July 6th marks the 45th anniversary of the premier live performance by Throbbing Gristle, which was held at the Air Gallery in London, UK, in 1976.
While the “Prostitution” performance at the ICA on October 18th of the same year is generally considered TG’s “official” debut, with its attendant press and resulting controversy (where an MP notoriously referred to the group as “wreckers of civilization”, an epithet they handily appropriated for their own mythos, thank you very much!), there were two shows prior to this which constituted TG’s “soft launch”. Those being the Air Gallery on July 6th and the Winchester Hat Fair show on Aug 21st. These were much less promoted affairs and were essentially a warmup for what would be put on at the ICA.
For the Air Gallery show, the group were set up in a manner which separated the group’s performing space from the audience’s position with the PA system. The group were in a central courtyard area which was only visible from certain windows in the building while the PA was positioned away from the windows so that, in order to hear the performance, the audience would not be able to see the group and those who could see the group could not hear the PA. Musically, the set consisted of a continuous rambling instrumental dirge with little resembling anything that would manifest into any recognizable TG compositions. The various releases of the recording list no track names with "Dead ED" and "Very Friendly" on the cassette cover only being applicable to the Winchester Aug 21st recording. The monaural recording is dominated by Genesis’ base & violin and Cosey’s fuzz guitar, with Carter’s synths swelling up from time to time and virtually no audible evidence of Sleazy’s presence.
At this point, the group had been together barely a year, having mutated out of the primordial ooze of COUM Transmissions when, first Peter Christopherson and then Chris Carter joined long time collaborators, Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti. Carter’s arrival, in particular, shifted the focus from transgressive performance art to sonic exploration. After a year of experimenting with techniques and tools at their Death Factory studio in Hackney, where the foundations of Industrial Records would take shape, bringing TG to the public became the next step and the first footing on that journey began with the Air Gallery show.
It’s an embryonic entity that exists in the recording of this show. The mood is almost contemplative and introspective, lacking the sense of confrontation that would characterize their shows starting with the ICA performance. The beast was just waking up, testing its limbs and lurching out from the weight of its placental remnants and amniotic fluids. It was certainly imbued with the distinctive dissonance that would become its trademark, but it just needed to take a few steps before standing fully erect to reveal its true stature. This it would do soon enough and the strides it would take would leave their indelible imprints across the landscape of modern music in the last quarter of the 20th century and beyond into the 21st.
