Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) (10 page)

Though it remains the work of four unique spirits and not some vague emanation from a kind of abstracted social group, I would like to wager that Throbbing Gristle’s art, music and public statements constitute one way to trace precisely such cracks and fissures in the national psyche of Britain in the late seventies. To go out on a bit of limb, the song “Convincing People” can arguably be read as an allegory in miniature of the public relations problems of the Labour party, reading its implosion in the dismal election results of 1979 as a symptom of its inability on a mass level to make good on its own populist rhetoric and successfully “convince people.” In order to test this fanciful claim, I separately asked all of the members of the band about their sense of how the political climate may have impacted the creation of the album, and of “Convincing People” in particular.

Drew:
What about the political context of London in 1979? I know TG were never a party politics band, but you were making this album right after the collapse of the Labour government and the transfer of power to the Tories.

Sleazy:
For myself, at that time I think that the Labour government was seen as the bad guy. They had been the cause of many of the social problems that we had railed against. There had been a long period where garbage wasn’t collected and there were mountains of garbage everywhere. That had been the backdrop to the earlier period of TG. So when the conservatives first got into power, nobody really knew who they were aside from the fact that it was a change from the supposed darkness of the past. All of the negative things that we ascribe to the Conservative or Republican viewpoint now were unknown to us at the time.

Sleazy is referring to the embarrassingly public fallout from a string of union disputes and industrial actions that came to a head at the end of 1978 and which are now known as “The Winter of Discontent.” It badly eroded public trust in the Labour Party and the Callaghan administration.

The Winter of Discontent was a rash of strikes, often unofficial and largely in the public sector, against the Callaghan government’s attempt to impose a 5 percent norm for wage and salary increases. In December 1978 the Ford Motor Company eventually settled a strike at the cost of a 15 percent wage rise, and a similar figure settled a strike of BBC technicians. In the new year, there was an outburst of strikes and militant picketing by lorry drivers, ambulance drivers, oil-tanker drivers and local government manual workers that resulted in the closure of schools, disruption of hospitals and even in one well-publicized case a refusal to bury the dead. (Kavanaugh, p. 131)

An angry British public, already worried by “the English disease” of economic malaise (slow growth in production and wages, accelerating inflation, swiftly rising retail prices, grim unemployment statistics), was further inflamed by tabloid headlines about unburied corpses in the Liverpool morgue as a result of government employee walkouts. The Conservative party exploited this high-profile conflict for all it was worth and dealt a decisive defeat to their enemies in the May election. Though it was about to do even worse in the rout of 1983, the Labour’s party’s share of the vote in 1979 election was its lowest showing in forty-eight years (Callaghan, p. 225). Whatever fragile consensus had underwritten the Labour government’s almost unbroken reign
was tested and ultimately shattered by the coming of the Iron Lady.

Sleazy’s sense that Labour was “the bad guy” allows us to see an underacknowledged zone of overlap between the radical critique of Labour as a secretly authoritarian regime and the conservative critique of Labour as insufficiently “tough”: though in the service of distinct agendas, both perspectives foreground the antagonism lurking within the ambient despair of late-seventies Britain. The Tories, perhaps embittered by their own political disenfranchisement and loss of face in the culture wars of the swinging sixties and sybaritic seventies, rail against a society they depict as both permissive and joyless. Such a stance has long roots. The June 1946 issue of
The Economist
, admonishing the Labour party in a prescient, if coarse, manner, offers a case in point: “The human donkey requires either a carrot in front or a stick behind to goad it into activity. . . . The whole drift of British society for two generations past has been to whittle away at both the carrot and the stick, until now very little of either is left” (as quoted in Tyrell, p. 4). These cartoonish reductions (the British public as bored, braying pack animals with nothing to live for) find an eerie analogue in TG’s dystopian take on the human end products of the welfare state. Are Gen’s own descriptions of his trailer-dwelling gypsy neighbors in Hackney as “subhumans” who “make me dizzy with [their] disease” (from the TG single “Subhuman”) all that different from
The Economist’s
“human donkeys”? The same critique of dehumanization animates both, though
The Economist
does so in the interests of free-market capitalism, while Throbbing Gristle’s members, when pressed to define their politics in the wake of gossip that their use of images from the Third Reich
implied a fascist politics, broke their tight-lipped stance to profess a “small a” anarchism.

The most explicit articulation of a TG political stance occurs in a routine entitled “Assume Power Focus” written by Gen during the Coum era in 1975; I quote the version that accompanies a curious bootleg of early TG material (some left intact, and some doctored and reconstructed) released by the Dark Vinyl label:

Every society has within it a corrupt and malignant cabal. A dismal and malevolent bureaucracy that instills fear deeper than any medieval subjugation and illuminates the diminished return of a distressed and pandering economic dictatorship. A moral degeneracy that emasculates an individual’s power of response, and demeans the virility of their hatred.

From outside this corpse of formalized corruption we unite to assassinate all liberal values; to erode all suburban communities; to purge the decaying matter of that lineage once pure. This theory is for those whose trust in any inherently just social system has been sacrilegiously betrayed; whose governments are morally opportunist and ruthlessly axpanded
[sic];
whose constitutions and chosen rights are intellectually slandered and violently bypassed; their values ridiculed; their trust in freedom of expression policed; their belief in evolution denied; the very source of their idealistic fervor, criminalized. . .

Accompanied by the slogan “Freedom Is a Sickness,” Gen’s screed conveys the withering contempt that an entrenched Labour establishment had produced in its alienated opponents, and its references to the policing of freedom of expression is not a crusty-punk catechism but a reflection
of Gen’s direct experience of state interference (it is hardly coincidental that this text was written the same year that Gen was prosecuted for disseminating obscene mail art). That said, in openly celebrating the “virility of hatred,” declaring open season on “liberal values” and referring in a vague manner to a “lineage once pure” that has been betrayed, one can also see the source of the mistaken perception that TG were in some nebulous manner articulating a right-wing critique of the welfare state or, as the journalistic cliché goes, irresponsibly “playing with fascist imagery.”

The rhetorical overlap created by the common enemy of the Labour establishment can only be pressed so far, however. When the chips were down, TG’s transgressive aesthetics were anathema in the coming Conservative era. In her party conference speech on October 13, 1978, immediately preceding the full flowering of the Winter of Discontent, Margaret Thatcher said: “For years the British disease has been the ‘us and them’ philosophy. Many in industry are still infected with the virus. They still treat the factory not as a workplace but as a battlefield” (Thatcher, p. 83). Thatcher’s final, arresting image of the factory-as-battlefield neatly articulates the precise reading of the factory as an inhuman space of mechanized death and state oppression implicit in the Industrial Records use of the Auschwitz incineration tower as a promotional corporate logo. Apparently TG were part of the troubling “they” that needed to be re-educated, or pushed out.

Drew:
To what extent did the political climate of May of 1979 affect the meaning/content of the song “Convincing People,” or the album as a whole? How did you feel when the Conservatives came into power?

Cosey:
We were on the front line, because we were on the receiving end of what their party politics were. We were artists, we were anarchists, if you like, and we were poor. So whatever policies were in place affected us.

Chis:
Didn’t matter which government was in . . .

Cosey:
We felt it, either way. And in Hackney, where Gen and I lived in Beck Road, I remember the IRA stuff going on, and the police came down, there was a big police presence, it was when the thing at the Tower of London happened, they arrested the people living next door to us who were squatting, and then they came into our bedroom. It was a police state. They had this special SPG group that was around on the streets, a special patrol unit in vans with no markings, no nothing, no windows. They’d stop you in the street, open the back doors, put you in it, question you and then spit you out further up the road or take you to the station. That’s what it was like in London. So we were very much on the front lines and you felt it every day. So all of this—“Convincing People,” “Persuasion,” “Discipline”—all came out of this, of fighting for survival. And still trying to make your mark in a way that people could take it creatively, artistically, musically, but delivering in a way that was about the reality that we lived. Everybody else did too, but they liked to pretend that it wasn’t like that.

Drew:
But it seems that in a song like “Convincing People” you have some doubts about the context of performers delivering their message to a mass in front of them . . .

Cosey:
You delivered the information for them to then take as knowledge and use it in a way that would make their lives better, or more fulfilled. Hopefully, that’s the ideal, when you do anything like this is that you’re giving something
to someone that then feels empowered or inspired by it. And that’s how TG worked and that’s how we have worked ever since.

Drew:
Thatcher was elected in May, and you were recording in August. I know that the Labour government had not been particularly kind to Coum Transmissions or to you, to say the least. What did you expect from the Tories? What was your sense of that election, and of the UK at that time?

Gen:
As you probably know, in 1975 in the summer I was prosecuted for sending “Queen” postcards. And I got a suspended year sentence. I was warned that if they found anything else that was offensive that I did in my art, I would automatically go to jail for a year. I was already on notice that they were watching me and wanted to get me off the street. So when Thatcher came in, I just knew immediately that things were going to get even more polarized and even more self-censoring amongst the art world, that people would be running scared because they would want to protect their little stipends. We were fortunate to be doing Industrial Records because it gave us an ongoing financial independence. It meant that we were going to be able to pursue our concepts and our ideas with a minimum of interference from the surrounding social/cultural context. Having said that, I certainly felt threatened. I think it’s not wrong to suggest that that was really the beginning of the ongoing media war between myself and the authorities in Britain that culminated in me having to leave the country. But it’s also exciting. One way that I would describe it to people at the time, when they didn’t know if it was going to be exciting or frightening, was that when things get as polarized as they were at that time, it’s much easier to see the enemy, but it’s much easier to see your friends as
well. When the water level goes down and people go into the cracks who aren’t serious about confronting the status quo, whoever’s left standing on a rock is probably one of your friends. That way you can identify allies much quicker and you know that the allies are going to be much stronger because they are still visible. So it’s a two-edged sword.

The self-consuming logic of a song called “Convincing People” that tries to convince its listeners that it is not very convincing to tell people that you aren’t trying to convince them is of a piece with a particular political moment in which the participatory logic of democracy stopped allowing for a real debate. One can sense this stance in circulation across the political spectrum (not just in artistic or creative people) disgusted with the entrenched corruption of Labour but fearful of the authoritarianism to come with the Conservative party. The feeling could be summed up in the title of an old Nina Simone song: “Either Way I Lose.” It’s a sensation many American voters are now wearily familiar with. The sleeve design from the XTC album
Go 2
, designed by Peter Christopherson’s employers Hipgnosis in 1978, models precisely this paradox of the structured, oppressive “freedom of choice” enjoyed by contemporary consumers, offering its viewers a free choice which is no choice at all:

This writing is trying to pull you in much like an eye-catching picture. It is designed to get you to READ IT. This is called luring the VICTIM, and you are the VICTIM. But if you have a free mind you should STOP READING NOW! because all we are attempting to do is to get you to read on. Yet this is a DOUBLE BIND because if you indeed stop you’ll be doing what we tell you, and if you read on you’ll be
doing what we’ve wanted all along. And the more you read on the more you’re falling for this simple device of telling you exactly how a good commercial design works. They’re TRICKS and this is the worst TRICK of all since it’s describing the TRICK whilst trying to TRICK you, and if you’ve read this far then you’re TRICKED but you wouldn’t have known this unless you’d read this far.

At first blush, Hipgnosis’ self-deconstructing rhetoric in the
Go 2
sleeve seems to closely resemble Throbbing Gristle’s self-canceling lyrical strategy in “Convincing People,” and the Hipgnosis/Sleazy connection borders upon a “smoking gun” connecting them together. This surface kinship is deceptive, and the act of disentangling these two similar, but disjunctive, approaches to autocritical communication can help to clarify what Throbbing Gristle are, and are not, up to.