Rip It Up and Start Again (20 page)

Strongly influenced by the Pop Group, whom they’d seen supporting Pere Ubu in 1978, A Certain Ratio’s funk noir got a big boost when they recruited a drummer as good as Bruce Smith. Donald Johnson’s fatback drumming almost single-handedly prevented the group’s nebulous sound from wafting off into the void. Heard best on the early single “Flight,” ACR’s music worked through the tension between dry funk (rimshot cracks and rattling snares, neurotic bass, itchy rhythm guitar) and dank atmospherics (trumpet that seemed to waft through fog, diffuse smears from a guitar so heavily-effected the instrument sounded more like a synth). At times ACR sounded like Joy Division getting on the good foot. Singer Simon Topping more or less cloned Curtis’s baritone drone, while the lyrics hinted at dark drives and shadowy states of consciousness. “ACR had a bizarre sense of fashion—close-cropped hair, baggy khaki shorts,” recalls Manchester pop historian Dave Haslam. This look, vaguely redolent of colonialism or the Afrika Corps, lent itself to being misinterpreted as flirting with fascism. Still, the presence of a black man behind the drum kit helped to counteract A Certain Ratio’s faintly dodgy aura.

Unconsciously, labels seem to sign bands that closely resemble their most successful act, and Factory’s roster was crowded with Joy Division–influenced outfits like Section 25 and Crispy Ambulance. Their weak attempts to establish their own identity were further enfeebled by being given the trademark Factory sound courtesy of Martin Hannett. The producer, meanwhile, sank into heroin addiction, but still managed to do some of his best work as one half of the Invisible Girls, supplying the music for the genius Mancunian punk poet John Cooper Clarke on albums like the classic
Snap, Crackle [&] Bop
. As for Hook, Sumner, and Morris, they were struggling to find a direction out of the darkness that had claimed Curtis, and chose the distinctly suspect name New Order to signal their desire for a fresh start. But it would be a while before they discovered a new musical direction, thanks to electronic dance music from New York.

Factory dominated Manchester’s postpunk scene. The main alternative came from a cluster of activity around an organization called the Manchester Music Collective. The MMC was the brainchild of experimental musicians Trevor Wishart and Dick Witts (who was actually a colleague of Tony Wilson’s at Granada TV). Using a grant from a regional branch of the Arts Council, Wishart and Witts rented a basement and turned it into a Monday-night showcase. The Fall played their first gig there, and Joy Division were regular MMC participants. “It gave us somewhere to play, we met other musicians, talked, swapped ideas,” Ian Curtis told
NME
. “Also it gave us a chance to experiment in front of people.”

“The MMC was a great intervention,” recalls Richard Boon. “There was a whole stream of funny little groups who shared equipment—Dislocation Dance, Gay Animals, the Hamsters, and a bunch of groups on the Object Music label, like Spherical Objects, Grow-Up, and Dick Witts’s own group, the Passage.”

The Passage gave Joy Division a close run for their money at one point, with a string of independent hits like their third album
Degenerates
. Their debut,
Pindrop,
was hailed by Paul Morley in
NME
as a postpunk classic comparable to
Unknown Pleasures,
grappling with the grand themes of “love, power, and fear” in atmospheric, doom-laden music. Formerly a classically trained percussionist, Witts built dense, dramatic arrangements that were stirringly rhythmic but not the least bit rocklike. “We used bell sounds, military sounds like trumpet fanfares, brass and trumpets—anything that suggested things outside rock,” says Witts. Matching the epic sound was a thematic loftiness verging on didacticism. “Devils and Angels” railed against organized religion while “XOYO” obliquely explored gender politics.

Witts had originally formed the Passage as a collaboration with Tony Friel, the first member of the Fall to defect from the band. By 1980, every original member of the Fall had been replaced except for Mark E. Smith. Kay Carroll, a psychiatric nurse who befriended Una Baines, started going out with Smith, then took on the job of managing the Fall. The power dynamics shifted. “It became a bit of a Yoko and Lennon scenario,” says Bramah. “The girlfriend affirming Mark’s genius. Tony left first. He felt he’d invested a lot in the Fall. He’d come up with the name, and he was the only proper musician in the band.” Baines left next, following a mental breakdown triggered in part by the druggie lifestyle she was leading. “I was twenty and had this serious illness. It took me twelve months before I could even speak to people again.” Drummer Karl Burns lasted until the end of 1978, and Bramah stuck it out to April 1979. “What initially started out as a collective became a dictatorship,” he says. “Mark’s a genius, but he made it very hard for me to work with him. The breakup wasn’t so much about the music, though, it was more how we were being treated as people on a daily basis.”

According to Baines, Smith recruited his new Fall from the group’s roadies, who already had a band of their own and were much more pliable. “A word from Mark could decimate them,” says Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis, who produced the Fall’s third studio album,
Grotesque (After the Gramme
). “They loved him, but were a little bit awed. I remember sitting in a café with him and saying, ‘Don’t you think it’s really weird, Mark, that none of the band speak to you?’ One of his sayings was, ‘Musicians are the lowest form of life.’”

With Smith literally calling the tune, the Fall embarked upon their most intensely creative stretch, recording a series of visionary albums and brilliant singles, first for Rough Trade and then for the label Kamera. As 1980 progressed they drew level with Joy Division in the race to be Manchester’s leading postpunk band, hitting the uppermost reaches of the indie charts with the albums
Totale’s Turns
and
Grotesque
and the singles “How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man’” and “Totally Wired.”

Grotesque
offered a modern-day hallucinatory equivalent to William Hogarth’s eighteenth-century caricatures of the English lower classes taking their pleasures, an idea pursued further on the Fall’s singles of this period like “I’m into CB,” a hilarious satire of a hapless ham radio fanatic. For
NME
’s Barney Hoskyns, this era of Fall music—bookended by
Grotesque
and the coruscating mini-LP
Slates—
threw the listener into deranging “wastelands of sound without themes, messages, or politics. These records
were
politics, living conjurations of the crass and the grotesque in Northern prole life. What [the Fall’s music] implied was that the whole bastion of comfortable working-class traditions—the institutions of barbiturates, boozing, and bingo—could be transformed, could even transform themselves, into a deep cultural revolution.” Smith had broached this notion in the liner notes to
Totale’s Turns
. Alluding to the Northern circuit of workingmen’s clubs where the Fall played early on for lack of other opportunities, he speculated wildly, “Maybe one day a Northern sound will emerge not tied to that death-circuit attitude or merely reiterating movements based in the capital.” This fantasy scenario inspired
Grotesque
’s epic closing track, “The N.W.R.A.,” which stands for “The North Will Rise Again.” “It’s just like a sort of document of a revolution that could happen,” Smith explained. “Like somebody writing a book about what would have happened if the Nazis had invaded Britain.”

Around this time, Smith coined the imaginary genre Country ’n’ Northern to distance the Fall from self-consciously experimental bands such as the Pop Group. “We are a very retrogressive band in a lot of ways,” he told the zine
Printed Noises
. But even as the Fall’s music seemed to get more hillbilly primitive and raw, Smith’s lyrics became ever more intractably abstract. His frankly avant-garde torrent of encrypted utterances spliced with found text (the British tabloids were a favorite source of inanities) seemed uncontrollable, spilling onto the Fall’s record sleeves, which were daubed with hand-scrawled minirants, cryptic slogans, cartoons, and doodles. Through the sleeve scribblings and songs such as “2nd Dark Age,” one could follow a fractured running narrative concerning ex-cabaret artist Roman Totale and his secret-agent son, Joe. Totale, said Smith, was an “underground being…cursed with mystical insight.” He also had tentacles, the reason he had to go underground. “It’s like his face started
leaking,
” Smith sort of explained. The singer cultivated this magical element to counter the prevalent image of the Fall as being all about industrial decay and dole queues. “I am a dreamer sort of person and I resent being associated with realist bands,” he said.

Along with the speed and shrooms, tales of cosmic horror fueled Smith’s dreams. This short-story genre was pioneered by nineteenth-century gentleman occultists such as M. R. James, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and H. P. Lovecraft, all favorites of Smith’s. For a band dedicated to stripping away rock’s romantic mystifications, the Fall had a surprisingly potent streak of superstition. Smith believed he was attuned to the strange vibrations of certain places and that his writing was clairvoyant. “I used to be psychic but I drank my way out of it,” he quipped in 1996. Reading speed freak science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick gave him concepts such as “pre-cog” and “psychic time travel.” The latter informed the song “Wings,” during which he recruits gremlins and goes back through a “timelock” into the 1860s. A teenage phase of bumping into ghosts inspired songs such as “Spectre vs. Rector” and “Elves,” in which Smith shrieks, “The fantastic is in league against me!”

The culmination of the Fall’s fascination with the supernatural came with 1982’s
Hex Enduction Hour,
half of which was recorded in Iceland, a country where most of the population believes in fairies. The track “Iceland” was improvised in Reykjavik in a studio with lava walls, the band oozing out a dronehaze of two-note piano cycles and banjo that sounded like sitar, topped with incantations from Smith about casting “runes against your self-soul.”
Hex
is the Fall at their most forbidding and primal. On “Just Step S’Ways,” the group’s two-drummer lineup brings a new polyrhythmic tumultuousness to the Fall’s juggernaut rumble. “Hip Priest” has an almost jazzlike swing, while the guitars on “Who Makes the Nazis?” (the answer, by the way, is “intellectual half-wits”) sound like flint shards hewn from a mountain face.

Hex
was “a huge sort of kiss-off to, like, everything,” Smith said. And it’s a record the band never topped. But the Fall carried on, alternating between relatively lackluster phases and periods of renewed inspiration (1985’s
The Wonderful and Frightening World of the Fall
resembled a pop
Hex Enduction Hour,
dreamlike and almost lovely). By then, Smith had honed the media persona that makes him a perennial favorite with interviewers: the classic British contrarian suspicious of do-gooders and improvers, a curmudgeon who scorns trendy humbug and political cant whether it comes from the Left or Right.

Smith’s force of personality is matched only by the force of nature that is Fallmusic. Still going after almost thirty years, they have accumulated a body of work that rivals Bob Dylan’s in sheer size and density. A body of work like a body of water, never ending and ever shifting, its “changing same” ceaselessly churning up scintillating new patterns. You never step in the same river twice, they say, and so it goes with the Fall.

“WHEN PEOPLE ASK ME
where I am from, meaning my nationality, I never say British, I reply that I am from Manchester, in England,” Genesis P-Orridge of industrial-music pioneers Throbbing Gristle told band biographer Simon Ford. “It doesn’t mean I am nostalgic about the place. I was created bitter and resentful by Manchester. I learned absolute emptiness from Manchester. It is not a spiritual environment.”

Yet for all the unremitting ugliness and brutality it absorbed from its urban surroundings, there’s a real sense in which industrial music was the second flowering of an authentic psychedelia. Admittedly, on first listen, the punishing noise made by Throbbing Gristle and their offspring seems impossibly remote from the blissed-out, bucolic mystics of 1967. Syd Barrett’s nursery rhyme melodies and children’s storybook imagery, or the wistful arcadian reveries of the Byrds, seem like the total antithesis of TG’s songs, in which innocence figures only as something to be defiled. As for pastoral tranquility, suffice it to say that when TG posed on an idyllic, grassy cliffside overlooking the English Channel for their album
20 Jazz Funk Greats,
it was a sick joke—that particular pasture, Beachy Head, being a favorite leaping point for suicides.

Nonetheless, industrial music shares many things with psychedelia. The primary impulse in both genres is to blow minds through multimedia sensory overload. Almost every industrial band’s live show featured projected cut-up movies and extreme lighting redolent of 1960s happenings and acid tests. Richard H. Kirk of Cabaret Voltaire, who released some of their early “attic tape” material via TG’s label Industrial Records, described his group’s live shows as being “like a bad trip.” Both psychedelia and industrial followed the sonic imperative that “no sound shalt go untreated,” abandoning naturalistic recording in favor of heavy processing, tape loops, and electronic noise. The difference (and what makes industrial an “authentic” psychedelia rather than a mere revival) is that industrial is psychedelia inverted, replacing kissing the sky with gazing vertiginously into the cosmic abyss.

There were also direct historical links between the acid-dazed freaks of the late sixties and the autopsy aesthetes of the late seventies. The flyer for Throbbing Gristle’s 1976 debut show—or “disconcert” as they punningly dubbed it—described the group as “post-psychedelic trash.” This was plain truth. TG evolved out of COUM Transmissions, a taboo-smashing performance art ensemble, but COUM itself had originally started as an absurdist cosmic-rock group. In 1971, they supported Hawkwind, the leading band on Britain’s “post-psychedelic” underground. Looking at pictures of Genesis P-Orridge circa 1969, he resembles no one so much as Neil the Hippie from
The Young Ones,
with the same droopy, sad-sack expression and long, lank locks. As it happens, his real name
is
Neil—Neil Megson. And late as 1979 the list of his musical favorites (the Doors, Pearls Before Swine, Fugs, Beefheart, Zappa) fit the classic profile of a head.

In 1966, the sixteen-year-old P-Orridge organized a happening at his Solihull private school after reading newspaper accounts of London’s early acid freak-outs. A few years later, he joined the art commune Transmedia Explorations, an offshoot of Exploding Galaxy, which had been renowned for its “Kinetic Theater” performances at psychedelic raves like UFO. “Transmedia” referred to the in-vogue notion of a new form of “total art” involving the creation of “experiences” through synergizing different art forms and smashing down barriers between performer and spectator. More striking, though, was Transmedia’s communal lifestyle. Routines and habits, roles and expectations, were deliberately disrupted, with members sleeping in a different bed each night, selecting clothing out of a communal chest every morning, and eating meals at odd times.

This quest for some kind of authentic, pure self via a grueling regime of deconditioning became the hallmark of everything P-Orridge did in art and life. “We need to search for methods to break the preconceptions, modes of unthinking acceptance and expectations that make us, within our constructed behavior patterns, so vulnerable to Control,” he wrote years later, borrowing Burroughs’s near mystical concept of “Control” as this all-pervasive power reaching inside the fibers of our consciousness. COUM and Throbbing Gristle both aimed to set off “psychic detonations that negate Control.”

After his Transmedia adventures, P-Orridge returned to the dreary Northern city of Hull, where he’d been an undergraduate studying social administration and philosophy, and formed his own arts lab collective, COUM Transmissions. He fell for a flower child, Christine Carol Newby, who moved into COUM’s communal headquarters in a Hull warehouse and soon renamed herself Cosey Fanni Tutti. COUM started as a rock band of sorts, making up music on the spot, undeterred by lack of grounding in improvisational technique, using broken violins and prepared piano as well as conventional rock instruments like drums and electric bass. Inspired by John Cage’s writing and by primitivists like the Fugs and the Velvet Underground, P-Orridge believed that “the future of music lies in nonmusicians.” Gradually, the chaotic gigs got more theatrical and “environmental,” as first costumes and props, then full-blown installations were added. P-Orridge and Tutti realized they could get grants from the Arts Council if they described what they did as performance art rather than rock.

Starting in July 1972 with an event called
The Alien Brain,
COUM staged a series of increasingly outlandish and shocking performances at art galleries and mixed-media festivals across Britain and Europe. An important predecessor for COUM was Fluxus, an international art movement of the 1960s whose work combined elements of neo-Dada, Zen, and pranksterism, often with a confrontational performance art aspect. P-Orridge talked of admiring Fluxus’s “running battle and commentary with art itself.” Another sixties touchstone for COUM was the Vienna Aktionists and their ritualistic feats of abjection and self-mutilation. Typical components of a COUM performance included P-Orridge placing severed chicken heads on top of his penis and masturbating, or P-Orridge and Tutti engaging in simultaneous anal and vaginal sex using a double-pronged dildo. Various combinations of soiled tampons, maggots, black eggs, feathers, and syringes full of milk, blood, or urine figured as props. For instance, P-Orridge might stick a hypodermic into his testicle and then inject the blood into a black egg. Or for a pièce de résistance, he might give himself a blood-and-milk enema and then fart out the liquid, splattering the gallery floor.

By the end of 1973, COUM had moved to London. Their new headquarters was the basement of an abandoned factory in the East End. Early the following year, they acquired a new member, Peter Christopherson, nicknamed “Sleazy” because he was most interested in COUM’s “fab and kinky” sexual extremism. Sleazy worked as an assistant designer for Hipgnosis, famed creators of lavish artwork for prog-rock groups like Pink Floyd. This was another indication of industrial’s connections to post-psychedelic music, as was the arrival in 1975 of Chris Carter, the fourth member of what would soon become Throbbing Gristle. Carter’s road-to-Damascus experience was seeing Pink Floyd in 1968 while tripping on LSD. Rather than pick up an instrument, though, he started a light-show business. Later, as a fan of kosmik Krautrockers Tangerine Dream, he got into synthesizers.

Increasingly worried that COUM were being stifled by acceptance (they’d received coverage in art journals and invitations to perform all over Europe), P-Orridge decided it was time for a strategic shift into the world of pop culture. He wanted to find an audience more likely to be both genuinely challenged
and
galvanized to action by COUM’s shock effects and radical ideas. P-Orridge was also captivated by the Warholesque notion of using fame, hype, and controversy themselves as an artistic medium.

Founded in September 1975, Throbbing Gristle threw themselves into the project of conceptualization and sonic research. During the week, Carter, a technical whiz, built speakers, effects units, and synthesizer modules. He cobbled together a unique gizmo for Sleazy to play. Nicknamed the Gristle-izer, it was a sort of
musique concrète
mechanism or primitive sampler. Its one-octave keyboard triggered an array of cassette machines, each loaded with found sounds ranging from TV and movie dialogue to everyday conversations surreptitiously recorded by a roving Sleazy. The group’s own vocals were heavily processed, with Carter feeding them through a chorus echo that allowed him to speed them up and slow them down, or make them sound slimy or wobbly. Carter also adapted the conventional instruments like the bass and guitar, feeding them through relays of multiple effects. All of these treatments transformed the guitar and bass into sound-synthesizing machines. Unlike with proper synthesizers, though, extracting noise from the guitar and bass involved an element of hands-on physicality, and this gave TG’s sound a uniquely pummeled and percussive feel.

It seems no coincidence that TG formed in 1975, the same year that Lou Reed released the infamous
Metal Machine Music
. But where Reed talked of his intricate tapestries of white noise as a form of modern classical composition, TG’s approach was more “rock,” in the literal sense of wanting to rock the listener to the core. Their quest was to create a total-body experience, immersive and assaultive. They jettisoned songs, melody, and groove in favor of the overwhelming physical
force
of sound itself. “People think music’s just for the ears, they forget it goes into every surface of the body, the pores, the cells, it affects the blood vessels,” P-Orridge argued. The group’s interest in “metabolic music” led them to investigate military research into the use of infrasound as a nonlethal weapon, where certain frequencies trigger vomiting, epileptic seizures, and even involuntary defecation. TG’s own basement became a “chaotic research lab,” with P-Orridge and Carter exploring the perceptual and physical effects of high and low frequencies, distortion, and extreme volume, using themselves as guinea pigs. P-Orridge recalled, “We had moments when we had tunnel vision, couldn’t walk or stand up straight and so on from certain frequencies we hit.”

The whole band was very much an experiment, a conceptual exercise in seeing if they could be accepted as a rock band while pushing rock’s boundaries of form and content to the absolute limits. In one interview, P-Orridge recalled the steps in the band’s initial conceptualization process. “Let’s give it a really inappropriate name [‘throbbing gristle’ being Yorkshire slang for an erect penis]. Let’s not have a drummer because rock bands have drummers. Let’s not learn how to play music. Let’s put in a lot of
content—
in terms of the words and the ideas. So normally a band would be music, skill, style and all those other things. We threw away all the usual parameters for a band and said, ‘Let’s have content, authenticity and energy. Let’s refuse to look like or play like anything that’s acceptable as a band and see what happens.’”

Throbbing Gristle’s official public launch took place in October 1976 at the opening party for
Prostitution,
a COUM exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts that the group saw as their swan song. COUM’s last gasp turned out to be their finest hour, at least in terms of media attention. Located in the heart of London—a short stroll from Buckingham Palace, the House of Commons, and the National Gallery—the ICA represented a threshold, the place where art’s radical fringe collided with high culture. The centerpiece of
Prostitution
was photo documentation of Tutti’s work as a model in some forty porn magazines. This, plus the exhibition of used tampons, made
Prostitution
a perfect flash point for growing public concern about the subsidized avant-garde, what the Arts Council was supporting with taxpayers’ money at a time of recession and public-spending cuts. Conservative politician Nicholas Fairbairn denounced
Prostitution
as “a sickening outrage…. Public money is being wasted here to destroy the morality of our society. These people are wreckers of civilization!” Taken aback, COUM found themselves Public Enemy Number One in the newspapers, the subject of apoplectic headlines and smear stories in the tabloids and a symbol for declining standards in the more sober newspapers. The furor even reached the House of Commons, where questions were raised by members of Parliament.

The
Prostitution
controversy rivaled the media panic about the Sex Pistols’ swearing on TV some months later. Some soon-to-be-famous punks attended Throbbing Gristle’s ICA gig, but P-Orridge and crew were skeptical about punk’s credentials as radical music. To them, punk was too rock, too
musical
in fact. P-Orridge believed that
Sniffin’ Glue
’s exhortation “Here’s three chords, now start a band” conceded far too much to traditional musicality. “It starts with chords. They’re saying, ‘Be like everyone else, you gotta learn to play.’ You can start with
no chords
. Why not just say, ‘Form a band and it doesn’t matter what it sounds like or whether you even make a noise, if you just stand there silent for an hour, just do what you want’?” TG, he underlined frequently, was “anti-music.” During one gig in early 1977, P-Orridge poured scorn on the jeering punks in the audience: “You can’t have anarchy and have
music
.” During the cacophonous performance, Tutti bared her breasts and Genesis poured fake blood over his head. He then invited half a dozen members of the audience onstage and handed them instruments.

P-Orridge believed that “you should approach any instrument the way a child will.” He picked the bass because it was the instrument he was least qualified to play. Tutti, likewise, chose the guitar because it was the one she was least attracted to. She never learned to play chords, but used a slide to generate hair-raising glissandi or just bashed the strings, using the guitar as a rhythm instrument and—via a battery of effects—a source of abstract noise.