Entertainment Through Pain - Ugly As Your Pastime

For a few days in December 2002, all four members of TG reconvened for the first time in two decades to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the formation of their label, Industrial Records. This interview was conducted by noted electronic musician, DJ and self-confessed Throbbing Gristle 'fanboy' Andrew Weatherall, and journalist Tom Mugridge, at the Cabinet Gallery in London.

AW
I was led down a path that led to TG. I can trace it back to early childhood, when my parents almost demonised or hid certain things. When you're a child, if someone says they've hidden something you immediately go and look for it. That's the reason I've got tattoos. If I'd told my parents I wanted to play the piano and make tape cut-ups they'd have to told me to get out of the house and get a proper job. So I was wondering what your parents hid from you that led you to search out the things you did - what were you drawn to that set you on the path that led to Throbbing Gristle?

CC
The only taboo stuff in our family was sexually oriented! But I don't think anything my parents did affected what I did with Throbbing Gristle. In fact if anything it was the opposite because my dad had a tape recorder from as early as I can remember, and he used to do experiments with it. And I wanted to be like my dad, like you do, y'know, so I started mucking around with tape recorders at a really early age.

CFT
My dad used to build radios and TVs and I used to hear weird noises all the time. He wired them up through into the kitchen for my mother and stuff like that. But as a girl, I wasn't supposed to be interested in stuff like that, so I was told. Not by my dad though, he encouraged that, funnily enough, because he wanted a boy but got me.

PC
It's nothing to do with my parents, but I was once desperate for a piss and I was on my way to a public toilet in Brighton. This total stranger came up to me and said 'you don't want to go into that toilet. Whatever you do don't go into that toilet,' and that was it. The rest is history!

GPO
With me the taboos that led me there were not so much at home but from school - public school. At public school it was 'don't make art, don't write poetry, conform' and so the taboos were very much social taboos - the fact that there was this contradiction between what I felt was possible with my imagination,
and what was being imposed on me by society and the establishment. I think it was the contradictions that I saw in the public school system that led me to TG.

AW
I'm the same - I went to a grammar school and it was just like a university machine. People who were doing art and that sort of thing were put in a little room out of the way and that was supposed to discourage them, but the fact that I was put in a little room out of the way made me feel quite special, like I had a licence to fuck around.

CFT
I had the same thing at high school. I wanted to do art but I also wanted to do science and they said 'you've got to do one or the other, you can't do both'.  But I managed to, because I had a really good art teacher.

AW
Did any of you have a mentor?

GPO
I did at school. He was an English teacher called Bogbrush - because he this big moustache that looked like a toilet brush under his nose. One day I wrote some essay for him and he took me to one side and I thought 'oh shit, I'm going to get told off'. And he said 'I think you should try and find this book', and he wrote down On The Road by Jack Kerouac and told me I should seek out the beatniks. And then when they said I wasn't allowed to do art, just like with Cosey, the art teacher gave me a key to the art room and said 'you can do it on your own time, lunch breaks, you just go in and do stuff'. I thought 'this is alright - my own loft space, my own studio!'

AW
It's your first experience of creating your own little world, your own system within a bigger, oppressive system.

GPO
You feel separated from everyone else in the school, but enclosed in your own world that's somehow more valid. So that helped.

PC
I didn't really have a mentor as such until I started reading William Burroughs books and then I suddenly realised that the world wasn't they way they said it was in school. And amazingly it was an English coursebook that contained a quote from The Naked Lunch. It might have even been on the syllabus for O-level. It must have been about 1968 or 1970, and having seen this one short passage, the next weekend I went out from school - it was a boarding school - I went out to the local WHSmiths and picked up this book called The Naked Lunch. I started reading it at the back of the shop and within about five minutes the world had completely changed. I knew suddenly that there were all these other things happening.

TM
So how did you get to meet Burroughs the first time, and how did it feel to meet him?

PC
The first time I met him I was just like a complete fanboy. He plied me with vodka - poured a bottle of vodka down my throat more or less - and the rest is history!

GPO
I was doing mail art at the time and I got a postcard back off him from doing that. He put his phone number on it and said 'if you're ever in London just phone up'. So I made myself be in London pretty quickly after that - I came down from Hull. I rang him up, and he gave me his address, and I went round there. And then he started to ply me with vodka! But interestingly he started talking to me about tape recorders and cut-ups. I was asking him how he did cut-ups and what that was all about, rather than about being a writer per se.

AW
What year was this?

GPO
Late '71 or early '72, before we moved down to London.

AW
When Burroughs was talking about cut-ups did you immediately think 'you can do that with music'?

PC
He was doing experiments with tape recorders in the 60s.

GPO
Yeah, he was already cutting up things - including music, using cassette tapes.

AW
Did that give you a spur to making music?

GPO
Well, we were doing that already - Cosey and I had speakers and things wired up in our house in Hull, and we were already cutting up a combination of sounds and music in our house. This was more like a consolidation, and saying 'so how exactly did you do that and what do you think it means about reality?'

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AW
Was Throbbing Gristle a name and a concept and an idea before it became a reality? Was there like a board meeting where you decided to move from art into music?

PC
Yes, there was a board meeting - we had to have that meeting first before it became TG. We'd already been doing rehearsals. Well, not rehearsals, more kind of jams before that. It was only when we decided to do it in public that we needed a name and an identity.

CFT
To separate it from COUM.

CC
That took a little while to happen - it didn't happen overnight or anything.

GPO
Two or three days a week during '75 we would meet up and experiment.

AW
Did you feel you'd achieved all you could achieve through the art gallery and the art world?

GPO
It was an organic thing. Once the four of us were connected it became less appropriate to continue doing something in the same form that we had been using in galleries. We were just thinking 'this is getting a bit easy'. We could see how it would unfold as an art career if we did the pretty photographs like everyone else was doing at the time - if we'd had something to sell instead of just being performance. We could either go down that route and end up teaching at some dull art college in five years' time, or we could step back and go 'what is it we're really trying to do?' We wanted to communicate ideas and different ways of being to as many people as possible. So where could we go where that could happen?

PC
There were a couple of performances. I remember when we played in that place in Amsterdam.

CC
Melkweg.

PC
Yeah, Melkweg. We did a performance performance, not like an art type performance. The audience weren't like a rock audience, they were all kids and they were all stoned, and they were all going 'fuck me, what the hell was that?' and it just suddenly seemed that there was a whole different world, apart from the intellectual art critic type people, that was more meaningful and more exciting and more fun to perform to. And it felt to us that these people would actually get something visceral and exciting from us.

CFT
When we finished in the art scene there was very little resistance to us any more. When you haven't got any resistance you haven't got anything to kick against, and it was almost like 'well, I'm not interested any more - I don't want to play'. So you go somewhere else.

CC
I don't know if it's coincidence but I came in to the group at this point as an outsider and I didn't want anything to do with the art side of it. I had no intentionof doing anything in an art gallery, playing or whatever.

AW
But then you went back to the art gallery. Prostitution, when was that?

GPO
October '76. It was a segue, basically. There were certain commitments we had made as COUM.

CFT
We ended one and started the other at the same time.

CC
Prostitution was the only time COUM and TG were on the same bill.

PC
And it was the only way that a band of four people who couldn't play their instruments and didn't really know anything about the conventions of the music industry were going to get their first gig at the ICA on The Mall, 200 yards from Buckingham Palace.

CFT
We didn't want an opening that was like a soiree with glasses of wine...

CC
It certainly wasn't that!

CFT
...so we thought we'd have strippers and a band instead.

PC
And we did for the first time what we've been trying to do ever since, which is to infiltrate institutions and give them something that they're not expecting, and get people to think a little bit more carefully about their preconceptions about what music is and what art is.

GPO
And where they begin and end.

TM
What was it like moving from art institutions to confronting people in a much more direct way on stage?

PC
It was scary, really scary. We were assaulted; we had shit thrown at us.

CC
It was a dangerous position to be in.

AW
Yeah, but you were sort of assaulting them back - if you'd been going up there with acoustic guitars and singing folk songs it would have been a bit onesided.
But it was a two-way thing, wasn't it?

CC
But we weren't that aggressive. People assume that but we weren't really. I know the sound was unusual and it confused people, and I think that was the problem.

PC
We didn't sound like the Bay City Rollers!

AW
You were like the early experimental phase of sonic warfare, let's be honest.

CC
Well, yeah, that is true. But we weren't out and out aggressive.

GPO
If you look at those pictures from the ICA...

CC
Oh, the blood!

GPO
I remember at the ICA having a leather glove on and hitting that guitar very hard like this [makes pounding motion].

CFT
But you weren't hitting the audience.

GPO
I didn't have to, because we were doing it with the sound. Jumping down their mental throats.

CC
I must have been in a different mental place at the time.

GPO
You used to go into a trance.

CC
I did, yeah.

PC
We were very aware of the way that sound was being experimented with by the police for crowd control and that whole genre of sound as a weapon. We were aware of all that and were reading whatever books and pamphlets were available in underground bookshops or terrorist information cells. We knew all that stuff and it was just one of the many things that interested us about using sound in a different way. There was nothing whatsoever about what we were doing that bore any connection to the contemporary music of the time.

CC
They were like live sound experiments if anything, they really were.

PC
And anything we put the public through we always put ourselves through first.

AW
You said the Prostitution exhibition caused a lot of 'counter productive bullshit'. Did you underestimate the public reaction to it or overestimate your ability to deal with the public reaction?

GPO
Probably both.

CC
But it was a press reaction more than a public reaction.

CFT
I suppose you could say we were naïve at that moment in time. We thought we'd put all the COUM stuff up as documentation and say 'this is like a retrospective, saying goodbye to that side of things, and this is the new thing we're gonna be doing' but we didn't realise that all that was gonna happen.
Nobody did.

AW
Sometimes I think 'OK, great thing to do,' but to upset The Sun and The Daily Mail is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. Weren't you even considering what they might think of it?

CFT
No, because we were leaving it behind. We'd put it all there, it was like a retrospective, but the big thing was we would actually play as TG.

GPO
On our own terms, with some fun involved too. We had transvestite security guards and a stripper and all this other stuff. We were so wrapped up in our world that we were creating, and it was so familiar for all of us that there was definitely some suspension of understanding of how completely fresh and novel and surprising it would look to someone from established society who was just used to Cliff Richard and the Eurovision Song Contest. Or to the punks, who secretly worshipped the guitar and Top Of The Pops. For all their posturing they were actually trying to have rock 'n' roll careers. And they were equally as disgusted and shocked as the so-called straight people. So we were suddenly out on this limb, and at the same time national news in terms of representing everything wrong with life and society and the future. And it's a very bizarre feeling to wake up one morning and be told you are all anathema.

AW
Is that when the clicks on the telephone started - the surveillance? Was it quite hardcore?

GPO
Very hardcore.

CC
They were opening our mail and stuff.

GPO
And don't forget it wasn't long after that that John Lydon got attacked. There was a real risk of being physically beaten up for just being different.

AW
Did you ever get to the bottom of what it was they thought you were actually doing?

CC
We were the wreckers of civilisation!

AW
Did you ever get face to face with any of these people and say 'what the fuck were you scared of?' A few years ago, when you [GPO] had to leave the  country, I was speaking to someone who had been in contact with the police and they had just said 'well, we know he hasn't been doing what he's been accused of doing, but he's been getting away with it'. So even if you weren't inciting revolution, you were just doing that [raises middle finger] every now and then, and that was 'getting away with it'.

GPO
They don't know how to articulate what they're feeling -they just know it's their enemy but they're not sure why.

PC
It's very unusual for any artist or musician or any sort of social commentator to create a body of work that does not really have any reference to something  that's gone before. I mean especially now in the music industry - any record you hear now, you can immediately quote four things that it's coming form. And at the time, in the 70s, there was really nothing at all like what we were doing. In some way you could say there were influences from Stockhausen or Kraftwerk or something like that, but as a body, there was nothing like it. And people are just shit scared of what they don't know, what they can't recognise, what they can't pigeonhole, and you can look around here and say 'these people are wearing pseudo militaristic uniforms, so they must be terrorists' or 'they're using a logo with a white flash on it with a red and black background, so they must be fascists' or 'one of their members is appearing in pornographic magazines, so they must be sexual deviants.'

CFT
There's no question about that!

CC
That's something we've all got in common.

AW
So it's like a quadruple whammy for Daily Mail readers - they've got the full set of of what Daily Mail readers like to read about.

PC
Nowadays people are more used to it. [Tabloid notoriety] is a kind of game, an acknowledged game between the press and the publicists, and it's not too serious. But back then that game wasn't as defined and when the News Of The World wanted to dig the dirt, and went to our local supermarket to find out what we were buying for breakfast - which they did - it was serious stuff. They really wanted to get people put in prison or to get people deported or whatever, because that way they knew they could sell newspapers.

AW
In the current climate do you think there could ever be another setup like TG?

PC
I think so.

CC
We live in hope!

AW
But people are wise to the game and the spread of information is so quick. The reason I was drawn to you was that it was like esoteric, hidden information. The records weren't easy to find - I had to go and search them out. The amount of hidden information in the world is getting smaller and smaller as each minute ticks by, and that means it's less likely that someone like yourselves could emerge.

PC
Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to discover that somewhere there was an Al-Qaeda cell of 15 year-old boys singing Irish folk songs with an electronic backing - they'd be fantastic! I'd buy that record!

GPO
We've been talking about this a few times over the last few days - this kind of co-opting thing. Once, anything outside was seen as the enemy, as we were, and was pushed away, vilified and attacked, and they tried to crush it. But sometime between 1975/6 and now, one thing that has been learned by the establishment and the media industry conglomerates is that they see anything as co-optable. Nothing is their enemy any more, it's all sellable. Anything can be sold, everything can be exploited.

AW
Yeah - 'all of us down here at the Death Factory eat Pot Noodle'!

GPO
But the basic thing then that made TG so powerful was that we absolutely refused from the very beginning to in any way even consider someone buying anything of us. We were totally independent and self-contained. We did everything - sticking the labels on.

CFT
We weren't for sale.

CC
Any offers that came our way were refused.

GPO
That's how it could happen again - someone has to make the decision at the beginning that they will not sign any contract for someone else.

PC
But what would we have done then if there had been a load of Industrial copy bands who were doing sort of noise things that were on EMI and Virgin?
The world has changed...

CFT
Then you mutate into something else.

AW
Do you know Godspeed You Black Emperor? They're pretty hardcore in their beliefs in that way.

CFT
Well, you just said it - they have a belief. Most people don't. They're just a product.

AW
But what about if you have a belief and you need funds to fuel that belief?

PC
You can do what we did, which is to go out and get jobs.

CC
We all had day jobs.

GPO
You have to absolutely refuse to be susceptible to the money bribe

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AW
So not at any level would you have taken money from a corporate unit to use for your own purposes?

PC
To be honest with you it didn't come up in the way that it might come up today - no advertising agency ever came up to us and said 'can we use "Slug Bait" on an Audi ad'. If it had done, I think we might have taken the money because it would have been funny. But we'd have made sure that the people who knew us knew we thought it was funny and that we weren't doing it because we really wanted to.

CC
And then we'd have used the money for our own ends.

GPO
We'd have used it to put out a record by somebody who'd never otherwise get a record made.

AW
That's my position - I take money off major record companies for a remix, but that means that someone else can put a record out who would never otherwise have had the opportunity.

PC
Somebody offered us a million dollars to play live, but we didn't take it.

GPO
That was just recently.

CC
It was a birthday party, a private function.

CFT
This guy wanted Throbbing Gristle to reform for his birthday - and that's exactly the kind of thing that just smacks of what it's like today.

GPO
We thought we'd get rid of them by saying we wanted a million dollars, but they just said 'OK, it's in two weeks'.

CC
We just couldn't do it in two weeks. Three weeks maybe, two weeks no.

TM
Would you ever consider reforming for any other reason?

PC
The thing about bands from that time getting back together is that to me the very idea of repeating what happened back then fills me with absolute horror.Repetition or disinterring some kind of old thing - it doesn't interest me. New things interest me. And we all have our own music projects that take
numerous forms, and it's just more exciting to think of new combinations.

GPO
You know in advance with that kind of proposal that they just want us to go and somehow act as if we're the same people we were then.

TM
And run through your 'greatest hits'.

GPO
Yeah - that's just not reality. All of us are that many years older, hopefully wiser, certainly we've got a much much larger amount of emotional, intellectual and creative information in us.

AW
But I get sent four or five records a day that sound like Throbbing Gristle or Chris & Cosey. You've all developed as people and as artists, but how does it feel that 20 years later there are all these records coming out that sound like lost Chris & Cosey or TG tracks? It's ridiculous.

PC
The thing that made our music different for us - and this continues today - is the fact that the process of making music is not to do with the genre or the style of it, but to do with how we did it and what we were thinking about and the ritual of going on stage and reacting to the circumstances. Reacting to the fact that there'd just been something on the news about Myra Hindley or about terrorists in Munich bombing planes and shit like that. Everything we did when we played live on stage was a sort of stream of consciousness reaction to those circumstances, and it was that honesty and that direct connection between our subconscious and these crazy boxes that we built - because we couldn't find any other machinery that made the sounds we wanted - that gave our music the quality that it did. You can use any amount of sequencers and things, you can take soundscapes of trains rolling into concentration camps, and for me it doesn't sound like us because it's not done with the same thought process.

CC
We weren't an electronic band. We used electronics quite extensively but I wouldn't say we were an electronic band. We used a lot of acoustic instruments, and the way we used electronics was different to most bands anyway. And the bulk of what we did, the best work we did was live work, not studio work, and it was all done on a knife-edge.

GPO
People are more and more seduced by style or formula being the thing itself. In fact if people really listen to TG, on a certain level there was never a TG 'style'. There were different things that we immersed ourselves in, whether it be mundane electro-disco or about people walking by the canal or whatever and we would then assemble sounds we felt illustrated what we were talking about, almost like a movie. And we would then try and make everything fully relevant inside itself. Everybody's part would be them imagining in some way the situation or the story and how it would feel and sound and resonate.

So like in 'Hamburger Lady' it's the sounds of the cleaners on the ward in the background, in our minds, and the pulsing is the effect of morphine intravenously on someone who's in a state of semi-death. It seems very powerful to people because its emotional body is equal to its musical body. And it doesn't mean that the next one's gonna sound like that because it's a different story. So then it could be 'Hot On The Heels Of Love' or 'United'.

AW
A lot of electronic music is sterile - it's like sitting in a cold room, or like being on the set of THX 1138. And for a while a nice clean sterile atmosphere is nice, but every now and then you just want someone to open the door and just fart or make a noise or talk to you or something.

CFT
It has to be all-embracing - that's what I like it to be.

PC
Our music was immersive - you could totally get into the centre of it and it would hopefully fill every part of the way you were feeling at that moment. If you take a lot of electronic music today, if you immerse yourself totally in it you just go bonkers - you would actually end up psychotic.

AW
It's almost as if it's designed to pacify you.

CFT
With the TG stuff, even when it was quite scary or difficult it was great because when it stopped you got a nice feeling. Do you know what I mean? The contrast it set up was great.

GPO
And it was never formularised because we never knew what we wanted to talk about next, and the albums and the live events were very much a sum total of all our personal concerns - what Cosey is thinking about or going through, or something she's written down or a postcard she's had. Sleazy might have a book he's been reading - he'll come and talk about that; Chris'll come in and tell us about something and so on. And then we would amalgamate those, in a sort of journalistic diary way, and then find ways for the sound to speak about that on the assumption that we're not that different from everybody else in terms of experiencing life, so if we can be honest it will resonate with somebody else. They'll feel a connection even if they're not sure what's happening and the way it's working on them.

PC
The thing also today is that the music industry has such a rapid turnover of people that a lot of young kids who are making music are doing it because they
think they have a real chance of becoming rich and famous. And being rich and famous was not something which ever really interested us.

AW
Being famous interested you though, didn't it? [To GPO] Weren't you interested in Warhol's 15 minutes of fame thing and the extension of that?

GPO
I still am - it's very relevant to what's happened in the mass media - the whole cult of celebrity. Although now I'm wondering how negative it might be...

AW
Did you ever wake up in the morning with this kind of smug satisfaction, thinking 'I told you so - I told you it would end up like this'. When you switch on Pop Idol or Big Brother or something?

CFT
It just angers me - I think it's just tragic for the generation now. But on the other hand I'm hoping there'll be a kneejerk reaction to it. What ambitions do people have now except to be rich and famous, which are totally vacuous ambitions. I mean if you've got money, it doesn't mean anything any more - because whatever you want you can have and fame is nothing because it's over so quickly - you're on Big Brother for six weeks and as soon as it's over within a week you're forgotten.

AW
At first I was quite depressed about these things but I've got a glimmer of hope that it can't go on. There's got to be a return to substance.

PC
I don't really agree with that. 'Teens in tears' is a whole genre and it's going to carry on. There'll just end up being hours and hours of programmes of people being slapped and bursting into tears - because people like to watch that. What people don't understand is that winning those programmes is not the point of them - the point of them is that the public like to see all the people getting fucked up, they like to see people failing, they like to see them crying, they like to see them miserable, unable to sing in front of 20 million people on live TV. That's the point of those programmes. And sooner or later they're gonna run out of people who are prepared to be put through that shit. So if those programmes stop it's not because the public don't want to watch them or because the TV companies don't want them on, it's because they won't be able to find anybody who's prepared to go on them.

GPO
Well, having lived in America for quite a while, every week I'm amazed at the number of people who are happy to be absolutely humiliated and do ridiculous things like eat scorpions or get into a tank of snakes - and there are thousands and thousands of people who apply.

AW
But aren't we the same as the people who want to watch these programmes? 20 years ago we all wanted to seek out the dark side of things - I remember being fascinated, going to the Psychick Rally at Heaven and seeing the SPK videos of sex changes and mutilation.

PC
And now there are autopsies on Channel 4.

AW
Yeah - so what makes us different? Some people might like to watch an 18 year-old girl be humiliated, whereas we might like to watch limbs being amputated. Aren't they different sides of the same coin?

PC
It's just a progressive decay in moral values!

CC
Let's ring up the Daily Mail!

PC
But the irony is we were vilified then and on a number of occasions since then, for doing things that were so innocuous, but at the same time that kind of philosophy continues to survive unchallenged.

TM
But you were putting these things out in the public domain - doesn't that begin the process of making them more acceptable?

CFT
Yes, but it was the way we were putting them out.

PC
It was the fact that we were saying 'this is something that I am actually interested in - I 'fess up to being interested in what happens when a body is disinterred or whatever, and I'm interested in the mental processes of a serial killer. It's not the fact that someone is saying 'serial killers are terrible' or whatever, it's the fact that we were honest enough to say 'these things do interest us'.

GPO
And that they may be significant in terms of human behaviour evolving - which is what we were really interested in. These things were part of an ethical debate for us.

CFT
That's the difference: when you see things on TV they're just there for consumption, not for debate. No-one stays with anything long enough to analyse it and discuss what's going on. They don't want to know because they just want to be entertained.

GPO
One thing that separates us is that it seems that the establishment hates it if individuals discuss difficult subject matter and try and start some kind of ethical, moral discussion in whatever way they choose - painting or music and so on - but if it's corporate and based on consumers and income and profit and it stays in the control of the establishment, then it seems to be acceptable. So what's not acceptable is the re-empowerment of individuals to really think about what's happening in their lives and what's affecting them and why. That's all part of controlling people and trying to keep them numb and stupid enough to stay in the loop of consuming and buying and never being satisfied, and just being part of the supply system of money to someone who's higher up the food chain.

CFT
It's weird that you'll have people who will accept the authority of TV, but not of the police any more. And that's a big shift. You get someone on a chat show someone like Trisha or whatever - and if they tell someone to shut up, they'll shut up. But if a copper in the street told them to shut up they'd challenge it. It's very bizarre, but it's because their value system is totally screwed up.

AW
You achieved so much with TG, but is there anything you felt you didn't achieve? Did you pursue it to its logical - or illogical - conclusion?

CC
It came to its logical end I think.

AW
Would that be at the Psychick Rally at Heaven - I got the impression that that was your last sermon from the mount.

GPO
We had it at the back of our minds that that was the British swansong.

CC
Although I thought the American gigs were very good.

CFT
San Francisco was better than LA.

CFT
My memory of it and what it actually sounds like are two very different things.

CC
I was on a totally different plane that night.

CFT
At the San Francisco gig I remember feeling that I was actually about seven feet above the stage. I do, honestly, and I heard it totally differently. I put it on
afterwards and I thought 'fuckin' hell, that's terrible! It didn't sound like that to me when I was up there'.

CC
It was an emotional experience - it was probably one of the best gigs we ever did.

GPO
It was a truly mind-altering experience. But who knows why it worked that way? I don't think TG has ended, you see. I think the fact that this conversation
is happening means that TG is very much alive in terms of a compilation of ideas and attitudes and possibilities.

AW
People don't even realise that they're getting the ripples from what you did, they really don't. But what makes it so strong is that it's still kind of hidden - the shock waves are still under the surface and people discover it for themselves.

GPO
So maybe you've answered your own question. TG is still TG and it can still be sought out and therefore it's alive and kicking and carries on the function it had 25 years ago. And they haven't co-opted it.

CFT
TG always defied the definition of a band. We don't have to be together for it to be alive.

GPO
One thing you can see when you look round here [the TG exhibition where this interview took place] is how meticulous and thoughtful we were.  Everything was discussed and checked and thought about.

CFT
But also spontaneous. To me that's something that a lot of people have missed. Some things were worked out like you said, and other things just suddenly happened. And you know you're on the right track when things start happening like that.

GPO
When we played live it was like channelling.

CFT
And we very accepting about accidents. If something was planned and then something accidental happened, we often thought 'that's actually better than what we thought we wanted to do'. But that's the difference between TG and a lot of other bands - they want X and if they don't get that, it's no good.

AW
It's almost like they're constantly rehearsing to reach this certain point, but they could have already reached that point and missed it. They're always looking for something else instead of looking at what they've got.

CFT
And then when they get it they just keep repeating it - which was of no interest to us whatsoever.

GPO
I don't know how anybody else feels but I know I still crave novelty and stimulation. I love to be surprised and that was true then, especially on stage. I loved to turn round and think 'who made that noise?' - and you'd see all of us turning round looking at each other and we'd realise - WE made it.

CC
It was very hard sometimes to pick out who was doing what - the guitar sounds like a voice and the voice sounds like a violin!

GPO
And that's a joyous moment when despite everything you'd imagined or expected, something completely different takes place and it could only take place
through the interaction of four people that makes up the third mind.

TM
You all became involved in acid house in various guises after TG. Did you find many parallels between the acid house explosion and what you were doing in the late 70s?

PC
For me the best times I've ever had on a dancefloor were probably in about 1987; I'd be completely off my face and travelling to a number of other places that weren't really connected to this planet. That route to that place is one way of getting there and I think you can get there with volume and with the kind of sounds we were doing with TG. I think you can also get there with the kind of sounds that individually we do now - with Thee Majesty or Chris & Cosey or Coil. For me at that particular time that dancefloor route was a very good one and I had some very memorable times. But I don't think that's the only way to get there - it's not essential to take that path and it's certainly not essential to continue to take the same drugs over and over again, because you just burn out the pathways. To me, once you've done it a few times and it's as good as it could ever get, you've been there already, it's stored. And you can find yourself on a beach somewhere and you're not on drugs but you've got a CD of some new kind of music that you've never heard before that can still take you to that same place if you listen to it with that same intensity, the same passion and the same fervour. So in terms of whether TG influenced dance music, in some small respect from an audio point of view, but in a larger respect from an emotional perspective and learning to abandon yourself to the beat or the sound - because that's what we did in 1975 when we first set up the second-hand amps or the amps that we'd had built by someone or the bassbins that were so big that you could walk into them, and turned on the first oscillators and the first fuzz pedal and the first whatever. Those situations took us to places that we hadn't been to before that were great and that just showed us that sound can transport you. It's the transportation that's the interesting part for me, and that's the real connection between TG and dance music.

GPO
For me personally, when the whole rave thing was really starting in the mid 80s it was more like 1966/67 in London than it was like 1976/77. I found it much more reminiscent of that - that sort of psychedelic communing with lights and everything else, and people smiling and giving each other glasses of water and actually caring about each other in that situation. That was the bit that I found fascinating and exciting, the sense of people looking after each other. And a lot of girls used to say it was the only time they didn't get hit on when they were dancing in a club; that they felt liberated.

PC
That's because they were surrounded by gay men!

CFT
Yeah, they were in a safe zone.

GPO
But it was very much a safe zone for everybody - people really treasured that for a while, whereas in the late 70s with TG and Industrial and to a limited extent punk, it was fuelled very differently. Punk was fuelled by amphetamines and alcohol. We weren't really fuelled by anything like that.

CC
Just energy.

GPO
We were being transported. That was much more a directing of angst outwards and disgust at hypocrisy.

AW
Did you not find that that caring, sharing thing all wore a bit thin? Was there a point where you thought 'this is all a bit pacifying'?

PC
To me it didn't become pacifying, it became scary. I remember waking up about seven o'clock on New Year's Day in Marc Almond's flat...

AW
Scary enough at any time of year.

PC
He was staring at his parrot who was asleep - it was asleep with its arm over its head, and he was convinced that his head had fallen off.

CFT
Marc's head or the parrot's?

PC
He said 'my parrot's head's fallen off!' and he went out and scored more drugs in order to come down, supposedly. We left the apartment and I said to John Balance, my partner who was with me, 'we have to stop doing this - it's just too mad, too freaky'.

GPO
It wore off for me in California in about 93/94. It just suddenly became the classic problem - a formula.

AW
And you were too fucked up to think about the political angle of what was going on. A friend of mine was making a documentary about the Club Squad - do you remember that? He actually got to interview the head of the Club Squad and he said that what freaked the police out was that there were several rave organisers who had all this power to move masses of young people around the country, and there must be some political undertow or agenda to it. It just drove them mad that they couldn't find a political connection. But it was just totally devoid of any political content, so they left it alone. When I heard that, I thought yeah, for a movement that could move that amount of people around the country and have that level of influence, there was no message.

CFT
But that in itself becomes political.

AW
Yeah, but you've got to take it somewhere else - you can't just be satisfied with 'I'm off my tits dancing in a field on ecstasy'. There was that initial political act but there was no taking it any further. And then quite selfishly, when it affected the ravers, when the Criminal Justice Bill came along, then they manned the barricades - when it stopped their disco dancing.

GPO
I think that's true. Eventually it did become exposed as incredibly selfish in a rather uninteresting way.

AW
Which made it ideal to be turned into pop music, which is what it is now. Dance culture is now pop culture, there's no demarcation.

GPO
It's a tragic fact, it's probably the same here but definitely in America, every sports programme begins with techno and all the car adverts have techno and it's just become the cheap musical palette for advertising. And that was possible because there was no real content. I think it was a lost opportunity, because there was this vehicle presented for some kind of transporting, psychedelic music with rhythm, similar to music from all ages like joujouka and Sufi music and all those traditions. I kept waiting for somebody to start to put all these other bits of information in and start building new worlds like surrealist paintings, but it never happened.

PC
I think it was a reaction to the political scene at the time. The height of that thing in Britain was also the height of Thatcherism and people wanted a break from all that crap.

CC
Yeah, it could be seem as a release from all that.

PC
Something happened - I haven't really thought about this before - something happened that changed it. For the first few years of the whole dance, ecstasy thing, the places that I was going, the dancefloors with the sound of whistling coming at you through the mist, those places actually taught me something about myself and how I feel about death and how I feel about what happens after death. Those places were actually interesting and I discovered stuff. But somehow, I don't know exactly when it was, 89 or 90 or something, I just had to have another couple of Es because I just wanted to keep shuffling around and looking at sweaty bodies. And I don't know if it was the molecule that changed or something about the music that changed or just something about me, but I'd already learned what I could learn from that particular path. So I was just going somewhere to shuffle up and down and look at sweaty bodies and it was boring. The best kind of music always takes you to new places, and it's hard for musicians to figure out what those places are and how to get there. But that music was great for a while and suddenly it wasn't great any more because it didn't do the job any more.

TM
Can you envisage another musical sea-change on the horizon? What form do you think it might take?

PC
The tsunami is just over there. I'm way too old to be surfing the front of the wave but it's definitely coming. All the record companies are imploding, CD sales are plummeting - the signs are definitely there. If a few kids can read what you write or overhear their parents saying 'look at this disgusting Throbbing Gristle - do you remember them? If any little connection can be made between what we did then and these kids that are coming up, it would be so fantastic because suddenly people would realise that they don't have to go on PopStars, they don't have to sound like Kylie Minogue or The Beatles or whoever else and that there are different ways of doing it that don't involve guitars or drums or sequencers necessarily. It doesn't matter what you use - you can use a fucking plunger as long as you do it with your imagination in full fucking throttle.

GPO
There's no limitation on what is possible. But after what Sleazy just said last night I went back to the hotel and there was a young woman there with a friend of mine and at some point she said 'I want to be a singer'. And I said 'that's nice', as you do. And so she said 'how did you all do it? Should I get a manager first or a publisher?' That was her next step. And I said 'we never had a manager or a publisher or an agent. You don't have to'. So she looked at me, then she looked down, then she said 'so should I get a manger or an agent first?'. It just wouldn't go in that there was any alternative way than what she'd watched on television.

AW
I think that kind of attitude is the end result of punk. The whole point of punk was that anyone could do it.

CC
It wasn't, it wasn't.

PC
It was that anyone could do it as long as they had a guitarist and a drummer and sounded a bit like The Ramones.

AW
It was taken further by people like you and Suicide, that you don't need guitars, but if someone asked me to sum up punk, I would say that the bottom line was that you didn't have to be a trained musician. Admittedly you had to go to a studio and you had to have a guitar, but...

CFT
You've already said 'you've got to do this, you've got to do that'. So you're not saying that anyone can do it, are you?

AW
But it still put that spark into people's heads. But is the end result of that spark just karaoke and software that means you can make a track in your bedroom? Isn't that the real end result of the punk rock experience?

GPO
When they said 'learn three chords, go and form a band', we said 'why learn any?' and I think we still have that basic feeling. Our first album was recorded on a Sony cassette recorder with a condenser microphone on a table on the other side of the room. That's it. And a couple of bits were from live shows recorded with the same technique.

CC
And it was a borrowed tape - we couldn't even afford a blank tape!

GPO
And that album has been available in some form ever since. It's never been deleted. That's a big statement - it just says no, don't limit yourself by thinking  'I must this, I must that'. Most of all this idea that they want managers and agents, and they get their photo done before they write a song - they've been hypnotised by the mass media into thinking that the only way to do it is the way that serves the corporations.

AW
But the way pop music operates hasn't really changed that much in 50 years.

PC
There's always been the boy bands and so on, but every so often you get something that totally bucks the system, like Jimi Hendrix. Not that I'm comparing TG to Jimi Hendrix necessarily but at least we were different. There was nothing about Captain Beefheart that corresponded to anything in the system and there's nobody that even sound like Captain Beefheart today, particularly.

GPO
I would hope that one thing that could happen is that young people will start having an aspiration towards being creative, creativity for its own sake, and realising that ignorance isn't an excuse - because as you've said, everybody knows how the system works now.

CFT
For someone to create something they have to have something to express and it seems there's a generation of kids of who have never actually experienced anything that's of interest to them, let alone anyone else.

GPO
But the world is at a crisis point. I saw the buildings come down in New York - that's very symbolic of people realising that everything is very tenuous,  nothing is as secure as they thought it was. That security that the last couple of generations felt is gone now.

AW
I was reading your early descriptions of Throbbing Gristle - walking through an industrial wasteland with a dog barking, etc - and I just thought if that's how you felt about it then, now you really must have something to moan about.

GPO
I breathed in the burning bodies, the petroleum and the asbestos the next day; I could see it from the roof. So yeah I think that's true! I think people are in for the most incredible shock and that's what triggers the waking up. The tranquiliser is wearing off. Fundamentalism in all its forms is rearing its ugliest head and this time it's so poisonous that we're all at risk. That is going to be the thing that makes people make very different choices about what they want to do with their lives and their little bit of time - hopefully they'll realise it's very valuable and precious and that it shouldn't be wasted or cast aside.

PC
Just to clarify, you mean any kind of fundamentalism, including American?

GPO
Yes, of course, absolutely. All forms of fundamentalism terrify me.

CFT
They are the enemy.

PC
Well, 'fundament' is another word for 'arse', isn't it.

AW
What are the authorities like towards you now? Any more clicks on the phone?

CC
Probably, but they just hide the clicks.

CFT
I'm still very cautious on the phone. You have to be. And with email.

CC
Assume all communications are tapped. Speak in code wherever possible, question everything, don't trust anybody.

GPO
The fundamentalist establishment has made it very clear that they see the paranoia of the moment as the best opportunity they'll ever have for bringing in all these surveillance techniques and control techniques that they would never have got away with two years ago - they're laughing.

AW
The most creative times are always when things are difficult - it does throw up a lot of interesting stuff. But I don't know how you strike that balance between great art and imminent destruction.

PC
They're opposite sides of the same thing - if you live through a time when half of your friends die from a virus that they don't know how to control, it teaches you things about life that you didn't know before. And if you live through a time when your parents spend 20 years in a nursing home with Alzheimer's and don't know who you are, then you have a totally different view about old age, for example. What doesn't kill us makes us stronger, as the cliché goes.

GPO
People just need to think for themselves. It worries me when society is not engaged with the idea of consciousness in its widest sense, of being aware and awake and trying to evolve consciousness. If they're only trying to evolve technology you get this separation that's very dangerous; there's no real discussion of morality in its most essential form.

AW
I've read Wreckers of Civilisation about two or three times. I always scoff at those people who stand in Smiths at lunchtime reading these 'How To Get Ahead In Business' type books, but I read that book and it was a total kick up the arse for me. I just felt, well, am I getting the same feeling that someone gets from reading a self-help book? Is this like 'industrial self-help'? And if it is, so the fuck what? It doesn't matter what you call it, it's given me a kick up the arse. You people have put yourselves on offer intellectually and physically - there was an axe on your back door, for god's sake! I'm like, 'oh I'm a bit worried about sticking my neck out', but you ran to the top of a mountain, stripped bare and went 'fuck off!!!' So what have I got to worry about? Do you find that offensive that I call it a self-help book?

CC
They should republish it with that title.

GPO
I think that's wonderful.

CFT
One of the best ways I've ever described it is that if you're honest with yourself and do things with honesty and integrity, then when people question you,  there is no question. You can always answer it because you've never done anything you didn't believe in. If they slag you off, the worst they can say is that they didn't like what you did. But if you feel good about it, it doesn't matter.

About The Interviewees
Peter Christopherson continues to make music with his group Coil <www.brainwashed.com/coil/>
Genesis P-Orridge <www.genesisp-orridge.com> now describes himself as a 'cultural engineer' and records under the name Thee Majesty.
Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti are still recording, performing and DJing as Chris & Cosey <www.chrisandcosey.com>.
Andrew Weatherall is a prolific producer, remixer and DJ, and also runs the Rotters Golf Club <www.rottersgolfclub.co.uk> label.

Links
The official Industrial Records web site is hosted by Mute Records <www.mute.com/tg/>
For an exhaustive TG discography and further information visit Brainwashed <www.brainwashed.com/tg/>
For the full story of TG, read Wreckers of Civilisation by Simon Ford (Black Dog Publishing <www.bdpworld.com>)

Credits
Words: Tom Mugridge <tom@hell.com>
Photography: Jason Manning <jay.manning@virgin.net>
Design: Rebels In Control <www.rebelsincontrol.com>
Hosted by: Zerocrop <www.zerocrop.com>
Many thanks to: Andrew Weatherall, Throbbing Gristle, Paul Taylor and all at Mute Records, Andy Fraser, the Cabinet Gallery.
An edited version of this interview was first published in Muzik magazine, March 2003.