Throbbing Gristle ‘Secret’ Gig Review

As you may have heard, the Re-​TG week­end at Camber Sands - which was sup­posed to be the high­light of my Summer - ended up being can­celled and replaced by an exclu­sive Throb­bing Gris­tle studio gig last Sunday, for those of us who bought fes­ti­val tickets.

I couldn’t make the show, but my internet-​friend Matt did, and posted the fol­low­ing to the forums of a site I’m not allowed to men­tion (where some folk are ever so slightly geeky, hence the tech­ni­cal stuff at the beginning).

Ok, gear first.

Chris and Sleazy had Power­books, Cosey an iBook. Sleazy was also using what looked like a small red Korg, don’t know the model’s name. Chris had a Nova­tion Remote 25 audio and that made me very happy - like a big stupid kid - because I’ve just bought one. He did have a rack of beau­ti­ful, intri­cate and unaf­ford­able look­ing hard­ware to go along with it though. He also had a drum machine on the side and I didn’t recog­nise either that, or the soft­ware he was run­ning. Cosey mostly played slide guitar on her lap. She played trum­pet on one song and did some­thing on her iBook on another, but didn’t sing at all, so no ‘Hot on the Heels’.

Gen played bass and violin on one song, and sang on the rest. She was wear­ing a plas­tic red mini with match­ing jacket, stock­ings and a padded basque to show off her tits. With all the scar­i­fi­ca­tion, tats, metal teeth and implants she looked like a high­way pros­ti­tute from the sev­enth circle of hell. Perfect.

After a bit of banter and a false start, they opened with what I think were the min­i­mal­is­tic rum­blings of ‘X-Ray’ off TGNOW. In fact, I think they played all of TGNOW on the day and, unusu­ally in this sort of sit­u­a­tion, it was the right thing to do - it’s absolutely amaz­ing and was mind­blow­ing live. The stand­outs from the back cat­a­logue were ‘Persuasion’ and ‘Hamburger Lady’ but I don’t have all their stuff, so I’m not sure what was new. To add to the con­fu­sion, the live ver­sions of the new stuff were com­pletely dif­fer­ent from the CD (which I didn’t hear till after the gig) and the live ver­sions of the old ones were often only recog­nis­able by the lyrics and a nuclear flash of sonic connection.

They all seemed to be loving it. Espe­cially Sleazy. Sleazy was having a ball. It was all really fuck­ing intense of course. Even more so than I’d hoped. Immense brain and ball crush­ing bassl spec­tral, clang­ing guitar slashes… and that trum­pet sound, Cosey - wow! What Chris and Sleazy con­cocted together was true syn­er­getic alchemy of the most pre­cise nature, trans­mut­ing their gold from the ten­ta­tive micro move­ments of tiny knobs and the spasm-​crashing howl of acci­den­tal feed­back from synths both soft and hard. Gen’s voice has become rich with the years and shows incred­i­ble range, from girl­ish squeals to deep eldritch grunts, mostly processed and deliv­ered with cun­ning wit.

I think I shiv­ered at least once every couple of min­utes but the last tune they played pretty much made me… well I get a bit shy talk­ing about that sort of thing. I’m pretty sure it must have been ‘How Do You Deal.’ It banged like a bas­tard, reach­ing a crescendo some­where above any­where I’ve been before with live elec­tronic music, that pure rush of elec­tronic sexual energy up the spine is what I crave most in my dreams.

And then that was it. No encore. No fuck­ing way. Good after­noon London. An hour and forty min­utes of indus­trial bliss.

Many thanks to Matt for let­ting me post his excel­lent notes on the gig here. No thanks at all for making me sick to the back teeth with seething jealousy!

Posted at 12pm on 19/05/04 by Jack Mottram to the music category.
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Tags: music, performance, technology