Did working as a sound engineer spark your interest in music, or did your passion predate that?
My interest in music predated that by quite a lot – it probably goes back to when I was 10 or 11. My dad was a hi-fi buff and was always listening to music. He had a reel-to-reel tape recorder and would make, what I suppose we'd now call, mix tapes. One birthday he bought me a small battery-powered tape recorder and a kit for making crystal radios and oscillators, so there was this mixture of listening to crooners on his hi-fi, as well as doing all these experimental circuits. When I was about to leave school, I was offered an apprenticeship as a sound engineer, then things started to overlap.
What were you actively doing during your apprenticeship?
I was working with a freelance film and television sound engineer named Ted Ball. I did some television shows and documentaries at Elstree and Pinewood film studios. I guess it's where I learned my craft. The first thing I had to do was learn how to use a Nagra tape recorder, so I was thrown in the deep end, but it was a step in the right direction and it picqued my interest working with professional sound. When Ted retired, I went off on a tangent and worked for a photographer in Soho. From doing sound for television and film to working in a darkroom was quite a career change.
What did you learn during that period with Ball that initiated your desire to experiment further with sound?
That period overlapped with me building my own circuits. I used to buy a magazine called Practical Electronics religiously and was always tinkering with the little circuits they had in there before getting more ambitious and building bigger ones. One month, they put a whole synthesiser design in the magazine, where you could build the filters and oscillators module-by-module. I started building my first synth around that period, but because I was also splicing tape for television and film as an assistant sound recorder, I was working with these two different disciplines simultaneously. Then I started incorporating what I'd learned into what I was doing at home with my own music. I'd record experiments with my synths and circuits onto cassette, because I couldn't afford to have a Nagra tape recorder at home.
How rudimentary was this synth you built? Was it akin to the Eurorack modules that we see today?
It was very similar. They would publish a different module each month, but the idea was that you'd put this thing into one big cabinet, most likely based on a bigger version of an EMS VCS3. Each month, they'd publish a part of that design, so you'd build a VCF [voltage controlled filter] one month, a VCO [voltage controlled oscillator] the next, and then a modulator. I was building all these circuits and putting them into quite a big case. This was in the mid-'70s, around the same time I met Cosey Fanni Tutti and Genesis P. Orridge, so I took my creation down to their studio in Hackney, plugged it into the PA, and we started jamming.
Presumably there were synthesisers on the market at the time, but well out of your reach financially?
I wasn't earning much, but I used to collect all the Moog and EMS catalogues and I'd actually been down to EMS in Putney a few times. At one point, when I lived in North London, I got an EMS VCS3 on hire purchase, but couldn't afford to keep up the payments. The only alternative was to build my own, so it was born out of necessity. A lot of what we used when we were in Throbbing Gristle was built by me or friends of ours – even the PA was handmade.
At that early point, did you foresee electronic instruments initiating a musical revolution?
I don't know if we were that forward-thinking. It was obviously happening; synths were appearing all over the place, but it wasn't new to us. Disco really embraced the synthesiser and electronic sounds, so we went along with that. As we got more successful, we'd buy gear off-the-shelf and incorporate it into our own. Once the Japanese entered the market, the prices came down tremendously. Initially it was all very American-based – ARP and Moog were the main players – but once Roland and Korg came on board it changed the whole landscape. One of the first synths I bought was the MiniKorg-700, which was relatively affordable. Then I got a Roland SH3 and started buying modules and incorporating those with what I had built myself. It was a slow process though.
Throbbing Gristle was a precursor to the whole industrial movement, but was there a template for the music you were making at the time?
We invented the name and everything, but at the time the term "industrial" related to us being industrious rather than sounding industrial. Because we weren't musicians as such, I didn't have a clue. Cosey had learned piano, so she had a good ear; but then she took up guitar, which she'd never played before. Genesis hadn't played bass, and although I knew how to put a synth together and make noises, I wasn't a keyboard player. We were making it up as we went along, so we were creating the template as we were doing it. It was like the cart before the horse, or the chicken before the egg, and because it was so rudimentary that gave it a raw edge.
I'm amazed that the term "industrial" did not relate to the sound of the music, but rather to the process itself...
It was more conceptual. The term "industrial" is like Frankenstein's monster; we don't really recognise what it was from when we started. People took it far too literally and the genre now is all about making an industrial sound. Back then, we were a cottage industry and wanted to do as much of the process as we could, including the distribution and production. That wasn't entirely why it was called "industrial" – our friend Monte Cazazza coined the phrase partly because we were in a very industrial area of East London, with factories all around us. You couldn't say the music we were making was industrial-sounding all the time because we were also doing love songs, pop ditties, and all sorts.
What did you think of the bands that spawned from that genre, such as SPK, Portion Control and, later, the likes of Front 242 and Nine Inch Nails?
They did amazing stuff, and it's a great sound. Somehow the industrial tag got put on them, and I don't want to diss them in any way. I totally get how people would label them as industrial, but it developed into something completely different from what we started. It's as basic as record shops wanting to compartmentalise everything, so it become a very wide genre, incorporating lots of sub-genres, like industrial techno.
In 2000, you worked with Cosey Fanni Tutti on some ambient remixes of your former album, The Space Between, as well as some Throbbing Gristle tracks. Was that a reaction to industrial?
That's quite perceptive – not a lot of people got that. It was a reaction. We wanted to take our sound in a different direction and that was an idea we'd had for a long time. When we were in the studio, we'd be remastering or running old tapes and we'd start putting them through different processes to get these nice drones and pads. By transforming the original sounds, we thought it would be good to do a project based around that.
Which brings me nicely to your 2018 release, Chemistry Lessons Volume 1. What precipitated this return to solo work?
TG regrouped around 2006, and we started doing Chris & Cosey gigs not long after. It was a very intense time and I needed something to do as a form of relaxation, so I set up a small workspace in the studio. I started building circuits again and recording what I was doing. I gave it the project name Chemistry Lessons and started putting tracks online, but over the years I'd accumulated all these different tracks and recordings, which bled into my modular system and other gear. It was Cosey who suggested I had enough for an album four or five years into the project.
Do you feel that, despite it being a wholly electronic-sounding album, it's informed by your early experiments in the '60s?
Back in the '60s I used to listen to BBC radio a hell of a lot through a small transistor radio, as well as shows like Doctor Who on the television. With a lot of this, the music, the idents, and the special effects were all done by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. At the time, I had no idea about where the sound design element came from, until I found out it was all done in that one department. Listening to all that definitely influenced my taste in music and sound. A lot of people still don't realise how much material they actually put out. The breadth of what they did was amazing, from sound design to doing pop songs and everything in between. They had an amazing repertoire, and I loved them because of that.
Were the album tracks compiled with the intention of being listened to as a journey rather than a fragmented listening experience?>
To be honest, I'm not bothered either way. We agonised over the track listing with Mute Records for months to make it sound more like a journey. My original track listing was completely different, but because the tracks are so short it works quite well when they're randomly selected. I've gotten used to listening to it in its present incarnation, especially on train journeys – it's almost conceptual the way the tracks merge into each other.
It's also very film soundtrack oriented, but this is not really an area you've operated in previously and I wonder why?
In the last three or four years, we've had a lot of television and movie placements for the Chris & Cosey catalogue. I guess people have been going back, because there's been this '80s revival going on. We wouldn't have thought all of that old material was suitable, but the people that place the music obviously feel otherwise. It was an area we could have developed, but because we were into playing the high-energy, rhythmic material that we specialised in, we just continued down that avenue. But you're not the first person to tell me this, so maybe it's an avenue I should develop more.
Putting music to image is also a very different way of approaching the recording process.
I tried that in the '80s when I did some television work, but it was quite demanding. People can be very fussy, and if you don't handle rejection well it's not a good place to be. You can spend days working on a track for a piece of visual, hand it in, and they don't like it or want it changed and you're back to square one. That's not the way I like to work. I know we have collaborated with an awful lot of people over the years, but not so much with visual artists – it's a different kettle of fish and I'm not sure it's something I'm entirely comfortable with, although I might consider it for the right project.
