Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) (17 page)

Drew:
Tell me about your working lives. I’m curious about the nature of repetition in your music and whether it has a relationship with the repetition of the working day in a shitty job.

Cosey:
I liked having shitty repetitious jobs, because I could detach myself from it, get the money and then go and do what I really want to do. I did lots of those jobs. I worked in a paint factory, I worked in a car parts factory, I worked in a dress factory as a wages clerk.

Drew:
So that was clerical, but the paint job was real factory work?

Cosey:
Yeah. I was filling the paint pots. From 7:30 to 4 or 5 o’clock. I was really good. I was promoted really quickly. I was good because I have the kind of mind that thinks, “Right, what’s the most efficient way of doing this. Okay this is it.” I would sooner do a job where I knew what I had to do, you
have to do this you get paid that, and then I can go home and leave all my thoughts and creativity for me.

Drew:
So “What a Day” doesn’t express how you felt about the paint factory at all?

Cosey:
No, that was about having to get up, having to go on the tube, the frustration of that.

Chris:
But that was about Gen going down to St. Jame’s Press.

Cosey:
To do the contemporary artists books.

Chris:
Which was just as mind-numbing, wasn’t it, really, in its own way? It used to drive him mad; he was hell to live with.

Drew:
What accent is he doing?

Cosey:
He’s got a Northern accent, he’s not from Hull, he’s from Manchester. His accent is Northern Mancunian. Live in “What a Day” he’s going into a London accent. It’s a Cockney accent, very Dick Van Dyke. We were living in the East End then with old-school East Enders. When we lived in Hackney we were very sociable, we knew everybody, all the shopowners and market traders, and they all used to say [in accent], “Hellao, mawning.”

Drew:
Did you create any of the sounds on “What a Day,” or are you just a vocalist?

Gen:
No, I’m just vocalizing on “What a Day.” The original rhythm for “What a Day” was invented by Sleazy. I don’t know if he told you this, or remembers. It was made on the “Box of Tricks,” the device that Chris built with Sleazy. It had six Walkmans in it. It was converted so that you could play each side of the tape. You had a key for each side of each cassette, and it had a sequencer as well, so you could either play it like a cassette tape Mellotron, or you could sequence when
it would play each side of each cassette tape. The first rhythm for “What a Day” was made by sequencing his found sounds and field recordings on cassette.

Drew:
The song is almost like a parody of what “industrial” music would sound like. Was this a reaction to your own success?

Gen:
I think that there was a point round about
20 Jazz Funk Greats
where . . . certainly for me, writing the melodies and writing the lyrics that I do, a lot of it was rearguard action against the surprise that we felt, at the speed of assimilation, the speed of commodification, the speed [at which we became] part of an accessorized cultural iconography. All of that speed was really surprising, how quickly that happened, and quite disturbing. Also, [I was struck by] the amount of people who professed to be fans but were beginning to pick and choose so that their favorite aspects were the least important but the most vicarious. And I was very aware of this imbalance in the response.

Drew:
Does that lead you to produce something like “What a Day,” where, lyrically, instead of delivering the most “intense” or “shocking” material you deliberately give people something totally banal and plain?

Gen:
That one is based on going to Broadway Market in Hackney with my dog Tanith and hearing two old ladies talking. One of them was going, “Oh, I had an awful day, I had a terrible day, all day it was just awful,” and something struck me about it, it was almost like a Samuel Beckett play. But a naïve Samuel Beckett play, a found object almost. And it stuck in my head because it was so vibrant and funny, and yet at the same time it didn’t really tell me anything. Just this complaining, whining voice, and so I stole them. I stole the old ladies.

Gen is not making a random or idle literary reference. Beckett did use the very phrase in question in his description of an enema in the novel
Molloy:
“We were in the bathroom. He lay down on the tiles, his big fat bottom sticking up. Let it soak well in, I said. What a day” (p. 118).

Drew:
So you are doing a Mockney sendup and concealing your Manchester accent? I would never have thought of the song as two old women, that adds a layer of gender reversal that isn’t immediately apparent.

Gen:
It was my [attempt at] doing two Cockneys talking to each other, but it was meant to be ridiculous, ridiculously stretched. It’s fun to do.

Drew:
The song seems purpose built to try the listener’s patience, to trap them in a monotonous, repetitive loop of experience. It’s stifling.

Gen:
Yeah. I guess I can only say that William Burroughs and Brion Gysin are the culprits. They taught me the infinitude of permutation, that by the repetition of certain phrases, there is a subvocal resonance of meaning that is inarticulable with straightforward langauge. It exists in the actual act of repetition rather than in the linear sense of meaning.

Drew:
So with the repetition of phrases you push the cadence toward hidden associations, and as the repetitions stack up for the listener, they become hungry for new information, and so they try to hear something “new” even in the repetition of the “same” phrase?

Gen:
Yes, exactly that, exactly that. There’s a certain magic with words. This is something that I’ve always believed, since the early sixties. All words are alive, in a literal sense. It’s not just a metaphor. They have the ability to create and pressure
people to bend and manifest the agendas of those very words. Certain words are vying to control the direction of what you write. They work a bit like the gene strands of DNA.

Drew:
We are all in “the prison house of language”?

Gen:
Tape-recorded loops. As Burroughs asked: in a prerecorded universe, who made the first recording? When I am working with words, I’m very aware that it’s not necessarily an amicable relationship. Words are trying to push me to reveal or hide, to camouflage certain things that need to be discussed. I’m always looking for ways to trap the words in little games so that their particular agendas are confounded and something that’s a little closer to the real story of what is happening comes through.

You take your head and put it down between your knees, and do the Ostrich.

The Primitives, “Do the Ostrich”

The last song on the album, “Six Six Sixties” is also the most upfront moment on the album, boasting a manic bass guitar solo and, finally, a full-on lead vocal from Gen with an energy that matches the peak of the band’s live performances. Fading up from silence after the exhausting trudge of “What a Day,” “Six Six Sixties” ends
20 Jazz Funk Greats
with a completely contradictory scribble of nervous, gnawing energy, an unexpected final swing of the genre-exercise pendulum toward . . . rock music, albeit in a gristle-ized form. In their public broadsides, TG expressed hostility toward the pomposity and exhaustion of rock and roll, even going so far as to court accusations of racism with their scornful announcement that rock and roll’s basis in the blues made
it essentially a form of historically superseded preindustrial slave music. These proclamations were cases of the band protesting too much, floating decoys for the credulous press while TG made raids upon strategically valuable rock territory. Some of the sniping can be chalked up to the narcissism of petty differences, and some to a felt need to preserve a crucial distinction between TG and punk rock, but whatever their reasoning, with hindsight the late seventies seems like a terrible time to make the argument that rock and roll was over. It was precisely at that moment that rock culture fragmented centrifugally outward into a richly conflicted, fecund mess of new subgenres, a process of decomposition and recomposition that only accelerated when the first wave of punk died. Despite these overdetermined protestations of hatred, there are greasy rock and roll fingerprints all over Throbbing Gristle’s lyrics, tactics and imagery.

Both Gen and Chris have confessed in print to having foundational aesthetic experiences at Pink Floyd concerts, though in each case they seem to be not so much a celebration of Floyd-qua-rock-band so much as they were encounters with the total perceptual overload induced by electronic and amplified sound at high volume, retina-destroying strobe lights and exploding oils and copious amounts of hallucinogenic drugs. Chris Carter’s acid-enhanced experience in 1968 of a Pink Floyd concert prompted him to found his own psychedelic lightshow company, Orpheus Lites, before he was old enough to drive; the very next year Gen dropped out of college, hitchhiked to London to see a Pink Floyd and Rolling Stones double bill at the Albert Hall and moved into the Transmedia Exploration commune all in one evening (Ford, pp. 5.14, 1.14). Simon Reynolds’s thesis that “late Seventies
industrial music was the second flowering of an authentic psychedelia” finds Exhibit A in Throbbing Gristle’s live shows: the overwhelming lightshows, the happening-like atmospheres of their ritualistic performances, the electronically distorted textures and the loose, free-associative jamming that defined TG’s spontaneously created work would have fit in well at the U.F.O. club a decade earlier, were it not for its relentless negativity (Reynolds,
Rip It Up and Start Again
, p. 224). In dubbing themselves “post-psychedelic trash,” one can detect a nostalgic affection for the very outmodedness of psychedelia as an unfinished revolutionary project rendered taboo by punk aesthetics, and the band certainly courted the naff and passé on purpose. This carries over into the anachronistic “rocker” look they sported at the height of punk rock’s media visibility: all in identical mirrored cop shades, three out of the four (Sleazy excepted, as ever) with long straight stringy hair, a style they were quick to point out was entirely out of fashion at the time. When looked at critically, even the most austere TG design elements verge on rock and roll cheese: the classic lighting bolt insignia used on early recordings, T-shirts, badges and posters bears an ominous and oft-noted resemblance to the party flag of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, but it also rather closely resembles the ironed-on lightning bolt costumes of the contemporaneous pub-glam German chart act Chicory Tip. This overtly trashy rock and roll image was parodied in a hilarious prank photograph in the noise fanzine
Bananafish
, which simply printed a photo of an eighties thrash metal band and identified its four members as “Gen, Sleazy, Chris and Cosey.”

Though the Floyd struck first, the Velvet Underground were the primal rock and roll touchstone for the band, and
the TG single “Zyklon B Zombie” is essentially a re-creation of “I Heard Her Call My Name,” complete with the giveaway lyric “And then my head split open” hiding in plain sight and triggering its own withering blast, a modular synth and effects processing riposte to the original guitar solo. When prodded, TG’s members confessed to a quite specific sound crush on the Velvet Underground’s guitar tone that produced the parting shot of “Six Six Sixties”:

Drew:
I’m curious about that florid solo at the end of “Six Six Sixties.”

Cosey:
That’s Gen on bass.

Chris:
That track is entirely Gen. It’s a solo track really.

Cosey:
I didn’t realize how Velvet Underground it was until I listened to it again recently.

Chris:
It’s all Gen, everything about it. I helped with the beat, by which I mean I plugged it all in and set the rhythm up. It was on the very first drum machine we had, the Rhythm Ace. It’s just a preset that he ran through an echo machine that had long loops.

Drew:
A Copycat?

Chris:
No, but I did have one of those. It was a Roland Space Echo. Gen’s had a switch on it and you could make it just loop, just bump something into it, and they were quite long loops. He recorded the drum machine into that loop with some bass guitar on top of it, and then he played bass guitar on top of that. So it’s an overdub.

Drew:
And that was done in one burst of inspiration?

Chris:
Yeah, it was done in one go and that was it. We recorded the rhythm separately because I could already hear that it was such a good track, and we recorded the loop [on
its own] so that we could play the loop back when we did gigs and stuff.

Cosey:
Because we couldn’t do it again. That was the trouble with all of us: “Well, I really like it but I can’t do it again, so if you’ve recorded it, great.”

Chris:
Because the loop was on his Echo machine we couldn’t use it again so we had to get it off the machine and onto tape as quickly as possible.

Drew:
Tell me about “Six Six Sixties.”

Gen:
That’s a solo track of mine. I had bought a Dr. Rhythm, a really early drum machine. It was a wooden box, had probably eight buttons, one said “bossa nova” and another said “cha cha.” It was for people who played really cheesy organs in clubs to have a rhythm to play to, in working men’s pubs and so on. But I wanted something to just play along to when I was on my own in Martello St. just jamming on the bass. I used to practice a lot more in those days. I put it through the Space Echo and got that incredible rhythm. And I’d always wanted to figure out how the Velvet Underground “Ostrich” guitar sound worked on their first album—particularly on “European Son of Delmore Schwartz,” that stuttering, descending sound. [Imitates it] And that particular day, it was an afternoon, I remember it very clearly, and I was on the stage in the studio space, and I was alone at the beginning, and I got that rhythm and I got the bass echoing just right so that I could do that effect finally. I was so excited and it was so perfectly what I had tried to get for ages! Chris turned up and I said, “Chris, Chris, I’m not going to change anything, just record it for a whole side of a cassette because I’ll never get this again.” That’s what we did. I did a drawing of every setting and every effect and how it was all connected.