Sometimes they come back.
Throbbing Gristle were never really away. The albums that came out of the charnel house at Industrial Records threw multiple spanners in the works as the ’70s drew to a close. The world TG inhabited then was as grey as their followers and they made no effort to alleviate the suffering. TG were punk, perhaps, but the music turned away from the stop-start pub-rock-on-amphetamines exemplar and looked backwards to the thornier bits of Velvet Underground, the churning of prog (mercifully sans the ability to actually play), the cold star techno of Tangerine Dream.
They saw the future of music, but never attempted any form of futurism, unless you count the visceral and kinetic school of Italians who capitalised on that name. Instead, TG focused on a kind of eternal now, documenting the present with a muffled form of clarity. Their music left nothing out, not even tunes. Tesco and disco became Tesco disco, with each element equally wrought and sliding in and out of focus. The music sometimes echoed the grinding of the industrial world around them, but it was as much about million pound sales and upset breakfasts.
I mentioned in a review of Cosey’s great book Art Sex Magick that the essential TG track for me was “Hit By A Rock” from DOA; you really couldn’t imagine any of the industrial bands that followed in the wake singing the line “spoiling my breakfast” or mentioning “marmalade”, whereas there’s lots of male screamers who might yell out ‘Hit by a rock!” to adoring head-nodders.
As Big Black’s rocket-fuelled drum and bass later proved, noise is especially noisy when you’re trying to make it pretty. It’s odd how little is made of this aspect of TG; commentators tend to emphasise the ugliness of their anti-music but, while live this was often the case, on record, even their first record, there are plenty of sprinkles. Many of the individual members came from the hippie and prog culture and you can hear that in the music, just like you can hear Abba, or Cluster, or the knottier bits of Pink Floyd.
Which brings me to The Endless Not, a comeback album which sees TG’s response to the mess they’d made of music in the decades before. It’s common to not want bands to make comeback records, particularly since most bands appear to (perhaps deliberately) misunderstand the reasons they were loved in the first place.
Arguably, TG’s members went on to better things in the intervening period, with Peter Christopherson’s Coil perhaps being the exemplar and Chris And Cosey establishing themselves at the forefront of the body music genre and then bin-dipping into pure pop. Genesis… well, The Endless Not sounds suspiciously like a title that early ’80s Psychic TV might have used, and I guess Dreams Less Sweet and a few other things (Jack The Tab leaps out) kept the innovation and cultural clashes going, even if all too often PTV sounded too much like they wanted to be The Velvet Underground or Pearls Before Swine.
So… I don’t think I can be alone in thinking that I didn’t really need this album, that somehow it might taint my youthful TG memories and the thrill of making my parents bristle with “Convincing People” blaring out from my bedroom (the version on The Psychic Sacrifice was my favourite), but it came and I bought it and… well, things had changed. The first thing you notice is that this is TG digitised; the cracks that appeared in their early work are here, but these are digital pops and squeaks, not dissimilar in places to Coil or Chris And Cosey, the rumbling bass slightly fucked drum sounds seem a little safer now, at least in the sense that you didn’t feel that at any time the equipment would fall apart.
TG have always been about jazz-funk (to my mind, the title of 20 Jazz Funk Greats is ironic only in being not especially ironic) and there’s tracks here where a strange form of jazz does creep in, even if it’s often supplemented by strange electronic swells. It’s certainly sinister and reaches pure TG (and so distances itself from the “my serial killer’s nastier than yours” crowd) by virtue of its lyrical ambiguity, something that TG have always specialised in. It might not be necessary, or even essential music, but it certainly made a case for confirming TG at the forefront of this genre.
That the group’s solo pieces here sound less individualistic than they did on DOA is telling; these are people who have travelled the same pathways for all these years and it’s inevitable that a degree of homogeneity creeps in. They’ve always been in the band and, together, TG represents something different from the projects that came later. With TG, the sum was always stranger than the parts, even if the parts already dwelt in some pretty strange places. You lifted up rock and TG was under there.
To some extent, homogenity is the problem with TG Now. It’s the sound of a band perfecting a sound that should never have been perfected. I think it’s probably the TG album I’ve returned to fewer times than any others. Even the deliberately jagged bits sound smoothed out and it gurgles along like a Coil backing track.
The tracks are way too long and, while TG has often had filler tracks, you get the sense that these have been time-stretched way past their logical development. The vocals are mangled, but it seems forced and there’s a general lack of chaos in the mix; you know which sound is coming and where it’s coming from.
It seems calculated in the worst way and you don’t get the feeling that anyone in the band really wants this music out there, so it’s strange that it exists at all, at least in this form; many of the tracks seem like they would have worked a little better slipped out into Soundcloud à la Aphex Twin; abandoned babies that retain only a little of the magick of the band’s best releases. TG Now annoys me in the same way that the Gristleiser and the TG Buddha Machine annoyed me; get the authentic TG sound at the touch of a button, no alchemy required. I guess that may have been the joke; I didn’t get it.
I don’t hate any of this music and I suppose it’s better than a lot of bands doing similar things, and there’s times when it retains a vital, sexual, throb, especially when played very loud (played quietly it loses everything) but… to my ears this kind of thing was done better on any of a number of TG live albums and nothing retains the ritualistic power of, say, “See You Are” from The Tyranny Of The Beat compilation, which I was occasionally reminded of.
There’s a world of electronic and guitar squall here, but the length of the tracks makes it seem like it would be a lot more fun making this noise than listening to it. Maybe this should be seen as pure documentation, of TG playing with a few themes and seeing where they might end up. I guess that fits, but as an album it doesn’t really work for me.
A few tracks from TG Now spill over into Live December 2004: A Souvenir Of Camber Sands and they already seem more at home in the live setting. TG and Pontins seem made for one another, a camp camp. For me, the power of TG were that they were always about holiday camps as much as death camps and live, in front of an assumedly adoring ATP audience, they really let fly.
Live, the digitisation sounds decidedly dirtier but, given the long separation, it’s remarkable how much like a “real” band they sound; the alchemy present on the Mission Of Dead Souls live album is present here and, in the void left by the death a month before of Jhon Balance, who should have been here at the front, dancing like a jester, there’s a real sense of communion, of coming together. A new psychic rally.
We know that TG always had cracks, but this performance works on every level; the cracks aren’t smoothed out, but each one opens up a new channel and you can feel the energy pouring out. Yes, perhaps the newer tracks don’t have quite the impact of the older ones, but that is to be expected; what’s important here is that the new pieces slide effortlessly between the old classics. They don’t seem out of place and have the effect of dragging TG into the present. This album should have been titled TG Now.
The older tracks have been lovingly recreated and they sound great. I’m guessing that many older fans would have looked upon this return with a fair degree of suspicion — as the nostalgia industry piles on the pressure to have loved, I’ve often found myself turning away in disgust or despair — but I know several people who went to this gig and were changed by it, who came out of it looking at music in an altogether different way. You can almost imagine them, stumbling out into the darkness in that strange Hi De Hi (should have been a track title) setting, already excited about the band they’d just decided to form.
-Loki-
