Throbbing Gristle to re-unite for one concert
The four original members of Thobbing Gristle are getting together for a festival in their honor, and a one-time only reunion concert, which will be the first time they’ve played together in two decades.
Throbbing Gristle, along with SPK and Cabaret Voltaire, began what later came to be called industrial music which, loosely, was deliberate aural and visual assaults on the theory that the culture so desensitizes people that it takes extreme shocks to wake them up. Plus, of course, it’s always fun to piss off the bourgeoise. A lot of people noticed them, and the influence of industrial music spread wide – and still does.
From The Guardian
In the second half of the 1970s, Throbbing Gristle waged war on British society. With songs about the Moors murders and the Manson killings, and riotous concerts that garnered front-page headlines and sparked debates in the House of Commons, the band did, as guitarist Cosey Fanni Tutti puts it, “disrupt things a little”. The MP Nicholas Fairbairn called them wreckers of civilisation shortly before he was arrested for indecent exposure.
It is hard to equate the polite, middle-aged people before me in the offices of the Mute record company with the infamous performance-art deviants of past years. Even if one of them is currently turning into a man/woman hybrid.
“What happened to Nicholas Fairbairn highlighted the value and accuracy of Throbbing Gristle,” says Genesis P-Orridge, who, with bouffant highlights and sparkling earrings, looks like a smartly dressed patroness of the arts, despite still technically being a man. P-Orridge and his wife are engaging in a project in which they are turning into the same person through surgery and hormone treatments. They celebrated Valentine’s Day by getting matching breast implants. “The hypocrisy that we were outlining was validated, especially as the people who decried us were later prosecuted for things far worse than anything we had ever done.”
Genesis P-orridge (that’s his legal name), to put it mildly, has always been, um, controversial – as a member of TG, as a founder of Psychic TV, in body modifications, magick, and lots of other extreme stuff. Not that the other members aren’t equally cutting edge, because they absolutely are. TG outraged many, they also had serious talent and were unfraid to push things to the limits.
The festival will be the first and only time they will play together since they split up. It’s hard to imagine the band waging the all-out assault they did back then. Have they changed?
“Well, I think I have,” says P-Orridge with a flutter of his/her lashes.
“After nearly 30 years, we can sit in a room and still follow the same processes that we did when we started,” says Christopherson. “But this isn’t going to be a Rolling Stones-like nostalgia concert. We plan to destroy our own myth very efficiently.”
All of them have continued to create some quite excellent music after TG broke up in the early 80’s.
Throbbing Gristle official site
Chris & Cosey, whose music in the late 80’s-early 90’s influenced and helped create the emerging electronica/tribal/dance scene.
Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson is in Coil.
And they all have a multitude of side projects.
Cabaret Voltaire is also active and continues to release music. Graeme Revell, founder of SPK, is a prolific soundtrack composer.
Middle Pillar is an excellent online source for music by TG, Coil, Chris and Cosey, P TV et al.