Throbbing Gristle - 20 Jazz Funk Greats (LP)

Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats remains one of those records that still feels like it’s smirking at you from the shelf. Released in 1979 on their own Industrial Records, it arrived with a cheerful cover shot at Beachy Head in East Sussex, a clifftop known for far darker reasons. The title and sleeve wink at bargain bin compilations, yet the music inside is anything but background. It’s the group’s most accessible set on the surface, but the joke lands because the heart of the record is still cold, wry and charged with a very particular menace.

The band of Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Chris Carter and Peter Christopherson had already turned shock and sound collage into a language by this point, and here they tidy that vocabulary just enough to pull you closer. The title track opens as a sly lounge pastiche, all breezy melody and soft focus, then you notice the air is poisoned around the edges. Many listeners come for Hot on the Heels of Love, which glides on a straight pulse and glimmering synth pattern, Tutti whispering like she’s a metre from your ear. Critics often call it a proto-house moment, and that fits. You can dance to it, but you never relax.

The record works so well because it keeps shifting the ground under you. Convincing People circles a flat intonation and clipped electronics until suggestion turns into threat. What a Day spits noise and bitterness, a purgative that makes the sweeter moments taste stranger. Walkabout feels like a postcard looped until it frays, bright but haunted. Still Walking drifts on a soft machine heartbeat. You get synthesisers and drum programming, sure, but also tape edits, room tone, and the sense that Carter’s circuitry is being bent on the fly. It is precision with a grubby fingerprint.

Part of the album’s pull is the way it connects scenes that did not yet know each other. Industrial Music for Industrial People was the slogan stamped on their sleeves, and this set is the sharpest expression of it. Yet you can hear why DJs and electronic producers later picked up threads from Hot on the Heels of Love and ran with them. At the same time, the rougher pieces gave noise artists and post-punk outliers a blueprint for how to push at form without losing the song. Plenty of publications have since called it a landmark, but you don’t need a list to feel that. It sounds like a hinge opening toward the 1980s.

The cover art has its own mythos, and with reason. The band looks almost wholesome against the South Downs greenery, but they chose that location for its grim notoriety, and even the colour grading feels like a dare. It’s one of those sleeves that turns heads in a crate. If you collect Throbbing Gristle vinyl, you know the thrill of spotting a clean copy of 20 Jazz Funk Greats vinyl, then flipping it over and clocking the tracklist that reads like in-jokes and warnings. I first heard the title track piping through a Melbourne record store on a rainy afternoon, and it felt like the clerk was letting me in on something. That’s still the best way to encounter it, though you can buy Throbbing Gristle records online easily now, especially with so many shops in the vinyl records Australia scene leaning into deep catalogue.

Original pressings came out via Industrial Records in the UK, and it has been reissued several times since, including editions overseen by the band’s own imprint in the 2010s. The remasters sharpen the low-end throb and tidy some tape murk without sanding off the grit, which matters for music that lives in the quiet menace between sounds. If you are hunting for Throbbing Gristle albums on vinyl, this is the one that earns its shelf space beyond historical interest. It’s playable, unsettling, and oddly beautiful.

What keeps 20 Jazz Funk Greats fresh is the balance it strikes. It’s not a prank, though it is funny. It’s not pop, though it does shimmer. It’s a document of four artists testing how far a song can stretch before it breaks, and finding a sweet spot where body music and psychic warfare meet. File it next to the records that changed your listening habits rather than the ones that matched your mood. Then put it on and see which part of you leans forward first.