Up Close and Personal

This is a blog that has needed writing for a long time. Mark and I saw Psychic TV at the old Astoria 3 years ago, and spent several hours in the Cro-Bar afterwards, downing bottles of Budvar and trying to come to terms with what we had just witnessed. That's a story for another time.

Back in June, we saw a Throbbing Gristle show at Heaven, in the black-out arches under Charing Cross Station. The sense of distress, manipulation, preening and cold-hearted acting-out was whipped up as early as the appearance of several expensive and pretty New York style victims with the ignorance and teenaged self-centre that it would take to appropriate the SCUM name for their idea-free, turgid noise-pop. Cheekbones and strutting are nothing to be proud of if your songs are lumpy cold soup.

TG were clinical, precise, surgical. The stage was set up more for a laboratory experiment in unhygeinic conditions than for any sort of pop. There has always appeared to be open space in TG's sound, though more the space of the empty warehouse or abandoned estate.

We were close enough to watch Genesis licking and kissing the tattoos of his late wife on his inner arms, and to glimpse the surgery scars underneath his tits. He appears caught in some sort of terrible limbo between genders, between artifice, performance and memorial. Not between "reality" or anything as ludicrous as that. TG have long since rendered reality the doubtful world it is. It's a dreadful place to be, and only TG have made the sacrifices necessary to raise it to the state of something approaching celebratory.

Give us another three years, and we might just have worked out what we saw this time.