10 Martello Street

I'm clicking my way around the world this morning, courtesy of Google Maps and my latest stopover ties in with the music I'm currently listening to... Below a picture of 10 Martello Street, a fairly innocuous looking building in Hackney, East London but in the latter half of the 70's, number 10, otherwise known as Death Factory served as Throbbing Gristle's studio. Reports about Hackney are occasionally grim - I remember seeing Hackney on the news during the 2011 London riots, but looking at this picture of Martello Street, the immediate area around Death Factory looks for more salubrious than it did when Throbbing Gristle were recording there - to the right across the street from the building is a small block of luxury apartments. The relationship between music and place is an interesting one to mull over - the disrepair and decrepitude of Hackney in the mid-70's fed into Throbbing Gristle's music. Interviewed in 1983 Genesis P-Orridge recalled: "When we finished that first record, we went outside and we suddenly heard trains going past, and little workshops under the railway arches, and the lathes going and electric saws, and we suddenly thought, “We haven’t actually created anything at all, we’ve just taken it in subconsciously and re-created it.”