Throbbing Gristle
INDUSTRIAL 1980
A-side: ‘Subhumanz’
Industrial originators at their most coy and accessible.
Chris Carter’s proto-techno, fashioned from homemade electronic devices, defined the sound of Throbbing Gristle just as much as their abrasive beats, sheeting guitars, bleak churning tape loops and the tuneless whining of frontman Genesis P-Orridge. Damned by Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn as “wreckers of civilisation” Throbbing Gristle’s reputation rests as much on their outrageous performance art live shows – something the late Stephen Wells called “trying a bit too hard” in 2007’s Primer for The Guardian – as their punishing, apocalyptic template for ‘industrial music’. Their second consecutive B-side about masturbation (after 1979’s impenetrable ‘Five Knuckle Shuffle’) ‘Something Came Over Me’ was one of the few early TG releases with an identifiable tune, unlike the A-side’s primitivist sludge. And if a milkman might balk at whistling its repeated references to something else that’s ‘white and sticky’ and P-Orridge’s faux-dumb ignorance thereof (“I don’t know what it was/But I rather like it/So I’m doing it again”), it was relatively light relief against the Nazi concentration camps, burns victims, mutilation and serial killers that litter their catalogue. After they etched “WHiTE STAiNS” into the runout groove like cocky adolescents, this B-side took on a more subversive hue when Throbbing Gristle played Oundle, one of England’s biggest boarding schools.