Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) (5 page)

. . .

To us, Beachy Head encompassed all our fascinations with double meanings, ambiguity and the melancholy of sprawling suburban angst. I myself have never stopped being deeply concerned in my art, even in the present, with the way that a person’s reaction to a neutral image will alter and animate that image, as well as the emotions of the person themselves, based upon what information is given, or withheld from the viewer. Exploring the metaphors of Beachy Head was a logical progression after using the ovens at Auschwitz as a record label logo. Not until we ourselves chose at a later date to increase the information on the image source was a murmur of protest heard, and the symbology of the image forever altered. This technique was, and is, intended to reveal and expose the under-lying exploitation and commodification of metaphor and image by the media and advertising, corporate conglomerates and political agendas. Our intent was sarcastic, caustic and ironic. Most of all this strategy was carefully structured in a knowing way to comment and gradually educate, rather than compound, the hibernation of awareness we felt we battled in the realm of popular music and culture.

Next, the clothes. All of us had been taken a little off-guard by the rapidity with which our camouflage, anti-fashion, urban genetic terrorist outfits had become yet another stereotype wholly associated at that moment with the genre we had tagged “Industrial Music.” The effectiveness of our lifestyle and attitude symbology was already confounding our intent
to contradict and surprise. We needed a tactic to alienate and break all expectations. Instead of uniform non-uniformity, we would embrace cheesiness and the late 50’s aesthetic of the cover. Sickness through conformity. Destruction through seduction. The status quo, even our own unwitting one, no matter how novel it might be, must be destabilized and satirized. Each of us selected our own outfits based upon this premise. Chris was into an Abba 70’s approach; Sleazy a slightly USA tourist leisure wear ideal for living; Cosey went suburban cute and in deference to my father (as balance to the influence already of my mother) I went for an interpretation of a Frank Sinatra inspired lounge singing ensemble.

. . .

The title lettering for the album title was directly inspired by the genre of disco versions of top twenty hits that used to be sold in Woolworth’s, combined with the lowest common denominator of American disco-funk compilations and of course the inevitable nod to our fetish Martin Denny. The sickly pink lilac colour of the back sleeve was as close as we could get to Simon & Garfunkel’s
Bookends
album. Apart from the original letter that became the basis for
Hamburger Lady
, we had maintained our ambiguity of content by not printing any of my TG lyrics. As
20 Jazz Funk Greats
was drenched in ironic parody, however, we mimicked the print layout of Simon & Garfunkel as well to give the impression of classic pop archetypes of design and consumer friendliness.

Bracketing their intentions for a moment, did the cover work? If the goal was to deliberately alienate and wrongfoot their audience, it seems to have succeeded in baffling at least
some of TG’s fans, followers and friends. Val Denham, a painter and visual artist who went on to create album sleeves for Psychic TV, Mark and the Mambas and many other artists associated with the Some Bizarre label, was a close friend of Gen’s who frequently stayed at Beck’s Road in the period immediately following Gen and Cosey’s breakup. Recalling the impact of the cover of
20 Jazz Funk Greats
, Val minces no words:

Val:
I remember Gen showing me the album cover artwork, and I wasn’t very impressed. I thought it looked like such a shit cover.

Drew:
You weren’t into the seaside kitsch look?

Val:
He thought it was really funny. He said, “It’s going to be called
Jazz and Funk Greats.”
He thought it was amusing that people might pick it up in a record store and actually think that it was jazz and funk greats. I didn’t like the cover at all. I thought it looked really bland. Which it was, I guess it was a sort of subversive kitsch, but I didn’t like it. Even though many thought of it as an in-joke, because of the fact that it was on Beachy Head, the top suicide spot in Britain. I didn’t really like it.

Val’s response suggests a few limitations with the “subversive” agenda of seamlessly reconstructing a familiar image. In a sense, the cover worked a little
too well
at achieving banality. If you didn’t know anything about the band already, and you didn’t know anything about the morbid backstory of this site-specific prank, then the image crumples, and simply presents four people in leisure wear smiling among some flowers, not particularly different from any other generic sleeve for tacky, manufactured mid-60s sunshine-pop combos such as the
Groop or the Love Generation. The elements are all there: Cosey’s bright white smile and schoolgirl socks; Chris Carter’s cable-knit sweater and pudding bowl hairdo; Gen’s “nice” narrow-lapel suiting; Sleazy’s boyish, clean-cut grin. This strategy divides the audience into information haves and have-nots. On one side, there stands a generalized record-buying public constituted as outside the joke, a population who were, by 1979, probably not terribly interested in the overly familiar aesthetic on offer. On the other side, there huddles a tiny coterie of followers who are in on the joke, but who, as TG fans presumably drawn to the “dark,” “evil” and “transgressive,” can only snicker at this deliberate attempt to disappoint them. Inside information flattens the image in a different direction: if something is “just” an inside joke, then it’s not particularly difficult or demanding, because the band are not risking any real exposure or self-revelation with such a move. Pop artists carefully manufacture their images, and tend to have meticulously art-directed photoshoots as part of the total package. TG, far from subverting a tradition, were just behaving like pop stars. Occupying a disappearing middle between boredom and disdain, the cover seems calculated to please no one.

There is another possibility that none of the members of the band openly acknowledge, but which a close ally of the band, and the creator of
Sordide Sentimentale
label and magazine, flagged when I approached him for his thoughts on the cover image and the stance of the band within it:

Jean-Pierre Turmel:
At first there is a glance at the record cover, and jubilation. I, too, am passionate about the Sixties. In TG there is an obvious “modern” aspect, a “futurist” (in the artistic meaning of the word) way of considering pop music. But I immediately sense the nostalgic dimension behind this,
although this was well hidden by the band. I remember that I wrote one day to Gen and said that we were both two old hippies, and he agreed. So, for me, this record cover was less about humor and parody than deep nostalgia, nostalgia for an age of innocence, even though [the sixties were also a] hard time for the mind and the personality (generalized censorship). I think that for many fans this record cover was a surprise, but not for me. There was also a need to break their urban, military looking image. I think that it was at this moment that I began to develop a theory of “deception” as an essential need for any artist: the necessity to deceive your “fan,” who always asks you to do again and again the same performance. If you don’t organize the “deception” yourself then you are trapped. One of the reasons I communicated well with Gen since the beginning was that despite appearances, I was persuaded that TG was not only a “sordid” band but also a deeply “sentimental” one. Especially Gen. And you can’t really understand this band if you ignore this aspect.

In his guidebook
Highways & Byways in Sussex
, E. V. Lucas praises Beachy Head for having “the best turf, the best prospect, best loneliness and the best air” (Surtees, p. 15). The loneliness on offer can prove terminal. Statistics on the number of suicides there are rarely reliable. Coroners, mindful of the social stigma and aware that a definitive suicide verdict cheats surviving family members out of life insurance policies, have tended toward sins of omission in their decisions about whether or not to conclusively rule a cause of death as “suicide” or “open.” Furthermore, it is said that in the absence of an explicit suicide note, past coroners tended to conservatively avoid ascribing suicidal intent in cases of “falls” at the
cliff’s edge. Whatever the true number, it is clear that deaths at Beachy Head were increasingly in the public eye over the years leading up to Throbbing Gristle’s act of musical homage. Dr. Surtee’s statistical survey of coroner reports suggests that the total deaths at Beachy Head rose threefold from 1965 to 1979. An emergency telephone with posted number for the Samaritans was erected near the cliff edge in 1976, and would have been on the site when the band arrived for their photo shoot. The implications of a certain site becoming a de facto “suicide spot” are themselves worth considering. The withdrawal of a human being from society turns into an ironically conformist act when this most individual of decisions slants overwhelmingly in favor of a sanctioned, “scenic” and beautiful spot. Mute nature becomes conscripted and put to work, and everything, even the most absolute gesture of refusal, is tainted with a faint but poisonous hint of cliché.

Quite literally a postcard from the edge that laughs at suicide, the cover of
20 Jazz Funk Greats
makes good on the punk promise of a cheap holiday in other people’s misery, then goes beyond it. It’s compelling not because it is a uniquely inappropriate act of public relations, and therefore prescient of the savvy, self-canceling strategies of post-grunge marketing in the 1990s. Nor is it compelling because subsequent musical trends proved it prescient, “ahead of the curve” in predicting the revival of lounge culture. It is compelling because it is, to take up the melancholic Marxist parlance of Walter Benjamin, “a dialectical image”: it allegorizes conflict, catching the emergent and the extinct in a compromising embrace. As a deliberate mockery of the falsifying scenario of the band photo, it subverts the inherent corniness of staged authenticity and self-conscious camaraderie that band photos tend to radiate—but
it subverts it through an over-the-top, hyperconformist execution of that very mandate. Instead of attempting to look exotic, dangerous, contemporary and “real” (the subterranean imperatives involved in selling punk to the kids), TG took pains to ensure that they look banal, innocuous, dated and fake. As an orchestrated act of comic imposture staged on the site of suicide, Throbbing Gristle don’t just model thrift store chic, but also embody a kind of radically indifferent, collective emotion. Standing on the brink of the ultimate romantic gesture of tortured, solitary self-hood, Throbbing Gristle close ranks with creepy, foolish grins all round. Halfway between glee and sangfroid, they are feeling a lukewarm, mysterious . . . something. What are they doing here? With no blanket and no picnic basket, they obviously don’t intend to stay.

The reverse of this image of smirking, morbid festivity is the solitary car parked by the same cliff on the opposite side. As a brand with specific class connotations, the Range Rover whispers wealth and entitlement, albeit gilded with faintly sporty pretensions. Perched on the lip of Beachy Head, the car seems to radiate a faint unease, the same despair already implicit in the telling tourist industry phrase “weekend getaway.” Of course, the escapist logic with which such goods and services are marketed to luxury consumers—“use our product to escape your (ugly, polluted, stifling) urban life”—conceals the extent to which the vehicle of escape becomes a prison of its own, extending the range of the very same conditions, reinforcing the fuel-dependence, pollution, aesthetic ugliness and levelled-down sameness of modernity. Written in the early sixties but all too accurate today, Lewis Mumford’s remark in
The Highway and the City
(1963) aptly diagnoses the problem:

In using the car to flee from the metropolis the motorist finds he has merely transferred congestion to the highway and thereby doubled it. When he reaches his destination, he finds the countryside he sought has disappeared; beyond him, thanks to the motorway, lies only another suburb, as dull as his own. (Mumford as quoted in Rowley, p. 417)

Fond of the suburban banality of everyday Britain, Throbbing Gristle, with their lyrical references to “dead pence” and “Tesco Disco,” seem uniquely equipped for this particular journey to the end of the line. As the
ne plus ultra
of the motorway system, Beachy Head offers the overwhelmed urbanite the dizzying prospect of an ultimate, permanent getaway. Left hanging like a question mark on the LP’s backside, TG’s rented Range Rover seems to pine for its vanished masters.

Both “saying cheese” for the camera and soldiering on behind the scenes, by 1979 Throbbing Gristle might have had a few reasons of their own for longing for some kind of escape. In the wake of the interpersonal abyss that was
D.o.A
., an album marked by the dissolution of the actionist performance group Coum Transmissions, Gen’s attempted overdose and suicidal collapse during a gig at the Crypt, the breakup of Gen and Cosey’s relationship, the beginning of Chris and Cosey’s personal and musical alliance and the band’s own increasing critical success and popularity (unwanted and internally divisive), the forced grins now on display for
20 Jazz Funk Greats
offer the viewer a cheap holiday in the midst of Throbbing Gristle’s own painfully awkward position in the aftermath of romantic and creative upheaval. The final irony is that, far from misleading the consumer by promising a musical experience that TG cannot possibly deliver, the image’s own
inherent contradiction all too neatly expresses the volatile ambiguity of the musical (dis)contents within. Just as the cover flickers uncomfortably between extroverted, collective celebration and introverted, solitary withdrawal, the eleven songs bound by this cover pinball unpredictably between group creativity and solo outbursts, between glossy pop and hastily scribbled improvisation, alternately firming songs up into solid structures and dissolving them down into a miasma of textures, moving backward into pastiche and forward into futurism. Poised at the edge of the abyss, it’s a record that can’t make up its mind whether to jump or hang on.