play a gig there and said he would book us through the music society. He told the house master we were like John Cage but we said we would only come along if we could spend the day and have school dinners with them and all the rest of it and that’s what we did. It was amazing, we came on and they just start singing ‘Jerusalem’. It was an amazing atmosphere. They had been given license to just let rip, which was wonderful, and they did. The energy in there and the testosterone levels were sky high it was really funny”. The show finished with the schoolboys carrying singer P-Orridge around the school on their shoulders.
The group ended however in 1981 after becoming victims of their own success. “We had started to become icons and that was what we were against. Just as we got successful we ended it”
Roll forward to 2004 and Chris Carter, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Genesis P.Orridge and Peter Christopherson have briefly reformed for RE:TG, a festival that has been curated in their honour. But why now, surely the offers for the to reform must have rolled in in the past? “We did get an offer from a big computer firm in America to reform for some executive’s birthday. We told them a Million dollar fee so there was no way. In the past people have asked us if we are ever going to get together again. I mean we weren’t all talking until a few years ago anyway. Then we did the TG 24 box set to stop all the bootlegging basically and get it back on track and protect the legacy as such. It was not until the launch of that when we all met again and realised we could actually get on OK and then someone asked us we said ‘well maybe but not just a homage gig at one venue it would have to be a bit special and also celebrate stuff that has come after TG’ it is not just about us”.
photo: Industrial Records Ltd.
It is also no surprise that some of today’s most notable figures in electronic dance music have jumped at the chance to re-work some classic TG tracks. “The thing with us is that because we are not in that kind of scene, and a lot of the people that were in to TG were the kind of people you would never have even imagined (like Basement Jaxx who site TG’s 2nd Annual Report as the blueprint to their Rooty album). So to hear what they did with it was great. You can’t sit back and think ‘well no I don’t like that because I don’t want that done to it’ because that is not what re-mixing is about. It is fodder for whoever wants to pick it up and work with it and that is what we really liked. I think that is testimony to the skill of the people who did it and where they are coming from and their approach to it. Being in to TG anyway is quite unusual. So that signals immediately that they have a different attitude to music so therefore in a way it would be kind of OK to me anyway.
David O’Coy
COSEY FANNI-TUTTI THE THROBBING GRISTLE NOISENIK
First appeared in Fused magazine issue 19
