Falmouth lecturer publishes new poetry book

In Damage Limitation, a poetry book in the form of a zine, published by zimZalla, Senior Lecturer Rupert Loydell explores power, abuse, music and cultdom, and how the band Throbbing Gristle - and its later offspring Psychic TV - influenced their followers and other musicians.

The poems engage with ideas of noise, self-mythologising, surveillance, occult mysticism, strategies of control and psychic damage, as a form of cultural exorcism and alternative documentation, drawing on writings about and by the band to weave together impressionistic fragments of text through remixing, collaging, recontextualisation and juxtaposition.  

The book is published as a zine, with collaged design by the author, appropriate to its 1980s subject and challenges the self-publicity and marketing strategies adopted by the bands.

"The one time I saw [the band] in Manchester in the mid-80s they came on hours late, played some pretty basic industrial rhythms, accompanied by a film they claimed was shocking but which was so full of static and distortion it could have been (and probably was) anything. To be honest, Ivor Cutler's poetry and music performance in the hall next door, which we snuck into whilst waiting, was far more 'out there' than Psychic TV." - Rupert Loydell

Damage Limitation is part of Rupert's ongoing research in to industrial music, cults and obsession, following on from The Salvation Engine (Analogue Flashback, 2025), a poetic exploration of abuse within the organised church; a chapter about Nurse With Wound and Cabaret Voltaire in Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022); numerous interviews, reviews and articles for the Intellect journal Punk and Post-Punk; and two forthcoming sequences of poems, one about relics and religious pilgrimage, the other critiquing the Moon Landing Conspiracy.