Throbbing Gristle’s failed attempt to crack the football terraces of England
Industrial music owes everything to Throbbing Gristle.
While the genre took on many incarnations over the ensuing years, attaching itself to heavy metal in the 1990s many of the movement’s progenitors held no love for, the caustic tape collages and buzzing aggression emitted from Throbbing Gristle’s performance art shows and run of pioneering avant-garde albums set the sonic and thematic template for future synth abusers and shock provocateurs that would twist synthpop toward darker terrain in the 1980s.
Formed in the ashes of Hull’s COUM Transmissions collective, members Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti decamped to London, crossing paths with TV sound man Chris Carter and Hipgnosis graphic designer Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson, the four forming Throbbing Gristle and recording material in a Hackney studio they darkly dubbed “The Death Factory”.
Seeking to challenge the mores and values of England’s civilised veneer, the outfit would plunder political history and the human condition, extracting the queasy residue of grim news reports, sexual perversions, war crimes, and the moral rot that palpitated underneath the UK’s post-industrial malaise across the late 1970s.
Among their blasts of abrasive din and jaundiced musique concrète was Carter’s highly idiosyncratic electronics and DIY hardware. Charged with a slightly atonal, sinewy resonance, the infamous ‘Gristleizer’ home-made effects unit had all the instruments processed through it, lending a trumpet blast or synth whine an arresting distortion that perfectly scored their controversial subject matter and transgressive live shows.
Throbbing Gristle would help shape the emerging synthpop and electronic music permeating the post-punks, albeit unwittingly. Dropping their debut single in May 1978 via their own Industrial Records, ‘United’ entered the indie charts with an atypically accessible character channelling lyrical fodder examining romantic love and the working-class chants heard across UK football terraces. While its B-side ‘Zyklon B Zombie’ hurtled toward the unsettling miasma they’d forged a reputation for—dubbed “wreckers of civilisation” by Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn two years earlier—’United’ possessed a strange and warped sprightliness that disconcerts precisely because no acidic undertone ever rears its head across its four minutes.
“We thought of Manchester City and United—United just sounded better,” P-Orridge revealed to Mojo in 2014, recalling Throbbing Gristle’s wry yet earnest effort to pen a football singalong. “We failed miserably, but thanks to the idea, the song took on a life of its own”.
They added: “The lyrics were inspired by this couple we’d met in 1976 when COUM Transmissions were performing in the US, Rhoda Mappo and Billy Haddock, people we’d been in touch with via mail art… We were struck by how in love they were, how they’d share everything and make collages together at night. We thought: ‘Is there a way to deal with the idea of love without compromising our stance musically?’ We sat down with a typewriter and typed it almost word-perfect.”
Beneath ‘United’s’ terse minimalism and austere fizz lurks a strange and affectionate reportage of Mappo and Haddock’s passionate companionship and a bizarre yet unironic mirror flash of England’s footy fever, an act of legacy dismantling and self-desecration before a debut LP was even out.
Laying the grounds for synthpop that would explode a few short years later, it’s clear that the band enjoyed their slice of comic unorthodoxy, adding ‘United’ to 1978’s sophomore DoA: The Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle as a 16-second sped-up mix.
