In his post-punk history bible, Rip It Up and Start Again, writer Simon Reynolds notes that psychedelia and early industrial music were as spiritually in tune as they were sonically antithetical. After all, many of industrial’s key progenitors were lapsed hippies themselves, adapting 1960s-schooled principles of sound manipulation, visual stimulation, anti-establishment rhetoric, and communal living to the unforgivably harsh landscape of late 1970s post-punk Britain. Psychedelia and industrial were essentially opposing poles on the same horseshoe magnet—and no one put more effort into bending them together than Genesis P-Orridge.
If punk was an attempt to revitalize rock’n’roll, then P-Orridge’s proto-industrial performance-art troupe, Throbbing Gristle, were on a mission to annihilate it altogether. Absconding with all of rock’s signifiers (guitars, drums, melody, any possibility of deriving pleasure from a song, etc.), Throbbing Gristle believed subjecting audiences to all manner of ugliness—be it ear-drilling synth frequencies or concentration-camp imagery—was necessary to dismantling Western power structures and emancipating the self. But if Throbbing Gristle aurally and visually terrorized their fans with the cool, cruel efficiency of a military operation (complete with their disturbingly SS-like insignia), P-Orridge’s post-TG outfit practiced a similar liberation philosophy under the rubric of a religion. Their provocation agent of choice shifted from Nazism to the Manson Family.
Featuring P-Orridge alongside TG’s resident visual specialist Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson and multi-instrumentalist Alex Fergusson (also of first-wave punks Alternative TV), Psychic TV were conceived less as a proper band than the musical arm of upstart occult organization Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY). Its fundamental belief, in P-Orridge’s words, is that “the conscious and unconscious mind should be integrated.” Like Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV were as much a visual as musical entity, the “TV” functioning as both a simple callback to Fergusson’s former band and a recognition that their most effective pulpit was the burgeoning medium of home video. After attempting to destroy rock’n’roll with Throbbing Gristle, P-Orridge’s mission with Psychic TV was to infiltrate and infect it, and transmit the Temple’s message to a wider audience.
True to their name, the music that Psychic TV released at the outset effectively mirrors the act of mindlessly flipping through television stations and being subjected to a series of jarring, seemingly unrelated images. From song to song, Psychic TV could be as warm, congenial, and nostalgic as a rerun of your favorite sitcom, and then as horrifying as images of some warzone massacre on the 11 o’clock news; they could sound as low budget as a public-access show and as droning and repetitive as a test pattern. Two new reissues filter that experience through radically different lenses—one with all of grainy resolution a UHF-dialed black-and-white TV, the other in glorious HD. Pagan Day (1984) and Allegory and Self (1988) represent extremities in the early Psychic TV catalog—the former was once the rarest and rawest of their recordings, the latter was their most pop-oriented and commercially successful. But these two oppositional records share a significant amount of DNA.
Like followers of any religion, TOPY parishioners were occasionally subjected to tests of faith. And for those wishing to procure a copy of Pagan Day upon its release, that meant showing up at London’s Rough Trade Records on December 23, 1984 at 11 p.m. (i.e., the 23rd hour of the 23rd day) to snag one of 999 copies before the record was removed from racks at midnight forevermore (or at least until 1986, when it received a proper release). Pagan Day was Psychic TV’s subversive take on the traditional limited-edition Christmas release. Like many holiday-themed records, it’s a celebration of being with family—after hearing her cry as a newborn on PTV’s 1982 debut, Force the Hand of Chance, Genesis’ daughter Caresse graces the cover of Pagan Day and delivers the album’s welcome message in garbled toddler-speak. However, unlike most holiday-themed albums, this seemingly innocent package contains hazy-headed psych-blues jams with self-explanatory names like “Opium” and minimalist synth-disco advocating for “New Sexuality.”
Comprising four-track recordings that P-Orridge and Fergusson had amassed over the previous years, Pagan Day was a byproduct of, as explained in a recent SPIN interview, becoming “re-obsessed with the wonderful simplicity but sort-of brutal use of studio techniques in psychedelic music” (like using metal plates to create natural reverb). The album is an exercise in futurist primitivism, split evenly between the sort of intimately melodic serenades P-Orridge introduced on Force the Hand of Chance and 1983’s Dreams Less Sweet, and crude, rhythmic instrumental sketches in search of a song. For the tracks that fall in the latter camp, the sense of slap-dash improvisation is all too palpable. On “Cadaques,” a brittle drum-machine beat provides the wobbly foundation for a flute-like synth melody and a jittery acoustic guitar line—and when the song runs out of gas before the two-minute mark, they just spark up the beat once more and do it all over again. Later, on “L.A.,” a sprightly, mechanistic rhythm gets weighed down by a heaving keyboard that sounds like a wheezing, detuned accordion.
But Pagan Day’s embrace of psychedelia went beyond a fascination with recording techniques. The album’s centerpiece is a stripped-down but reverential cover of “Translucent Carriages” by psych-folk figureheads Pearls Before Swine, and this reissue adds a boombox-raw but still disarmingly wistful rendition of the Rolling Stones’ “As Tears Go By” (titled “Farewell” on the tracklist). And in “Cold Steel,” Psychic TV deliver a beautifully baroque ballad that, even in this rudimentary recorded form, can stand proudly among those ’60s standards.
“Cold Steel” is actually the Fergusson-sung demo version of “The Orchids,” which first surfaced on Dreams Less Sweet (and was covered to wonderful effect by Califone in 2006). Its appearance here reinforces the fact that Pagan Day is less notable for what it is than what it became—a handful of these first drafts would get fleshed out into superior form on other PTV releases. And the greatest beneficiary was 1988’s Allegory and Self, where “We Kiss” would be upgraded from somber, synth-shaded folk ballad to sweeping, cinematic set piece; the tinker-toy Velvet Underground-styled romp “Baby’s Gone Away” would acquire a Smiths-ian shimmer; and “New Sexuality” would get stripped of its lyrics but blown up into the neon-tinted Moroder-esque fantasia of “She Was Surprised.”
Allegory and Self arrived after a mid-’80s avalanche of EPs, live records, soundtracks, ballet commissions, and other projects. If Psychic TV’s early recordings saw them trying to reconcile their avant/industrial roots with their irrepressible love of psychedelic pop, Allegory and Self forged a more harmonious relationship between vintage psych-rock and its modern permutation: rave. While Psychic TV’s full-blown conversion to acid house would soon take effect, Allegory and Self captures the moment right before the E really kicked in—if it doesn’t explicitly assume the form of dance music, it chases its blissful, weighty highs. The result is a record as splendorous as it is surreal.
But before they left rock behind for a subsequent slew of dance-oriented releases, Psychic TV effectively invented Britpop with “Godstar,” the 1985 single that serves as Allegory’s opening track. Overtop a hip-shaking Stonesy groove, P-Orridge delivers an elegy to that band’s late guitarist Brian Jones, undercutting the song’s ecstatic swagger and elated harmonies with intimations that Jones’ 1969 death may not have been as accidental as it appeared. “Godstar” proved to be Psychic TV’s one and only hit single and P-Orridge claims its chart ascent was curtailed by the Stones’ management coercing BBC Radio 1 to stop playing the song. Still, its ’80s spin on ’60s psych showed rhythmically inclined rock bands like the Stone Roses and Primal Scream the way to the dance floor, while its post-modernist sensibility would eventually take root across the Atlantic in U.S. acts like the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre.
Allegory and Self does yield equally sublime moments: the hand-clapped go-go goth of “Just Like Arcadia,” the heavenly Beach Boys homage “Being Lost.” In true PTV fashion, they serve as the Trojan Horse decoys that lead you into some forbiddingly unsettled soundscapes. That said, Allegory and Self’s ugliest, anarchic moments are rendered with the same lustrous detail and shot through the panoramic scope as its big-ticket pop songs. “Starlit Mire” is a house-quaking industrial behemoth that builds into an apocalyptic hellfire of creepy incantations, screeching klezmer violins, and suffocating dissonance. And “Thee Dweller” is at once the album’s most horrifying and hypnotic track, unfurling like a dub remix of the haunting “Mother Fore” section on Pink Floyd’s “Atom Heart Mother,” with P-Orridge’s demonic Beefheartian patter fighting for oxygen against wolf howls that resound like air-raid sirens.
And yet smack dab in the middle of Psychic TV’s artistic and commercial high point, they make room for “Caresse Song,” a Casiotone doodle featuring P-Orridge’s then-five-year-old daughter seemingly making up lyrics and chords on the spot. (Collectively, her cameos on these early Psychic TV records were like the ‘80s industrial equivalent of getting periodic photo updates of your friends’ kids on Facebook.) But as incongruous as this child’s play may seem in the context of Allegory and Self’s grandeur, “Caresse Song” was arguably the most important piece of the puzzle. Amid all of Psychic TV’s controversial efforts to promote new ways of thinking and being, it served as a poignant reminder of who they were fighting for.
