There was this hallucinatory summer at the end of the ’70s when the band Throbbing Gristle served as the soundtrack to my teenage friends’ and my descent into self-destruction. Punk had begun to fade, and there was a palpable hunger for something new and equally dangerous. The memories now seem like a cheap Italian horror film: girls in party dresses, a hunchback fetus in a laboratory jar, bloody syringes, my friend Dee in bikini briefs and a bone necklace selling drugs to bewildered Van Halen types. And for that entire crazy summer, the ominous electronic music of Throbbing Gristle played on cheap stereos and portable tape players, so frightening, new and seductive it sounded like,... More >>>