“Other, like me” may be one of the most important messages underground culture ever sends. A strange performance, homemade recording, letter, photocopied image or damaged little object travels outward until it reaches someone who had not known there were other people organized around the same private frequency. The receiver may live in another city, another country or several decades later, but the recognition is immediate: somebody else has felt this. Somebody else has tried to build a life from it.
This documentary follows that signal through COUM Transmissions and into Throbbing Gristle, but its deepest subject is not the invention of industrial music or even the famous scandals that eventually placed the group before a much larger public. It is the formation of a creative community among working-class, largely self-educated people who did not wait for permission, professional training or an established audience. They found one another, adopted new names, shared houses, scavenged materials and began turning the available world into art.
The earliest COUM footage is especially revealing because it complicates the severe reputation that later attached itself to the group. Before the bodily extremity, pornography, blood and public outrage, there was play. There were handmade costumes, improvised street actions, absurd characters and a sense that Hull itself could become an unfinished stage. Children sometimes appeared to understand the performances more readily than adults because the work had not yet acquired the burden of being recognized as important art. It was peculiar people making peculiar things in public and discovering what happened next.
That openness was not the absence of purpose. COUM rejected the idea that creativity belonged to specialists who had received the correct education or mastered an approved technique. Their materials could be clothing, food, photographs, rubbish, sex, letters, domestic routines, bodily functions or the social confusion created by entering a public space incorrectly. Art was not a decorated object separated from ordinary existence. It was a method of examining existence while living inside it.
The most radical part may therefore be the group’s willingness to begin without knowing exactly what they were beginning. Modern histories can make every early gesture look like a deliberate step toward Throbbing Gristle, industrial music and eventual cultural influence. The film restores uncertainty. These people did not know which actions would disappear, which friendships would fracture or which homemade sounds would eventually travel around the world. They were discovering the structure by inhabiting it.
Cosey Fanni Tutti’s presence is essential to understanding both the power and the contradictions of that environment. Her use of pornography and modeling as material was not simply an attempt to provoke outsiders. She entered an industry that ordinarily converted women into images and attempted to bring the resulting images back under her own authorship. Her body became the location of the work, its evidence and one of the places where arguments about feminism, labor, desire and exploitation could no longer remain theoretical.
Her memories also prevent the communal life from becoming a frictionless legend. Declaring conventional society false does not automatically remove conventional power from a household. Cooking, cleaning, earning money, organizing daily survival and absorbing emotional damage remain work even when everyone involved calls the arrangement liberated. The film does not completely resolve these contradictions, nor should an oral history pretend that memory can issue a final verdict. It allows different people to describe the world they believed they were creating, while the distance between their recollections tells part of the story too.
The movement from COUM into Throbbing Gristle was not really a retreat from performance art into music. It was an expansion of the same experiment through another system. The punk invitation was to learn three chords and form a band; their response was effectively to question why the chords were necessary. Instruments could be built or altered, noise could carry information, an independent label could become part of the artwork, and a live performance did not have to deliver pleasure in the expected form.
“Industrial” initially described more than a recognizable collection of harsh sounds. It described machinery, repetition, labor, control, information and the structures manufacturing ordinary consciousness. Industrial Records gave the group its own means of production while also naming the environment they were investigating. Packaging, correspondence, symbols, concert recordings, slogans and distribution belonged to the same project as the music. They did not merely make records about systems. They constructed a small system of their own.
Throbbing Gristle’s music remains disturbing partly because it refuses to tell the listener exactly how to stand in relation to its materials. Beauty, boredom, humor, dread, pornography, political violence, cheap electronics and damaged popular culture can occupy the same piece without being arranged into a comforting moral order. The listener must examine the attraction and revulsion personally. The work does not remain safely on the other side of the speakers.
That ambiguity also produced consequences the group could not fully control. Symbols intended as investigations can become decoration. An audience may imitate the uniform while missing the criticism of uniformity. Shock can interrupt habitual thought, but it can also become another predictable product. A project built to discourage passive followers can acquire devoted followers anyway. The documentary becomes most interesting whenever the people involved recognize that creating a signal does not grant permanent authority over everyone who receives it.
The enormous archive assembled here may be COUM’s other great creation. Letters, mail art, posters, photographs, films, recordings and scraps survived because participants treated communication and documentation as part of the work rather than debris left behind it. The filmmakers had more surviving material than an eighty-two-minute film could possibly absorb. Actions that may have seemed temporary now possess a second life because someone kept the evidence.
This gives the film an unusual emotional quality. We are not merely watching a historical account of influential artists. We are watching people look back at younger versions of themselves who were building an unknown future from poverty, appetite, friendship, conflict and whatever materials could be found. Some speak with affection, others with pain, and often both feelings occupy the same recollection. The past does not become tidy simply because it has entered a museum.
COUM and Throbbing Gristle are often remembered for granting permission to be extreme, but their more useful permission may be quieter: begin before approval arrives. Use what is available. Take the parts of life that seem unpresentable and examine them instead of hiding them. Make the record, performance, booklet, costume, instrument, archive or correspondence even when no existing category offers it a comfortable home.
Then send it outward.
Somewhere, perhaps much later, another person may receive the signal and recognize an impossible little community becoming possible: other, like me.
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