Throbbing Gristle invented industrial music. Not in its current, hyperbolic guise, but as it was when the group’s label, Industrial Records, released a series of now classic albums featuring archetypal tracks such as Hot on the Heels of Love, Hamburger Lady and Discipline.
TG announced its dissolution on 23 June 1981 with a postcard declaring “Throbbing Gristle: The Mission is Terminated.” Since then, Cosey and Chris have continued to write and perform as Chris & Cosey, and from 2000 as Carter Tutti.
Growing numbers of TG fans got a surprise when in 2004 the group released their first album of new material in over two decades, TG Now, and performed live for the first time in 24 years. 2007’s release, Part Two - The Endless Not, followed.
Now with a new release, The Third Mind Movements, and their current tour, Throbbing Gristle continues to keep lit the fierce flame of industrial music in its purest, brightest form. Cosey told us about their enduring legacy.
With TG it’s raw honesty. That’s what it was about in the beginning and still is now. There’s all the dirt and filth in there because that’s what people have to deal with. You can’t take something that’s been cleaned up and reach a final opinion about it because you don’t have all the details or the emotions you’ve gone through. That’s how industrial music as we perceived it first began.
It’s not about entertainment. That’s what it’s not about. It’s about self-exploration and sharing with people who may have empathy with just one tiny aspect that will kindle in them the spirit to do their own thing.
It’s not about joining a club. It wasn’t about copying what we did but taking the ethos and the mindset and doing them your own way, not doing ‘industrial music’ necessarily but taking the industrial approach forward.
In some respects I have less time for more obviously hard edge music than people who have taken a part of TG and made it mainstream. This is more positive than just banging out so-called industrial music because that keeps it in its own little category, whereas you spread yourself around like a virus doing it the other way.
I’ve heard different tracks over the years where I can half recognise Discipline or something – that’s the way things evolve, small elements come into the mainstream and they make certain sounds more acceptable. It speaks to your base instincts, those driving rhythms and hard edge sounds; you don’t have anywhere to hide.
In 1969 Christine Carol Newby met Genesis P-Orridge, founder of the COUM Transmissions performance art group, which she summarily joined. She adopted the name Cosmosis, shortened to Cosey, before a friend suggested Cosey Fanni Tutti after the Mozart opera Cosi fan tutte, translating as “women are like that” or “all women are the same.”
The name was well-suited as an ironic alias for Cosey, who was unconvinced by the social expectations placed on women’s behaviour and sexuality.
The basic thing that happened in my life is I should have been a boy. I was the second child and my father had it in his mind that he was going to have a son. He treated me, not like a girl or a boy, but as somewhere in between. So I had this fantastic upbringing; in his twisted mind he did me a great favour.
My dad was a Fire Chief but he also did electronics. He used to build wirelesses and TVs and things. I look back now and see exactly why I am the way I am. I was listening to all this weird noise as he was tuning things in, circuit boards going off. He bought me a tape recorder when I was ten and said “you don’t need a record player, you can take this and do things instead.”
I don’t think he realised what he was doing, he just wanted someone—a boy really—that he could share his interests with. [When] I grew old enough to challenge him as a woman he saw me as a woman and that was it, our relationship ended and I was rejected.
As soon as I left high school and wanted to go to art college my father said “your sister didn't go so you don't either.” That was a working class equality thing: you both worked hard, why should you be rewarded?
So I left home – well I got thrown out. I had a lot of friends that were into music and art by then anyway, that's one of the reasons I was thrown out. Then I met Genesis and we moved to London. He’d dropped out of university so neither of us was qualified, if you like, or ‘entitled’ to be in the art world.
We didn’t see why you needed a certificate to be an artist anyway. My mind [was] focussed on the fact that I could be who I wanted to be as an individual, I didn’t belong to anyone. Everyone has potential, you just have to acknowledge it and act on it. That’s what COUM was all about, that's what TG is all about, that’s what I’ve always been about.
