Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) (4 page)

Chris:
And we were getting locked in with punk, as well.

Cosey:
We didn’t like it because they didn’t understand the insignia they were working with or anything about what was going on. We knew from the start where punk had come from, the commercial aspect and all of that, so we were informed on that level and we then started reacting to it as well. That could have had a lot to do with where we moved from.

Drew:
So that made
20 Jazz Funk Greats
a deliberately un-punk rock album in both its musical form and its visual presentation.

Cosey:
We wanted to distance ourselves from it.

Drew:
But then again if you listen to one of your singles from just before that period, such as “Five Knuckle Shuffle”—the structure of it, the feeling of it, the way it effects the listener, even down to shouting the word “lobotomy” in the chorus—it seems very similar to punk rock even though the relationship of the performer to the material is different from punk.

Cosey:
The anger and frustration is the same, punks were frustrated and so were we.

Chris:
It was an angry time.

Cosey:
That’s something we had in common, but we differed in how we went about it.

Drew:
It’s difficult to look back at 1979 and not have to calibrate your own art making in relation to the fallout from punk rock. It has so much critical respect now that it’s difficult to disentangle your own achievement.

Cosey:
When you’re there and you watch punk rock being formed—literally—as a concept and then the group being formed to represent that concept and the clothes being designed to put the group in and then you see it sold as a lifestyle
and as a philosophy and then analyzed like that you think . . . punk was a commercial decision. But . . . having said that, it still meant a lot to a lot of people. If someone hadn’t made that commercial decision then you wouldn’t have had punk, which wound up being really important. So I’m not knocking it, but sometimes people see it quite differently from what it really was. You had Seditionaries with Malcolm McClaren and you had Boy Boutique with John Kravine. And they were both in competition. They [Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McClaren] had Sex Pistols and he had Chelsea, which became Generation X. When you’re in there auditioning Billy Idol to be in the band to represent your shop and then you have all these people going, “Punk is this, punk is that” and I’m thinking, “Oh, never mind . . . in a few years time it will be what you think it is, because it will have been taken over to become what you want, and it won’t be in the control of businessmen making money.”

Drew:
Chris and Cosey pointed out that the cover was really your idea so I was wondering if you could tell me as much as you can about the photo shoot. How and when did that concept arise?

Sleazy:
Making TG album covers was always difficult because each one tried to confound previous expectations, or to go against the conventional wisdom or conventional thinking about album covers at the time. Because I was working at Hipgnosis I was very conscious or aware of the contemporary genre of album covers and design. So all of the TG album covers, although I didn’t shoot all of the photos, I was pretty instrumental in choosing or putting together more or less all of them.
D.o.A
. was a photo that Gen took but otherwise it was my job. We tried to always confound expectations. By
the time that we got to
20 Jazz Funk Greats
I was getting the feeling that we’d done quite a few different things and it was getting pretty hard to come up with something new. I used to keep a scrapbook of clippings and photos that I was interested in. There was one photo that was a Hollywood still, a promotional photograph from a movie, I’m not sure if it was from
Brigadoon
or maybe
The Ghost of Mrs. Muir
, one of those black-and-white films about the Scottish highlands that had a rugged coastline. It had a picture of, oh shit, what’s his name? Do you remember the name of the actor that was in, fuck, my brain’s completely useless. Do you remember the black-and-white film that had the preacher with
LOVE
and
HATE
tattooed on his fingers?

Drew:
Night of the Hunter
, with Robert Mitchum?

Sleazy:
Yeah. This Hollywood still had Robert Mitchum standing wearing tweeds on a rugged clifftop . . .

Drew:
Posed the way you guys are?

Sleazy:
Kind of. It was him and some Hollywood starlet of the time, who was his paramour, and I showed it to TG and said I’m kind of interested in this because it’s got a weird vibe to it, but I’d like to give it a different twist. We were talking about having bodies in the bracken, in the grassy surface, and in fact subsequently there was a body that was superimposed. I can’t remember if I did it or somebody else did it.

Drew:
Chris said that you did it. [This “alternate” version of the cover was used as the album artwork (albeit in black and white) on the version of
20 Jazz Funk Greats
that appears in the Fetish Records TG LP boxset, and it also now appears on the back of the Mute CD reissue.]

Sleazy:
At the time, we were basically just trying to re-create something of the vibe of that photo, but with us standing
on the clifftops. That was shot at Beachy Head, which is a traditional suicide point, because it’s a very tall cliff.

Drew:
The day that you photographed, do you remember it? Was it a sunny day? Was it cold?

Sleazy:
It was a misty day. There was a whole subtext around the choice of the vehicle on the back. We rented the Range Rover from a car hire place—at considerable expense, actually. We drove down in it to the photo site. It was part of the performance aspect of the event.

Drew:
Why go for such a kitsch cover?

Sleazy:
At the time, there was no cultural knowledge or acceptance of that kind of thing, no “lounge movement.” Very few people knew who Martin Denny or Perez Prado or any of those guys were, not like now where everything is pretty much available and known about. At the time the whole lounge aspect to it was something that was completely out of left field, and that aspect contributed to the weirdness of it. People in England at that time thought they knew who TG were—we were very noisy and dark and weird in the public’s viewpoint, so twisting in this slightly sunny aspect or lounge aspect was definitely a twist that we hadn’t made before.

Drew:
The horizon line is soft, but the flowers in the foreground are weirdly sharp—did you touch up the print?

Sleazy:
I made the foreground more colorful. When we got there it was very, very misty and we only had the lighting opportunity for a short time; it was a one-shot deal. Under the circumstances, we just had to go with the mist. I would have preferred it to be more sunny, that would have gone with the concept. So I made the foreground brighter and more sunny looking. If you look carefully—I think we touched it out on the album cover, but on the other shots from that day it
shows—there’s a very long cable release that goes from my foot to the camera. So I actually pressed the button with my foot and I must have already had the other three standing in the right place.

Drew:
Did you pick the fonts, like the use of the brush script for “Throbbing Gristle BRING YOU 20 Jazz Funk Greats”?

Sleazy:
Yeah, I did all the typesetting for pretty much every Throbbing Gristle design. The whole thing was intended to be an homage, not a pastiche—it was supposed to remind you of albums from the 50s or 60s. In the 70s that really wasn’t de rigeur; at the time, no one was really interested in 50s or 60s culture in that way.

Drew:
Which came first, the cover idea or the song
20 Jazz Funk Greats?

Sleazy:
The cover. We did that song deliberately because we didn’t want somebody to complain that “there aren’t twenty jazz funk greats on this record.” That’s the reason that that song exists and has that title: to flesh out the concept of the cover, to give a “legal” excuse for why the record is called that even though it doesn’t have anything to do with that.

Peter Christopherson wasn’t the first critically minded media insider to send up and exploit the shock potential of a “lite” image staged on this particularly “heavy” location: in 1969 fashion photographer Jim Lee took a photograph entitled “Bikini/Beachy Head,” which frames a distraught couple in midargument on the same site, subtly working the literally edgy implications while also selling the swimwear on view. As art critic Barry Schwabsky put it in a review of Lee’s work, the Beachy Head photographs are full of “little shocks,
quite deliberately ambiguous for all their graphic punch. In fact, the ambiguity is at the heart of the shock” (Schwabsky, p. 382). He could easily have been describing Throbbing Gristle’s cover: the image isn’t shocking, nor is the mere fact of a suicide spot per se, yet it rankles. What is a “shock” to the viewer is the very difficulty in determining TG’s stance toward the location. The album cover is aesthetically soft but hermeneutically hard.

Though Sleazy executed and art directed the cover photograph, there is an alternate explanation for the visual gearshift from other band members. In February of 2001, Genesis wrote an extended text for
MOJO
magazine describing the album’s title, cover photograph and design philosophy; he emailed me his original, longer draft, and it is worth quoting at considerable length because it elaborates upon the specific “family romance” narrative behind the cover strategy, and describes the band’s democratic decision making process:

From the very beginning an aesthetic of bleak, post-industrial and dehumanizing references to contemporary life were utilized in our graphics. A lot of black and white, anonymous buildings, ambiguous icons and urban nihilism were journalistically sterilized in an anti-commercial design aesthetic. “Sleazy” a.k.a. Peter Christopherson worked as part of Hypgnosis at the time. [They] specialized in lavish, conspicuously expensive and elitist photo-surrealist covers for the likes of Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney, Led Zeppelin and other super-groups. For him to co-develop with TG the antithesis of this in an independent musical project expiated a lot of his frustration and discomfort about his relationship with the established rock world. His job also gave us, as an
anarchic and status-quo-challenging cultural unit, access to the highest end of graphic design techniques and labs to execute all our packaging to the same level of quality as his other clients. This is important to remember especially in reference to the finished cover of
20 Jazz Funk Greats
.

In fact the title came first, as was often the case with TG. Our general fascination with reanimating and subverting the mundane and occasionally kitsch erupted in a domestic conversation into peals of laughter at the thought of calling our genre “jazz-funk.” Disco had not died, and as aficionados of Martin Denny, film soundtracks and disposability gone mad the definitive sarcasm of the title, with its irrelevant number, was instantly accepted by all as the necessary contradiction of expectation that TG as an entity required.

Soon after the title appeared from our “third mind” I went home to Shrewsbury in December 1978 to visit my parents. My mother, Muriel, was well aware of the controversial nature of our images and content and the sensationalist reaction of the mass media and most of the music press. In passing I mentioned we were recording a new album and she slightly aggressively, and a little sadly asked me, “Why can’t you make a nice record for once, and use a nice picture for a change?” I asked her, “Like what, for example?” “Something nice, like flowers,” she said, “and why can’t you all smile for a change?”

For some reason, for all the wrong, contrary reasons, this idea stuck in my head. Why not seem to please mum and the general public’s ideas of good taste and pleasantness and yet still, secretly, maintain our perversity?

I returned to Hackney and threw the “flowers and smiles” idea on the table for the others. It appealed to everyone. We
were all tired of being so quickly pigeon-holed, even by our fans and supporters in the media, as colourless, gratuitous, bleak, industrial, dark, somber, and humourless. So full colour it was.
20 Jazz Funk Greats
it was too. Flowers. Smiles, that proved harder than I expected!

From here on the development can only be attributed again to chats over tea, one person suggesting, another amending, jokes, irony, practicality. Certainly Chris and/or Cosey were repulsed and attracted to Range Rovers at the time. The royal family had begun to use them. Maggie Thatcher’s son endorsed them. What more fitting for the notorious “wreckers of civilization” than to appear to drive the same car as their arch cultural “enemies”? Once the photo-shoot was arranged a Range Rover was rented for the day. It appears in the back cover image as a deliberate reference to the way that status symbols and money so easily seduce creativity and act as bait for those who first challenge the establishment of pop culture to be absorbed and bribed into impotence. Many people misinterpreted this symbol, including, much to our delight, infuriated fans, as proving we’d made lots of money and “sold-out.” Ah the vagaries of subtlety! One thing TG can be accused of is over-estimating the sophistication and desire to really think and analyze of both the public and critics.

Once more, in all fairness, I cannot say for sure who first raised the concept of Beachy Head, near Brighton as the perfect locale. These things swirled around us all the time. I recall reading about the regularity of suicides at Beachy Head and considering the implications of why one particular place draws despair and death, another prostitution. Does an inanimate spot, a row of cliffs, a landscape have a memory? A destructive
“personality”? Or are we merely primitive primates with pretensions, as controlled by latent and unconscious natural instinct as migrating birds or tumbling lemmings?