Throbbing Gristle — Heathen Earth: The Live Sound Of Throbbing Gristle

Heathen Earth was recorded live in the studio in front of a small, selected audience in the middle of February 1980. So the story goes, the band were getting frustrated with engineers meddling with their live sound through altering their volume and thereby distortion levels that they deployed deliberately. While in their studio, based in the cellar of a disused trouser factory in a run-down, pre-hip Hackney, they could successfully control and explore these aspects of their sound. However, particularly with their preceding LP, 20 Jazz Funk Greats, where the ‘reviled noise mongers’ confounded expectations once again by producing a pop-like work with nods to the easy listening disco of Abba or the louche atmospheres of jazz clubs, there was a growing gap between TG’s recorded work and live performances which remained wilder, messier and more unpredictable affairs. Observing that “to be in control technically means that you can lose a lot of very magical possibilities…”, however, the group elected to record their next LP in one take. While this decision could have been as much to do with the eroding relationships in the band, letting them get on with making a new record together in a minimum amount of time, it produced an astonishing work that captured the very best aspects of both TG’s studio and live sound, while portending to even more astonishing musical developments post-TG.

The material that formed Heathen Earth was the second public airing of a set they had debuted at TG’s Christmas gig at Butler’s Wharf in London on 23 December 1979, and would continue developing in their performances afterwards. Strange, then, that the album has a restrained and occasionally well-rehearsed feel when compared to its looser counterparts captured on tape throughout their subsequent gigs of the 1980s.

It opens with what has since become TG’s signature sound of Cosey Fanni Tutti’s cornet, each tone becoming recycled through divergent echo effects, as she is accompanied this time by Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson, also on cornet, to produce a hazy, dream-like air raid warning. They triumphantly follow this with a reworked version of ‘Six Six Sixties’ from the previous LP that does away with the oblique words of the original (lifted from a séance Genesis P-Orridge attended in 1968), and instead used new lyrics heavily influenced by Burroughs titled ‘The Old Man Smiles’. Narrated by a dispassionate GP-O, his talk of the number 23, self-injection and sitting in a café in Tangiers is coldly juxtaposed with a rousing riffin’ buzz guitar, rare for TG, and heavy drum machine beats from Chris Carter that, in retrospect, form a powerful hip-hop head nod.

Side one of the original LP continues through an improvised blanket of noise and effects, originally referred to as ‘free-link’, creating what was then genuinely new sinister sounds over which GP-O read a prepared statement about fighting control processes. He concludes “It’s a campaign, it has nothing to do with art.” before artfully segueing into Heathen Earth’s most powerful number ‘The World Is A War Film’, the dystopian sentiments extending into a seriously hypnotic synth pattern whose deft use of echo builds into an hallucinogenic rhythm, unnerving and fluid. GP-O’s bass and Cosey’s guitar are played sparingly and tentatively, careful not to intrude on the beguiling electronics as a whistled accompaniment from Sleazy gives it a spaghetti-cinematic edge. Brion Gysin had apparently said that the first side of Heathen Earth was the best music he’d ever played with the Dreamachine, his rotating table-top invention whose flickering shadows were designed to induce trance-like states, and it’s certainly this last track of side one that feels like it could invoke such a state without recourse to any outside stimuli.

Side two kicks off with an early version of Something Came Over Me that was released as a B-side later the same year. Here it is spared that recording’s silly lyrics about ejaculation, disposing with all but a few echoic fragments of voice to reveal its plodding beats formed from the interstices between the soundtracks of Alan Howarth/John Carpenter and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop with a nod to Kraftwerk, as its road-trip rhythms become lacerated by needle fine guitar wails that gradually evolve into a dervish of distortion and an almost acidic analogue arsenal. Such bleak, apocalyptic layers replete with helicopter samples are followed by a highly contrasting spoken word piece between Sleazy and Cosey: Sleazy, true to his moniker, is improvising persuasive chat up lines while Cosey seems to be having a separate, more fragmented conversation. Spoken over the dieing embers of one of Carter’s synths, their words take on a more menacing dimension as, like all the trumpeting and guitar work before it, their tones are channelled through Carter’s effects, speeding up to sound child-like and slowing down to sound drugged.

This disorientating miniature radio play is followed briefly by a lonely bass solo from GP-O subtly gilded by distortion before entering the album’s grand finale, blatantly titled ‘Don’t Do As You’re Told, Do As You Think’. The title is used by GP-O as a chant placed over the seriously infectious electro-tribal rhythms that Chris & Cosey would continue to develop after TG’s split just over a year later. Indeed, there is much about the album that, with the power of hindsight, sets the scene for what follows. The album’s final track is ‘Sleazy’s tape’, a self-help audiobook originally designed to help expectant mothers realise ‘Painless Childbirth’ as its patronising narrator suggests its listeners “open your eyes now, feeling refreshed”. This is possibly the prototype for ‘Message from the Temple’ that closed the debut LP of Psychic TV, formed by Sleazy and GP-O with several members of the Heathen Earth audience including one Geff Rushton who would become Sleazy’s partner in life and in Coil.

This release marks the second instance where Chris Carter has re-mastered this and the other TG LPs. This time around the sound is certainly louder, and perhaps punchier with a wider stereo image. It also comes with a second disk of tracks culled from live recordings from the latter half of 1980, but by the time of these performances, most of which took place after the release of Heathen Earth, TG were starting to change direction once more, ultimately in different directions from each other. The extra tracks don’t particularly add to the bewitching psychoactivity of Heathen Earth, returning again to TG’s more dense and feral performance sound, but perhaps in contrast show how balanced and considered the recording of Heathen Earth somehow seems.