Ben Woolhead takes in new BBC documentary, Other, Like Me, which examines the turbulent history of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle – pioneers in the conceptual art and experimental music fields.
The quote with which Other, Like Me begins serves as a neat precis for what follows: “We did a lot of sado-masochistic, sexual things and pornography. Then we got bored with everyone thinking what we were doing was art so we decided to spoil it by doing whatever we were worst at, and we just did the music.” As might be expected of any documentary film about the notorious electronic pioneers Throbbing Gristle and their origins, it’s not for the faint of heart.
The story begins in Hull in the late 1960s, and a working-class girl called Christine Newby with a head full of artistic aspiration and a determination to escape the rigid social structures into which she’d been born. Witnessing Jimi Hendrix live was an epiphany, proof that a different kind of life was possible – a life that started to take shape when she paired up with fellow renegade Neil Andrew Megson and they left their birth names behind to become Cosey Fanni Tutti and Genesis P-Orridge. As part of the nebulous performance art collective COUM Transmissions, the couple and an assortment of co-conspirators took surrealism onto the city’s streets, fuelled by a belief in freedom, collaboration and creativity, and a conviction that art should be open to all.
Those initial projects were met with public amusement as well as bemusement – but, after decamping to Hackney, COUM’s work became increasingly challenging and provocative in content and tone, focusing on the body and its functions and fluids. Tutti talks candidly about her distrust of feminism as “divisive” and her work as a porn model as a form of self-empowerment: “I was in a position where I could explore who I was.” COUM continued to act like a magnet for counterculturalists such as Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson (who designed major label album covers as a partner at the Hipgnosis agency by day, but sought to explore darker avenues by night) and Monte Cazazza (an American artist who coined the term ‘industrial music’ and whose party piece, P-Orridge recalls, was to turn up with a dead cat in a briefcase that he would douse in lighter fluid and set on fire).
Working with experimental electronic musicians John Lacey and Chris Carter opened Tutti and P-Orridge’s eyes to a world of sonic possibility, and by 1976 they, Carter and Christopherson were ready to lay COUM to rest and embark on a new project that would, in Tutti’s words, “rebuild the notion of what music could be”. Punks before punk, their starting point was the inability to play.
Conceived as part COUM retrospective and part launch party for Throbbing Gristle, the infamous Prostitution show at the ICA on the Mall featured a stripper, X-rated spreads from some of Tutti’s modelling assignments and art made from used tampons – and when TG’s performance (“a one-hour set called Music From The Death Factory”) ended in a riot, the press had a field day. Outraged Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn fulminated about the misuse of public arts funding and branded them “the wreckers of civilisation”, a badge that they subsequently wore with pride. Metaphorically as well as geographically, Throbbing Gristle had struck at the heart of the establishment.
A clutch of revolutionary records followed, setting the blueprint for legions of industrial, electronic and noise artists, but in 1981 the group somewhat ironically succumbed to rock’n’roll cliché, crumbling due to fragmenting personal alliances (Tutti split up with P-Orridge to begin a relationship with Carter) and musical differences (Tutti and Carter were sick of being confrontational and abrasive). Chris & Cosey, P-Orridge’s Psychic TV and Christopherson’s Coil emerged from the wreckage, the members going their separate ways until 2004, when Mute Records brought them back together. Three albums later, in 2010, P-Orridge walked out, Christopherson died and Throbbing Gristle were no more.
Perhaps inevitably, the film glosses over the circumstances of Tutti and P-Orridge’s split and pussyfoots around his alleged abuse of her, as detailed in her 2017 memoir Art Sex Music. Tutti herself seeks to shut down the conversation on this point (“We’re going to get into dodgy territory here. I don’t want to go into it”). But more could have been made of her comments about how responsibility for household chores fell on her, as the only woman in COUM. Even a bunch of free thinkers living in a commune and committed to radical change in the public sphere were content to leave gendered political and social divisions intact in private, it seems.
Similarly, the filmmakers could have probed a bit more forcefully on the shock tactics routinely employed by COUM and Throbbing Gristle. The group’s members always maintained (and continue to do so in the film) that these were necessary and artistically legitimate, a deliberate assault on hypocrisy, silencing and conservatism that served a higher purpose. That argument holds some water, certainly – but the persistent flirtation with Nazi iconography, for instance, trod a very fine line and, as Dylan Miller noted in an article on extreme music for The Quietus, Throbbing Gristle paved the way for “a grimly determined race to the bottom, as the early 1980s experimental noise scene entirely blurred, or perhaps simply erased, the lines between provocative art and outright political incitement”.
Were P-Orridge still alive, she would most likely respond with a shrug and repeat the claim she makes at the end of Other, Like Me: that all of the work, however controversial and influential, was fundamentally about “trying to come to terms with being alive”.
Other, Like Me: The Oral History Of COUM Transmissions And Throbbing Gristle is available on BBC iPlayer now. Info and streaming: here
words BEN WOOLHEAD
Buzz Culture
Discover how our brand new learning experience is giving young people in Wales the skills they need to get ahead