The third Throbbing Gristle LP, the band's first full studio album, and the masterpiece in which the band deliberately frustrated their own developed reception template through ironic pastiche of the commercial-music environment they had been opposing.
20 Jazz Funk Greats is the third studio album by Throbbing Gristle, released in December 1979 by Industrial Records (catalogue number IR0008). The album is the band's first full studio release: previous albums (The Second Annual Report 1977 filed at R·001, D.o.A: The Third and Final Report 1978) had combined live and studio recordings considerably. 20 Jazz Funk Greats was recorded entirely at the band's Death Factory studio at 50 Beck Road (S·002) across the weeks ending 3 September 1979, using a 16-track tape recorder borrowed from Paul McCartney via Peter Christopherson (who had worked on the artwork for Wings's 1975 album Venus and Mars as a member of the design collective Hipgnosis). The production was credited to "Sinclair / Brooks", the band's pseudonym for the studio method.
The album's move is the deliberate frustration of the band's own developed reception template. By December 1979 Throbbing Gristle had established a particular default (the abrasive-confrontational live-and-studio mode documented at R·001 and on D.o.A), and the contemporary cult audience had consolidated into an expectation of what later TG releases would sound like. Cosey Fanni Tutti has later documented the motivation explicitly: "We had started to get a following of people that seemed to think they knew what we were going to do. We never wanted that." The album's title (an pastiche of the contemporary K-Tel-style commercial-compilation vein), its cover photograph (the band photographed by Clay Holden in serene pastoral pose at Beachy Head in East Sussex, the contemporary documented suicide spot with 124 deaths and 115+ suicides recorded by 1979), and its musical content (which traverses jazz-funk, exotica, disco, electropop and commercial-music modes in deliberately-ironic pastiche) together constitute the album's editorial move against the band's own consolidated expectations.
The Beachy Head cover photograph is the album's gesture. The pastoral-domestic surface (the band breezily posed amid flowers, sea and a parked Range Rover) deliberately suggests the contemporary easy-listening commercial-compilation idiom the album's title prepares listeners for; that the location is one of the world's most-documented suicide spots is available only to viewers who already know it, with the consequence that the album's editorial subject is divided between the surface-aware viewer and the informed viewer. P-Orridge later documented the logic in his standard framing of the band's transgressive method: "I'm fascinated with images that seem innocuous, unless you're given additional information." The 1981 reissue extended the move by adding a dead naked male body to the foreground of the cover photograph, making the subject explicit rather than concealed.
The musical content is a good deal more accessible than the band's previous catalogue, with the consequence that the album has later become the TG catalogue's most-cited entry point for new listeners. Hot on the Heels of Love is the album's most accessible track: a sequenced electropop-disco piece with Cosey Fanni Tutti's vocal lead that later became one of the 1980s influence references for the Chicago house and Detroit techno traditions. The opening title track 20 Jazz Funk Greats establishes the album's irony explicitly (Cosey's wonky cornet over P-Orridge's deadpan vocal repeating "Jazz", "Nice"). Beachy Head is a field-recording-and-electronic-drone piece that documents the cover photo's location explicitly. Persuasion, Convincing People, and Six Six Sixties retain the transgressive lyrical manner of the band's previous catalogue. Walkabout, Still Walking, Tanith, and Exotica develop the album's pastiche of commercial-music modes at compositional scale. What A Day as the album's closing piece returns the method to the more abstract drone-and-texture palette of the band's previous catalogue.
The album's equipment mode is documented. Roland equipment anchored the recording: SH-7 synthesiser, CSQ-100 sequencer, CR-78 drum machine, System-100M modular synthesiser, SRE-555 Chorus Echo delay. Boss equipment (Roland's effects subsidiary): PH-1 phaser, DR-55 "Dr. Rhythm" drum machine, KM-4 mixer, CE-2 chorus, BF-2 flanger. Other equipment: Simmons ClapTrap percussion synthesiser, Auratone 5C monitor speakers, JVC amplifier, TEAC cassette deck, Seck 6-2 audio mixer, Casio M10 keyboard and Chris Carter's custom Gristleizer effects unit. The consequence is that the album's commercial-pastiche vein is produced through the commercial-electronic-instrument environment of the contemporary 1979 period, with the transgressive editorial position produced through juxtaposition between the commercial-instrument idiom and the band's transgressive content manner.
The album's reception was divided at the time. The contemporary commercial-press response ranged from confused-to-hostile (the NME / Paul Morley November 1979 joint review with the Adam and the Ants debut LP Dirk Wears White Sox, headlined "Berks That Lurk In The Corner Of Your Psyche") to qualifiedly engaged. The consequence is that the album's later critical-press standing has expanded across the four decades since the original December 1979 release: Pitchfork named the album the best industrial album of all time, Fact named the album the best album of the 1970s, the 1992 Johnathan Gold Los Angeles Times essential-industrial-albums list included the album as the genre's masterpiece. The album's continuing commercial availability runs through Throbbing Gristle's Bandcamp and Mute's distribution arrangements; the 2011 reissue documented Drew Daniel (of Matmos)'s later retrospective critical reassessment in detail.
The Bureau holds 20 Jazz Funk Greats as the masterpiece of the Throbbing Gristle founding catalogue, filed at R·003 because the album's editorial move (the deliberate pastiche of the contemporary commercial-music palette against the band's own developed reception template) is the early TG catalogue's most-developed method statement. The album is the centre of the genre's reception template in later critical reassessment; the R·003 filing documents that centrality.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Norman period · last revised c. the Edwardian era