throbbing gristle – meathookcinema.com

I first heard of the transgressive music group Throbbing Gristle through my love of Siouxsie and the Banshees. I also bought the book about them, Wreckers of Civilization by Simon Ford when I lived in London. Shortly after this TG’s back catalogue was remastered and I lapped it up.

For years I hoped for a documentary about this remarkable band. This happened in 2020 and I was due to see it as part of the Leeds International Film Festival but this screening was cancelled due to COVID.

But good ol’ YouTube has the documentary on its platform. This is actually the hour-long version shown on the BBC (a longer 88 min version is the theatrical feature length).

The story of the band goes like this- Genesis P Orridge is a student in Hull who meets Christine Newby who renames herself as Cosey Fanni Tutti. They both perform as part of COUM Transmissions performing art actions either as part of art festivals or just on the mean streets of Hull. They then leave Hull (or you could say they were run out of town), move to London and hold the art show Prostitution which offers a retrospective of COUM but also signifies the first performance of their new music outfit, Throbbing Gristle which also includes artist Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson and synth whizz Chris Carter. This show proves to be massively controversial due to its transgressive content and they manage to make the front page of every national and local newspaper in the UK. A Tory MP who was at the exhibition dubs them the ‘Wreckers of Civilisation.’ TG then go on to release albums whilst performing gigs and examining taboo subjects whilst making some of the most genre-pushing music ever created.

On seeing this Other, Like Me for the first time, I’m astounded at how good it is. I knew that TG member Genesis P Orridge had organised his/her archive of Coum Transmissions/Throbbing Gristle ephemera and the documentary dips into this brilliantly. There’s a lot of photographic and video material regarding the bands that I had never seen before which is a revelation.

This isn’t a complete history as that would take hours more to fully document. Cosey’s autobiography Art, Sex, Music is a good place to investigate further as is Gen’s book Non-Binary but Other, Like Me is a very good place for the curious or the already devoted to venture.

Other, Like Me is an incredible time-capsule as to the truly transgressive artists who were working in the more permissive sixties and seventies but without their work being edgy just for the sake of it but rather a band of artists who were genuinely curious as to certain subject matters and were intent on poking holes in society as we know it.

5 stars out of 5

Jack Malik is a struggling singer/songwriter. On his way back home from a gig he finds himself in an accident as the result of a worldwide power outage. Whilst recuperating he finds that he is now in a world where, shock horror, The Beatles and their music are completely unknown with their songs not being written or recorded. He fraudulently decides to address this by performing the songs in his own set and quickly becomes famous because of this.

This film is vile. Firstly it presumes that The Beatles’ music is so fantastic that it would become huge in any era and under any auspices. Theres only a handful of the band’s entire oeuvre that I can tolerate at best and so this film’s assertion is completely, pun not intended, tone deaf to me.

Secondly, Ed Sheeran stars as himself. In a film that centres around bland music, it’s fitting that he has a prominent place within proceedings. But whoever thought that Sheeran has a face for the celluloid screen? He looks like a ginger version of Pepe The Frog.

Thirdly, this film is so twee that it seems to have been made to be shown on BBC1 (preferably on a Sunday afternoon) for many decades to come. It’s full of irritating middle class people being all cutesy, annotingly awkward and vomit inducing to boot. It’s no surprise that Richard Curtis wrote this monstrosity.

If I had to rewrite this film it would go like this- Jack finds that whilst The Beatles are nowhere to be heard (and suffered) in the post outage world, there’s a band called Throbbing Gristle who are as famous as The Fab Four were. Songs such as United, Zyklon B Zombie and Six Six Sixties are known by everybody and appropriately held dear in the hearts of the populace. Jack peddles his Beatles covers but he, like their songs, remains mired in obscurity. The End.

Yesterday gets no stars.

meathookcinema.com

Tag: throbbing gristle

Film Review- Other, Like Me: The Oral History of Coum Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle (2020)

Review- Yesterday (2019)