num_pages: 300
description: "These people are the wreckers of civilisation", exclaimed the conservative Member of Parliament Nicholas Fairbairn in 1976. His outburst was meant to describe four artists and musicians - Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fani Tutti, Peter Christopherson and Chris Carter. What "these people" had done to deserve such an epithet, and what they were about to do, is the subject of this book.Wreckers of Civilisation recalls a time which despite volumes of print remains occluded, obdurate, even that moment before the conservative reconstruction. To be awake in London in the late 1970s was to be plunged into externally manifest in riot, internally within various forms of damage and depression and, if one felt brave or driven, extreme aesthetics. COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle mark the furthest reach of that even more so than Punk, they plunged into a technological and personal examination of the dark side - the forbidden, the taboo, the dystopian future on the doorstep. Today this might seem like science fiction or deliberate shock tactics, but then it seemed like reportage, front line dispatches from a convulsed country.
language: English
title: Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle
titlecomplete: Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle
genres: Biography, History, Music, Nonfiction, Art
ratings_count: 464
places: Britain
publisher: Black Dog Publishing