Forty
five years ago this month, in November of 1977, The Second Annual
Report of Throbbing Gristle hit the record shops in the UK in its first
edition of exactly 785 copies. Independently released by the band’s own
imprint, Industrial Records, the run was precisely how much they could
afford to press with their limited, self financed budget. It was the
first major release from Industrial Records and would become the
cornerstone for an entirely new genre of popular music.
TG had
been bubbling up from the basement of their “Death Factory” at 10
Martello Rd. in Hackney for about two years before the album was
released, mutating out of the carcass of COUM Transmissions, a
multimedia transgressive performance art collective which had been
operating since 1969. After being essentially chased out of their home
town of Hull by local authorities, Genesis P-Orridge
and Cosey Fanni Tutti managed to pull in fellow pervert, Hipgnosis
photographer/designer Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, and electronics
wizard, Chris Carter, to complete the TG lineup before the end of 1975.
After spending endless hours reinventing sound in their makeshift
studio, the group began to perform live in 1976, kicking off their
notoriety with the infamous Prostitution show at the ICA, which
triggered off debate in the British parliament regarding the use of
public funds for the arts. This also garnered them the infamous
“wreckers of civilization” condemnation from one of the MPs.
Prior
to the release of the album, a few cassette compilations were hand
copied and unofficially circulated among friends until the group felt
they’d got something worthy of pressing on vinyl. Side one of the album
would mostly consist of extracts from four of their recent live
performances, which had been recorded on stereo cassette. These would
be edited together on 2 track reel-to-reel and augmented by a couple of
studio tidbits. The side would end with a DJ from one of the live shows
scolding the audience for their bad behavior. The second side of the
album would consist of a single composition, the soundtrack to the COUM
film, After Cease to Exist, recorded on 4 track reel-to-reel. The
overall sound of the album ended up being a bubbling cauldron of murky
noise, news radio & surveillance sound fragments and distorted
vocals from
Gen about things like Manson family style murdering as exemplified by a
graphic description of a pregnant woman having her baby cut out of her
belly. It was the ambience of dead factories and deserted streets mixed
with images of suburban nightmares and it was deliberately as far away
from the influence of American style blues and jazz as you could
possibly conceive. Despite this, the group, on stage, still affected a
kind of “rock band” configuration, using heavily processed, ineptly
played guitar and bass, though without a drummer and accompanied by home
made synths & electronics. The whole shebang was further processed
through Chris’ custom made sound processors, the “Gristleizer”, giving
it all a distinctly garbled modulation.
The album was presented
in a plain white sleeve with a printed b&w sheet glued to the back
containing a small photograph of the band and an extensive text
detailing the product and its purpose. It was presented like a dry,
clinical research paper from a soulless corporation of no particular
distinction. Inside was included a long questionnaire which encouraged
purchasers of the LP to complete and return to Industrial Records by
mail. It was a tactical ploy to help the group establish both a kind of
“fan club” correspondence and to develop internal data regarding their
followers. The entire operation was quite brilliantly conceived to both
parody corporate methodologies while leveraging their practical value
for the groups own purposes.
Surprisingly, the LP quickly sold
out and garnered some very favorable reviews, which took the group by
surprise and brought them a level of credibility they’d not anticipated.
The funds from the sale of the album were returned directly back into
Industrial Records and used to finance further productions of records
and singles. The master tapes for the first album were turned over to
the founders of Fetish Records to use as a means of establishing their
label. Fetish reissued the LP in a few different editions, including
one where the record was remastered backwards and side two included an
inadvertent addition to the audio in the form of some barely audible
chamber music, which had been on a tape used for the remastering, but
which was not properly erased and bled through the After Cease To Exist
audio.
That particular backwards/chamber music version of the LP
ended up being the record by TG which caused me to have my “epiphany” in
terms of recognizing the importance of this music. It was on a night
in December of 1984 when a friend and I dropped blotter acid called
“Flash” (complete with a lightning bolt print on the tab) and listened
to that album. It was during that experience when I comprehended that
TG had done something much more fundamental than gone “primitive” with
their music. They’d actually gone back into the DNA of sound itself and
recombined it into something entirely new. Not that there weren’t
precedents to this music prior to TG. The German experimental scene of
the early 1970s had produced similar sounding recordings, but TG had
identified something additional in terms of both the means of performing
and the conceptual potential inherent therein. TG had created an
entire methodology of presentation and packaging, as well as the use of
transgressive, “taboo” subject matter. They devised a system of
delivery which was constantly able to re-calibrate itself and apply
contradictory juxtapositions in order to avoid any sense of
predictability. Whatever the tangent, as soon as it was perceived as
becoming “expected”, they’d swap things around and deliver something
which seemed to oppose what went before.
As a foundational
document, The Second Annual Report of Throbbing Gristle stands as one of
the most vitally revolutionary musical artifacts to come along in the
latter half of the 20th century. It utterly changed the way I perceive
sound and how I approach the creation and performance of “music”.
