Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (33 1/3) by Drew Daniel Page B

waves from the cliff top” (Surtees, 14). Indistinct murmuring pretty much nails it, and indirectly cashes out the casual sublimity of Throbbing Gristle’s achievement here. If the Burkean recipe for the sublime called for equal measures of beauty and terror, “Beachy Head” delivers both, combining the soft caress of a distant wave with the imminent threat of a killer drop.
    Drew: There are some signature sounds in TG’s musical vocabulary, and I can’t quite figure out how they’re made. Can we listen to “Beachy Head” together as a family and maybe you can tell me what’s going on?
    [weird guitar tone]
    Cosey: That’s my Gizmo guitar.
    Chris: Through his work with Hipgnosis, Sleazy knew Godley & Crème, who were in 10cc. They invented this thing called a Gizmo which was a . . .
    Cosey: . . . a device with these little plastic wheels with teethon, six of them. It sits on your strings and plucks them for you.
    Chris: Battery-operated. It’s like a box about this big, with rubber wheels, and you push it down . . .
    Drew: . . . and the serrations produce a kind of rubbing tone?
    Chris: Yeah, but you have to really push down on the box. You have to drill holes in the guitar and stuff.
    Drew: So it’s like a mechanical EBow. [bird calls] Those seagulls—did you record them yourself?
    Chris: They’re from a BBC sound effects record.
    Drew: Is that your modular synth?
    Chris: That would be the modular synth. I’ve got the feeling there might be violin as well.
    Cosey: Where?
    Drew: There are sounds where I can’t figure out if they are made by a cornet or violin or guitar.
    Chris: That could have been Gen’s violin through that weird fuzzbox he had.
    Drew: I hear a kind of squawking sound but I can’t tell if it’s a real bird or a manipulated violin.
    Perched more than five hundred feet above the English Channel, the scenic white cliffs of Beachy Head chalk the broken edges of the Sussex coastline. Formed in the ocean’s ooze over millennia, the cliff faces are highly unstable, with pinnacled “fingers” breaking off from the mainland and erosion eating inward from the Channel waters toward the crumbling remains of the nineteenth-century beacons and lighthouses that still stud the perimeter. It is a site rich with resonance in English history: barrows, swords and circlets attest to Bronze Age settlement, the Spanish Armada was sighted from itsridge in 1588, and its Victorian visitors included Charles Darwin and Lewis Carroll. In his chapter on Eastbourne in
The English Landscape in the Twentieth Century
, Trevor Rowley describes the social engineering that preserved this pristine jewel of seaside tourism. The Duke of Devonshire secured “the banning of donkeys on the beach and the Sunday marches of the Salvation Army [and] also restricted the number of public houses and other developments which might bring in ‘the wrong sort’ of visitor, such as fairgrounds on vacant lots and stalls in front gardens” (Rowley, p. 350). Luckily, “the wrong sort” did arrive all the same: “The finest climb at Beachy Head was said to be the ascent of Devil’s Chimney, from its base to a gap between it and the top of the cliff. Aleister Crowley (later of strange and unsavory reputation) and his companion Gregor Grant climbed it in 1894 the other way round from the gap” (Surtees, p. 85). A keen young Crowley described his adventure with obvious relish in the
Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal
, and his description of the motions necessary to navigate his way across the crumbling chalk only hint at the danger he faced when the cliff face partially collapsed in mid-ascent: “A convulsive series of amoeboid movements enabled me to get out over the debris, when it immediately thundered down, leaving me in a very comfortable gap. I was soon on the ridge” (Surtees, p. 87). The poetic image of Aleister Crowley convulsing like an amoeba while ascending the Devil’s Chimney is a serendipitous gift from history, which