Single

45 RPM 12" with 2 live versions of the song "Discipline" recorded in Berlin and Manchester. Center labels are cream with black printing. Glossy picture sleeve of TG group stood outside ex-Nazi Ministry of Propaganda

Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda

The Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda was Nazi Germany's ministry that enforced Nazi Party ideology in Germany and regulated its culture and society. Founded on March 13, 1933, by Adolf Hitler's new National Socialist government, the Ministry was headed by Dr...

 in Berlin on front and Val Denham holding Hitler Youth dagger

Hitler Youth Knife

The Hitler Youth Knife was a knife sold to and carried by boys of the paramilitary youth organization of the Nazi Party that existed from 1922 to 1945. The Hitler Youth wore knives as part of their uniform, which was very similar to the uniforms worn by the Sturmabteilung or SA...

 centre back. The words "Techno Primitive" scratched on side A and "Psykick Youth Squad" on side B. Both tracks were later released on the CD version of 20 Jazz Funk Greats

20 Jazz Funk Greats

20 Jazz Funk Greats is the third full-length album by industrial music pioneers Throbbing Gristle. The track "Still Walking" also appears on the live album Heathen Earth, although with a radically different structure...

.

Track listing

Side A:

1. "Discipline (Manchester)" - 8:06

Side B:

1. "Discipline (Berlin)" - 10:45

Song

"Discipline" may be Throbbing Gristle's most infamous song. First played at the S036 Club in Berlin (as documented on the single), it was at first entirely improvised, based upon a topic suggestion given by Cosey Fanni Tutti

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Cosey Fanni Tutti is best known as a performance artist and for her time in Throbbing Gristle and Chris & Cosey....

 before the show. The song is driven by a minimal, pulsing synthesizer drumbeat, over which Genesis P-Orridge

Genesis P-Orridge

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is an English singer-songwriter, musician, writer and artist. P-Orridge's early confrontational performance work in COUM Transmissions in the late 1960s and early 1970s along with the industrial band Throbbing Gristle, which dealt with subjects such as prostitution,...

 would declaim lyrics surrounding the concept of discipline, slowly introducing other musical elements, such as electric bass and walls of guitar or synth noise. After Berlin, it was played at nearly every TG show up to the group's demise. Often it would range in length from eight to twelve minutes, although it could be stretched out much longer: A version from one of their last shows at the Lyceum in London was over half an hour, as documented on the bootleg Once Upon a Time and the VHS release Destiny.

The song was covered by Marc Almond

Marc Almond

Marc Almond is an English singer-songwriter and musician, who originally found fame as half of the seminal synthpop/New Wave duo Soft Cell...

 and Friends on a flexi disc

Flexi disc

The flexi disc is a phonograph record made of a thin, flexible vinyl sheet with a molded-in spiral stylus groove, and is designed to be playable on a normal phonograph turntable...

 that was issued free with an issue of Flexi-Pop Magazine and by German synthpop

Synthpop

Synthpop is a genre of popular music that first became prominent in the 1980s, in which the synthesizer is the dominant musical instrument. It was prefigured in the 1960s and early 1970s by the use of synthesizers in progressive rock, electronic art rock, disco and particularly the "Kraut rock" of...

 group Propaganda

Propaganda (band)

Propaganda is a German synthpop group, formed in 1982. They were one of the initial roster of acts signed to Trevor Horn's ZTT label, between 1984 and 1986, during which they released the critically acclaimed album A Secret Wish....

, as "Disziplin".