Throbbing Gristle – Page 5

Just the ticket: Cabaret Voltaire

The current issue of The Wire has a great appraisal by Keith Moliné of the musical history of Cabaret Voltaire, a well-timed piece given the recent announcement of forthcoming reissues from Mute Records. Having been a Cabophile from the start I’m rather biased, but the Wire piece has had me listening to the early albums and singles this week (between bouts of Zdenek Liska), and finding the passage of time has made those early recordings seem increasingly strange. Cabaret Voltaire were one of the few groups I liked obsessively enough to collect ephemera from newspapers and magazines. Knowing this, a friend gave me this curious fanzine/ticket from a gig the group played in Liverpool in February, 1981. The venue was Plato’s Ballroom at Pickwicks, and judging by the wording inside—”A Plato’s Publication”—it seems it was the venue’s idea to make the ticket a small (10.5 x 15 cm) booklet.

What’s surprising about this is that the fanzine the ticket is bundled with has nothing at all to do with music (or that other perennial of 80s post-punk culture, left-wing politics) but is a glimpse of life as a gay man in Liverpool. I’ve always found this fascinating for the daring it took to foist the thing on a bunch of unwitting Cabs fans, most of whom would have been straight men and not especially sympathetic to the subject matter. In the context of 1981 forcing people to look at grainy shots of naked men with accompanying text (by another man) declaring them to be a turn-on was a transgressive act. The only representations of anything gay in the popular media were a few camp (and therefore safe) comedians; Derek Jarman was still an underground figure, and as late as 1984 a BBC play about gay men was prefaced with a warning about its “contentious” subject.

I’ve no idea who was responsible for the fanzine, there are no credits, and it’s possible that the people involved didn’t want to be too easily identified. If the tone of the writing seems rather dramatic then, again, it’s important to see it in context of a country which wasn’t much more amenable to gay people than Russia is today. Saying things in public that most people didn’t want to hear was a challenging act; emotions often ran high.

Looking for information about the gig turned up this newspaper ad. (Who were Jell and Aardvarks, I wonder?) By an odd coincidence only the day before I’d found this upload from the same person of a very scarce compilation tape that happens to be from the same year, and which features contributions from Cabaret Voltaire’s Chris Watson and Richard Kirk. The Men With The Deadly Dreams was compiled by Geoff Rushton, aka John Balance of Coil, and was apparently limited to 200 copies. Among the other highlights there’s a track from Eyeless in Gaza, whose early work I like a great deal, and an electronic piece by Throbbing Gristle’s Chris Carter which I think is exclusive to this collection. Two artefacts—fanzine and tape—with brown paper covers that give a snapshot of Britain’s underground culture in 1981.

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Abrahadabra

01 First (1985).

I’ve linked to so many publications at the Internet Archive I’m a little surprised it’s taken me this long to find something featuring my own work. Abrahadabra was a Dutch periodical covering subjects familiar to readers of the esoteric magazines of the 1980s (RE/Search, Rapid Eye, etc): Industrial music of the TG/Psychic TV/Coil variety, transgressive writers such as Burroughs, Ballard and Bataille, weird fiction of the Lovecraft/Machen school, and a heavy emphasis on occultism. My friend Ed was one of the contributors which is how my Pan drawing ended up in the Witches issue in 1987.

For a publication with minimal resources the production was often impressive, the drawing on the cover of the Austin Spare issue, for instance, being printed in silver ink on black paper. The contents were mostly in Dutch but each issue featured interesting and often original graphics. I also drew a small Horus head for issue 11 (which I’d forgotten about until I saw it again), whose title design was used on the cover of issue 12. Some of the other issues I hadn’t seen before so it’s good to find them scanned and easily available. The 1980s was the last time print was used as the primary medium for underground culture to talk to and disseminate itself. By the end of the decade many of the small magazines had either evolved—both RE/Search and Rapid Eye turned into books—or expired. The final Abrahadabra is dated 1990.

02 Second (1985).

03 Third (1985).

04 Sex (1985).

05 Derangement (1985).

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Seven Songs by 23 Skidoo

Along with Elemental 7 by CTI, this was another Doublevision video release that I never got to see in its original videocassette form. Seven Songs is the first and arguably the best of the 23 Skidoo albums, released in 1982 on Fetish Records in a great sleeve by Neville Brody. Production was by “Tony, Terry & David” aka Ken Thomas, Genesis P-Orridge & Peter Christopherson. The latter two were still in Throbbing Gristle at the time so there’s a further connection with the CTI release. The video director was Richard Heslop who can be seen with his Super-8 camera on the inner sleeve of 23 Skidoo’s second album. Seven Songs is his first credited film work.

The videos are very much of their time, layered and cut-up images mixing footage from numerous sources—tribal rituals, totalitarian politics, animation, medical or scientific films, shots of the group performing, and so on—with the whole mélange processed through a video synthesiser. While it may look outmoded now, thirty years ago this degree of intensity and fragmentation was still radically unlike anything being offered by broadcast television. Pop video directors and ad agencies weren’t slow to adopt similar techniques for far more commercial ends. Richard Heslop went on to work with Derek Jarman, and recently directed a feature of his own, Frank. Low-quality bits of Seven Songs have been on YouTube for a while but Heslop posted the whole thing to Vimeo a few months ago along with the Tranquiliser footage that rounded out the original cassette release. 23 Skidoo are still active, and are playing a gig in London next Sunday with the former singer from Can, Damo Suzuki. Details about that event here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Elemental 7 by CTI
• Neville Brody and Fetish Records

Elemental 7 by CTI

Design by CTI and Kevin Thorne.

Yet another of those things I’ve known about for years but have only seen recently thanks to YouTube. Elemental 7 was an early music + video release by Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti following the split of Throbbing Gristle in 1981. They’d already recorded under the Chris & Cosey name but in 1983 formed CTI—Creative Technology Institute—a side project that allowed for the release of works such as this that differed from their usual electronic output. Elemental 7 is a 50-minute video that for want of a better term might be classed as ambient, the visuals being grainy, impressionistic or semi-abstract images by John Lacey with a soundtrack that’s on the whole less rhythmic than the C&C albums. The whole thing was made for £500, and the quality isn’t supposed to compete with broadcast television. In 1983 it was still a rare thing for groups to take control of their own video production. In the UK few people were doing this aside from Factory Records, who had their own Ikon video label, and some of the Industrial groups such as Cabaret Voltaire, Psychic TV and 23 Skidoo. Cabaret Voltaire released the tape and soundtrack album of Elemental 7 on their Doublevision label.

It’s a curious thing being able to see this after so long. I’m very familiar with the music (it was always good late-night listening) but, as with Cabaret Voltaire’s Johnny YesNo film and other Doublevision releases, I didn’t have any means of watching video tapes through much of the 1980s. Nothing this unusual ever appeared on TV, of course. The ritualistic sequences are reminiscent of the early films of Derek Jarman, not least In the Shadow of the Sun which had a soundtrack by Throbbing Gristle, while the opening sequence, Temple Bar, has some historical value in showing the stone gate of the City of London sitting abandoned in Theobalds Park before it was returned to the capital in 2003.

Elemental 7 has never been reissued since its tape release so this is the only way you’ll get to see it for now.

Elemental 7: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5

1. Elemental 7 0:13
2. Temple Bar (The Forgotten Ancient Gates Of London) 12:30
3. Dancing Ghosts (Midnight At Robinwood Mill) 10:37
4. Meeting Mr. Evans (A Moving Experience) 04:13
5. Invisible Spectrum (Ritual By Candlelight) 10:35
6. Sidereal (Time Measured By Movement Of The Stars) 05:23
7. Well Spring Of Life (Gathering The First Waters Of Spring) 06:39
8. The Final Calling (Physical Exorcism) 03:21
9. CTI Credit Sequence 02.17

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Gristleism
• A=P=P=A=R=I=T=I=O=N
• In the Shadow of the Sun by Derek Jarman

Reverbstorm: Bauhaus Horror

Lord Horror (after Klaus Barthelmess).

(No, not Pete Murphy and co.) Now that the Reverbstorm book is at the printers I have an excuse to discuss a few of the art and design appropriations that run through the narrative. I wanted to use some Bauhaus-style design back in the early 1990s when we were putting the first of the comic issues together but that idea got buried under conflicting demands and the need to actually finish all the drawing. It was only when I started designing the opening pages in 2008 that I was able to return to some of the original intentions. There were two reasons for this choice: one was that the minimalist graphics of the Bauhaus style worked well in black-and-white, and also provided an effective counterpoint to the very dense and detailed drawings that followed. The second was that the Bauhaus design school found itself in the early 1930s in opposition to the fascist forces which the figure of Lord Horror represents. (Many of the Bauhaus architects and designers eventually fled Germany for Britain and the United States.) This combination of antagonistic elements yielded another of Reverbstorm‘s collisions of counterposed philosophies and aesthetics.

Reverbstorm title page.

The title page is the most flagrant Bauhaus appropriation, a swipe worthy of Peter Saville at his plundering height. Joost Schmidt’s famous Bauhaus-Ausstellung poster is reworked with a Neville Brody typeface (Industria) and with Oskar Schlemmer’s face logo turned into a scowling profile.

On a typographic note, Industria was used right from the start with Reverbstorm since Brody designed it in the Thatcherite 1980s as a deliberate harking back to the authoritarian 1930s. It also has a very appropriate name. The other typefaces used in the book—Morris Fuller Benton’s Empire and Eric Gill’s Perpetua—date from 1937 and 1928 respectively.

Joost Schmidt (1923).

The reworked Oskar Schlemmer face/logo as it appears on the Appendix page. The lightning flash in Reverbstorm has multiple associations: adapted initially from the symbol used by Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (a symbol also appropriated at various times by David Bowie and Throbbing Gristle) it can also relate to storms, radio broadcasts and electricity in general. Here it becomes a minimal cipher representing Horror’s outrageous plume of hair.

Oskar Schlemmer (1923).

Reverbstorm, part 8.

In part 8 of Reverbstorm Horror ends up naked inside “a Soul” (don’t ask), and we see his figure juxtaposed against a series of backgrounds that recapitulate earlier aspects of the narrative. It was always the intention to end the series with a change of style so I did this by creating a kind of digital maquette figure using vector shapes that could be posed in a variety of ways. The origin of the figure was a sketch by Klaus Barthelmess, one of the students in Oskar Schlemmer’s drawing class. The sketch below appeared in a slightly altered form in issue 5 of the original publications but I always felt more could have been done with it: a posable figure turned out to be the perfect solution. By coincidence, while I was working on the final pages, Clive Hicks-Jenkins had been running a maquette exhibition on his blog. I was tempted to offer my example but a combination of too much work and a reluctance to throw Lord Horror’s obscene and reprehensible presence into the mix put paid to that. Besides which, my figure is a digital creation, not a bona fide paper cut-out.

Drawing by Klaus Barthelmess (1922).

For those who want more Bauhaus design, the Barbican in London is currently staging a major exhibition, Bauhaus: Art as Life, that will run throughout the summer.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Reverbstorm: an introduction and preview