Prepare for the coronavirus global recession

Larry Elliott


What initially seemed localised is worldwide and economic pain will go on for longer than first thought

Mon 16 Mar 2020


 

If people do not go out to their weekly meal

 at their favourite local restaurant for the next

 two months they are not going to eat out four

 times a week when the fear of infection has

 been lifted. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA


Travel bans. Sporting events cancelled. Mass gatherings prohibited. Stock markets in freefall. Deserted shopping malls. Get ready for the Covid-19 global recession.

Up until a month ago this seemed far-fetched. It was assumed that the coronavirus outbreak would be a localised problem for China and that any spillover effects to the rest of the world could be comfortably managed by a bit of policy easing by central banks.

When it became clear that Covid-19 was not confined to China and that the economic effects would be more widespread, forecasts started to be revised down. But central banks, finance ministries and independent economists took comfort from the fact that there would be a sharp but short hit to activity followed by a rapid return to business as usual.

This line of thinking has exact parallels with the events of 2007, when it was initially assumed that the subprime mortgage crisis was a minor and manageable problem affecting only the US – and nobody needs reminding how that ended.

If history is any guide, the global economy will eventually recover from the Covid-19 pandemic, but the idea that this is going to be a V-shaped recession in the first half of 2020 followed by a recovery in the second half of the year looks absurd after the tumultuous events of the past week.

What’s more, policymakers know as much. The Federal Reserve – the US central bank – did not need to be told by Donald Trump that it needed to cut interest rates and resume large-scale asset purchases known as quantitative easing. The world’s most powerful central bank pulled out the stops on Sunday night by slashing rates to nearly zero and pledging to expand its balance sheet by $700bn.

In the coming weeks the Bank of England can be expected to cut interest rates to 0.1%

In the UK the coordinated response by the Bank of England and the Treasury last week was seen as a textbook example of how policymakers ought to respond to the crisis. It was, though, only the start. Airline companies will quickly go bust unless they receive financial assistance. The same goes for retailers, many of them hanging on by their fingertips even before Covid-19. Britain has a new chancellor of the exchequer in Rishi Sunak and, from Monday, a new governor of the Bank of England in Andrew Bailey, and they will both be aware that the risks of doing too little too late are far greater than those of doing too much too soon.

So, in the coming weeks the Bank can be expected to cut interest rates to 0.1% – the lowest they have ever been – and to resume its QE programme. Sunak will have to add to the £12bn he has set aside to deal with Covid-19.

As in 2008-09, the authorities in the eurozone have been slowest to act but there have been welcome signs in recent days – from Germany, most significantly – of the need for governments to spend, and spend big.

It has been clear from the start that Covid-19 affects both sides of the economy: supply and demand. The supply of goods and services is impaired because factories and offices are shut and output falls as a result. But demand also falls because consumers stay at home and stop spending, and businesses mothball investment.

Conventional policy measures – such as cutting the cost of borrowing or reducing taxes – tend to work better when there is a demand shock. There is a limit to what they can do in the event of a combined supply and demand shock.
 Italy is in lockdown because of the coronavirus. 

Photograph: Antonio Masiello/Getty Images

Policymakers know that, which is why Sunak stressed in his budget speech that the economy faced a tough period. The aim is make the downturn as short and shallow as possible, even though the chances of this look vanishingly small.


One reason for that is because the economic disruption caused by Covid-19 is enormous. Entire countries – Italy and Spain – are in lockdown. The problems facing airline companies are symptomatic of a crisis facing the global travel industry, from cruise companies to hotels that cater for tourists. Discretionary spending by consumers appears to have collapsed in recent days.

Despite globalisation, much economic activity remains local but here, too, there will be an impact as people cancel appointments at the dentist, put off having their hair cut and wait to put their house on the market.

Paul Dales, the chief UK economist at Capital Economics, has estimated that output in Britain will shrink by 2.5% in the second quarter but says a 5% fall is possible. The more pessimistic estimate looks quite plausible.Sign up to the daily Business Today email or follow Guardian Business on Twitter at @BusinessDesk

What’s more, in a service-sector dominated economy much of the lost output is never going to be recovered. If people do not go out to their weekly meal at their favourite local restaurant for the next two months they are not going to eat out four times a week when the fear of infection has been lifted.

It also seems likely that the economic pain will go on for longer than originally estimated. Having imposed bans and restrictions, governments and private-sector bodies will be cautious about removing them. Countries such as Italy will be wary of opening their borders while there is a fear of reinfection. The idea that Premier League football will be back by early April is fanciful.

There is also a question of how long it will take consumer and business confidence to recover. Policy action by central banks and finance ministries can help in this respect but only so much. The chances are that the imminent recession will be U-shaped: a steep decline followed by a period of bumping along the bottom. There will be recovery but it will take time and only after much damage has been caused.

America has no real public health system – coronavirus has a clear run

Trump’s response has been inadequate but the system is rigged anyway. As always, the poor will be hit hardest

Sun 15 Mar 2020 Robert Reich
 

‘Almost 30% of American workers have no 

paid sick leave from their employers, including

 70% of low-income workers earning less than 

$10.49 an hour.’ Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters

Dr Anthony S Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and just about the only official in the Trump administration trusted to tell the truth about the coronavirus, said last Thursday: “The system does not, is not really geared to what we need right now … It is a failing, let’s admit it.”


While we’re at it, let’s admit something more basic. The system would be failing even under a halfway competent president. The dirty little secret, which will soon become apparent to all, is that there is no real public health system in the United States.

The ad hoc response fashioned late Friday by House Democrats and the White House may help a bit, although it’s skimpy, as I’ll explain.

As the coronavirus outbreak in the US follows the same grim exponential growth path first displayed in Wuhan, China, before herculean measures were put in place to slow its spread there, America is waking up to the fact that it has almost no public capacity to deal with it.


n America, the word 'public' means a sum total of individual needs, not the common good

Instead of a public health system, we have a private for-profit system for individuals lucky enough to afford it and a rickety social insurance system for people fortunate enough to have a full-time job.

At their best, both systems respond to the needs of individuals rather than the needs of the public as a whole. In America, the word “public” – as in public health, public education or public welfare – means a sum total of individual needs, not the common good.


Contrast this with America’s financial system. The Federal Reserve concerns itself with the health of financial markets as a whole. Late last week the Fed made $1.5tn available to banks, at the slightest hint of difficulties making trades. No one batted an eye.

When it comes to the health of the nation as a whole, money like this isn’t available. And there are no institutions analogous to the Fed with responsibility for overseeing and managing the public’s health – able to whip out a giant checkbook at a moment’s notice to prevent human, rather than financial, devastation.

Even if a test for the Covid-19 virus had been developed and approved in time, no institutions are in place to administer it to tens of millions of Americans free of charge. Local and state health departments are already bare bones, having lost nearly a quarter of their workforce since 2008, according to the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

Healthcare in America is delivered mainly by private for-profit corporations which, unlike financial institutions, are not required to maintain reserve capacity. As a result, the nation’s supply of ventilators isn’t nearly large enough to care for projected numbers of critically ill coronavirus victims unable to breathe for themselves. Its 45,000 intensive care unit beds fall woefully short of the 2.9 million likely to be needed.

The Fed can close banks to quarantine financial crises but the US can’t close workplaces because the nation’s social insurance system depends on people going to work.

Almost 30% of American workers have no paid sick leave from their employers, including 70% of low-income workers earning less than $10.49 an hour. Vast numbers of self-employed workers cannot afford sick leave. Friday’s deal between House Democrats and the White House won’t have much effect because it exempts large employers and offers waivers to smaller ones.



Most jobless Americans don’t qualify for unemployment insurance because they haven’t worked long enough in a steady job and the ad-hoc deal doesn’t alter this. Meanwhile, more than 30 million Americans have no health insurance. Eligibility for Medicaid, food stamps and other public assistance is now linked to having or actively looking for work.

It’s hard to close public schools because most working parents cannot afford childcare. Many poor children rely on school lunches for their only square meal a day. In Los Angeles, about 80% of students qualify for free or reduced lunches and just under 20,000 are homeless at some point during the school year.

There is no public health system in the US, in short, because the richest nation in the world has no capacity to protect the public as a whole, apart from national defense. Ad-hoc remedies such as House Democrats and the White House fashioned on Friday are better than nothing, but they don’t come close to filling this void.


Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His next book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, will be out in March. He is a columnist for Guardian US

THROBBING GRISTLE AND PSYCHIC TV

Throbbing Gristle

'I smeared Gen in flour paste and whipped him hard': an extract from Cosey Fanni Tutti's book

The art provocateur recalls life in an art commune in Hull, fighting the Hells Angels and thrashing Genesis P Orridge on stage in Amsterdam

Cosey Fanni Tutti
 Thu 22 Feb 2018
 

A COUM performance outside Ferens art gallery in 

Hull in 1971 (Tutti second from left). Photograph:

Courtesy: Cosey Fanni Tutti


I’d gone to an “acid test” at the union at Hull University. I walked in, paid my entrance fee and received my tab. People were already tripping when I arrived: they were on the floor groping one another or playing with a bathtub of coloured jelly. A guy was playing the saxophone, free jazz-style. The notes were so jarring, fast and scatty that it drove me crazy. As I went to leave, I saw what I thought was a hallucination: a small, beautiful guy dressed in a black graduation gown, complete with mortarboard and a wispy, pale-lilac goatee beard.

About a week later, I was out dancing when a guy came over to me and said: “Cosmosis, Genesis would like to see you.” “What?” It was explained to me that a guy called Genesis had seen me and named me Cosmosis. It was the man I thought I had hallucinated, and he wanted us to get together. “Gen was so beautiful,” reads an entry in my diary for November 1969. “His eyes were a clear blue, his hair dark brown and his skin a clear, golden colour. He smiled so beautifully.”

I started seeing Gen. I’d never met anyone like him. He was very well read, quite the archetypal revolutionary-cum-bohemian artist. He’d moved into a flat in Spring Bank, where my friend Graham also lived. Gen slept under the kitchen table, in a sleeping bag inside a polythene tunnel he called his rainshell. It was a strange and unromantic place to conduct our liaisons, but it made some sense: it was free, and warm from the cooker. My visits weren’t the hot, lusty love affair I’d come to expect from previous relationships, and there were arguments, unexpected at such an early stage. I put it down to Gen being very sensitive, and also his liberal view of relationships: that “no ties” posturing.

The Ho Ho Funhouse, which we later moved in to, was my first home away from home – a far cry from Bilton Grange housing estate. It was part of Wellington House, a Victorian building close to the fruit market on Queen Street. My room, which was small and dark, faced on to a dank alley at the back. Moses, as we called him due to the way he looked, and Gen shared a room opposite. Among all the other people living there was Roger, who had escaped from prison, taking the Midnight Express from Turkey and arriving back at the Funhouse after being severely beaten on the soles of his feet and suffering from dysentery. .

Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti in 1969. 

Photograph: John Krivine

At first I felt a little out of my depth, being the youngest, and the only person who hadn’t gone to university. I was slightly in awe of Gen. I learned that he’d won a poetry prize while studying English at Hull University, that he and radical student friends had started Worm, a student magazine that was free from editorial control but shortlived because of its obscene and “dangerous” content. After he’d dropped out, he’d joined an artists’ commune in London, called Transmedia Explorations. Gen learned a lot from his short time with them – but he never mentioned to me the fact that much of what he presented as “his” concept for his new project, COUM Transmissions, came from Transmedia Explorations and its predecessor, the Exploding Galaxy: life as art, communal creativity, everyone is an artist, costumes, rituals, play, artworks, scavenging for art materials, street theatre, rejection of conventions, and the advocation of sexual liberation.


Gen and his friends would go on shopping trips, returning with a holdall full of books and other items “liberated” from various sources. I went shopping with Gen and a friend one day to the food hall in Hammonds (the Harrods of Hull). When we paid and went to leave, store detectives escorted us to a side room. I hadn’t taken anything, so handed my bag over without a second thought. They emptied our bags to reveal stolen food. I was gobsmacked. My attempts to explain that I hadn’t known or done anything fell on deaf ears.

We were all taken to the police station and charged with shoplifting. We were asked our address, but gave “no fixed abode”. If we’d given the Ho Ho Funhouse address, the police would have gone there and found drugs. They put us in cells for the night. After an hour, my door opened and I was taken to the front desk. I saw Mum, her eyes red from crying. She held me tight. I asked her how she knew I was there. The police had rung Dad and said: “We have your daughter. She’s been sleeping rough with two young men.”

Dad was appalled. She’d begged him to drive her to the police station, but he wouldn’t come inside. I assured her I was fine, that I wasn’t sleeping rough, or with two men. She left feeling relatively comforted. I went back to my cell and the next morning me, Gen and John were found guilty, fined £10 each (despite pleading poverty), and set free. The air had never smelled so good.
Photobooth snaps of Tutti and friends

One night at the Funhouse, we were enjoying having the building to ourselves, when we heard the roar of motorbikes, followed swiftly by a smashing sound as the Hells Angels broke in through our front door and tore through the house, spraypainting the walls and ransacking the place. For some reason, they didn’t make it as far as us on the top floor. When the noise subsided, we quietly made our way downstairs to find they’d congregated in the communal room and were giving one of their “prospects” a mouth-scrubbing with Ajax toilet cleaner.


My background meant I was more savvy at handling Hull hardcases than the others. I was confronted by one of the bikers’ girlfriends, a tough blonde girl they all called Glob. She was surprised at my combative response to her threats. I entered into a dialogue with a couple of the guys. Some of them came from Longhill Estate, near my family home. That was our saving grace. We ended up having a half-civil conversation, sparring until we arrived at an amicable kind of “understanding”, and they left.

When the other commune members returned, Bronwyn was particularly pissed off as the bikers had sprayed “Bronwyn pulls a train” in huge letters across her room. This is a term used by the Angels for women who had sex with one man after another to gain status. It wasn’t the nicest thing to come home to.

In the mid-1970s, the COUM team took a show to Amsterdam. Being a sexually liberated place, Amsterdam seemed an opportunity to indulge ourselves, and we took the brakes off. To start, Foxtrot walked on looking menacing in his SS leather coat and hat, his riding boots and sunglasses, and wielding a blowtorch, which he used to light the torches on the stage. He and I had a scene together, both dressed as homosexual soldiers, kissing and groping.

Gen had wanted me to give Foxtrot a blowjob, but I refused. Biggles was on a table being massaged by Fizzy in his “Shirley Shassey” dress and he offered Biggles the “extra” service, then turned to the audience, smiling, and proceeded to oil Biggles’ bits – rather too vigorously for comfort, judging by Biggles’ face.

Sleazy was positioned to one side of the stage, fully dressed, seated alone on a chair, softly lit, reading aloud his public-schoolboy sexual fantasies from handwritten notes. I had a much more full-on time. I strode on stage, dominatrix-style, in high heels but otherwise naked save for a strap costume that didn’t cover much. I’d made it from strips of black PVC and gold buckles I’d found in a bin.

I stood watching a naked Gen being chained to a cross. I daubed him in flour paste and chicken’s feet and whipped him hard. Gen had told me to whip him properly – it had to be real. I don’t think he’d really thought about what being whipped meant in terms of pain, or that I’d actually do it, but I really got into it, and Fizzy was itching to have a go, too. I had to hold back a bit the second night because of the welts that I’d inflicted.


We’d performed to 1,500 people each night. We’d had little sleep but felt elated at what we’d done. Whipping Gen crucified on the cross worked so well that we restaged it back in Britain for a new COUM poster image. Sleazy did some photographs with Gen drunk, cuffed and chained to the cross, and me in the foreground in my strap costume clutching the whip. Me and Sleazy loved it, but Gen wasn’t too keen. I thought it reflected a shift in the dynamics of my and Gen’s personal and working relationship. For the first time I was in the dominant position.

I was constantly having to second-guess Gen’s mood swings. Nothing I did was enough. He showed no empathy towards me – it was always about him. If I had an early start for a photo or film shoot, he’d keep me up late, talking about himself, saying he was depressed and needing reassurance. He fed off me like a parasite. I knew my life with Gen couldn’t continue.
Throbbing Gristle in the 1970s. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

On 1 August 1978, as we lay in bed, I told Gen I thought that we should separate. First there were tears, from us both. I held him close. I hated making him so sad. When he realised he couldn’t talk me round, the reality hit home. “But you’re my battery – I feed off you,” he said. No mention of love. “That’s why I have to leave,” I said. “I feel like I’m being eaten away.”

He leapt on top of me and started strangling me. “If I can’t have you, nobody can!” I was strong enough to get him off me and hold him down until his temper subsided a bit. He was wild-eyed, and I suspected that as soon as I let go of him, he’d flip again. I jumped up, ran through to the front bedroom, dressed as quickly as I could, and grabbed the bag of essentials that I’d thankfully packed ages ago. I heard Gen get out of bed and turned as he came running after me. He was so fast. “All because of THAT!” he screamed at me as he kicked me so hard in my crotch that it almost lifted me off the ground. I was doubled over in pain, holding myself. I couldn’t move. Then he unleashed a torrent of punches and kicks and delivered a verbal blow that hurt me more: “I’d never have let you kill my baby if I’d known you’d leave me.” I was stunned to hear him use the termination I’d had in this way. “My baby”? Not “our baby”? How cruel to use the child I’d mourned against me.

Me and Gen living apart didn’t seem to adversely affect Throbbing Gristle, the band that evolved from COUM. We were on fire with ideas. The band took a trip to visit our friend Monte, who was now living in San Francisco. We all slept on the floor of his living room, which was difficult as Gen kept wanting to sleep with me.


Cosey Fanni Tutti: 'I don’t like acceptance. It makes me think I've done something wrong'



I took the opportunity to get an all-over tan. I hated bikini marks – they didn’t look good when I was stripping. I was on my own in the garden, lying on my front in a red G-string, half-asleep. Suddenly there was a great thud. I sprang up to see that a large cement block had landed about six inches from my head. Gen had thrown it from Monte’s balcony and was standing there staring down in silence.

He could have killed me. I shouted at him and Monte came out to see what was going on. He was horrified, but Gen carried on like nothing had happened. With hindsight, it’s unbelievable that Gen wasn’t brought to account. Maybe Monte made him realise what a narrow escape he – and I – had had. That put a halt to any more sunbathing for me when Gen was around.

• This is an edited extract from Art Sex Music by Cosey Fanni Tutti, which is published by Faber & Faber on 6 April at £14.99. Order it for £12.74 at bookshop.theguardian.com. COUM Transmissions is a series of events at Hull 2017 UK City of Culture

Interview

Cosey Fanni Tutti: 'I don’t like acceptance. It makes me think I've done something wrong'

Alexis Petridis


As a member of COUM and Throbbing Gristle, Cosey Fanni Tutti made art that was so shocking, the police ran them out of Hull. But now they’re being invited back – and celebrated in galleries. Here she talks about how they survived

Tue 14 Mar 2017 modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018

 

‘COUM were never confrontational. People might think we were, but we weren’t. We were just sharing something, if you like’ … Cosey Fanni Tutti. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian


There’s no getting around the fact that meeting Cosey Fanni Tutti after you’ve read her autobiography is a slightly disconcerting experience. It’s not just that she’s so nice, in a way that’s entirely at odds with the fearsome reputation of notorious 70s performance art collective COUM and Throbbing Gristle, the groundbreaking, wildly influential band COUM begat – although she certainly is.

At 65, there’s a certain formidable doesn’t-suffer-fools air about her. Even so, it’s hard to square the woman in whose kitchen I’m eating biscuits and drinking tea with the person who did the more shocking stuff described in Art Sex Music: performances so transgressive that other transgressive performance artists tended to walk out in disgust (“We ended up locked together, lying in piss, blood and vomit,” ends one characteristic description); exhibitions involving used tampons and blood-smeared dildos that caused one fulminating Tory MP to dub Tutti and the rest of COUM “wreckers of civilisation”; game plunges into the world of porn modelling and stripping as part of her art practice; music that screamed about serial killers and death camps and frequently caused uncomprehending audiences to erupt in rage and horror.

It’s more that she seems so normal, so unscathed by the extraordinary life depicted in the book. There are moments of deadpan humour in it – not least when her then-teenage son Nick comes face-to-face with some of her old work during an exhibition at the ICA (whatever parenting problems you may have encountered, it seems doubtful that you’ve ever had to, as Tutti puts it, “explain to Nick a film in which I castrated his dad”) – but it is an often harrowing read, pockmarked by familial dysfunction and violence. Between the art actions, the Throbbing Gristle gigs at which audiences tried to attack the band, the striptease bookings in dubious pubs and her turbulent, abusive relationship with COUM founder and Throbbing Gristle frontman Genesis P-Orridge, it’s hard not to be struck by how much physical danger she regularly found herself in. She looks a bit surprised when I mention it. “I didn’t think of it in the way you say it,” she shrugs. “It’s funny, isn’t it, when someone outside points it out?”

She says she’s not sure where her non-conformist streak came from, although it was there from the start, when she was still Christine Newby, the daughter of a fireman and a wages clerk from Hull’s Bilton Grange council estate. Her home life was strained: her father was emotionally distant, domineering and frequently violent; moreover he refused point-blank to let her go to art school. “That little thing I can thank him for,” she nods, “because it meant that I had to go out there and do it, not be taught it, which was brilliant. My imagination was free.”

Tutti with Throbbing Gristle in the 1970s

She immersed herself in Hull’s late-60s counterculture. It was at an LSD-fuelled happening in Hull University student union that she first met Genesis P-Orridge, who announced that he had rechristened her Cosmosis and that they should be together. Within weeks, she’d been thrown out of home by her father, was living with P-Orridge in a commune and was an active member of COUM. In many ways, she says, it was a liberating social and artistic experiment: “Just working with what presented itself, you know, going to jumble sales and finding these fantastic hoards, bringing it home and creating a small art work in the house, or costumes that would suggest something we could do, all ad hoc, based on chance, the way I still like it.”

But it’s hard not to notice that, despite the supposedly liberated lifestyle of the commune, it still fell to Tutti, the most prominent female member, to do all the cleaning, cooking and washing. “Another member of COUM, Spydeee, said to me recently, ‘People don’t realise how rife sexism was then, the misogyny there was even among liberal people’,” she says. “I was doing everything. Not that I didn’t see anything wrong with the role, it’s just that I was surviving. I had no home, no family to go back to, so I had to make my home as near as dammit to what was comfortable to me, and if that meant cooking, cleaning … I saw a photo from back then recently and thought, ‘What’s that around my neck?’ It was a police whistle that somebody had given me because I was always making sure that everybody did what they were supposed to do. Someone had to organise at some point.”


Initially, COUM’s art was funny and playful. There is footage of them, covered in tinsel, performing actions on the streets of Hull to crowds of apparently entranced children; they formed a band in which “everybody got on stage and did what they wanted, which was absolute chaos”, entering talent competitions and chanting “off, off” to pre-empt the inevitable audience reaction.

But gradually, their tone changed. By the mid-70s, their performances often involved nudity, live sex acts and bodily fluids: crowds of entranced children were noticeable by their absence. Tutti thinks her increasing fascination with and involvement in the world of pornography had something to do with it. She’d been including images from porn magazines in collages, she says. “I just thought: ‘It’s a bit rotten using them like this.’ I’d sooner get in there and do it myself, so I know the background behind it and how it’s made. And then, once you enter that world, things do change, they get less playful.”

Encouraged by P-Orridge, she began modelling for top-shelf magazines, then appearing in both hardcore and softcore films, and stripping. The 70s porn industry sounds pretty grim, but she says she thinks it might be worse today. “Back then, there was an unwritten code, that you treated the girls as good as you could. Nowadays … I think I expected it would be different, because of feminism for a start, and because now there are female porn sites; it seems quite liberated. But I watched that documentary about [latterday porn star] Annabel Chong that came out about 15 years ago, and it really shocked me. It might have been bad in the 70s, underground and a bit seedy, but it wasn’t violent in that way, it wasn’t treating you like a piece of meat, literally.”

 

‘We were playing with ideas all the time’ … 

Cosey Fanni Tutti. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

She included framed centrefolds from the magazines in COUM’s 1976 retrospective show, Prostitution. When it opened, the tabloids went berserk – as a result of the coverage, Tutti’s mother never spoke to her again – questions were asked in the House of Commons and the ICA’s public funding was threatened. In her telling of it, Tutti and the rest of COUM were genuinely hurt and bewildered by the furore: “COUM were never confrontational,” she shrugs. “People might think we were, but we weren’t, we were just … sharing something, if you like.”

Oh, come off it. It was an exhibition full of used tampons and photos from porn mags. You must have realised it was a provocative thing to do? “No. Strange isn’t it? That’s the bubble, I suppose. It was what we did every day in the studio, it was just part of my daily life, my routine: saving my Tampax for it, trying to stop the dog from eating them.” She laughs. “She was terrible for that.”

The opening of Prostitution marked the launch of Throbbing Gristle, the band formed when Tutti, P-Orridge and fellow COUM member Peter Christopherson met electronics wizard Chris Carter. If the musical results were no closer to traditional rock and pop than COUM’s free-for-all experiments, they now had a new potency and focus: the churning, terrifying noise they created gradually attracted an ever-increasing group of intense devotees, much to the band’s apparent horror. “We wore uniforms because we were playing with ideas all the time, investigating that concept of how uniformity sells a product, that was fascinating to us,” says Tutti. “That started out as an interest and then it actually worked: eventually, we played the Lyceum in London and the whole audience was wearing military uniforms. No, no, no, no: we don’t want followers.”

For all the talk of investigating concepts, Art Sex Music makes their sound seem less like an artistic exercise than an expression of the chaos in their personal lives: Tutti and Carter fell in love, which caused her relationship with P-Orridge, always fraught, to collapse in acrimony: at one juncture, he threw a breeze block at her from a balcony, narrowly missing her head. It seems a miracle the band managed to achieve anything, let alone a series of albums that spawned an entire musical genre named after their record label, Industrial: “Well, it was a struggle, it really was. I don’t know how it held together.”

Throbbing Gristle finally split up in 1981. (An attempt to regroup in the 00s was an acclaimed artistic triumph but, by all accounts, as much of a psychological nightmare as the old days.) Tutti and Carter continued to work together, as Chris and Cosey, CTI and Carter Tutti. And after almost a decade’s absence, Tutti made a triumphant return to the art world in the mid-90s.

In the interim, something deeply improbable had happened. Her work had gone from reviled to revered. In recent years, her art has been widely exhibited, bought by the Tate and the subject of a day-long festival at the ICA. Throbbing Gristle are routinely hailed as one of the most important bands of their era, while – initially unbeknownst to the pair – the music she and Carter made turned out to be a huge influence on subsequent electronic music: shows they played revisiting old material and their “cross-generational” collaboration with Nik Void of Factory Floor were rapturously received.


Most recently, nearly 45 years after COUM were effectively run out of Hull by the police, they were invited back: an exhibition of their work and a series of events based on it form a major part of the programme for Hull’s year as UK City of Culture. When I mention that she seems to have become accepted, Tutti frowns and says “I know,” in the way you might say “I know” if someone pointed out you’d just stepped in something disgusting. You’re not keen on the idea?

“I look at it like it’s retrospective acceptance, so what I feel about the work when it was done is still there, it still has meaning for me. Of its time, it was unacceptable. I don’t like acceptance, I distrust it completely, I think I’ve done something wrong, like I’ve gone off on a bad tangent and need to get back on track.” She pauses. “I mean, I understand why certain things have found their place in history, so I can accept that. But I don’t see it as acceptance of what I did then, because it wasn’t. It’s still loaded with that unacceptance.”

• Art Sex Music by Cosey Fanni Tutti is published by Faber & Faber on 6 April at £14.99. Order it for £12.74 at bookshop.theguardian.com. COUM Transmissions is a series of events at Hull 2017 UK City of Culture

Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV leader Genesis Breyer P-Orridge dies aged 70

Genesis P-Orridge obituary
Musician, writer and performance artist who was a co-founder of the band Throbbing Gristle

Genesis P-Orridge in New York, 2007. Photograph: Neville Elder/Redferns

Adam Sweeting
Published on Sun 15 Mar 2020


“I am at war with the status quo of society and I am at war with those in control and power,” said Genesis P-Orridge in 1989. “I’m at war with hypocrisy and lies, I’m at war with the mass media.” P-Orridge, who has died of leukaemia aged 70, stuck to the task of delivering aesthetic shocks and trampling over cultural taboos with impressive dedication and across multiple disciplines.

Perhaps best known for work with the bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, P-Orridge, who used s/he as a pronoun, wrote songs about mass murder, mutilation, the occult and fascism. Throbbing Gristle’s track Zyklon B Zombie was a reference to the poison gas used in the Nazi death camps. Hamburger Lady (from their 1978 album DOA) was inspired by the story of a burns victim.

Unstintingly harsh and abrasive, Throbbing Gristle nonetheless built a select but dedicated following. Their album 20 Jazz Funk Greats (1979) – an exercise in Germanic electro-pop rather than jazz-funk – took them to No 6 on the UK indie chart.

Psychic TV, in whose oeuvre a playful pop music sensibility could be discerned, among experiments with electronic noise, psychedelia and droning repetition, seemed to favour subtle infiltration rather than the bludgeoning approach of Throbbing Gristle. They reached 67 on the UK pop chart in 1986 with Godstar, a song about the death of the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones. More remarkable was their project, starting in 1986, to record a live album on the 23rd of each month for 23 months. They managed 14 in 18 months, but this was enough to earn them a Guinness World Records entry.

Genesis P-Orridge with Throbbing Gristle performing at the Coachella Valley festival in Indio, California, in 2009. Photograph: Axel Koester/Corbis/Getty Images

But music was only one of the ways in which P-Orridge channelled their creative energies. Psychic TV made their debut in 1982 at a four-day multimedia event in London and Manchester called the Final Academy, which featured artists including William S Burroughs and Brion Gysin – whose cut-up writing technique had been a powerful influence on P-Orridge – in a mix of music, literature, film and video. In 1969, P-Orridge had begun laying the groundwork for future explorations by forming COUM Transmissions, a group based in Hull who performed improvised theatre and music shows. They adopted a logo of a partially erect penis, and infused their work with Dada-inspired absurdity.

They became successful enough to win grants from the Yorkshire Arts Association, the Arts Council of Great Britain and the British Council, though this did not bring with it a yearning for respectability. Their performances became increasingly extreme, featuring body-cutting and involving P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti (AKA Christine Carol Newby) having sex onstage. In her autobiography Art Sex Music (2017), Fanni Tutti made allegations that P-Orridge had been a violent and manipulative partner, which were denied by P-Orridge.

Throbbing Gristle was founded on 3 September 1975 (on the 36th anniversary of Britain declaring war on Germany), comprising Tutti and P-Orridge alongside Chris Carter and Peter Christopherson, and for a time continued alongside COUM.

COUM’s show Prostitution, staged at the ICA in London in 1976, provoked uproar with its pornographic images, sculptures fashioned from used tampons and transvestite security guards, prompting the Scottish Conservative MP Sir Nicholas Fairbairn to describe P-Orridge and Tutti as “wreckers of civilisation”.

P-Orridge was born Neil Megson in Longsight, Manchester, the child of Muriel and Ronald Megson. Ronald was a travelling salesman, jazz drummer and former actor who had survived Dunkirk with the British Army in 1940. The family moved to Essex, then later to Cheshire, where Neil attended Gatley primary school and won a scholarship to Stockport grammar school. In 1964 Neil was sent to the private Solihull school.

There tastes for literature and the avant-garde were developed and Neil became fascinated with the writings of the magician and occultist Aleister Crowley. (In 1981 Neil would form Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth, an association of occultists.) In 1965 Neil founded his first band, Worm, with some school friends. They recorded an album, Early Worm (1968), but only one vinyl copy of it was produced.

In 1968, Neil went to Hull University to study social administration and philosophy, but dropped out the following year and moved to London joining the Transmedia Explorations commune in Islington. By the end of 1969 Neil was back in Hull, where COUM Transmissions was developed with John Shapeero.

The later phases of P-Orridge’s life were in some ways the most startling. P-Orridge moved to the US in the 1990s, following allegations (that subsequently proved false) in a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary that s/he had been involved in satanic ritual abuse.

In 1993 P-Orridge met Jacqueline Breyer, who was working at a New York S&M dungeon. She adopted the name Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge, and they moved in together in Queens, New York. They married in California in 1995, the year that P-Orridge was badly injured while escaping a fire at the Los Angeles home of the record producer Rick Rubin. He was awarded $1.5m compensation in 1998.

The couple set about using plastic surgery to become mirror images of one another, beginning with matching breast implants on Valentine’s Day 2003, and continuing with work on eyes and nose, liposuction and hormone therapy. They dressed in identical outfits, and P-Orridge coined the term “pandrogyny” to express the idea that they fused into a third person, Breyer P-Orridge, who only existed when they were together. P-Orridge subsequently preferred the self-descriptor “we”, though did not object to being called “s/he”.

This pandrogyny project was cut short when Breyer died of acute heart arrhythmia in 2007, an especially painful loss at a time when P-Orridge was beginning to receive highbrow acclaim. The Invisible-Exports gallery in New York staged a retrospective of their collages, 30 Years of Being Cut Up, and in 2009 Tate Britain purchased their archive.

Marie Losier’s documentary film The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye was released in 2011, and in 2016 the Rubin Museum of Art in New York hosted Try to Altar Everything, an exhibition of P-Orridge’s paintings, sculptures and installations. In 2018 s/he published Brion Gysin: His Name Was Master, a collection of interviews and essays.

In 2003 P-Orridge had unveiled PTV3, a new band drawing on the legacy of Psychic TV. They released four albums and several EPs between 2007 and 2016. In 2018 they performed at Heaven in London.

P-Orridge is survived by two daughters, Genesse and Caresse, from a first marriage, to Paula Brooking, which ended in divorce.

• Genesis P-Orridge (Neil Andrew Megson), musician, writer and performance artist, born 22 February 1950; died 14 March 2020



Genesis P-Orridge

Genesis P-Orridge: troubling catalyst who loathed rock yet changed it for ever

Alexis Petridis

With Throbbing Gristle, P-Orridge inadvertently helped invent an entire genre – industrial music
Sun 15 Mar 2020
 

‘Presaging everything from acid house to the 

ongoing conversation about gender fluidity’ ... 

Genesis P-Orridge. Photograph: Neville Elder/Redferns


For someone who occasionally purported to hate rock music – it was, a homemade T-shirt s/he was fond of wearing in the 1970s proclaimed, “for arselickers” – Genesis Breyer P-Orridge ended up having a vast influence on it. With Throbbing Gristle, P-Orridge inadvertently helped invent an entire genre – industrial music, its name taken from the band’s Industrial record label – which, over the years, developed and mutated from a misunderstood and frequently reviled cult into a platinum-selling concern.

Intent on, as one writer put it, “bursting open the blistered lie [that] rock and roll culture was telling about rebellion and transgression”, virtually every one of Throbbing Gristle’s radical, confrontational ideas was gradually subsumed into something approaching the mainstream. Electronic producers queued up to pay homage to the band, whose resident technical wizard Chris Carter may or may not have invented the first sampler by dismantling a series of cassette recorders and linking them to bandmate Peter Christopherson’s keyboard: Detroit techno pioneer Carl Craig named a 1991 EP Four Jazz Funk Classics in homage to TG’s 1979 album 20 Jazz Funk Greats.

Twenty years after they caused disquiet by writing songs about serial killers and toying with quasi-Nazi imagery, one of the biggest rock stars in the world was called Marilyn Manson: on his Antichrist Superstar tour, performed in front of a huge logo that looked remarkably similar to TG’s trademark thunderflash, with its echoes both of high-voltage warning signs and, more queasily, the symbol of the British Union of Fascists. If P-Orridge’s later work with Psychic TV is less celebrated, it nevertheless demonstrated h/er uncanny ability to think ahead of the curve, presaging everything from acid house to the ongoing conversation about gender fluidity. 

Throbbing Gristle perform in Culver City,

 California, 22 May 1981. Photograph:

 Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images


P-Orridge formed h/er first band, Worm, when s/he was still Neil Megson, a Manchester-born pupil at Solihull Public School. Worm even recorded an album, pressing up a solitary copy in 1968. If nothing else, it revealed that P-Orridge’s approach to music was defiantly left-field from the start: noise, improvisations and tape experiments mixed with songs that sounded a little like a less adept, more chaotic version of psychedelic folkies the Incredible String Band. When s/he moved to Hull, adopted the pseudonym Genesis P-Orridge and set up performance art group Coum with h/er partner, Christine Newby, who was re-christened Cosey Fanni Tutti, they too were initially music-based, albeit in the widest sense of the phrase.

They performed chaotic, tuneless, unrehearsed gigs, including one supporting Hawkwind where they chanted “off off off” from the stage to prefigure the audience’s inevitable response. Despite the enthusiasm of DJ John Peel, who plugged the band in his Disc and Music Echo column, Coum’s interest in music seemed to wane as h/er art became less playful and more disturbing: from brightly costumed actions on the streets of Hull that occasionally attracted crowds of entranced children, h/er performances shifted and began involving live sex acts, violence and much spilling of bodily fluids.


It wasn’t until P-Orridge and Tutti met former sound engineer Chris Carter that they were able to make music that reflected Coum’s bleak latterday vision, while enabling them to break out of an art world they increasingly derided as sterile and elitist. With Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson – a photographer and record sleeve designer who had taken part in some of Coum’s later performances – on keyboards, the early Throbbing Gristle dealt in churning noise, punishing electronic rhythms and distorted vocals that dealt with a variety of distressing topics: the Moors Murders, the Nazi holocaust, the acts of mutilation and barbarism described in Slug Bait.

They started playing gigs, to a largely apoplectic response: shows at regular rock venues frequently degenerated into violent confrontations with the audience. They performed at London’s ICA as part of the Coum retrospective exhibition Prostitution, which provoked such outrage that questions were asked in Parliament – Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn provided Throbbing Gristle with their lasting epigraph by describing them as “wreckers of civilisation” – and the venue’s Arts Council funding was cut. Perhaps understandably, the band did not expect their murky, lo-fi, self-released debut album Second Annual Report to be a success: if it wasn’t entirely without precedent – you could hear in it echoes of Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s experimental work, the German avant-garde rock bands of the early 70s, the Velvet Underground circa White Light/White Heat and Lou Reed’s notorious Metal Machine Music – it was nevertheless incredibly extreme for its era. But not only did its initial pressing of 750 copies sell out, it seemed to act as a lightning rod for other artists who had coincidentally been thinking along similar musical lines, many of whom ended up being released by Industrial: Sheffield’s Cabaret Voltaire and Clock DVA, Australia’s SPK and Germany’s Leather Nun.

Throbbing Gristle proved to be a more expansive and diverse band than the unsettling din of Second Annual Report suggested. They followed it up with United, an alternately creepy and oddly sweet-sounding electronic single that foreshadowed the synth-led direction that mainstream pop would take in the early 80s: their subsequent albums took in everything from experiments with dark ambience, warped pop songs, audio collages and tracks that now sound remarkably like techno five years too early, while continually picking away at unpleasant subject matter. At its best, their work had a startling originality and power: 42 years after it first appeared on 1978’s DOA: The Third and Final Report, Hamburger Lady’s eerie, hushed retelling of the plight of a burns victim remains a genuinely terrifying piece of music.

Throbbing Gristle were never going to be anything other than divisive, as evidenced by the contemporary critical reaction, but they developed an increasingly fanatical cult following, with Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis among their ranks. Some of TG’s members professed to be horrified by their popularity – “I don’t like acceptance, I distrust it completely,” said Tutti – but P-Orridge set about moulding their fanbase into a quasi-paramilitary cult. S/he began referring to their gigs as “rallies” and sending out literature asking: “Do you want to become a fully-equipped Terror Guard? Ready for action? NOTHING SHORT OF A TOTAL WAR”; their 1981 single Discipline bore the legend “marching music for psychic youth”. By the time of their rancorous split, shortly after Discipline’s release, there was a burgeoning underground scene of new artists exploring similar musical and thematic areas: Current 93, Whitehouse, Nurse With Wound, Foetus, Test Department. Some were TG acolytes, some professed to loathe them and have no connection to their work: either way, it was impossible to see how said scene could have existed had Throbbing Gristle not existed first.

P-Orridge formed Psychic TV with, among others, Christopherson and his partner John Balance. They unexpectedly signed to a major label; more unexpected still, their 1982 debut album, Force the Hand of Chance, was frequently lush, melodic and strangely romantic. Its sleeve, however, bore the words: “File under: fundraising activities”. P-Orridge viewed Psychic TV as the musical wing of Thee Temple Ov Psychic Youth, which, depending on your perspective, was either an organisation dedicated to disseminating information about magickal practices – some derived from Aleister Crowley, others from occultist Austin Osman Spare – a satire on organised religion, or something approaching a cult, with P-Orridge its leader.


The latter was an accusation frequently levelled by ex-members of Psychic TV, including Christopherson and Balance, who left after 1983’s alternately cinematic and chilling Dreams Less Sweet to concentrate on their own project, the hugely acclaimed Coil. Their departure set the tone for a certain turbulence among Psychic TV’s personnel: P-Orridge never failed to attract interesting collaborators – there’s a credible argument that his greatest talent lay as a catalyst – but members perpetually came and left, frequently in acrimony, occasionally claiming that P-Orridge had taken credit for their work or ripped them off financially.

Psychic TV’s subsequent releases were never quite as musically compelling, although you couldn’t fault their eclecticism, nor P-Orridge’s willingness to spring surprises on his audience. Perhaps the biggest shock came when Psychic TV reinvented themselves as a relatively straightforward psychedelic rock band – P-Orridge having presumably decided that rock and roll wasn’t for arselickers as long as he was doing it – with decidedly mixed results: their cover of the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations was an impressive act of chutzpah given P-Orridge’s limited vocal ability, though they grazed the lower reaches of the charts with Godstar, a charming and remarkably catchy paean to late Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones.

P-Orridge performing with Psychic TV in London in 2006. 

Photograph: Jim Dyson/Getty Images


They then shifted into acid house, or at least something like it: an enthusiastic consumer of hallucinogens, P-Orridge had heard the term, but none of the music. P-Orridge devotees are fond of making lofty claims for the results – initially released as a fake compilation album, Jack the Tab – but in truth “the first British acid house album” betrays its origins: a hastily thrown-together cocktail of electronic beats and samples from 60s exploitation movies, it patently wasn’t going to give any of acid house’s actual progenitors sleepless nights. Never popular with British clubbers or DJs, Psychic TV’s subsequent acid house albums – Towards Thee Infinite Beat and the remix collection Beyond Thee Infinite Beat – fared better in the US: the band played raves in California and looked at one stage to have secured a major label deal.

The latter fell through, but by then P-Orridge had bigger problems: falsely accused of ritual Satanic abuse in a bizarre 1992 Channel 4 documentary made by a Christian fundamentalist group, s/he went into self-imposed exile in the US. Initially, s/he continued releasing albums as Psychic TV – the electronic collages of the Electric Newspaper series, the return to psychedelic rock of 1996’s Trip Reset – but seemed to be gradually losing interest in music: h/er next project, Thee Majesty, featured P-Orridge reading and improvising poetry over experimental soundscapes.

S/he reactivated the Psychic TV name in 2003 – an all-new line-up featuring h/er second wife, Jacqueline Breyer, with whom P-Orridge embarked on the “pandrogeny project”, involving gender neutrality and body modification to look more like each other. Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs contributed to the 2006 album, Hell Is Invisible, Heaven Is Her/e, but more attention was attracted by the reunion of Throbbing Gristle.

The latter came as a considerable surprise: relations between the former members were famously strained, a state of affairs not much helped by Psychic TV playing a 1988 London gig as Throbbing Gristle Ltd, ostensibly to demonstrate that P-Orridge was the sole creative force behind the band and the others were, in his words, “dishonest parasitic bastards”. As it turned out, the reunion was as tempestuous as Throbbing Gristle’s initial incarnation. They played a series of acclaimed live shows and released a handful of interesting albums, but Cosey Fanni Tutti’s 2017 autobiography Art Sex Music depicted the reformed band in a state of almost perpetual conflict, with P-Orridge invariably at odds with the other members before suddenly quitting.


P-Orridge subsequently attempted to halt the release of Desertshore, a cover of Nico’s 1968 album recorded by Tutti, Carter and a series of guest vocalists as a tribute to Peter Christopherson, who died in 2010. Certainly, the album and an accompanying collection of improvisations recorded after h/er departure didn’t do much for P-Orridge’s assertion s/he was the band’s sole creative force: they were significantly better than anything the reformed TG had released while s/he was a member.

These were far from the most damaging claims made in Tutti’s harrowing memoir, which not only depicted P-Orridge as mentally and physically abusive and given to claiming authorship of others’ work, but baldly accused h/er of attempted murder: first attacking her with a knife, then throwing a breeze block at her from a balcony, narrowly missing her head. P-Orridge blithely dismissed the claims, which seemed to have little impact on h/er standing as a revered cult figure, partly because Tutti’s book wasn’t published in the US, where P-Orridge was permanently based: either those devotees who did read it chose not to believe what it said, or felt that s/he had spent so long engaged in transgressive activities that a further set of transgressions didn’t matter. Or perhaps they felt Genesis P-Orridge’s artistic achievements were so monumental that such revelations couldn’t impact on them. Whether history will posthumously agree remains to be seen: that Genesis P-Orridge played a role in changing the course of rock music, however, is beyond doubt.

Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV leader Genesis Breyer P-Orridge dies aged 70
Co-founder of avant garde and experimental groups dies after long illness, leaving behind complicated legacy

Martin Belam Sat 14 Mar 2020
 
Genesis P Orridge in their 2014 exhibition at
 Summerhall, Edinburgh. Photograph: Peter Dibdin/Publicity image

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, co-founder of avant-garde band Throbbing Gristle and leader of Psychic TV, has died aged 70, according to reports from their family.

Genesis’ daughters, Genesse and Caresse, stated their parent, who used s/he as a pronoun, died on 14 March, issuing the following statement via social media:

“Dear friends, family and loving supporters, it is with very heavy hearts that we announce the passing of our beloved father, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. S/he had been battling leukaemia for two and a half years and dropped her body early this morning, Saturday 14th March, 2020. S/he will be laid to rest with h/er other half, Jacqueline ‘Lady Jaye’ Breyer who left us in 2007, where they will be re-united.”

Genesis P-Orridge: fantastic transgressor or sadistic aggressor?

P-Orridge had been diagnosed with chronic myelomonocytic leukemia in 2017, and in recent years had been touring farewell shows with Psychic TV, last playing in London and Berlin in 2018.

Born as Neil Andrew Megson in Manchester, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge grew up in Essex. S/he was a member of radical art collective COUM Transmissions in the late 1960s, and went on to form Throbbing Gristle with Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter Christopherson and Chris Carter. The band’s three albums in the late 70s were considered landmarks of the industrial scene.

Godstar, Psychic TV’s tribute to Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones, came closest to delivering a pop anthem from an artist who had helped pioneer industrial sounds and then adopted trappings of psychedelia.

Godstar - Psychic TV

In recent years, the nature of P-Orridge’s work in Throbbing Gristle has been re-examined after Cosey Fanni Tutti’s biography revealed more about their relationship, and the sometimes physical danger she felt she was in while working in the collective. She claimed that at one point s/he nearly killed her, throwing a breeze block at her from a balcony, narrowly missing her head. P-Orridge always denied the allegations.

Genesis P-Orridge: fantastic transgressor or sadistic aggressor?
The music essay Genesis P-Orridge

The Throbbing Gristle provocateur is being hymned as she nears the end of her life. But accusations of abuse, all denied, complicate her legacy

Lottie Brazier Tue 11 Dec 2018 
 

A new kind of human relationship ... Genesis P-Orridge.

 Photograph: Peter Dibdin

Last month, industrial performance artist and provocateur Genesis P-Orridge performed her final concert at London venue Heaven. It wasn’t just a farewell to her audience, but also a means for Genesis P-Orridge to bid farewell to herself. Recently she told the New York Times that the course of her chronic myelomonocytic leukaemia meant that she had “less optimistically, a year, maybe six months. And then I’m on the downward slope to death”. As with the Fall’s Mark E Smith in January this year, it’s difficult to imagine the UK music underground without this constant fixture.

Roughly half a century ago, Genesis P-Orridge flitted between several artist collectives. After dropping out of Hull university, she met avant-garde performance artist Cosey Fanni Tutti before joining the Ho Ho Funhouse art collective in London. Then a couple, the pair created the supposedly egalitarian, hippy collective COUM Transmissions and developed keen ideas around art’s purpose in society: namely, “art as life”. Fanni Tutti, Chris Carter and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson and P-Orridge formed the industrial noise project Throbbing Gristle, who vowed never to rehash their albums live, aimed to be more antagonistic than punk and were bestowed the title “wreckers of civilisation” by Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn following their pornographic Prostitution exhibition at London’s ICA in 1976. Seeking to juxtapose the monotonous sounds of factory work coupled with controversial reappropriation of totalitarian symbolism, Throbbing Gristle gave Genesis P-Orridge her reputation as the “godperson of industrial music”. An extraordinary life, no doubt – but to what extent can it be celebrated?

That recent New York Times piece shows ambitious, radical bodily transgression to be the overarching theme of Genesis P-Orridge’s prolific creative life, a fascination that began with her teenage love of German dadaist artist Max Ernst’s surrealist corporeal mashup, The Hundred Headless Woman. P-Orridge would leave behind her past identity as Neil Andrew Megson, and, decades later, participate in body modification in order to become a cosmetic “double” of her partner, the nurse and dominatrix Lady Jaye, in what P-Orridge termed the Pandrogyne Project

.
Genesis P-Orridge playing with Throbbing Gristle at YMCA, London, 3 August 1979. Photograph: David Corio/Redferns

Lady Jaye died in 2007, but P-Orridge continued with cosmetic surgery to alter her own body, part of her continuous striving to exist as a work of art. While P-Orridge and Lady Jaye might have conceived of a new kind of human relationship – a radical reconsideration of the self in relationship to another – it seemed strange that the New York Times didn’t consider P-Orridge’s status as body provocateur alongside Fanni Tutti’s allegations. In her 2017 autobiography Art Sex Music – she says P-Orridge was a manipulative, cruel partner. Fanni Tutti reveals another side to P-Orridge’s story, in which her own artistic freedoms and body, which she also considers interchangeable, are controlled and oppressed by her then-lover and bandmate.

Fanni Tutti recalls a series of alleged incidents in Art Sex Music, all denied by P-Orridge to the New York Times: how P-Orridge threw a concrete block at her head from a balcony, apparently aiming to kill her, and missed. How she allegedly pressured Fanni Tutti into frequent unprotected sex, which led her to seek an abortion. How she ran at her with a knife after Fanni Tutti threatened to end their relationship. How P-Orridge appointed herself chief supervisor of COUM’s frequent orgies and expected Fanni Tutti to have sex with various friends “instigated by and shared with [P-Orridge]”. There are repeat alleged incidences of P-Orridge forcing Fanni Tutti out of their shared living space.

The New York Times referenced Fanni Tutti’s allegations in a slim, sceptical paragraph. P-Orridge’s response: “Whatever sells a book sells a book.”
Cosey Fanni Tutti. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

Former COUM member Foxtrot Echo also suggests in Art Sex Magic that P-Orridge’s genius didn’t lie in her artistic skills, but rather in her ability to manipulate others. One key COUM member, Spydee, left the group after confessing to Fanni Tutti his frustration that P-Orridge “just wanted followers, not people to contribute. [She was] very dominant, we had no fun.”

In an interview with the Quietus, Throbbing Gristle’s electronics supervisor Chris Carter admitted that this tension drove the group’s sound – at least until their first split in 1981, after P-Orridge departed. Still, it was Carter’s DIY circuitry that fuelled their constant experimentation and unpredictable live performances. Throbbing Gristle created a sublime terror through their combination of imagery and sound. This, they explained, was their attempt to reveal the hypocrisy of British conservative politics, to strip back the safeness and niceness of “ordinary society” to show what humanity was truly capable of. In the early 90s, Scotland Yard’s Obscene Publications Squad raided Genesis P-Orridge’s house and discovered a fascination with necrophilia, murder and Nazism; Genesis herself has reminisced about art performances involving enemas of blood, milk and urine, or masturbating with severed chicken heads.

In his book on the history of British esoteric music, England’s Hidden Reverse, David Keenan argues that: “To take morality so seriously you have to pick it apart yourself in order to rebuild it in the face of the truth of existence, in all its horror and beauty, is intensely moral.” But for some, adopting such imagery is still a seductive means to signal extremist allegiances, while operating under the veneer of explorative artistic “transgression”.
Genesis P-Orridge at an exhibition of her work at Summerhall, Edinburgh, 2014. Photograph: Peter Dibdin

After leaving Throbbing Gristle in 1981, Genesis P-Orridge’s new band Psychic TV at times adopted a more straightforward garage rock setup (though perhaps with a little ironic distance). One of their most well-known tracks, the scrappy, Buzzcocks-esque Godstar, had P-Orridge recount the tragic life of the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones, commenting on the shallowness and destruction of fame. This anti-pop pop song clawed its way into the UK charts, surely something P-Orridge would have sniffed at during the Throbbing Gristle days. Other Psychic TV works continue Throbbing Gristle’s sound collage approach, but they’re sorely lacking Chris Carter’s metal machine music – their track Discipline sounds as if it’s driven by the irregular heartbeat and screams of Linda Blair, the demonically possessed girl in The Exorcist.

Psychic TV has continued well through the 80s and P-Orridge has released 37 studio albums with the band since its conception. In 1993, P-Orridge moved with Lady Jaye to Ridgewood, Queens in New York where the pair began the Pandrogeny Project, identifying themselves singularly as “Breyer P-Orridge”. In a recent documentary by French director and curator Marie Losier, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, P-Orridge is shown to be heartbroken, weak, struggling to pay the bills. But Losier allows P-Orridge to steer the course of the film away from the more controversial, problematic aspects of her early years – a celebration bordering on hagiography.

Artists that push for the representation of progressive lifestyles and new ways of framing identity should not be denied a platform, but their actions cannot be swept under the rug if they do not fit with their projected image – or even worse, glamorised as part of their transgression when they are plainly harmful. As Andrea Long Chu stated in her masterful disassembly of non-binary writer and director Jill Soloway’s memoir, She Wants It: Desire, Power, and Toppling the Patriarchy: “The ethics of gender recognition, now more than ever, compel us to accept without contest or prejudice the self-identification of all people. They do not, however, compel us to find those identities likable, interesting, or worth writing a book about.”

As the Quietus warn in their essay on extreme politics in underground music: “Artistic transgression and subversion are vital elements of any socially progressive culture, but mindlessly pushing against the boundaries of what is considered acceptable, artistically, politically, or socially, is not necessarily progress.” Legacies place an artist’s fingerprints on scenes and communities, that linger even in their absence, and P-Orridge is certainly interesting enough to write a book about. But Fanni Tutti’s accusations are now part of this legacy – and anyway, with such an unruly personality, P-Orridge herself would likely reject a straightforward, purely celebratory account of her life. Histories of our artists must be written honestly and sometimes even painfully – otherwise our civilisation will truly be wrecked.





Could it be magick? The occult returns to the art world

Andy Battaglia


Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Tony Oursler have spent many years exploring paranormal phenomena through their artworks. Now, both have major exhibitions in New York – and suddenly they’re not alone in their interests

Fri 1 Jul 2016  modified on Tue 30 Apr 2019 

 

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: a pandrogenous devotee of sex magick. Photograph: Peter Dibdin/Publicity image


Drugs, blood, caskets, fish and hair all feature in the arsenal of supplies enlisted for art by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. A few more, for variety’s sake: bones, a brass hand, dominatrix shoes and the discarded skin of a pet boa constrictor.


Best known as a musical dissident with the proto-industrial band Throbbing Gristle and later Psychic TV, Breyer P-Orridge has made visual art for decades as part of a ritualistic practice in which boundaries tend to blur. The first transmissions of musical noise started in the 1970s, but art has been part of the project from several years before then to the present day. Work of the more recent vintage makes up the bulk of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: Try to Altar Everything, an exhibition on view at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York.

The Rubin museum focuses on correspondences between global contemporaneity and historic cultures from areas around the Himalayas and India, and the show surveys, in an expansive fashion, Breyer P-Orridge’s engagement with ideas from Hindu mythology and Nepal. Nepal is a favored haven away from the artist’s home in New York, but – as with most matters in Breyer P-Orridge’s realm – worldly matters turn otherworldly fast.
Reliquary by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. Photograph: Invisible Exports

Visitors to the exhibition are greeted by two large illuminated portraits of nude bodies on the surface of caskets standing on end, one belonging to the artist and the other to h/er late partner and muse Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge. The unorthodox pronoun “h/er” is not a mistake but the preferred way to address the genderless existence of the pandrogyne, a state of male-female fusion the two were seeking to achieve by way of surgical incursions and rituals to combine souls. The undertaking was chronicled intimately in the 2011 documentary The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, released to wide acclaim four years after Lady Jaye fell prey to cancer and died (or “left her body,” as Genesis tells it). Now, Try to Altar Everything brings some of the couple’s collaborative artwork into the light.


Blood Bunny, made over 10 years until its completion in 2007, is a sculpture under glass of a wooden rabbit covered in blood. Hanging from its head is a ponytail made from Lady Jaye’s hair, bright blond in contrast to the dark blood all but black in its desiccated state. The source of it was needle pricks from injections of the powerful drug ketamine, which the couple took – and Breyer P-Orridge reveres still – for its fabled out-of-body experiences.

“It’s such a powerful material that we don’t waste it – we use it. We’ve got little vials of blood in our refrigerator at home,” Breyer P-Orridge says while staring the bunny down at the museum on a recent sunny afternoon. 

Blood Bunny: includes blood infused with ketamine. Photograph: Invisible Exports


Nearby are a small sculptural shrine with dried fish slathered in sparkles over an abstract mandala design (Feeding the Fishes, 2010) and an odd clock remade with fossil teeth, feathers and bits of gold alluding to alchemical forces (It’s All a Matter of Time, 2016).

Works of the sort in the show serve as reliquaries or tools for use in rituals rooted in a mixture of familiar religions (Buddhism, Hinduism, voodoo) and inclinations toward the more arcane realms of black magic and the occult.

“We’ve investigated lots of avenues and that includes occulture of various types,” says Breyer P-Orridge, who uses the word “we” exclusively in reference to a sort of individual and collective self. Early learning from occult figures like Aleister Crowley and mysterious magical sects like the Ordo Templi Orientis led to a lifelong devotion to ritualistic practice that has expanded and evolved.

S/he speaks highly still of “sex magic, where the orgasm is the moment when all forms of consciousness in your mind are joined, temporarily, and therefore you can pass a message through.” And other ceremonial endeavors involving age-old symbols and codes continue to be part of a method of art-making that is as much about the making as the end result.
Feeding the Fishes: a small sculptural shrine. Photograph: Invisible Exports

An essay in the catalog for the Rubin show refers to Breyer P-Orridge’s earliest work’s dedication to “the ‘discovery of intention’, meaning it created and unearthed its message and relevance through performance, not before,” while characterizing h/er ritual-abetted communion with Lady Jaye as a “living, experimental work of art in the process”.

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The exhibition, which continues through 1 August, arrives in the midst of a certain vogue for art attuned to occult practices. Last fall, a survey of demonic and deranged paintings by Marjorie Cameron, an associate of notorious rocket-scientist/occultist Jack Parsons and film-maker Kenneth Anger, showed at the gallery of prominent New York art maven Jeffrey Deitch. A group show titled Language of the Birds: Occult and Art gathered work by the likes of Brion Gysin, Jordan Belson, Anohni, Lionel Ziprin, Carol Bove and many more (including Breyer P-Orridge) in the 80WSE Gallery at New York University. Uptown at the American Folk Art Museum, a show titled Mystery and Benevolence: Masonic and Odd Fellows Folk Art drew visitors before closing in May.

Enough interest has been fostered and fanned out to make one wonder about the source of it all. Is it a yearning for art made for purposes other than mere aesthetic enterprise? A desired deferral to forces other than those proffered by markets and asset-class finance deals? A curiosity about creations devised with a mind for matters at play outside internal dialogues within just the art world itself? 

FacebookTwitterPinterest A still from Tony Oursler’s 

Imponderable. Photograph: MoMA


Tony Oursler, who has a new exhibition with paranormal proclivities on view at the Museum of Modern Art, says he can see the appeal of looking beyond the artistic pursuit for other forms of reason and rationale.

“A lot of people are trying to move into more social practices to find some relevance. It’s probably refreshing for people to see a certain kind of agency that can be offered in other practices,” the artist says.

Oursler’s show is more playful and inclined toward levity and debunking than Breyer P-Orridge’s. It includes parts of an immense archival collection related to stage magic and historical matters such as spirit photography and telekinetic mediums popular in the early 20th century, when notions of ghosts and transmissions from other worlds were very much part of the cultural conversation. The archive and a fanciful feature-length film, Imponderable, chart a peculiar history involving Oursler’s own grandfather Charles Fulton Oursler and his real-life dealings with characters including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Houdini and various spirit-world fixtures who turned out to be hucksters and frauds.

About the magnetism of such a subject, Oursler speaks of an “unending interest in magical thinking and how it’s generated through media and various social means that led me back to these world views.” 

Bolts from the blue: art gets spooky. Photograph: MoMA

He insists, too, that they are not as anachronistic as many might suspect. “Everyone walks around with a matrix of beliefs through which they view the world,” Oursler says. “Statistically, if you look at America, it turns out roughly 60% of the population believes in ESP. One in three people do not believe in evolution. Forty percent of the public believes in UFOs. The rationalism we assume to be there might not, in fact, be there.”

Breyer P-Orridge attributes rising interest in the occult to certain fleeting motivations. “Some of it is pure fashion, always,” s/he says. But the role of ritual and faith in its own ends can be a guide. After growing weary of the hierarchies and conscriptions of ceremonial magic as practiced early on (see: robes, chants, gestures with strict limitations and rules), “We thought: Do you need all the fancy theatrics or is there something at the core that makes things happen? Our experience tells us it’s just one or two things at the core. One of those is being able to reprogram one’s deep consciousness through repetition in ritual.”

When a working sense of ritual conjoins with the process of making art, the result might be differently invested. “When we walk around to galleries, we’re nearly always disappointed,” Breyer P-Orridge says of art s/he sees around town. “Most of it is not about anything. It’s decorative at best and looks nice in penthouses. And now it’s gotten more corrupted because it’s like the stock market – people going around to advise people what to buy as an investment. You can’t trust the art world.”

To be trusted instead: “That strange reverberation that tells me what’s fascinating.”
This article was amended on 1 July 2016; the artist mentioned is Marjorie Cameron, not Carmen

This much I know
Genesis P-Orridge
Interview
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: 'Pleasure is a weapon'

Hanna Hanra


The musician and artist, 66, on Wiliam Burroughs, Caitlyn Jenner, Donald Trump and his dead wife Lady Jaye, with whom he shares a body


Sat 30 Jul 2016 14.00 BSTLast modified on Tue 19 Jun 2018 12.45 BST




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‘William Burroughs told me, look for who has 

the vested interest’: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.

 Photograph: Drew Wiedemann

I refer to myself as ‘we’. My wife, Lady Jaye, and I spent time in a Tibetan monastery and realised it is possible for some people to reincarnate. Before Lady Jaye dropped her body [she died of stomach cancer in 2007] we had discussed that she would contact me and she would reappear. We are still together, and she represents us in the immaterial world where she resides.

My father enlisted at the age of 17. He lied about his age because he wanted to ride the fastest motorbikes, which were with the British army. At the end of the war all he got were two bronze medals in a box with a printed note: “Thank you very much for your service.” I’ve just used them in a collage with some Union Jack postcards and some bags of heroin.

William Burroughs told me: “Gen, if you want to know what’s going on, look for who has the vested interest at any given time.” And he’s right.

I was bullied out of the UK and moved to New York. At the time I was with my band Throbbing Gristle and the attention became unbearable. I lost two houses. My parents were doorstepped by the News of the World. They were asked: “Has your son always been a sex maniac?” My mother said: “I know my son is extremely intelligent and whatever he happens to be doing, he will be doing it for a good reason. Goodbye.”

Lady Jaye dressed me in her clothes the first day we met. The love we had was so strong we wished we could become one. Then we thought: why shouldn’t we? [They had plastic surgery to look like each other.]

There are lots of kids on the streets who are hustling and they need the money to transition

We don’t agree with Caitlyn Jenner deciding she is the spokesperson for trans people. There are lots of kids on the streets who are hustling and they need the money to transition. And she is saying: “It’s so hard being a woman, knowing what dress to wear to the Oscars.”

We used to live in a radical Maoist commune. Everything was shared. All the clothes were in a box and you wore whatever you pulled out. You couldn’t sleep in the same place twice. All the money was shared and you had to justify why you needed it. We got tired of that dogmatism.

We very rarely relax, but when we do it’s with our dog, Musty Dagger. She’s a Pekingese rescue. When we need to not think and feel for a bit, we lie on the bed and fall asleep.

Anger and rage were the right response to Thatcher and the early 80s, but not now. Our response is: “Pleasure is a weapon.” We always try to look at the opposite of what is happening. Now society is happy to expose its own nasty underbelly – look at Donald Trump.

Everything we do has a story and a connection. It’s not about art for art’s sake. It’s about commentaries on what it is to be alive, and how we can make it better for everyone. We are at a crisis point as a species, so anything that persuades people to be better as human beings is worth doing.

Psychic TV’s new album, Alienist, is out in September (genesisbreyerporridge.com)

Interview

Genesis P-Orridge: 'People's lives should be as interesting as their art'Dave Simpson
The Throbbing Gristle founder, once branded a 'wrecker of civilisation', talks about being given a poetry prize by Philip Larkin and reaching marital unity through plastic surgery

Thu 29 Aug 2013 

 
Genesis P-Orridge: 'The press portray me as outrageous, but we have a way with animals.' Photograph: Andy Kropa/Getty Images North America


Hi Genesis! Your new photographic retrospective book about your life contains images of nudity and genital mutilation. (1) Yet some fans might be more shocked by the one of you as a cute little boy clutching a rabbit.

For the first nine years of my life we (2) weren't allowed pets because of my asthma, apart from that rabbit, which lived outdoors in a hutch. But we've had dogs since 1969. The media portray me as outrageous, but we have a way with animals and can train dogs so well that they don't need leads. We once took the dog shopping, went home and two hours later thought: "Where's the fucking dog?" We ran back like a maniac and she was still there, sitting outside the butcher's.

How did cute little Neil Megson become the notorious Genesis P-Orridge?

Solihull School radicalised me in terms of who are the enemy. All the other kids were being told: "You are the future leaders of Britain. You will be MPs or military generals." Then there was me. We started an underground magazine complaining about the school rules and actually got some of them changed, like the one which insisted that boys of 6ft 4in with stubble should always wear their school cap. It was ridiculous!

Were you a bit of a handful, even then?

There's one of my old school reports in the book. The English teacher – nicknamed Bog Brush because of his moustache – put: "Neil seems to live in a completely different universe to the rest of us. Very weird but very intelligent." We'd been quoting Tibetan Buddhism in essays about Shakespeare and stuff. He did recommend Jack Kerouac's On The Road to me, though, which convinced me that people's lives should be as interesting as the art they make. A lifelong manifesto.

Were you really given a prize at Hull University by Philip Larkin?

We went there to study philosophy and economics. God knows why. Within three weeks we thought: "We can't do this." So we started writing poetry. Philip Larkin – the librarian there – gave me the prize, and not long afterwards told the Times I was the most promising young poet in Britain. Which, of course, immediately stopped me writing poetry.

Most people form bands to be famous, make money and have sex. What motivated you to form Throbbing Gristle?

Well, we were already getting plenty of sex! We'd been doing this thing called Coum Transmissions and I remember wearing gas masks outside Hull town hall and this guy in a suit rushing up asking: "Who are you people?" The British Council sent us to Milan with Gilbert and George to represent British performance art, but one day I was talking to this old man in the pub who'd been gassed in the first world war. He'd said: "I understand you're trying to wake people up. But how many people in this pub would get it? Why don't you do something accessible, like music?" So we did.


How did you invent industrial music, which became a genre that has since inspired everyone from David Bowie to Marilyn Manson to Nine Inch Nails?

It was a process of reduction. We decided we didn't want a drummer, because that would immediately anchor us in rock history. At the beginning, we hit my bass strings with a leather glove to provide a rhythm. Chris Carter started building drum machines and weird gadgets. Sleazy Christopherson experimented with tape machines and cut ups because he was into [William] Burroughs. Cosey [Fanni Tutti] wanted to play lead guitar, which at the time was unheard of for a woman. We got one from Woolworths, but she said it was too heavy. So we took an electric saw and cut off the excess wood. That's how she ended up with that style of guitar.

How did you write songs?

We jammed every weekend throughout 1975, recording everything and listening to it back so we could use the best bits. Later, we added my deadpan Lou Reed voice and the various stories. It was about taking lyrics and imagery to the logical conclusion. Nothing was too extreme. Nothing was taboo.

Your first performance – the notorious "Prostitution" show at the ICA in 1976 – catapulted you to national attention.

Yeah. We had a plastic art deco clock filled with used tampons called It's That Time of the Month. The whole country was in uproar. Now those tampons are in the Tate National Collection of Fine Art – with the Turners, the Rothkos and the Constables.'

How did it feel to be branded "wreckers of civilisation" in the House of Commons?


We were so proud. We had a flyer with that on it the very next day. The irony of it was that Sir Nicholas Fairbairn – the [Tory] MP who called us that – was involved in various sex scandals. And his mistress, a House of Commons secretary, tried to hang herself outside his office. It was classic British hypocrisy: everything we were against.

Is it true that TG's 20 Jazz Funk Greats album was returned to the shops by irate jazz funk fans compaining: "This isn't jazz funk. It's horrible noise!"?

There was a lot of dark, twisted humour in TG.

Your Twitter page says you're "STILL!" a member of TG. Does that mean the band still exists?

I never quit the band even though the others said I did. I just didn't do the last two gigs for reasons that will become clear eventually – it was the people around them on the business side. But Sleazy died not long after, so maybe it was the end of our natural life as a band.


TG and your other band Psychic TV both became international cults without entering the mainstream. Would you have liked hits?

Well Godstar (3) got to No 29. But going on Top of the Pops would have ruined everything. It would have made it much more difficult to write books, do art exhibitions and set up religions and be taken seriously. Once you have a hit, it just becomes another old song. Mick Jagger is 70 and still singing Satisfaction every concert. That would drive me insane.

Were you really the last person to speak to Joy Division's Ian Curtis before he killed himself?

Ian Curtis was a young genius. We were the last person he spoke to on the phone. He said: "I don't want to go on the American tour. I'd rather be dead." He sang our song Weeping – about suicide – down the phone. We were ringing people in Manchester, saying: "You've got to go round to Ian's because he's going to try and kill himself." The people we got through to went, "Oh, he's always being dramatic" and the other people were out. Even now it really upsets me.

In 1992, you were hounded from the UK by the tabloids and the police, amid allegations of "Satanic ritual abuse"? What happened?

Sleazy had made this film of young boys: LA skateboarders who meet this guy who puts an implant in their arms so every time they press a button they get an orgasm. After a while it burns out the nerves, so they put it in their cocks. It was all fake, but when I first saw it, I said: "Sleazy. People will think this is real."

So you aren't a Satanist, Gen?

That's so far from what we are. We were actually in Kathmandu using our own money to help Tibetan monks feed beggars and refugees when the papers called us "Satanists". Scotland Yard raided my house and took everything, then told my lawyers that if I'd tell them who made the film, they'd forget all about it. But we wouldn't snitch. We lost everything: two homes, our children gave up their friends. Sleazy never thanked me. That was disappointing.

You moved to America and met Lady Jaye Breyer (4), your second wife, musical collaborator and soulmate. Where did you find her?

In a friend's dungeon. We were in the middle of a not very pleasant divorce, so every so often we'd come to New York for a break and basically go wild. We were fast asleep with all these torture instruments after being awake for three days, woke up and this beautiful tall, slim girl wearing 60s clothing with a Brian Jones haircut walks past, then gets changed into this really sexy leather outfit. I was thinking: "Dear universe, if I can be with this woman for the rest of my life, that's all I want." She came over and we were in love from that moment. We got a windfall from a court case and rather than do what everyone else does and buy a Ferrari and a big house, we realised it meant we could be free to never work, just be in love and create things. Thank goodness, because we spent every minute together for the whole time she was physically on this planet. If we'd have done things the normal way, we'd have just seen each other at dinnertime when we were tired.


Why did you start pandrogyny [having plastic surgery to look the same as each other]?

Well, you know that moment when you meet someone and think: "I want to eat you, be immersed in you?" It began like that, and then we began to see more ramifications in terms of how society is controlled and evolution. Humans have to realise they're not individuals, but individual parts of the same organism, with responsibility to each other.

The photographs of Jaye and of you after her death (5) show a deeply moving, intimate side of you that the public has never seen. Was it difficult sifting through those photos?

My friend Leigha Mason selected them because it was impossible for me. My parents and all the animals in the photos apart from Musty, my Pekinese, are dead. Lady Jaye has dropped her body. We believe in reincarnation, but that was really hard.
Footnotes

(1) The book Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is published by First Third Books in deluxe and standard editions.

(2) Genesis usually refers to h/erself in the second person as "we".

(3) 1985 Psychic TV single, a tribute to dead Rolling Stone Brian Jones.

(4)Former nurse Jacqueline Breyer, also known as Miss Domination. After marriage Genesis adopted the name Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.

(5) In 2007, from a heart attack related to stomach cancer.