r/PowerElectronics • u/UnspeakableArchives • 7h ago
The History of Whitehouse - Part One: The Early Years
This story starts in the late 70s with William "Disco Caligula" Bennett, a musician so accomplished that Wikipedia doesn't have a real page for him, despite having pages for five other) musicians) with) that name.
At that time, the music scene was already evolving thanks to groups like the jazz funk band known as Throbbing Gristle. This new breed of musicians had begun to experiment with incorporating sounds that weren't normally considered "musical" simply because they sounded awful.
Meanwhile, Bennett was growing increasingly frustrated with the contemporary London musical scene. Everywhere he looked, he discovered that bands were wasting valuable stage time "performing" things called "songs" in order to "entertain" audiences. Right then and there, Bennett made it his life's goal to put a stop to this.
To this end, Bennett founded Whitehouse in 1980, as a way to combine the two great passions in his life: screaming at confused bar patrons and disappointing his parents. He immediately began populating his band with the least-fuckable men in existence in an effort to make himself look better by comparison.
The first person recruited was teenaged runaway Philip "The White Noise" Best, who was already conveniently chained to a radiator in Bennett’s basement. Bennett had provided the youngster with an EDP Wasp synthesizer, and then purposefully trained him wrong because he thought it would be funny.
"It was," Bennett later confirmed.
The next to join was Kevin "Ten Cassettes Too Many" Tomkins, who would go on to become well-known for playing the autoharp and also pachinko machines. Tomkins would remain with Whitehouse for two years before leaving to pursue a normal life, having been the first person to realize that membership was entirely voluntary.
But Bennett knew that no band would be complete without an obese sex offender awkwardly lumbering around the stage for no discernible reason. For this, Bennett tapped world-renowned pedophile Peter "Not Allowed Within 500 Feet of a School Zone" Sotos, whom he had discovered in one of the booths above the Bijou Theater), where Sotos was on his hands and knees, licking up cold, gelatinous cum from the floor while jacking off to the autopsy photos of Adam Walsh.
Also there were something like ten other members during this period, but they were all somehow even less interesting than those four.
Together, the group pioneered a new genre that Bennett christened "Power Electronics)," after a technical engineering manual he once saw.
They were doing something truly unprecedented: taking an art form traditionally associated with bringing people together and transforming it into a means of making everyone in the room wish they were somewhere else.
And unfortunately for everyone involved, this was only the beginning.
