Axis

Interview with Genesis P-Orridge

DIRT. What was the idea behind putting United on the new album? [AXIS note: DoA]

GEN. 'Cause they always have the hit single on their L.P. don't they? It was just a joke, a joke with an archetype. If we could have had them shrink-wrapped, what we really wanted to do was have them shrink-wrapped and have a sticker on saying 'featuring the hit single' as well, you know, a real spoof but we wont have them shrink-wrapped, so we can't do that 'cause it'd spoil the cover. That's why there's no times on the back you see, so that people looking at the titles will say, some of them will say, 'what cunts they've filled it out just using the single, typical, they've sold out man' and you know just using the old track 'cause it's trendy' and other people will think, 'oh great now I don't have to buy the single 'cause it's on the L.P.' Most people don't read the times on the middle of the record straight away, it says on there 0.16, and er… it's just gone… (imitates sound of United speeded up). But it's there, all the information, the sound information is in that track; it just appealed to our wit, people forget that a lot of the time we have got a sense of humour and we play games with archetypes and try and mess around with what they're expecting us to do, we like to try and actually manipulate their response in advance. Like we were at one point toying with the idea of a track called Terminal Expression which was gonna be cut like an ordinary track but have nothing on it except the normal tape noise and that would be just long enough, it wouldn't be like the gap between tracks, it would be a bit too long, to almost guarantee fifty percent of the people going over to their record players and twiddling a knob to see what had happened and when they looked at the record there was a track there and they'd wonder what had gone wrong with the record. We liked the idea of actually forcing people to move across a room just by a trick, a verbal trick, but we didn't do that in the end 'cause it still seemed a bit too John Cagey, a bit too twee and clever but we like the idea of trying to sort of predict in advance what sort of things people are going to do.

DIRT. Are there any other tracks on the album where you're trying to make people react in a certain way?

GEN. Well I.B.M. was put on as the first track because when people go in shops they always say 'can I hear the first track' or if they just ask to hear it, they always put the first track on and that's in a way the least obviously musical and the most abrasive and difficult to listen to and we deliberately made it longer than anyone would normally make it, so it starts to irritate you, you know. You think 'oh shit why couldn't they have stopped half a minute sooner, it would have been really good then, but they've gone on too long'. We put that on just… I mean I like the idea of thinking of places like the Virgin warehouse or H.M.V. or even little shops in Chelmsford and all those customers being subjected to that, suddenly out of the blue, it kind of addling their brains. Plus the fact that it's a computer anyway, actually is a computer tape…

DIRT. Yeah, it's a tape for pay-checks isn't it?

GEN. Yeah, it was found in the bin at I.B.M., one of their branches. They usually wipe them off and most of it was blank, but there was sixty seconds left on, which when it's fed into a computer, spews out everybody's monthly pay. We left it as it was for the first bit and then we added other noises into it as well, so it you put it back into the computer it might even blow it up! It'd start off churning out pay-checks, then god knows what it'd start doing. But I.B.M. is also, apart from the computers, Inter-continental Ballistic Missile too, which, it has sort of sound connotations with blips and noises like radars and scanners, that kind of stuff. Open ended, it's computers and missiles, which is why I suppose it's the most… it's the only track really that's not emotional or human really, it's a complete sort of electrical and cold. I find it the most difficult track really in a way. It's really horrible and usually you put your most commercial track first, to draw people in and they think 'oh that sounds alright, I think I'll get that'. But what we've done is say if you can cope with this and you're still interested then you might genuinely want to listen to this album. So it's a test in a way. The one that follows it straight afterwards was originally just called Hit By Rock, it's about transistor radios in the morning, kids sat in the kitchen trying to eat their breakfast with radio one on or whatever and comparing that to being belted over the head with a brick, and heavy rock and all those different connotations… a lot of the lyrics are very simple, but to me they convey about six levels at once, the banality of the radio at breakfast time, then a joke of heavy rock actually being sort of… people being belted over the head, killed with it, then a brick or a rock being an actual stone as well, so it sort of goes 'Hit by a rock spoiling my breakfast, blood and brains in my marmalade…: I always liked the idea of using marmalade, it's such a silly word…

DIRT. In that context…

GEN. …It's a stupid song, deliberately stupid and crass and it's the nearest to a heavy rock riff we'll ever manage, complete with stops and starts in the middle to prove we can all stop together, except it disintegrates, it's always not quite right like the rhythm goes off slightly at one point, then it finishes with me yelling about if you don't really like our records, that's just too bad and babbling away about people who don't want to buy our records anymore, than it fades away. It's another comment, there's a lot of commentary on this L.P.; commentary about the rock biz, rock groups and marketing, that's why it's got a slick cover this time, almost entirely opposite to the first one.

DIRT. What is your attitude to the audience?

GEN. That girl Sue who was here when I came the last time asked me what I thought bout the audience before I went on to play, what was my attitude to the audience, and I said we try and imagine that they are all already dead and then we don't have to refer to their wants and desires or feel that we're trying to pander to what they want us to be and she seemed really shocked somehow. She said 'Aren't you interested in entertainment?', I said not at all, we're not there to entertain. I said if they feel entertained afterwards as a sideline, by-product, that's fine, that's a luxury, we're there to demonstrate possibilities and to communicate information, our vision. In a sense we're just making the inside of our heads accessible to them, which is a very vulnerable thing to do, because you're saying this is exactly how I feel now, and it's very easy for anyone to damage you and hurt you when you're in that state. I think it's essential. We don't need an audience to play, an audience is a strain because no matter how hard you try to shut out what they're sort of subconsciously trying to will you to do, you do feel usually them pulling at you to be what they expect, to do some kind of act or to live up to what they've read or thought of in advance you know. I think it's very very important wherever possible to say no, you have no control over us. You've chosen to come and see us, not to come and tell us how to be and I think that's the great distinction between us and nearly all the other groups, 'cause most groups accept their formula, their image, when they've got one, they look for one and when they find one that seems to work they accept it and wear it and say 'yes come and see us as you expect us to be'. We're saying no, come and see us as we are, expect nothing and don't feel cheated because you have no right to demand anything of us. We choose to be here because we've been asked that's all. We owe you nothing at all. We were asked to come here, if nobody asked us we wouldn't play, we didn't force anyone to ask us and we didn't force you to decide to watch. So you have no right at all over what we do. You can have an opinion afterwards, but it's irrelevant to what we were doing. It's just feedback but we don't have to take any notice of it, we can if we want but we're under no obligation at all. As soon as you start wondering what would they like us to do, should we protect them from this? If I did this they'd find it more fun, is this a bit heavy? Is this a bit silly? You're letting them dictate the content of what you're producing and it becomes a lie, it's hypocritical. You're cheating them really, although they might enjoy it more, you're actually cheating them because you're degrading them, you're treating them as not intelligent enough to cope with reality. You're demeaning their intelligence, and okay, a lot of them so far can't take it 'cause they're conditioned through the mass media to be demeaned, to be treated as stupid. They're always being protected and told they can't cope with the real facts and I don't agree. I think that most people given the option and a little time to read, just would prefer the truth and would prefer the real facts, even if it's painful. I think ultimately that's the healthy state, to face up to what's happening. Because if people really accepted the truth of things like war and what it's really like, like Monte's seen somebody who's been shot and it's not romantic, it's a mess and there's a fucking big hole in your back, and there's blood everywhere. People scream and say 'I don't want to die, I don't want to die'. They don't just fall over neatly on the floor like in the movies, he said it's horrible, but that's the reality and he said kids would start thinking twice about going bang, bang, if they knew what that really was like. You can't overdo it either; if you show people every day they would again become so used to it, it wouldn't be real anyway.

At the same time we're not aggressive, we're not trying to bully them, we're presenting our view to people and they are equally entitled to say, 'We think Throbbing Gristle are boring, pretentious, stupid, too arty. They don't do enough, they can't play' etc., and they're entitled to walk out and they're entitled to tell anyone they want that, that's okay that's their privilege. The only time when I get cross is when somebody actually tries to shut us up, like that last time, because all they had to do was go and ask for their money back 'cause they thought it was a load of shit. But they didn't, they spoilt the evening for everyone else there, who was at least either interested or enjoying it, certainly prepared to take us in, and they tried to shut us up. Now that is the technique of the people who control this bloody place and those people were self declared anarchists, using police tactics and they are the ones who need checking out and that's what I mean when I said their heads couldn't cope. They've obviously in their heads, got a contradiction which is they do want everyone to agree with them and be like them, like you were saying, we don't; you don't, I don't, I want to try and find out, even if I make myself into a complete insane loony and end up locked up. I want to try and find out who I am and what my possibilities are and I'm prepared to walk a tight rope, as you know from things that we've talked about, you know, of sanity and of physical danger etc., to do that, that's my choice and it's not my fault if other people are fascinated to check on it and want to know why, I try and explain, I don't say everyone should be like me, there's no point in them copying me, I'm trying to find out this one, they should find out theirs. Maybe they feel inspired to have more courage to do that, I think that I can produce people who've worked with us in the past who have, and that's one of the few things I can look back on and think, well if nothing else I can cite maybe two or three dozen people whose lives have changed to being more creative and more sort of honest through working with and living with us. So even if I die now I know I've had some useful effect, that's thirty odd people more than one and they're all then meeting other people and maybe giving those people a little bit of inspiration and that's what it's about and that's what Gristle's about, it's propaganda in that sense, it's a means of getting in contact with those odd ones here and there who feel ready to move, it's like saying, 'You're not alone, we've been called crazy but we've managed to get this far, you'll probably get called crazy but you can get somewhere, it might be a completely different little niche but you can do something'.

DIRT. Could you tell me about your track on the L.P.?

GEN. I had the girl's letter that she'd written to me about when she got divorced, the Polish girl and I just slipped in certain sentences as I was making it up and I was also just thinking about how I felt about my personal relationship at the time, plus I also took a load of valium as well, 'cause I wanted it to be like a suicide, I didn't want it to be technically well sung, that's why I left the sock off the mike so there's a bit of popping from the voice like somebody really is about to OD and it's his final message and I was feeling pretty much like that, so I captured it while I was still in that state. So it's a description of how I actually was and yet at the same time the exact parallel of someone else in another country and how they were. Also in that there's the allusion of weeping, of burns and you know how you say you get burned in a relationship or in a deal, and it refers to burns and weeping of burns, as well as weeping tears. Then the next track, on side two, is the Hamburger Lady, which is about burns. Then the very last phrase in weeping is 'I can't even cease to exist', which is a reference back to the first album and cease to exist was the Charles Manson phrase anyway.

DIRT. Who are the people who made the death threats and why?

GEN. The first one's Robin Crocker-Banks? Banks-Crocker? hyphenated, middle class obviously. He was Annette Weatherman's boyfriend, ex Clash bodyguard or something. Then the other one's Chris's ex … Well she's still his wife, they're separated but they're not divorced yet and it was one of a series of more and more hysterical phone calls that we got. She blamed everything on him being in Gristle, 'cause it happened to coincide but it wasn't that. We've got one somewhere else where she actually said she'd paid some East End hoodlums to come and throw acid in Cosey's face. We get crank calls quite often. When we got that 'phone call from that bloke, I got a bit paranoid at first but then I thought the best thing to do with something like that is to trivialise it. If you're really going to threaten somebody it seems really stupid to put it on tape, to know you're talking to a machine that's recording what you're saying seems to me to be pretty stupid.

Source: Dirt 3, December 1978



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