27/02/1955 - 25/11/2010
Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, designer, director, pioneering, co-founder of the industrial post punk musicThrobbing Gristle has died aged 55. The musician, artist and provocateur "passed away peacefully in his sleep" at his home in Bangkok, Thailand.As a commercial artist, designer and photographer, he produced a plethora of album sleeves and videos for artists including Pink Floyd, Paul McCartney, Peter Gabriel and Rage Against the Machine, as well as hundreds of television commercials.
But he was also one of the most original and influential musicians of the post-punk era, initially as part of the band Throbbing Gristle, whose taboo-probing, blackly comic, defiantly non-commercial approach mirrored the other side of Christopherson's work.Occasionally, the two worlds collided, as when he attempted to convince McCartney that his album Tug of War should have a cover depicting a naked male body hanging from a noose; the former Beatle declined. More often, they fed into each other in more subtle ways.
A man who delighted in subversion, Christopherson was tickled by the notion that the money he made from directing commercials, such as a floral, soft-focus ad for Max Factor's Le Jardin perfume starring Jane Seymour, enabled his post-Throbbing Gristle band Coil to make records called things such as The Anal Staircase and His Body Was a Playground for the Nazi Elite.He was born in Leeds into what he described as a "large academic family": his father, Derman, was a professor of engineering who later became master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and received a knighthood. After taking his A-levels, Peter went to study computer programming, theatre design and video at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
While there he became interested in the work of radical performance artists such as Chris Burden, photographers, including Robert Mapplethorpe, and the surrealist Arthur Tress.Although the subject matter of Christopherson's photography – usually boy models with simulated injuries – was considered too shocking for publication, their technical quality earned him a job with Hipgnosis, the design team best known for producing Pink Floyd's album sleeves, on his return to England in 1974.
They also impressed Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti of the transgressive performance art group COUM Transmissions, who Christopherson met at an event in Kennington, south London, the same year. Such was Christopherson's enthusiasm for the sexual aspects of COUM's performances, which often featured nudity and self-mutilation, and took inspiration from Tutti's "day job" as a pornographic model and stripper – that the pair affectionately called him Sleazy, a nickname that stuck.
He began participating in their performances the following year, while continuing to design album sleeves and work as a photographer. In the latter capacity, one of his clients was a then-unknown band called the Sex Pistols, who Christopherson shot in the toilets of a YMCA, styled as rent boys, an image rejected as too shocking by their manager, Malcolm McLaren.McLaren's reaction prefigured the response of the punk movement to Throbbing Gristle, the musical project Christopherson, P-Orridge and Tutti embarked on in 1975 with Chris Carter, a sound engineer and electronics enthusiast who built his own synthesizers.
Throbbing Gristle's sound and subject matter proved too provocative and confrontational, even in the provocative and confrontational climate of punk. At first, they dealt in unsettling grey noise underpinned with clanking electronic rhythms and lyrics betraying a fascination with serial killers, fascism, sadism and death.They dubbed their sound "industrial music", and upset not only the kind of people who found punk rock offensive – a 1976 Throbbing Gristle performance at the London's Institute of Contemporary Arts led the Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn to call them "the wreckers of civilisation" – but punk audiences, too.
Their 1976 debut album, The Second Annual Report, included a recording of a compere at a Brighton gig berating the audience who had just booed the band offstage.
