“If you remember the '90s, you weren't there”

Post-punk pioneer JG Thirlwell tells us about his creative life in '80s London, Berlin and New York, plus how he came to remix some of '90s alt rock's biggest bands

Photo by Dan Efram

JG Thirlwell is a composer, producer and performer who over the past 45 years has created an unparalleled body of work under a variety of names, including Foetus, Steroid Maximus, Xordox, Manorexia and Silver Mantis. From post-punk to industrial, big band to alt rock, neo classical to ambient electronica, he’s never stood still and his questing creativity has seen him collaborate with an incredible number of artists. JG moved from his native Australia in 1978 to London, where he self-released his own music before signing to Some Bizzare, the label for whom he produced a run of albums and 12” singles that were at the forefront of sampling and studio technology. In addition to creating his own music, JG introduced the world to Einstürzende Neubauten and Swans, and worked with THE THE, Soft Cell, Virgin Prunes, and Coil. In 1983 he moved to New York, where he resides to this day, and, alongside his own work continued to collaborate with artists such as Lydia Lunch, Cliff Martinez, Zola Jesus, The Kronos Quartet, and John Zorn. For a brief period in the 90s he was also the go-to remixer for alt rock’s finest including Nine Inch Nails, The Cult and White Zombie.

I’m a huge fan of JG’s work in all its iterations, and I spoke with him several times for my book on Some Bizzare, Conform to Deform. JG was very generous with his time, and we talked about all facets of his career, not just his work in the ‘80s, and I was left with a lot of material that just didn’t fit the remit of the book. So I’m happy to share some of that here, collected loosely under the title of ‘collaborations’. Presented in chronological order, JG’s recollections of his time in post-punk London and Berlin are particularly insightful, as is his account of being alt rock’s remixer du jour in the early ‘90s.
For reasons of space, this piece finishes at the end of that period, but JG has been just as busy – if not busier – for the past two decades, not just with his own work under his increasing number of aliases, but also his successful scores for the TV shows Venture Brothers and Archer (his work for the latter has recently been released on CD and vinyl for the first time). He’s just finished a new album with his experimental synth project Xordox, and his next (and final) album under the Foetus moniker is being lined up for a 2025 release. There’s also his recent modern classical collaboration with the Mivos Quartet, Dystonia, live shows for his Silver Mantis and Foetus Ensemble projects (both of which played in the UK last year to rapturous receptions) and he’s currently working on a third volume of Venture Bros soundtrack. He’s a busy man, and in the words of Swans Michael Gira, a total mensch.

Please check out JG’s Bandcamp and Foetus.org website for full details of all his various projects and, if you’re unfamiliar with his work, prepare to be amazed. All links are at the bottom of the piece.

Early days and post-punk London
I was lucky enough to live in London, between 1978 and 1983, which was an incredible time for music. And the London that I experienced, still a very post-war city in a lot of ways, is gone now. People like THE THE’s Matt Johnson grew up there and could tell a lot more stories, but when I arrived in 1978 it was a really crazy time. If you imagine punk rock as the Big Bang, then this was the aftershock and the expanding universe of punk. A lot of people who were liberated by the revolutionary and anti-social aspect of punk rock, were also kind of bored by the traditional rock and roll form it was rooted in, and they were the ones who ended up taking a different approach to their music and instrumentation. That evolution happened so quickly; PiL were only a year on from the Sex Pistols, and the leap Wire made from Pink Flag to 154 was huge. The first Siouxsie and the Banshees album is really weird too. Then people like The Pop Group, who incorporated dub and funk, and early Scritti Politti who were deconstructing music and improvising; it was like this splintered universe, and it was all enabled by the explosion of independent labels.
I would go to Rough Trade all the time, and then I worked in Virgin Records on Oxford Street, so I knew everything that was coming out. It was possible to keep up with everything and you could see the bands, as they played all the time. People like Monochrome Set, Joy Division, Essential Logic would play in London every couple of weeks, and it was 50p to get into places like the Hope and Anchor. Then there was Daniel Miller putting out his single as The Normal on his own label Mute, which showed not only had the way music was created been democratised, but so too had the way it was manufactured and distributed. There was just a flood of creativity and things seem to happen really fast.
It was this energy that attracted me to London in the first place. I always knew that I wanted to do music, but I wasn’t sure in what way. As a kid I’d learned cello and percussion, but I didn't last very long because I never clicked with sight reading. Then when punk rock came along, I bought a bass guitar and played in my bedroom, then the energy sucked me up and I wanted to move to London. The first thing I did once there was buy a bass guitar, and then I got my first synthesizer, which was a Wasp. Then I bought a Korg MS20 and started making tapes in my bedroom. Through the actor Keith Allen, who was my flat mate at the time, I hooked up with a group called PragVEC and played on an album with them. It was while making that record I realised that I didn’t want to work in a democratic band and wanted to do something by myself. So I went into IPS, a little eight-track studio in Shepherds Bush, and recorded and mixed both sides of my first single Spite Your Face/OKFM in a day. Then I pressed a 7” and put it out on 1 January 1981 on my own label Self Immolation. And that was the start of Foetus.

THE THE and Some Bizzare
I knew [Some Bizzare label boss] Stevo peripherally prior to him starting the label. I was the singles buyer at Virgin and I would get in every obscure European import and keep a pretty deep stock. Stevo was delivering records for Phonogram as his day job and would DJ in the evening. So he would deliver boxes and sometimes buy records from us. I had also met Matt Johnson early in the Foetus days because we were both published by Cherry Red – I actually first met him at their Christmas party. I'd seen THE THE play a bunch of times, opening for Wire and Blah, Blah, Blah, and he had seen me around because we'd been going to the same concerts. So we ended up becoming really good friends, and later collaborators. THE THE became involved with Some Bizarre and were on the 1981 compilation album that also included Soft Cell, Depeche Mode and Blancmange. And when Soft Cell blew up, Stevo had some bargaining chips in his pocket, and started to expand the Some Bizzare family, and got Matt signed to Epic. Then Matt exposed Stevo to my work in the form of my second album Ache, which Stevo loved and really responded to, and was interested in signing me.

Einstüerzende Neubauten and Berlin
I was really tight with The Birthday Party and around mid-82 they had moved to Berlin, so I was going back and forth to see them a bit. Berlin with the wall up was a really unique place because it was kind of an island unto itself. It was this haven where a lot of people escaped to avoid the draft, and it was cheap to live and easy to get by there. And because of that people would go to Berlin and experiment with their art. I think there was also something unique to Germany at that time, a rejection of American and English culture, which resulted in the ground up creativity that was going on, a real collaborative and community-based spirit. And it was very daring, people were doing crazy stuff. The isolation was important, and I think people kind of liked the wall being up. There was a term, Geniale Dilletanten (Genial Dilletantes), and groups like Einstüerzende Neubauten, Malaria!, Die tödliche Doris and Mania D were creating this unique vision.
In New York, you had No Wave, which wasn't punk rock, as there were a lot of musicians who knew how to play. But there were also musicians who rejected musical conventions, things like chords and tonality, and were just exploring sound without a history of convention behind it. And in some ways, the scene in Berlin had a similar basis. If you look at Neubauten using found objects to make sounds or people who used electronics in unconventional ways. Even the means of distribution was really grassroots, and it was easy to put out a record in those days. People were excited about doing things. People who were not necessarily musicians doing music and people who were not necessarily artists making art. There were pockets of that type of thing in the UK, but because the UK is so small and had three weekly music papers, it was easily communicated. It seemed that Berlin existed in a bubble and could create an ecosystem which wasn't getting corrupted by outside media. People were creating things for the joy of it, and it was organic.
On one trip to visit The Birthday Party I saw Neubauten play. I was aware of their work through their singles, but I had no idea how phenomenal they were live, and the first time I saw them they just blew my mind. That was the classic line-up with Mufti and Mark Chung. Alex Hacke was actually doing their sound and would run onto the stage and play something then go back to the mixing desk. It was just incredible and so I approached them about getting their records out in the UK and that's how that relationship started. They’d released a single with Lydia Lunch and Roland S Howard called Durstiges Tier, which I loved, so I asked them about licencing it for a subsidiary of Self Immolation I was planning. I went to Rough Trade who were distributing my stuff, and they gave their blessing, and I was going to take the proceeds from Ache and launch a label, Hardt Records. Neubauten then decided that instead of licencing Durstiges Tier they'd rather do something more significant and put out a compilation album, which was fine with me. The band and I started putting this album together, which turned into Strategies Against Architecture Volume One.

This was around the same time I was talking to Stevo about signing to Some Bizzare, and I’d turned him onto Neubauten. I’d also spoken to Neubauten about Some Bizzare, and they were interested and came long for the ride too. Once the deal was done, Stevo decided he didn’t want to put out Strategies Against Architecture Volume One, he wanted to do something new. So they proceeded to go into the studio to start working on what became The Drawings of Patient OT album, so I took Strategies Against Architecture Volume One to Mute, and they were happy to put it out. Daniel actually offered to put the Hardt imprint on there, to which I said, No, my work here is done. Foolishly.

Sax for hire and Orange Juice
I was known as a kind of audio alchemist, so I was collaborating a lot. I was really interested in studio work, and a lot of the collaborations were studio based at the time. It started with Matt and THE THE, and then one thing led to another, and I ended up collaborating with pretty much everybody. It was a close-knit community in London back in those days, and there was a lot of cross pollination.
Also, for some reason, for about five minutes, I became the go-to sax player. I had taught myself how to play sax because I wanted to have brass instruments on Foetus records. So, I borrowed a sax from my roommate Katy Beale, who was Mick Harvey's partner and now wife, and learnt just enough so I could do overdubs and James Chance-influenced solos, stuff like that. I wasn't particularly great at playing it, I was the only sax player people knew. So, I ended up playing sax with Lydia on a tour of Scandinavia when Roland dropped out and then the Virgin Prunes asked me to play sax on one of their albums, which I did. I also went to Greece with The Birthday Party. There was a festival in Athens which was the first one that new wave bands had ever played. The headliners were The Fall, New Order and The Birthday Party. So, I was hanging out with them and they asked me to play sax on the encore, which was The Stooges’ Fun House. And it was absolute mayhem, the stage was invaded, and I barely got a few toots out. But it did end up on one of their live albums.
I was also friends with Edwin Collins from Orange Juice, although funnily enough when the whole Orange Juice and Postcard thing first came up, I didn't identify with it at all. I thought it was it was a bit weak and wimpy, and I had a friend who knew Edwin and, I was like, "Fucking Edwin Collins, that wimp, when I meet him I'm going to push him down the stairs." And when I did meet him, Edwin came up to me and said, "Och, Foetus, are you going to push me down some stairs then?"  And after that, we just became really good friends, he's a great guy with a great sense of humour and we had a lot of similar reference points. And then I became friends with the others, Davey, Malcolm and Zeke, and we hung out and stuff.
So when Orange Juice got offered Top of the Pops for Rip It Up, they asked me to come and mime the sax solo. Which was fun. And then weirdly enough, they were headlining the Lyceum, and I got a call – I don't where I was, but it wasn't my house because I didn't have a telephone – saying, "You've got to get down to Lyceum because Orange Juice want you to play Rip It Up with them." So, I went over there with my sax and played the encore.

Soft Cell, Marc & the Mambas and Coil
Those were very heady days for Some Bizarre and there was a lot of success. Stevo had a golden ticket with Soft Cell – they were huge, Tainted Love had been a worldwide smash, they’d continued to have hit singles in the UK, and they were on the cover of every music paper imaginable. Every day there’d be a clan of Marc Almond clones hanging around outside the Some Bizzare office waiting for a Marc spotting, and he’d sign autographs and they’d squeal and stuff. But up in office, it was quite social, and you would go in and hang out. It was the place to go to find out what was going on and you’d run into people there. It was where I became friends with Coil which led to working with them.

Working with Marc started with just hanging out too, and then Soft Cell invited me to sing Ghost Rider with them live, which I did a few times and on a TV show [Switch, 1983]. When Marc was recording the Mambas stuff, he asked me to write a track for him which became the song A Million Manias. That was a really magical time for Marc, the confluence of influences that were on Torment and Toreros, the mood of the songs, both his own and the covers, was really dark but really heartfelt. It’s almost perfectly curated, a great distillation of what he was into at that time. I don't know how it did commercially but I think it was a really successful crystallisation of his vision. Marc and I also recorded the Flesh Volcano EP [eventually released in 1987], and we did a one-off show opening for Cabaret Voltaire under the name Bruise ‘n’ Chain. It was unannounced and really thrown together. Marc had put some backing tracks together on cassette over which I played sax and guitar and he sang. It was pretty scrappy.
As for Coil’s Scatology, they asked me to produce it and I consider it a production job. The lines are a bit blurred, because we all played on it, but I was definitely honouring what they wanted it to be. I became good friends with Geoff Rushton up at the Some Bizarre offices, we talked about music a lot and we had a lot of common reference points. He really liked the way my records sounded so that's how it came out. I’d go over their place and listen to their demos, and I think one or two of the demos ended up on the album untouched. But with other tracks we took the demos and they transferred them to a 24-track and we put overdubs on them. And then some stuff we started from scratch. So that was a mixture of things.
It was an interesting point for them because their trajectory up until then had been more instrumental. Scatology was a mixture of sonic experiments, songs and even kind of poppy things. So they’d kind of broadened their palate. It's an essential chapter in their history, although they covered so many different things in their time it’s definitely one of the corner stones. And around the same time, we did the Tainted Love single, different sessions but they kind of blur together.

Nick Cave, Lydia Lunch and The Immaculate Consumptive 
The Birthday Party had dissolved, it was a mutual thing, and Nick asked me to be involved with whatever was next. And that started with us writing the music for Wings Off Flies on a piano at Lydia’s house. And then we went into the studio with Mick and Blixa Bargeld. I played some guitar on an early version of From Her to Eternity, which was totally different to the one that we all know. From about March to September, I was also recording Hole and the 12" inches that came out around the same time, all at Wave Studios in Hoxton Square. And that was my first time in a 24-track studio working on Foetus stuff. I had only just finished mixing everything right up until the eve of going to New York for the Immaculate Consumptive shows which were October '83. I was doing edits on Cold Day In Hell right up until the day before I left for New York. Lydia had been offered some Halloween shows at Danceteria, and asked Nick, Marc and I to do a kind of twisted cabaret. It was four very strong personalities, and as so few people got to see it and there's no documentation, it's gone into this sort of legendary status. It was short-lived but really interesting. It may have seemed like a weird collision of people, but we were all friends and we'd all worked together before in one way or another. I had done stuff with Marc, Lydia and Nick, so for me it made total sense. Marc and I did a segment, we did A Million Manias and I played sax, and we did one song when all four of us played together. It was the first time I played live as Foetus, and it was also super-significant for me because it was while doing those shows I decided to move to New York.

New York and Swans
The Birthday Party had met Lydia in New York when they played there, and she got involved with them and moved to London. I used to write the press releases for The Birthday Party when they were on 4AD which were quite fanciful and prosaic, and Lydia had seen them and asked me to write one for her, which is how we got to know each other. I was doing a lot of stuff with Lydia before we got together romantically. We recorded StinkFist around the same time as we did the backing tracks for The Immaculate Consumptive. Anni Hogan, Barry Adamson and Mick were involved in putting those together. Once I'd moved to New York we fleshed it out and added some other material which we recorded with Norman Westberg from Swans, and that became a set called Swelter. Lydia and I performed that with Cliff Martinez, who'd been playing drums with Captain Beefheart and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. At the end of '83 we did a bunch of shows in Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco, places like that.
I knew about Circus Morte which was Michael Gira's pre-Swans group and the first Swans 12". Through the connection with Lydia, one of the first people I met in New York was Michael and we became really good pals, and we used to go out every night, getting up to mischief and stuff.
The first time I saw Swans at the Pyramid in New York they absolutely floored me. It was it was one of the most visceral things that I'd ever seen. It was such an extreme outpouring of emotion and bodily fluids. It felt like saliva and snot and sweat and blood, a kind of excruciating but ecstatic exorcism. It was so intense, but at the same time I heard echoes of The Stooges in it as well, that kind of rawness. And Roli Mosimann’s drumming was almost channelling John Bonham because the beats were really slow. This was post-Filth and pre-Cop, and it was, woah, just incredible. My motivation for turning [Some Bizzare’s] Rob Collins on to Swans was I thought they were amazing and wanted them to be exposed and have an avenue to get their records out. And it worked out.

EMF, White Zombie, The Cult and ‘90s alt rock remix culture
First of all, if you can remember the ‘90s you weren't there. Second of all, Nirvana – and to a lesser extent Nine Inch Nails – changed everything. There was a lot of money going around, but also there was a lot of really interesting music that became super popular. A band like The Breeders were selling close to a million albums, The Melvins signed to Atlantic, and even The Boredoms got picked up by Warners. I was asked to remix EMF's second single, I Believe, and I became friendly with them and I'd see them when they came to town. I then did a mix of Lies, which ended up as being the single mix.
I was then asked to do a remix for Prong, a three-piece metal band, for their track Prove You Wrong. I did my thing and it turned into a bit of a hit, and as a result, metal people were coming to me to remix them. So I ended up doing bands like Pantera, Megadeth, and the Chilli Peppers. Although I was more interested in things like Aphex Twin and stuff like that, I was doing it anyway, because those were the sort of jobs I was being offered and the money was good.
I also seemed to be doing a bunch of production around that time too, which was interesting for me as it was a bit of a change. With The Beyond I had remixed two of their songs and as a result of that, they asked me to produce their album [Chasm]. They were super young, and easy to work with, and I think that album turned out really well. But then management took my mixes remixed them, and I was really unhappy about that, as the mixes weren't as good as the ones that I did. The Silverfish thing [Organ Fan] was really good too. We worked at a studio that was near my place, and they all stayed at my house, so we were kind of together 24 hours a day. Some of the songs they came in with were in skeletal form, so we worked them out on the spot. I thought that was a good project, it was fun.

Then the next major thing was White Zombie, where I was asked to produce. I had known them for a long time and I used to go and see them play, and they were phenomenal live. When they started they were much scuzz rock than they were metal, it was like wilder and weirder and more dissonant than what they turned into, which I liked as well. But I produced four songs, which became the demos that got them the deal with Geffen. And then I was supposed to produce that album [La Sexorcisto] but due to lack of communication and so on, I ended up not doing it. It was a super successful album anyway, but I really liked the way that those demos sounded. And I think they sounded better than the album that came out. But I'm really glad for what happened to them and the success they had.
Remix culture certainly from my end died really quickly as by the end of the ‘90s everyone had their own digital audio workstation. People weren't really interested in doing remixes. I still do the occasional one but it seems that the trend of doing millions of remixes and making remix albums has sort of disappeared, as far as I can see.

www.foetus.org
www.facebook.com/pages/J-G-Thirlwell/28556888681
https://www.instagram.com/jgthirlwell/
https://jgthirlwell.bandcamp.com/
http://jgthirlwell.tumblr.com/
https://twitter.com/jgthirlwell
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4l1uKp3KiyrIzfYLk62d1A

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#NowPlaying

I was at an event last week where a music industry veteran talked about his career and played some of the music he was involved in putting out. It was a great evening, but when it came to the Q&A section, half the questions came from ‘better in my day’ boomers banging on about how the music they love ‘wouldn’t be allowed to happen these days.’ I despair at this attitude, particularly as it tends to come from my generation. Excellent new music is out there, it’s just down to us to find it.

Case in point, Brighton’s Goo Records organised a day’s worth of new music at the city’s Hope and Ruin last weekend. Spread out over the venue’s two floors (the downstairs was free to get in), and showcasing a dozen bands from in and around the area, the ticketed part of the gig was sold out, while the free part was packed, with the acts playing rough and ready sets to an enthusiastic audience.

Time constraints meant I only caught a couple of bands, but most impressive (to me) was Everyday Saints. A glam gothic five piece, not only did they look incredible (like all good bands, every member had their own thing going on yet looked like a gang), they also sounded amazing and were totally committed to their performance. They could play too, the songs were good and the arrangements thrilling. Without being reductive, I could hear hints of Roxy Music, Suede, Bauhaus, and All About Eve, but really they just sound like themselves. I was properly impressed and will definitely be keeping an eye on them.

So the next time you hear some bloke (it’s always a bloke) going on about how things aren’t as good as they used to be, tell them to get their head out of the latest issue of Mojo and go and track down something they’ve never heard before. There is more new music being made now than ever, we just need to put a bit of effort into finding it.

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For those who read to the end…

Thanks as always for reading and, hopefully, subscribing. I seem to be going through a bit of purple patch with my music writing at the moment, and have quite a few pieces coming up for Record Collector and The Quietus.
Plus I’m just about to sign on the doted line for my next book, which I’ll hopefully be able to announce soon. All very exciting.
The downside of all this is that moving forward, I won’t be able to keep up my goal of posting weekly for The Dancing Architect. Taking into account the time it takes to compile a post, I think bi-weekly missives are a more realistic aim.
However, that’s not to say that it will not continue to be a priority. I have three interviews in the bag for upcoming issues that are completely exclusive to The Dancing Architect and will not appear anywhere else. I’m keeping the identities under wraps for now, but if you’re a fan of the artists that have featured so far, you’re not going to want to miss these.
I’ll be posting them over the next couple of months, so make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss out, and tell your friends…