Do you have a particular piece of music journalism so ignorant, so shoddily researched you sometimes go back and read it as if picking at an irresistibly crusty scab?
I can’t even remember half of mine, but this Throbbing Gristle hatchet job by the late Steven Wells is a strong contender.
Now I know what you’re thinking. Surely, Tonty, a gentleman & scholar as handsome, erudite & witty as yourself has better things to be doing of a Tuesday evening than issuing a strongly-worded rebuttal to a piece of music hackery published in 2007 by a man who died in 2009?
And you’d be right, my friends, but most of those things involve applying for jobs and planning my wedding, so I’ve opted for the quick dopamine route instead. Let’s break this baby down point by disingenous point.
In common with all other industrial bands, TG wouldn’t last 10 minutes in a real factory.
In common with every other bucktoothed, dung-spattered hick to wander in from the swamp, park the combine outside the NME offices and call himself a music journalist, Swells couldn’t last ten minutes without making a spectacularly literal-minded assumption about the point of industrial music.
The Throb Nation is happiest when sneering.
Pot, kettle, glass houses, I don’t even fucking????
The only two members of Throbbing Gristle you need to know about are Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti.
Yeah man, fuck Sleazy. What did Coil ever contribute to music? Or indeed Chris Carter, apart from building nearly every single instrument TG ever used from scratch?
Cosey Fanni Tutti’s greatest moment came when she appeared in a series of strip-tease photos in a Sunday colour supplement that caused a Radio 1 DJ to have a sexist, drooling on-air melt-down the following Monday.
Freaks my nut out that back in the 2000s you could get paid to start a sentence with “this woman artist and musician’s greatest moment was getting her bits out” and end it with a snide comment about somebody else’s sexism.
This is a typical Throbbing Gristle lyric: “I am one of the injured/A tear blurs flesh/ Dissolving/Like an injured dog” (Six Six Sixties)
Insofar as a “typical” TG lyric even exists you could have gone for literally any of the ones that don’t portray the band as dour and humourless, e.g.
Hit by a rock
Spoiling my breakfast
Hit by a rock
Blood and brains on my marmalade
Makes me think you don’t like my records…
But that would require having a sense of humour in the first place.
The P in Genesis P-Orridge stands for Peter.
It was at this point in Swellsy’s piece that it occurred to me that perhaps it wasn’t entirely serious and it was in fact me who was being dour and humourless in exactly the way he describes your average Gristleist.
Hobbit’s Pistle are a “semi-humorous” LA-based dwarf tribute band who play Throbbing Gristle songs on authentic medieval instruments at “Renaissance Fayres” across the US — often in the company of the UK based ‘baroque and roll’” medieval-punk band Barnstormer.
I’m scared to Google any of this in case it turns out to be true.
The last Grizzler I met was working the cash register in the upbeat, happy, smiley, US-based, Polynesian-themed feel-good hippy supermarket Trader Joes. I told him I was a music journalist. He asked if I liked The Throb. I said I liked the idea of The Throb and then I pointed to the satanic pentangle necklace he wore under his jolly Hawaiian shirt.
Sounds like he met Boyd Rice getting in some work experience before starting his tiki joint.
[graphic description of Gen & Cosey’s antics at the infamous ICA ’76 performance]
You could never get away with that nowadays. The woke mob would insist you use oat milk.
