The label that named the genre, by accident, on a slogan it didn't write.
The Industrial Records founding prospectus is a small document with an outsize effect. It is not a manifesto in the long-form sense Russolo wrote at Russolo. It is, structurally, a label introduction packet: a corporate-parody letterhead, four typed pages, a list of three forthcoming releases, an order form, a price list, a note about distribution. What it did, as a side effect of being a perfectly ordinary label introduction packet, was put two phrases into wide circulation that have been circulating ever since. Industrial music for industrial people was on the spine. The Second Annual Report was the title of a forthcoming LP that had not been released yet. Both phrases were jokes; both stuck.
Some background. By autumn 1976, the four people who had performed at the opening night of Prostitution at the ICA had decided to constitute themselves as a band, give the band a name, give the band a label, give the label an aesthetic and use the aesthetic as the punchline of an extended joke about corporate culture that the joke would, by being extended for long enough, eventually become indistinguishable from. Genesis P-Orridge had the name (Throbbing Gristle, an English idiom for an erection, suggested in a context I will not reproduce). Peter Christopherson, working at Hipgnosis design studio, had the visual language (the IR flash mark, the typewriter face, the clinical beige and oxide red colour palette, the catalogue numbers in an apparently bureaucratic series). Chris Carter had the technical knowledge to turn out four-track recordings out of a converted bedroom on Beck Road. Cosey Fanni Tutti had the most experience of being photographed for inserts.
The slogan, however, was Monte Cazazza's. I wish to be precise on this point because the credit has been distributed unevenly in the secondary literature for forty years. Monte Cazazza, an American performance artist visiting London in autumn 1976, said it as a joke at a dinner. The dinner was at Beck Road. The phrase travelled across the table once, was repeated twice, went in someone's notebook and ended up on the spine of the IR prospectus three weeks later. Cazazza was uncredited on the prospectus and remained largely uncredited until RE/Search got into the room with him in the early 1980s and got the story on tape.
The prospectus itself was typed on Christopherson's Selectric, photocopied late at night at his job at Hipgnosis (a fact Christopherson confirmed cheerfully decades later, on the assumption that the statute of limitations on stolen toner was long since up), folded once, side-stapled and posted in roughly three hundred copies to journalists, distributors, friends, foreign correspondents and one or two existing customers of COUM Transmissions' previous output. The typeface, the corner staple, the photocopied flatness and the catalogue-number convention were the document's argument. The slogan was its second argument. The third argument was that the label existed at all: that a band had constituted itself as a small independent company with a name, address, telephone number, catalogue and order form, which in the ordinary post-punk economy of 1976 was a more interesting position than the one most bands had thought to occupy.
The prospectus also did one thing I still admire: it cited Russolo. The second page contained a short paragraph, two sentences long, naming Luigi Russolo (1913), John Cage (no date), Karlheinz Stockhausen (no date), Pierre Schaeffer (no date) and Hermann Nitsch (no date) as antecedents. The list was the four English-language readers' best guess at a foundational canon for the work the label intended to produce. I note that the list, with the addition of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and minus Nitsch, is in fact a serviceable canon for the long prelude (at The Long Prelude); that the four-line citation was probably the first English-language reference to Russolo to reach a popular-music audience since the 1930s; and that the people who read the prospectus and looked Russolo up afterwards are still finding their way, fifty years later, into the second-hand bookshops where the Russolo source materials are kept.
The three forthcoming releases listed in the prospectus were all imminent and all delivered on schedule. The Second Annual Report of Throbbing Gristle (IR0002) was the first: a record titled as if its predecessor had been called the First Annual Report, although no such record existed; the record numbered 0002, although no record numbered 0001 existed; the record packaged as if to settle a financial year. The catalogue numbering scheme (IR0001 through IR0099) was deliberately set up to look as if the label were already on its second hundred entries. None of these jokes worked at all the first time they were tried. They worked, slowly, by being repeated for long enough that the audience eventually accepted them.
By 1981, when Throbbing Gristle dissolved themselves at Kezar Pavilion in San Francisco, the Industrial Records catalogue had reached IR0011 with two further LPs, eight singles, the 24 Hours live cassette box and a small number of releases by other artists (Monte Cazazza, SPK, Leather Nun, Clock DVA). The dissolution communique, The Mission Is Terminated in this department, ended the catalogue at that number. The slogan outlived the label by forty-five years and counting. I have not yet identified a popular-music slogan that has kept the genre under its name with comparable economy.
One closing observation. I hold the slogan to be Monte Cazazza's, the prospectus to be Christopherson's design, the typing to be Christopherson or P-Orridge (no one is quite sure which), and the editorial decisions to be P-Orridge's. This distributes the credit four ways. That the document is generally remembered as P-Orridge's project alone is a feature of the way credit accretes around the most-quoted figure rather than the most-responsible one. I correct, where I can, with the available evidence.
VAGO · c. the Bronze Age