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from subverting a tradition, were just behaving like pop stars. Occupying a disappearing middle between boredom and disdain, the cover seems calculated to please no one.
    There is another possibility that none of the members of the band openly acknowledge, but which a close ally of the band, and the creator of
Sordide Sentimentale
label and magazine, flagged when I approached him for his thoughts on the cover image and the stance of the band within it:
    Jean-Pierre Turmel: At first there is a glance at the record cover, and jubilation. I, too, am passionate about the Sixties. In TG there is an obvious “modern” aspect, a “futurist” (in the artistic meaning of the word) way of considering pop music. But I immediately sense the nostalgic dimension behind this,although this was well hidden by the band. I remember that I wrote one day to Gen and said that we were both two old hippies, and he agreed. So, for me, this record cover was less about humor and parody than deep nostalgia, nostalgia for an age of innocence, even though [the sixties were also a] hard time for the mind and the personality (generalized censorship). I think that for many fans this record cover was a surprise, but not for me. There was also a need to break their urban, military looking image. I think that it was at this moment that I began to develop a theory of “deception” as an essential need for any artist: the necessity to deceive your “fan,” who always asks you to do again and again the same performance. If you don’t organize the “deception” yourself then you are trapped. One of the reasons I communicated well with Gen since the beginning was that despite appearances, I was persuaded that TG was not only a “sordid” band but also a deeply “sentimental” one. Especially Gen. And you can’t really understand this band if you ignore this aspect.
    In his guidebook
Highways & Byways in Sussex
, E. V. Lucas praises Beachy Head for having “the best turf, the best prospect, best loneliness and the best air” (Surtees, p. 15). The loneliness on offer can prove terminal. Statistics on the number of suicides there are rarely reliable. Coroners, mindful of the social stigma and aware that a definitive suicide verdict cheats surviving family members out of life insurance policies, have tended toward sins of omission in their decisions about whether or not to conclusively rule a cause of death as “suicide” or “open.” Furthermore, it is said that in the absence of an explicit suicide note, past coroners tended to conservatively avoid ascribing suicidal intent in cases of “falls” at thecliff’s edge. Whatever the true number, it is clear that deaths at Beachy Head were increasingly in the public eye over the years leading up to Throbbing Gristle’s act of musical homage. Dr. Surtee’s statistical survey of coroner reports suggests that the total deaths at Beachy Head rose threefold from 1965 to 1979. An emergency telephone with posted number for the Samaritans was erected near the cliff edge in 1976, and would have been on the site when the band arrived for their photo shoot. The implications of a certain site becoming a de facto “suicide spot” are themselves worth considering. The withdrawal of a human being from society turns into an ironically conformist act when this most individual of decisions slants overwhelmingly in favor of a sanctioned, “scenic” and beautiful spot. Mute nature becomes conscripted and put to work, and everything, even the most absolute gesture of refusal, is tainted with a faint but poisonous hint of cliché.
    Quite literally a postcard from the edge that laughs at suicide, the cover of
20 Jazz Funk Greats
makes good on the punk promise of a cheap holiday in other people’s misery, then goes beyond it. It’s compelling not because it is a uniquely inappropriate act of public relations, and therefore prescient of the savvy, self-canceling strategies of post-grunge marketing in the 1990s. Nor