The chain of events that led Moynihan and Rice to an eccentric and avant-garde form of cultural fascism that would have made Hitler himself apoplectic began in the "industrial culture" movement of the late 1970s, and particularly with the seminal British industrial band Throbbing Gristle (TG). Boyd Rice and TG played together at Rice's first London concert in 1978, and then again later in Berlin. TG's Industrial Records even agreed to release a Boyd Rice LP before he signed up with Mute. TG and Rice were also lauded by Re/Search in its influential 1983 "Industrial Culture" issue.
TG's most important member, "Genesis P-Orridge" (a pun on General Post Office),legally changed his name from Neil Megson after becoming active in the mail art movement of the early 1970s. He also did extreme performance art with his then-girlfriend "Cosey Fanni Tutti" under the name C0UM Transmissions. Their shows incorporated whipping, self-mutilation, masturbation, enemas, and vomiting. C0UM Transmissions lasted until 1976 when GPO, Cosey, and their friend "Sleazy" (Peter Christopherson, who had joined COUM in its last year) created TG with electronics wiz Chris Carter to reach a broader audience.
Boyd Rice recalled that when he and GPO first met in London in 1978:
I played Gen an early NON concert tape and he played me an early T.G. tape. We both agreed that there were some amazing similarities not only in the musical (if you can call it that) direction we were exploring, but also on a personal level – a lot of shared interests. I had no idea what T.G. was when I went around to look up Gen, all I knew is that he was an artist who was very into Manson and Hitler. Back then. NO ONE was into that sort of thing...In those days. Gen still wore swastikas and would tell anyone who'd listen (and many that wouldn't) what a great guy Hitler was. Uncle Adolf he called him. But that was a long time ago.
GPO's interest in Hitler was not unique. British punks often incorporated swastika imagery and Malcolm McLaren's Sex boutique sold Nazi symbols side-by-side with S/M and fetish gear. More than just a cheap shock, the swastika deliberately mocked the ideals of the 1960s, the era of long hair, free love, and flower power.
Nor could English swastika wearers be completely oblivious to the fact that the racial populist National Front (NF) was then polling at an all-time high. The NF took 18.5% of the vote in the Leicester by-election in the summer of 1976, and it appeared likely that it would win its first seat in the House of Commons from the Hackney section of east London. To the aesthetically rigid NF and its "John Bull" allies in the neo-skinhead/soccer hooligan scene, however, punk was too mockingly anti-patriotic and nihilist, just one more symptom of England's sad decline.
TG, the linchpin of the post-punk "industrial" turn, dressed in camouflage gear decorated with an SS-looking lightning bolt patch, and issued songs like "Zyklon B Zombie" and "Salon Kitty" (named after an SS-run brothel in Berlin). The cover for the TG song "Discipline" on Fetish Records showed the group outside the former Nazi Ministry of Propaganda building in Berlin. TG called their Hackney-based recording studio the Death Factory, and its Industrial Records logo was an unidentified picture of Auschwitz. Many punks despised TG as misogynist "death art" fascists. At a 6 July 1978 con-cert at the London Film Co-op (where Boyd Rice also appeared), a fight even broke out between TG and members of the Rock Against Racism-allied bands the Slits and the Raincoats.
T(ECH)G(NOSIS) TG's fascination with violent totalitarian imagery, however, had its roots not in politics but in industrial culture. At a time when disco celebrated the body, sensuality, and mindless pleasure, industrial culture had an almost Gnostic contempt for the flesh. Believing that rock music had turned into yet another pop culture narcotic, TG's sound was deliberately abrasive. The Beatles pro-claimed: "All you need is love." TG mockingly defined its sonic assault mission as "Entertainment through pain."
Beginning with Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music", industrial culture demanded sounds that screamed about meaningless life lived inside concrete boxes in decaying cities. Like the Futurists of the early 1900s, it was obsessed with the tradition-smashing technological wonders of modem life – the roar of jet engines, the wail of air-raid sirens, and the screech and sparks of subway cars all served as sources of aural inspiration. Cosey Fanni Tutti later recalled that for TG industrial "wasn't just [about] the music. It was a philosophy. It was a serious-ness of what life is about. That has nothing to do with what is called industrial now. It was so anti-music to call something industrial." Unlike their optimistic and Utopian Futurist forebears, however, TG and their fans were filled with pessimism about the future.
These dystopian British "industrialists" saw mass consumer society, the Situationist "society of the spectacle," as -to quote from Guy Debord – a "permanent opium war" that reduced all who were trapped inside it to docile sleepwalkers. To anyone who wanted to break the stranglehold of media high priests over the imagination, providing "entertainment" was viewed as collaboration with the enemy. The artist's mission was to short-circuit the psychic control machine by breaking cultural and social taboos. For just this reason, TG also toured with bands like SPK, whose live performances included eating raw brains from recently opened sheep skulls.