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NANTUCKET LIT PHLOG

MY HAMBURGER LADY STORY

NJB // 2025-09-12 // Lafayette, CO

© 2025 Nicholas Bernhard

CC-BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)

My Mastodon feed recently brought up the infamous song Hamburger Lady
(https://krapp.masto.host/@krapp/115194861381389514), and it reminded me of a
time when the song was a little *too* effective. 

For those who don't know: Hamburger Lady is a song by the 70s British "band"
Throbbing Gristle. Throbbing Gristle was one of the first bands to make
"industrial" music, in fact their label was Industrial Records. They absolutely
paved the way for artists like Nine Inch Nails. This was the time of punk music
and anti-establishment attitudes, and Throbbing Gristle was known for live
shows that could be actively hostile to audiences. 

Hamburger Lady might be one of the most distrubing songs ever recorded. Even if
you play it in your car on a cheerful sunny day, the sky will appear to darken,
and a feeling of dread will soak into your bones. You would not want to play
this song in the dark, or driving at night. 

The song begins with a deep, slow four-on-the-floor beat. Then, a synthesizer
tone fades in, oscillating up and down, up and down. 

Then the vocals come in. It's a spoken-word monologue, but run through an audio
filter which makes the words difficult to discern. It sounds sort of like a
voice call with a bad connection. The fact that it's diffcult to understand is
part of what makes it unnerving. 

*Then*, a strange chittering sound comes in over the monologue. It sounds like
seagulls played through a delay pedal. This makes it even harder to understand
the words. 

Not understanding the words might be for the best. The monologue is itself
intensely disturbing: it's a letter or diarty entry by a nurse who is taking
care of a burn victim, the titular Hamburger Lady. (Full disclosure: before I
read the monologue, I imagined the Hamburger Lady as a creepy lady who ran a
hamburger stand in some British seaside resort.)

These elements repeat for the duration of the song. There is no melody or chord
progression, only the dread atmosphere. 

But, as Levar Burton said, don't take my word for it...

Many years ago, I directed a true crime documentary. There was a scene where I
highlight an individual, Dr. Hammond, who may have committed a heinous murder.
Dr. Hammond was a respected opthamologist in Fort Collins, Colorado. He was
also a pervert who rigged up his own TV studio in his basement, with cameras
spying through the vents in the bathrooms and bedrooms upstairs. 

One day a house-sitter discovered this TV room in the basement, with thousands
and thousands of videotapes he'd made of his unwitting victims. He also had a
side business selling these videos over the internet (this was in the early
1990s, mind you). He was arresed, but before he could be positively connected
to the murder that happened near his house, he took his own life. Because he
was so well-connected in Fort Collins, the tapes were a major embarassment. The
whole "country club crowd" may have been on camera. The police had the tapes
destroyed without reviewing them. We'll never know if he had anything to do
with the murder, and an innocent spent ten years in jail instead. 

I wrote and performed the music for the documentary. I hadn't written the music
for the Dr. Hammond scene, so I decided I'd put in a temp track. The temp track
was Hamburger Lady. 

The movie was extensively "workshopped" by screening it for people and having
them pick it apart. During one screening, I played a cut with the Hamburger
Lady edition of the Dr. Hammond scene. 

When the scene ended, one of my screeners paused the movie. "Nicholas, this is
really coming along..." they said, "...but WHATEVER THE HELL you put in the Dr.
Hammond scene, you HAVE to take it out. It was too disturbing. Jesus, what was
that?"

I think I recorded my score for that scene that same night, but that night I
discovered the true, visceral power of Hamburger Lady.

**Do you have any stories about Hamburger Lady, or the band Throbbing Gristle?
Any Gary Numan stories, Tom???? Send me a reply via email to
njb@nantucketlit.com, and I'll add it to this blog post.**


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