In Damage Limitation, 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. His 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 introductory essay, and the poetry pieces that follow, eviscerate and lay bare the myth and bluster that surrounded Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV with a surgeon’s eye. […] the excoriation of the journey from Throbbing Gristle through Psychic TV, the manifestos, the cult-ish Temple of Psychic Youth, indoctrination, and the noisy, atonal, and confrontational music and films, is comprehensive. […] What Loydell has done here adds more value than another history or hagiography (of which there are many) as it challenges the challengers back.’
   – Alan Rider, Outside Left

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. 

Rupert has written about his writing methodology, ‘Process, Remix, Juxtaposition, Assemblage and Selection’, for the Australian journal Axon, in response to the question ‘How does the 21st century poet makes poetry out of autobiographical material?’; and has recently published ‘The Words Already Around Us: A Conversation Between Rupert Loydell and H. L. Hix’ in the current issue of Writing In Practice. The Spring 2025 issue of the Korean journal The Symbology Institute includes an interview, ‘Collage and Beyond, & Poetry’ along with an ekphrastic poem and commentary.  

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Rupert Loydell is the editor of Stride and a contributing editor to International Times. He has many books of poetry in print, published by zimzalla, Shearsman, Red Ceilings, Salt and KFS. He has co-authored many collaborative works; and edited Smartarse and co-edited Yesterday’s Music Today for Knives Forks & Spoons Press, From Hepworth’s Garden Out: poems about painters and St. Ives for Shearsman, and Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh: manifestos and unmanifestos for Salt. His critical writing has appeared in Punk & Post-Punk (which he is on the editorial board of), Journal of Writing and Creative Practice, New Writing, English, Text, Axon, Musicology Research, Revenant, The Quint: an interdisciplinary journal from the north and Journal of Visual Art Practice. He also authored chapters in Brian Eno. Oblique Music (Bloomsbury, 2016), Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Music in Twin Peaks: Listen to the Sounds (Routledge, 2021), Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and A Critical Companion to David Lynch (Lexington Books, 2024).

Reviews

Alan Rider in Outside Left.

Dominic Rivron in International Times.

Lucia Z. Liner in Regen Magazine.

Nicholas Royle in Confingo.

Ian Trowell in Punk & Post Punk.