By 1981, the great Throbbing Gristle was over. The UK quartet – Chris Carter, queer visionary Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, guitar hero / pocket trumpet enthusiast / sex and art lover Cosey Fanni Tutti and carnival barker-cum-cult leader Genesis P -Orridge- had the boundaries between punk, psychedelia, disco and music specific. Along the way they had done what seemed like irreparable damage to each other's ears, bodies and hearts. They abruptly ended their tour and sent a broadcast to their fan club: Mission Terminated.
Then, five years later, they briefly flickered back to life with 1986 TGCD1. The new compact disc – the format, launched in 1982, had taken off the previous year – came in typically minimalist packaging with the high-voltage flash symbol and a written note from each of the four players. A new edition from Mute recreates the CD and splits the 42 minutes of studio recordings made on their TEAC 8 track into two vinyl sides. At their core, Throbbing Gristle were a jam band, although their idea of hippie dancing might have put your toe off. Much of their extensive discography, including the infamous 24-tape affair, documented their long, frantic improvisations. TGCD1 offers a pair of renditions of classics from their album 20 Jazz Funk Greats. Back then, they might have sounded like autopsies. Today, they sound like a dangerous gig.
Side one opens with seven minutes of noise, part cauldron and part plasma ball. There's foam and noise, guitar shards that invoke Krautrock and Stockhausen, and other brownish-grey shades of white noise. Then, with the brute force of the slow clock at work you fucking hate, the legendary groove of 'What a Day' kicks in. It goes on like this for the next 13 minutes, going nowhere but deeply moving, a reverie that you resent but must continue on with.
The second part is fully launched into space and then settles into long orbits around another 20 JFG classic, “Persuasive People”. P-Orridges madman/ad-man vocals are absent. But its 20 minutes makes you think Throbbing Gristle could have been a dance act, churning out 12″ megamixes for queerdos to get on the dance floor. TG could have been Moroder, spinning their sonic wads for Freddie Krueger films instead of Derek Jarman's Soundtracking art experiments They could be huge, instead of hugely influential.
But they didn't want to. They went on to bigger, often better things: Sleazy's immortal Coil with his beloved John Balance, frosty electro-pop outfit Chris & Cosey, P-Orridge's trans-genre-challenging motor, Psychic TV. (But the former is unlucky Hellraiser The soundtrack work and the latter's hits and misses on the dancefloor proved that the world would never really be ready for them.) And then, some 23 years later – and given their occult interest in numerology, that number didn't could have been an accident – they reactivated again. Three astonishingly vital and thick albums arrived, each newly reissued by Mute. Even more improbably, they played Coachella and New York, the last dates with all the house lights, so the crowd was sure they weren't imagining things. Amongst the t-shirts and enamel badges on the merch table, they could see something else: a compact disc called The movements of the third mind.
