in this post you mentioned how much his family & relationship with his parents affected his music. I’ve been trying to find interviews/mentions of his family but i’ve not had much luck (i might be looking in the wrong places). You don’t have to like, directly find the links but could you point me in the right direction for some info about this ?
Sorry if this is a bother!! I’ll probably find somthing eventually but you seem to be in the know for a lot of his stuff
Hi anon, thanks for the message!
Yeah, Thirlwell's family (particularly his father) had a really strong impact on a lot of his early work, but you can still see a lot of the aftershocks in his later work in the 90's and through to today.
This ended up being a bit longer than intended - hope you don't mind.
His father, Hal Thirlwell was a soldier in the second world war who was stationed in south-east Asia (modern-day Singapore + Thailand), and was in February 1943 captured as a prisoner of war and interred at the Changi camp, under the authority of the Japanese army. Over the duration of his imprisonment, 30% of all incarcerated soldiers died, Thirlwell was forced into labour and to complete a forced march of 200 kilometers, contracted both malaria and cholera, and was for a period paralyzed from the waist down due to the compounding health compilations. He was freed at the end of August 1945, where he was evacuated to a hospital, his health having degraded to the point that another survivor of the force described having seen him "literally dragging himself" by hand down the rail line that they were working on.
Now, J.G. obviously wasn't born at this point, but considering the prominence of [waterborne] disease, Naziism, the outbreak of WW2, the homogenous brutality of soldiers, and genocide in his work, as well as his obsessive use of Asiatic/Japanese soldiers, it seems likely that Hal brought home this trauma, and that it was something that J.G. grew up in the shadow of, which explains how intimately he relates to it in his work. I will say that a lot of the Asian figures in his cover art are actually Chinese (drawn from this book), but considering they're paired so frequently with Nazi symbology, I think it's fair to say that he exploited potential ambiguity, and intended for the individuals to be seen as Japanese.
Alternatively, it's also possible that Thirlwell leaned on Chinese figures because he may have identified & felt a sense of kinship with the people, due to both his father and the Chinese having suffered atrocities at the hands of the Japanese. In either regard, his employ of the motif was significantly informed by his interest in Communist imagery and his habit of drawing parallels between far-left and far-right regimes.
I think the paternal-military influences in his work reached their peak, or their most explicit point, in the mid-90's, with the release of NULL - considering that J.G. actually had Hal's soldier headshot printed on the CD (he posts the original unedited photograph here). I've no doubt that the prominence of violence in his work is in part due to the fact that the bourgeoning industrial and alternative genres prioritized shock and offense, but it's clear that in J.G.'s case a lot of this has a much more personal root.
Comparatively speaking, his mother and sister (through whom he is an uncle & great uncle!) have a lot less of an explicit presence in his art, but there are certain songs (i.e. Halo Flamin' Lead) where I think you can make the case that he's talking about his youth & home experience in a vague, holistic light.
Growing up, the Thirlwell family was middle class (he mentions this in a number of interviews, but my exact source is here. The full quote is the interviewer asking "was it a typical middle-class home?", to which Thirlwell responds "fairly." I've had the quote written down for months now, but didn't note down the exact timestamp at which it occurs, so sorry about that), with Hal managing a number of various stores during his teen years. His schooling involved him attending an all-male Baptist school, where he was ostracized, regularly bullied and subject to homophobic abuse by his peers - an experience that was evidently incredibly traumatic, considering that Thirlwell has repeatedly described having to "[block] out most of my childhood", and has observed that his emotional dysfunction originated, or at least emerged, in his adolescence ("There was one day [...] I was eight years old and out of nowhere I just started crying and couldn't stop; I felt so alone".)
Although his academic performance was incredibly strong (receiving the highest marks in Literature amongst his cohort in his final year, and being repeatedly recognized for his art and English results) his teachers would regularly criticize him on account of the fact that he was a non-believer ("James needs to have more faith"), which further estranged him from his peers, and drove him towards a form of 'radical atheism' and anti-Christianity.
Both above images sourced from his school (Carey Grammar)'s 1977 yearbook, pages 9 and 33. Other academic acknowledgements of Thirlwell can be found in earlier yearbooks, but in the event that you try seek them out, I warn that they will regularly misspell his last name. I do have screenshots of most of them, so in any regard I can send them to you to save you the hassle.
After graduating High School he did briefly pursue a tertiary education at Melbourne State College (ironically where I'm currently studying), but quickly realized that he had no interest in studying art in a formal environment, something that compounded with his resentment of Australian culture (the "cultural cringe") & with the trauma of his childhood, leading to him leaving the country at 18 to move to the UK, something that he evidently had "always [planned]" on some level. He describes the act as being "tantamount to running away from home", and that he had only told his parents that he was going on a short holiday before going AWOL for 3 decades. An important aspect to note is that his mother is Scottish, and that she had a background in music education in London, and that he had always felt more comfortable in the UK as opposed to in Australia. Ironically, the process of abandoning his family in Australia was also in an abstract way a form of reconnection with his mother.
His bitterness towards Australia (as a whole nation, not strictly as a culture in isolation) extended long into his adulthood, considering the fact that after leaving the continent, he did not return to Melbourne for another 32 years. This abstinence was broken in 2012 when he finally reconnected with his father (who was at that stage dying), as well as his mother (and I presume sister as well). His Manorexia album Cholera Nocebo was published and performed in the country shortly after, so I would hazard a guess that the work was directly inspired by the experience of reconnecting with his father (recall that Hal contracted cholera during his imprisonment). Since then, it does seem that he's on good terms with his family, given that he regularly returns to the country (at least once a year), not only to tour but also to catch up with relatives.
Hope that this has helped explain the relationship between his parents and his music, or at the very least, has highlighted the influence that his upbringing has had on his life's work. If there's any things I later realize I forgot to include, I'll come back and edit this.
turns out i fucked up some of the calculations the first time and ended up having to redo a lot of it but heres the amended versions (now with foetus themed colors + lines between scatterplot points for your viewing pleasure)
Curious to know what other people feel about the NYC Foetus documentary (youtube). I rewatched a few of the interview segments yesterday and tho I don't think it's as bad as I remember, its still astoundingly shallow lol. 0 mention of his family and his relationship to his parents despite that being one of the biggest influences of his early-mid 80's output
kaledo-art
yousharknotpass
tangentwithtanner