In 1987, Keyboard Magazine published an interview by BB pal Mark Dery with industrial music pioneer Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson of Throbbing Gristle and Coil. Last week, Sleazy tragically died at age 55. Over at Thought Catalog, Dery gives his "Final Report" on this late, great agent provacateur. Photo below of Sleazy (left) and Chris Carter in 1977, by Cosey, from Chris's Flickr stream:
Throbbing Gristle were the house band for postpunk's cultural unconscious. Ballardian and Burroughsian to the core, they made the first truly post-industrial music; unmoored from any roots in the Afro-American blues tradition that anchored Rock as We Knew It, TG made sonic statements–sound as information–that, like Ballard's Crash and Burroughs's Nova Trilogy, responded to the media landscape and the built environment around them, anatomizing the posthuman psychology and social pathologies native to these environments.I remember interviewing (Sleazy) in the Broome Street Bar, in Soho. He was softspoken, diffident, with a coruscating intelligence and a sense of humor dry as bone dust. With his talk of sex magick and blood sacrifice, anal staircases and tape recordings of "this little kid laughing and saying things like, 'My legs are starting to sweat,'" I found him genially, discreetly depraved. Which, then as now, impressed me no end.
"This Mortal Coil: A Final Report on Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson"
