Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) Read Online Free PDF Page A

rugged clifftop . . .
    Drew: Posed the way you guys are?
    Sleazy: Kind of. It was him and some Hollywood starlet of the time, who was his paramour, and I showed it to TG and said I’m kind of interested in this because it’s got a weird vibe to it, but I’d like to give it a different twist. We were talking about having bodies in the bracken, in the grassy surface, and in fact subsequently there was a body that was superimposed. I can’t remember if I did it or somebody else did it.
    Drew: Chris said that you did it. [This “alternate” version of the cover was used as the album artwork (albeit in black and white) on the version of
20 Jazz Funk Greats
that appears in the Fetish Records TG LP boxset, and it also now appears on the back of the Mute CD reissue.]
    Sleazy: At the time, we were basically just trying to re-create something of the vibe of that photo, but with us standingon the clifftops. That was shot at Beachy Head, which is a traditional suicide point, because it’s a very tall cliff.
    Drew: The day that you photographed, do you remember it? Was it a sunny day? Was it cold?
    Sleazy: It was a misty day. There was a whole subtext around the choice of the vehicle on the back. We rented the Range Rover from a car hire place—at considerable expense, actually. We drove down in it to the photo site. It was part of the performance aspect of the event.
    Drew: Why go for such a kitsch cover?
    Sleazy: At the time, there was no cultural knowledge or acceptance of that kind of thing, no “lounge movement.” Very few people knew who Martin Denny or Perez Prado or any of those guys were, not like now where everything is pretty much available and known about. At the time the whole lounge aspect to it was something that was completely out of left field, and that aspect contributed to the weirdness of it. People in England at that time thought they knew who TG were—we were very noisy and dark and weird in the public’s viewpoint, so twisting in this slightly sunny aspect or lounge aspect was definitely a twist that we hadn’t made before.
    Drew: The horizon line is soft, but the flowers in the foreground are weirdly sharp—did you touch up the print?
    Sleazy: I made the foreground more colorful. When we got there it was very, very misty and we only had the lighting opportunity for a short time; it was a one-shot deal. Under the circumstances, we just had to go with the mist. I would have preferred it to be more sunny, that would have gone with the concept. So I made the foreground brighter and more sunny looking. If you look carefully—I think we touched it out on the album cover, but on the other shots from that day itshows—there’s a very long cable release that goes from my foot to the camera. So I actually pressed the button with my foot and I must have already had the other three standing in the right place.
    Drew: Did you pick the fonts, like the use of the brush script for “Throbbing Gristle BRING YOU 20 Jazz Funk Greats”?
    Sleazy: Yeah, I did all the typesetting for pretty much every Throbbing Gristle design. The whole thing was intended to be an homage, not a pastiche—it was supposed to remind you of albums from the 50s or 60s. In the 70s that really wasn’t de rigeur; at the time, no one was really interested in 50s or 60s culture in that way.
    Drew: Which came first, the cover idea or the song
20 Jazz Funk Greats?
    Sleazy: The cover. We did that song deliberately because we didn’t want somebody to complain that “there aren’t twenty jazz funk greats on this record.” That’s the reason that that song exists and has that title: to flesh out the concept of the cover, to give a “legal” excuse for why the record is called that even though it doesn’t have anything to do with that.
    Peter Christopherson wasn’t the first critically minded media insider to send up and exploit the shock potential of a “lite” image staged on this particularly “heavy” location: in 1969 fashion