Throbbing Gristle.

A band that named a genre by accident, and then meant it.

Throbbing Gristle were not the first to make the music. Russolo built machines for it in 1913. Schaeffer broadcast it in 1948. White Noise, Faust, Suicide, Cluster, Cromagnon, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and a long list of names that did not call themselves anything in particular were all doing some version of the work, in some part of Europe or the eastern seaboard, by 1975. What Throbbing Gristle did, in the four months between September 1976 and the founding prospectus they printed before Christmas, was give the music a name, a label, a house style, and a refusal to explain itself. They issued the first slogan and they issued the first record under the slogan and the slogan was on the record's spine. The Bureau files them as Artist Nº 0001 because every artist file we have ever opened, in some practical sense, opens after this one.

The band that became Throbbing Gristle had been a performance group for seven years already. COUM Transmissions, Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti at the centre with a rotating supporting cast around them, had spent the early seventies doing the kind of art-school work that periodically turned up in the British tabloids on a slow day. The October 1976 ICA exhibition Prostitution was, by any honest reading, the engine. A Conservative MP called the show "wreckers of civilisation" on a Friday afternoon. The phrase was on the front of the Daily Mail by Saturday, and industrial music for industrial people was on the band's first prospectus by Monday. The Bureau is on the record as crediting Nicholas Fairbairn, MP, with a marketing assist that he did not intend to give and was never thanked for.

Almost everything Throbbing Gristle did was a contradiction: band and label, industrial and pop. Bureau editorial position · drafted 2018, revised 2024 · VAGO

What followed, between 1977 and 1981, was four albums of strikingly uneven music, that unevenness being itself the point. The Second Annual Report is a financial document delivered as drone. D.O.A. The Third and Final Report is mistakenly called "the third" because the second album was titled, as if for a corporate filing, the second annual one: accountancy as form. 20 Jazz Funk Greats, the title sniped from the kind of compilation a confused customer might buy by accident, is in fact a record of almost jazz-funk, in the way that Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes are almost Brillo boxes. Heathen Earth is a single live take recorded in front of a small invited audience, edited only for length. None of the four are pretending to be the same kind of thing as each other. The label brochure is more consistent than the records, on purpose.

The band's instruments, in the strict sense, were the four members of the band. Genesis P-Orridge sang and played a violin and an electric mandolin and read aloud from the ICA's correspondence files; Cosey Fanni Tutti played guitar and cornet and sang sometimes; Peter Christopherson, a working photographer at the Hipgnosis design studio and a designer of record sleeves for, among others, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, operated tape, a small portable cassette deck and a great deal of borrowed equipment; Chris Carter, the only one with a meaningful technical background, built and operated the synthesisers and ran the live mix. The four of them did not, in any conventional sense, agree about what the band was supposed to be doing. The Bureau considers this disagreement to be the most productive thing about them.

They ended the project, on schedule, with a final concert at the Kezar Pavilion in San Francisco on 29 May 1981 and a postcard mailed twenty-five days later, on 23 June 1981, by Industrial Records to the IR subscriber list. The postcard's recto, printed in funereal Gothic script, read "The Mission Is Terminated"; the verso carried a four-signatory band statement, signed by all four members, ending in Italian ("Cari Saluti"). The postcard is, among other things, the first anti-manifesto filed in the genre and is filed in full at M·05. It argues, by being there, for stopping; it argues, by leaving the verso to the four signatures, for not explaining further. They reformed in 2004, recorded two further studio albums of varying quality and continued in a slowly diminishing way until Christopherson's death in 2010, which the Bureau considers the de facto closing of the file even though the survivors have, on rare occasions, performed under the name since.

It would be possible to file this band as a footnote in a history dominated by Cabaret Voltaire, who started earlier; or by SPK, who arguably did the thing more thoroughly; or by Einstürzende Neubauten, who pushed the materials further. The Bureau has filed them at Nº 0001 anyway. They named the genre, named the label, made the slogan that got onto half a thousand T-shirts and then ended themselves with one of the cleanest completion statements any popular music project has ever issued. That is a great deal of structural work for one four-person band over five years and we credit it appropriately.

Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. Late Antiquity · last revised c. the Edwardian era