The label that named the genre, on a slogan it didn't write.
Industrial Records was set up in 1976 or early 1977 (accounts differ) by the four members of Throbbing Gristle: Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter Christopherson and Chris Carter. The band had made what is usually remembered as its debut in October 1976, at the opening of COUM Transmissions' Prostitution at the ICA (at COUM Prostitution). The label followed within months.
The slogan came from outside the band. Monte Cazazza, the San Francisco performance and mail artist, is credited with coining Industrial Music for Industrial People, and the label took it as its strapline. P-Orridge's own account is plain on the point: “Monte Cazazza suggested our business slogan should be INDUSTRIAL MUSIC FOR INDUSTRIAL PEOPLE.” I quote it in full because credit has a habit of drifting towards the most-quoted member of a group, and here the group's own text sends it back where it belongs.
Note the word business. The joke of Industrial Records was that it presented itself as a company. The name was meant to be the dullest one available, and the account calls it “the most unromantic yet appropriate title we could envisage”: Industrial Records Limited. The catalogue numbers had four digits, as if the label expected to need them. The first release, The Second Annual Report, came out in November 1977 as IR0002. There was no IR0001, and no first annual report. The original pressing ran to 785 copies.
As far as I can find, the label issued no manifesto when it was founded. The nearest thing it has is retrospective: P-Orridge's account of Industrial Records, printed among sleeve notes written by each member for CD1, the band's first compact disc, issued by Mute in 1986. The other members' texts are dated between March and June of that year. It is a founding document written about ten years after the founding, which suits a label whose first record was a second report.
What it says is short. “Industrial Records began as an investigation.” The four wanted to “re-invest Rock music with content, motivation and risk”, to make records “more effective and relevant to our Industrial society”, and to “investigate music as a Business phenomenon”. Read as a programme, it is three sentences long. Read against the catalogue, it was carried out.
The IR series ran from IR0002 to IR0016 between 1977 and 1981: four Throbbing Gristle albums and a run of singles, with records by Cazazza, The Leather Nun, Thomas Leer and Robert Rental, Surgical Penis Klinik, Elisabeth Welch and Dorothy along the way. A parallel IRC series of cassettes carried concert recordings, most of them Throbbing Gristle's. The last IR record was William S. Burroughs's Nothing Here Now But The Recordings in 1981. Throbbing Gristle played the final concert of their first phase at the Kezar Pavilion in San Francisco on 29 May 1981, and on 23 June announced by postcard that the mission was terminated (at The Mission Is Terminated). The label's run ended with the band's.
P-Orridge's account ends on the Burroughs title: “Nothing here now but the recordings.” The slogan has outlasted the label by more than forty years.
VAGO · c. the Bronze Age