Original subtitles

This programme contains scenes of a sexual nature, some strong language,

and scenes which some viewers may find disturbing

SYNTH NOTES REVERBERATE

LOW NOTES BOOM

ELECTRONIC BEAT INTENSIFIES

Look what I'm doing - standing with a knife.

MAN LAUGHS

Even like this, I can keep up my secret reputation

as evil and vicious.

Ah! Oh! God bless David Bowie.

Which one? The LSD, the DMT or the ketamine?

The OTO, Cafe OTO, was great.

It was beautiful.

We really like doing those. Your lunch is here.

Lunch is served.

Do you mind if I just give her a little...?

We moved here in '96.

Way back in the '60s, we wrote this poem about,

"New York is the toilet of Europe.

"They flush all the people they don't want into New York."

And strangely enough, they flushed me here, too.

Wow, what a life, Musty.

What a life.

One of the most transgressive art collectives

that this country's ever produced.

It was pretty full-on. How do you actually describe your own music?

To be as difficult as possible.

No boundaries.

You were intending to provoke the establishment, weren't you?

We've always strived to be honest.

I'm interested in what human beings are capable of doing to one another,

good and bad.

I grew up with Throbbing Gristle.

Utter inspiration to me when I was younger and queer.

The wreckers of civilisation,

and anything less, I'll be sorely disappointed.

All my life I've been drawn to gardens,

and I'm a big believer that everybody should touch the Earth

once a day.

The garden is a very spiritual place.

It's, there's, the plants are not going to ask you any questions,

they're just going to make their statement and be there.

Maybe we should be more like that.

Just be rather than try and change everything.

Ah, lovely! That powdery blue, that lilac-y blue.

If you was at the beginning of the world,

and you were creating the world, could you have thought of that?

Would you have ever thought a fish, that live in water?

What great thing, what a great idea.

Whose idea was that?

They can't live in our world and we can't live in theirs. Wow!

I came originally from Hull.

I grew up with Cosey. We were neighbours.

We were friends from the age of dot.

She's like my sister rather than a friend.

We are very close.

In our teens, we grew up and did things together,

and, when she left home, she moved into a different part of Hull,

and eventually met up with Genesis,

and they'd started doing different things under the name

of COUM Transmissions.

I can't tell you when that actually started, or when it ended,

cos I feel it still goes on.

COUM is transmitting now.

Les once made a point to me years ago -

we forget that as we grow, we're growing away from the ground.

He said, "When you're young, you just see everything,

"and you're on the ground

"and you can see all this are the world going on.

"And as you grow your, your eyes are moving away from that

"and focusing on other things."

And I think it's good to get back down on the ground

and realise where everything really comes from.

I grew up on a council estate in Hull.

I was born in 1951 - post-war baby.

I wasn't content with what I was expected to be.

I mean, especially being I wasn't middle-lass, I was working-class,

and you were definitely channelled into just literally working

for the rest of your life,

being a wife and working and supporting your husband.

Even, even a lot of the women on my estate didn't go to work.

Some worked in factories, but not many.

They were stay-at-home mums.

And, erm, I, I couldn't see myself doing that.

Maybe the way my dad brought me up and gave me access to a more male

kind of view of the world, through, you know, wanting me to be a boy.

I think that had a lot to do with it.

I remember having a conversation with my father when I was 14.

He wanted me to be a gas fitter for British Gas.

And I told him I wanted to be a poet.

I never really knew what that meant, but it sounded nice.

But I knew instinctively, that I was different,

and that I wasn't like the other boys.

I lived on a council estate.

You were homosexual, you were queer, you would be beaten up.

Hull was pretty isolated.

The Humber Bridge wasn't built.

Back in the 1960s, Hull was a different sort of place.

Most people just had to work, and just tucked into that, you know,

so a very drab, drab place, Hull.

And I hate to say that, but that's how it was.

Obviously, there was beginnings of pop programmes

which became Top Of The Pops, but there were all sorts of things

going on before then, like Ready, Steady, Go.

So you've got an idea of what was going on in the world

outside of Hull.

And, also, there were a lot of bands that came to play in Hull.

So, you'd get the Small Faces and Walker Brothers,

and then Hendrix, of course, came in,

and that was a big sort of epiphany for me, really,

was seeing him.

When I started going to all the music and folk clubs

and meeting those kind of people,

I realised that a different lifestyle was possible,

and that was where I was heading, you know?

With a 303 rifle, I was a first-class sniper.

So, Jen and I first really met when we were travelling on a bus

to a cadet force day out.

This is where you dressed as soldiers and went out

and shot at things, you know?

I'd got a few things in my pockets that he was interested in.

I'd got my appendix I used to carry around with me in a jar,

I'd got a dried-up leech, I'd got a rabbit bone, you know,

all those things that boys have.

He was...effete.

He was kind of like the Oscar Wilde of the school.

Solihull School in those days was a very repressed place.

You know, we were very much outsiders.

And, at that point, we did not have a single friend.

And then there were these four boys a year below me

who were also in the same kind of boat.

They were getting bullied.

And it was our salvation, really, cos we then realised

that we were into the weird, new music that was happening,

and we were into beatnik poetry,

and it was spies that often informed us of new stuff.

He told me, "There's a band called The Velvet Underground,"

and he'd first heard about Sun Ra and the Mothers Of Invention.

It's hugely impossible to describe, in the internet days,

when you can just google something, but, you know,

we'd fall on this stuff like starving men, really.

We felt like we were a miniature version of the beats,

that we were protecting each other and inspiring each other,

and we were working towards doing something important.

We received...these visions,

under the name COUM Transmissions,

in the late summer of 1969.

We thought that we were completely alone

and that we'd experimented with being in a commune in London

and it hadn't worked, and we had no great idea of direction.

We were just floating free.

We decided to hitchhike around Britain and,

on the way, to drop in on my parents in Shrewsbury.

There was this weekend where they said,

"Would you like to go for a drive in the countryside?"

So, we were driving around,

and we closed our eyes at some point.

And suddenly there was an explosion of psychedelic spirals

and colours and voices,

and we suddenly had this experience that my being

had moved outside the car,

but we were reduced to the molecules and the atoms.

So, we were in the hedge, but moving through it.

And as that realisation was happening in my conscious mind,

suddenly all this other information started coming in.

And part of that was this phrase cosmic organicism

of the universal molecular.

COUM for short - C-O-U-M.

I was at the point where I'd started smoking dope, taking acid,

left my job because that was just too straight.

And there were people in the college that I got to meet who had bands.

And so my whole world shifted from the council estate to people

that went to university, art college, and I spent

all my time with them.

I was also in the throes of being thrown out of home.

And I've been thrown out once and still not learned my lesson.

We had received amongst the visions that we would meet a woman

who would be Cosmosis.

I was at the university and had gone to an acid test,

which I didn't like at all.

I was about to leave.

And as I was coming down the stairs, I saw this little guy

with a graduation gown and the hat and the purple beard.

And there was this classic flower child and we kind of stopped

and looked at her.

I didn't quite know if he was real or not.

And he'd seen me, apparently. Someone came up to me and said,

"Cosmosis, Genesis wants to see you."

That was the name he gave me.

Then about a week or two later, I met up with him.

So we moved all our stuff into Prince Street.

This totally Dickensian, Georgian terrace.

Two of them were more or less derelict, knocked into one.

They have 19 rooms.

But the downside was, when it rained or snowed, it snowed and rained

in the kitchen.

And then shortly after, Spydeee joined us.

I'd gone hitchhiking

around the country and gone to various places.

I'd gone to Hull then because I had to leave home as well.

Eventually, I found Gen and Cosey just living around the corner

and moved in with them.

And as far as I'm concerned, that's where COUM really began.

Hello, good morning and welcome to Arena. Genesis P-Orridge,

who is fairly well known in Hull for his walking about with long hair

and a beret, came into the studio to tell me what was going to happen.

Well, obviously it starts with COUMA Are Fab and Kinky.

"COUM is the folk music of tomorrow, because there is no tomorrow.

"COUM urinate down the handrails of your subconscious."

"Come away, you don't know where they've been."

"COUM make a nice evening out for the family."

There was nothing like it in Hull.

Totally nothing like it. We would go out on the streets, on the main

shopping area, dressed up in really vibrant colours and do bizarre

little Dada surrealist actions.

They said to me at one point the people come and say,

"Well, what does it mean?" It doesn't need to mean anything.

It just is.

We would bring props out and stand there and maybe do a sort of recite

poetry or do songs and try and involve the public.

By the way, Hull was quite a friendly place.

People were pleased to see, you know, you brighten their day.

You know, you could almost say every day was a performance, really.

It grabbed people's attention, it made people smile.

Some people became angry, they thought

we was absolute lunatics.

Some joined COUM from that and said, "I really enjoyed the other night.

"It was like something I'd never seen."

You know, "Next time you're doing something, can I join in?"

We were interested in the idea that people who've never been to art

college, people who were the cast-offs of society, were actually

all potentially geniuses.

We considered ourselves as outlaws and outcasts, really, because anyone

can do art. You don't need a degree.

Anyone can play an instrument.

Anyone can make a noise.

I mean, I had a couple of very cheap old tape recorders, reel

to reel, and I would mix them up and I'd slow them down and record

off the other one and I'd use a bit of Stockhausen and I'd use classical

music and underlay that with... Record the sound of the beds in the

garden and just overlay it and overlay it until I had a concoction

of sound which seemed to fill the room.

Most of the people that we worked with had nothing to do

with universities or art colleges.

They were just incredibly eccentric, interesting people.

People inhabited these characters that they had a particular interest

in and fetish for, even, if you want to say that, and they were allowed

to go and explore that, but in a public place.

Was a free thinking way of doing things.

It was new.

It felt right.

It felt as if this is the direction the whole world should go.

We did a gig in Bradford, and that was how we met Foxtrot.

I always thought it was more like a gang or a group, at least,

but a gang, really. In some ways it was like a criminal gang or a kid's

gang. It was very much a '60s thing, which I think was very healthy.

Everybody could have a go.

It was at a time when there was some social mobility.

You know, your father could have been a docker or something,

but you could do something.

I think this was to get into Czechoslovakia.

I actually said COUM was my company.

This is one of the patches, which were embroidered by Cosey.

And the whole Daily News or whatever it was.

There's Gen sitting in Prince Street.

That was an extraordinary place.

It was a semi-derelict jam factory.

There were sort of dummies and strange figures.

It was like a sort of wonderland, really.

And I know Spydeee said he was always cold.

The roof was leaking and the kitchen was just a cobbled floor that used

to get frosted over in winter, and the toilet in the corner,

which was disgusting.

And we used to have a water carrier that we'd fill up and take upstairs

to do the cooking on the fire.

It was hard, but for me, I was kind of living in a way I'd never lived

before, like everybody was. We all were in that house.

It was just, I can't really describe to people what it was like as an art

practice because I never looked at it like that.

It was just the way I lived.

It was hand to mouth.

A lot of people don't realise that having no money in your pocket

and no prospect of any money... Where you going to go?

What are you going to do?

Genesis got the dole. Cosey had part time jobs

to help them survive. I had to get odd jobs as well.

You know, I worked at the docks and I was a petrol pump attendant

and all sorts of in between.

I got quite fed up with not having enough money to eat properly.

And I went and got a job at the Humbrol paint factory.

So we could have regular meals and we could afford to buy

certain things for the actions that we wanted to do.

Cosey was actually on this poster.

This is a bone of contention.

Why was not the only female member of the group

on the poster, you know?

Well, it was really.

I never even cottoned on that I was the only woman because it's just not

the way I looked at it.

I was just part of this creative community.

But, yeah, I did do a lot of the housework.

So I think other people looked at me as a woman and expected me

to do womanly duties.

I had no roof over my head from being thrown out,

so this was my security, this home.

Both Cosey and I, we could have ended up homeless

on the streets, you know? Absolutely could.

It was very close to that side of things.

It's bad because I really don't want to compartmentalise

her as the mother figure, but she just had the common sense,

actually, is what it was, the common sense that, you know,

we need to eat. We need to keep a certain degree of cleanliness.

We need to keep a certain degree of sanity.

General Idea, who were based in Toronto, did a magazine called

File, and amongst it in one of their issues was about six pages

that were yellow paper and it was called the Image Bank Request List.

And in it, there were literally maybe 2,000 artists' names,

and you could give your name and your mailing address,

and then you could request images of what you needed for your work.

We started writing to people.

It was like being given a gift, really.

And sending handmade things.

The whole idea was that you were avoiding the galleries,

you were avoiding commerciality.

You are giving a gift to another artist.

And so, word got around and people would write to you and say,

"We're doing this, how do you fancy doing some little thing "with us?"

Was a good time, and it really accelerated

what we were doing in terms of who we're meeting

and the opportunities that were sort of presented to us as well.

Yeah, it sort of exploded.

Thank you all. Is he going to smack me up?

It became too hot, so they moved out. They made the right choice,

but it wasn't because of that, they had to get out of Hull.

There was nothing left in Hull, Hull had gone.

And I kept saying to them, you know, most of the things we'd like to do,

I'm sure they'll be a more receptive audience down in London.

And we had our Austin, the big black van, and we piled

what we needed and could fit into it.

ECHOING: You're walking along that way

ECHOING: You're walking along that way

because I've got to go now,

I own this house.

You know, sometimes I really do think...

..that, you know... Keep me company.

It was a big, big thing to move to London.

It was a big move that fragmented us as a collective.

And then we met different people.

Robin Klassnik was saying that there was a studio

at Martello St that was up,

and did we want it?

The electricity wasn't working and the water was turned off

in the one sink and one tap.

But it was home. It was a bit better than Prince St, but it was much

smaller, it was just one room instead of 17.

I built this box in one corner,

a wooden cave box just big enough

for a mattress that Cosey had sewn out of canvas.

And then we piled up foraged wood around it to make it look

like that's where we kept our raw material for sculptures,

because you weren't allowed to live there.

And then under the arches were all the factories, dress

factories, shoe factories, handbag factories, which were a great source

of art materials for us.

And Hackney was just very working class, hardcore area. We many times

got chased through the park and, you know, harassed and stuff.

But it was no different to Hull really.

REVERBERATING NOTE PLAYS

When we went into the Martello St studio, Bruce Lacey

was the caretaker there and his son, John Lacey, used to come and work

with him on his theatre productions.

And we got to know John really well, and he joined COUM

and brought his expertise on building synthesisers.

Testing, hello. Oh, listen.

When I first started working with COUM, more of the music was either

acoustic or guitars and bass.

But in terms of effects, units and synthesisers,

COUM weren't using those when I started working with them.

John was quite a catalyst in what we did, sound-wise.

I think he was the bridge from what we did as COUM - chaos -

to then having all this equipment

because he had theatre lights and everything.

The Oval House was about the COUMing Of Age, it was called, and that one

in particular was the very innocent views of sex.

It was about rites of passage.

I actually was in the control booth doing lighting and sound.

We did use other music, though.

We used John Cale, some Velvet Underground.

There was me on the swing, pink swing with a heart hole

cut in the seat of it.

But then I peed right across as I went along.

Jules Baker loaned us this wonderful cage.

Used on monsters for Doctor Who at the time.

And it had tendrils coming in all over it.

And I was in that as a model doing my modelling. But trapped

in this threatening environment.

And that was obviously drawn in from what she was doing

by that point in her actual daily life, which was photography

for other people.

I found this competition for Men Only magazine for...for,

you know, nude photographs that, you know, and if you got accepted,

you'd get a prize and maybe you'd get some more work from it.

"Shall we enter it? Would you do it?"

And I said, "Yeah, let's try it."

And that was the opportunity.

So he presented really the opportunity for me

to start doing that, must give him credit for that.

And I took the first photographs of her. We'd done nude stuff before.

So you're kind of like open to being naked in front of people.

And also, for myself, intrigued by the whole sex market

and exploring my sexuality in that way, because it's not

a commitment to anybody and it's an experience.

And it fascinated me, not least because I started doing collages

using porn magazines.

It would be really nice for me to be cutting myself out

and using myself in collages, in found material, but genuinely

found. If I enter that market and become that person

in the magazine that I'm cutting out, then that's a fantastic,

complete work to me.

I've entered it and brought it right back to my artwork again,

and it's an artwork from beginning to end.

We were trying to manipulate the media in some way.

That was one of the big ideas in COUM.

You know, either get yourself mentioned in the papers or lead

them down the garden path in some way or play with the way the media

would play with you.

It was fascinating because from the beginnings of those little black

and white porn mags and some colour ones off and on,

this whole thing sort of unfolded before me about what it is

to be a model for these sleazy little magazines.

It was a business.

And a big business.

I was in Greece, this is me in Greece, modelling for Men Only.

I did a lot of modelling for Laszlo Szabo.

He became a very good friend of mine and he photocopied one of them

and sent it to me and signed it.

This is part of the life forms artwork I did with a series

of about four or five sequences of photographs.

It shows the body position of me whatever arena I was working in,

one informed the other.

So we have the photograph I did with Szabo, the striptease

I was doing in Shepherd's Bush in London and the art performance, art

action I did at the Hayward Gallery.

I do this set of business cards, but they're like little artworks

because they fix in time certain important parts of my life.

And this was for one I did it for Tate, which, as you can see

again, I had to...

..cross out the offending areas, but there you go.

It's ongoing, isn't it?

I didn't find feminism spoke for me at all.

In fact, I found it very divisive.

It would split me away from an area that I was really

enjoying exploring.

And I'd been to Gay Liberation Front in Notting Hill, and I'd seen

first-hand what it was like to be all-inclusive rather than divisive.

And that's what I liked, and I felt more affinity with than feminism

at that time.

I didn't hate men.

You know, I loved men, I didn't want to have to say I don't want men

in my life.

I understand the points completely, but I am actually out doing

there what you are prescribing, but in a different way.

I was in a position where I could explore who I was and do exactly

what I wanted to do. I had no responsibilities to anyone.

I didn't have to answer to anyone.

Maybe, Gen, but,

you know, that was part of a relationship and working out

what you are with each other and...

But I didn't find feminism sparked for me at all.

ECHOING: Catch them, catch them, catch them, catch them...

Don't waste it, don't waste it...

Sleazy was starting to get into the mould

of everything, and it was starting to change.

It became more sinister.

What are you wearing under that?

We met Sleazy when we did the COUMing Of Age

at the Oval House in London.

Having seen the show one night and then came to the cafe and sidled

up to us and said, "Hi, my name is Peter.

"I'm a photographer and I'd like to take photographs of your show.

"Is that OK with you?"

And yeah, that's why...when he became Sleazy, because I said

he was...the way he approached us was very sleazy.

And the fact that he approached us to take photographs of us naked.

He was interested in COUM, and he knew it was within his kind of

zone of alternative interests, shall we say.

So he was wanting to be a part of it, but also needing

to keep his foot in the Hypnosis camp because that's

how he earned a living.

He's working with Hypnosis, doing all these hyper expensive album

covers for hundreds of thousands of pounds for Pink Floyd

and LED Zeppelin, and all in the era of great overindulgence

and massive budgets.

He was just sort of gradually becoming friends.

He was happy taking photographs because he was a voyeur, Sleazy,

you know. It got to the point where I said, "Well, are you actually

"going to do anything or are you just coming here just to sort of get

"down and dirty now and again, you know?"

And then we discovered that he'd joined the Casualties Union

and that he could simulate epileptic fits and create

really realistic wounds.

So you'd have like rehearsals for disasters, so they had to make

it look real.

And that interested us in terms of the art actions as well,

because it was a really fantastic art form.

And we said, if you, you know, if you want to do something

with COUM, that would be interesting for you to do.

The first was Coumdensation Mucus at the Royal College of Art,

and in the video,

Sleazy appears to slice his arm open and then stitch

it up with the needle and thread.

And we do blood and milk and wine enemas - which are real -

and then urinate into a milk bottle and then masturbate.

And it still disturbs people when we show them...

HE CHUCKLES

..for some strange reason.

Studio Of Lust, which were the three of us gradually becoming naked

and becoming entwined, which was something quite new for Sleazy

to be naked with a woman, cos he was gay.

So I was quite sensitive to that and careful how I positioned

myself, so I didn't freak him out completely.

That was his zone that he liked to be in, pushing himself as well.

It was really good to be with somebody who was other like me,

if that's a good phrase to put.

Bringing the base element of the human experience into a public

arena can shock people, but at the time I had such a long

time in that sphere of being naked and being at one with myself,

if you like, and with whatever my bodily functions were, it was me.

We are all the same.

And it's quite OK to share these things, rather than feel

that there's something we shouldn't talk about or discuss in public.

My personal belief is that you can do anything you want to yourself.

Body is your property.

It's not sacred.

It's not owned by society.

It's not owned by family.

It's not owned by laws and regulations.

It's yours to do with as you choose,

and to explore as you choose.

And for me, that's...that's enough.

There's enough there to keep you occupied for a very long time.

But the idea of then extending that out even voluntarily to other

people, it becomes problematic.

It was a party and Chris was doing a light show.

And then Chris and myself started discussing our interest

in synthesisers. And as he sort of entered our world...

..John left.

I was working for so many different people doing soundtracks, doing

lighting, that I kind of felt I'd lost my way a bit and I thought

I needed just to recoup.

So, yeah, Chris joined us and he brought again, like John did,

he brought every bit of equipment he did at one point to the studio

and set it all up. And that was just like mind-blowing.

And I thought, you know, this is something totally different.

Never heard anything like it.

What we could produce with the assistance of Chris's knowledge

is going into new territory completely with sound.

When you're trying to truly change a society or behaviour or any part

of some social group...

..you can't just use one strategy. You have to be really aware

of when the moment's gone and you have to switch.

Throbbing Gristle is Yorkshire slang for an erection.

Throbbing Gristle initially came from Les. That was just

a throwaway statement.

I don't know if I can say this on camera.

There used to be a big fishing fraternity in Hull,

and that's their expression they used to use.

It did describe the way we played.

It was throbbing. And gristly, it was tough.

And we proved that nobody needed

to have any training to make successful radical new art.

It's proved that you can also have a successful, radical,

innovative band with people who can't play.

You have to go to first.

Sleazy wasn't into playing an instrument.

He couldn't get a note out. He did try.

He got a cornet and tried to play it and couldn't do it.

Passed it to me and I managed to do it.

Well, we don't want a drummer because that immediately takes

you into traditional rhythms.

The guitarist must not be able to play, and that was Cosey.

It was just through effects pedals, striking the guitar and then working

the sound from there.

And there was an old bass guitar lying around,

somebody had left there.

I think possibly the only one that played any instrument straight

was Gen's bass because he kept a rhythm with it.

And Chris was obviously on his synths and effects units

that he built. And Sleazy wanted to extend the tape recorder

experiments and cut-ups.

He'd got this Walkman, Sony Walkman. What Chris did with him

was he used them to build a sampler so that he could run tapes.

Then built them a little keyboard that was hooked up to it.

And then you just play. We jammed.

ELECTRONIC SOUNDSCAPE

The timbre of the sounds, the frequencies and the volume...

..that's what it was about.

It was just to sort of rebuild the notion of what music could be.

The direct connection between frequency and physical response

was something that we investigated in Throbbing Gristle quite a bit.

In doing so we were quite often physically sick or had optical

tunnelling effects and things that could be regarded as probably

not very good for one's health.

We discovered some really weird things to do with sort of high-level

sound and various sound waves. Using low frequency sine waves

through really good speakers,

as loud as you can get it does the strangest things to my knees.

It really does.

The ICA had another in its long-running,

"let's make you sick" series.

This was called Prostitution and featured all the tools

of the trade - and the leftovers.

1976.

We decided mutually that it was time for COUM Transmissions to end.

We'd already been rehearsing as TG since 1975.

We wanted to then try and see what happened if we inserted

it into the culture.

The Prostitution show started off with Ted Little,

who was then the director of the ICA, inviting us to do

a male art show there.

Quickly turned into something else as things do.

And during a conversation with him, I must have mentioned this idea,

and he said, "I'll do a retrospective."

So Prostitution became a retrospective of COUM.

And basically our exit from the art world.

Cosey had just done some modelling for a magazine called Curious.

There was a picture of her on a chaise longue with a blindfold

on and above it,

it just said "prostitution".

I thought, well, we're all prostitutes, really.

So I proposed it should be called Prostitution.

I decided that that would be where I present the magazines for the first

time. My magazines were put out the back in a kind of box

where they were slid in, you know, like Athena posters used to be.

And you'd pull them out to have a look, but you had to join

and become a member of the ICA first before you could see them.

It was kind of work around the laws of pornography.

We had props that we built, so we ended up with those

being exhibited as well and bits of costumes that Cosey had made

and bits of costumes that I'd worn.

I had this idea for these small sculptures called Tampax Romana.

The tampons were my used tampons.

I had been collecting for a while and we used them

in performances, again as part of that whole thing of showing

what womanhood is.

There was a copy of the News Of The World on a table...

..and I just thought I wonder what would happen if we sent invites

to all the press.

Little did I realise what a furore it was going to cause.

And then we had the opening.

And lo and behold, all those editors and journalists

turned up and freaked.

We talked to Ted Little and said, we want music.

So we got the band Chelsea that became Generation X to play.

And so a punk element sort of contingent came along to see them.

It was brilliant.

And a comedian, John Smith from Bridlington, who told dirty jokes.

And we had a stripper.

Why not have a stripper? Let's make it our party.

And then Throbbing Gristle played live to launch the band.

MUSIC PLAYS

Everyone had been drinking a lot.

And Ian Hinchcliffe was there, was another quite extreme artist.

I remember there was a cluster of people and Ian was shouting at Gen

about something because I didn't get on.

Suddenly I saw stars, and the journalist from the Evening Standard

had hit me over the head with a pint beer glass.

And there was just like a huge fight on the floor

and Ted got kicked in the balls, had to go to hospital.

Gen, I took Gen to hospital because he thought he'd broken

his little finger and then we came back and cleared the gear away

into the van and we went home.

It was just like...

..being stunned by some hand grenade, really, that gig.

And the newspapers went crazy.

And then the next like ten days or so handling all the press

and being hounded by them outside the house and the market

nearby, in the gallery being chased by them.

Being slagged off by Spare Rib, all that, I just didn't even

want to know. Being called the wreckers of civilisation

by Nicholas Fairbairn wasn't a real problem.

I don't think we're uncivilised.

In actual fact, I think we're more civilised

than some people

and some elements of society.

Monte Cazazza over there will be making the video cassette

of the whole proceedings.

There was a Canadian artist who called herself Anna Banana.

One day she wrote me this long letter and amongst the letter,

it said, "We met this awful human being, the worst person

"we've ever met. He calls himself Monte Cazazza."

And he'd send us all this information and photographs,

photocopied things that he'd been up to.

We were at this person's house talking and drinking wine,

and then he turned up and he had this small suitcase

and he opened the little case and it had a dead cat in it, roadkill.

And he had no fear at all because he had no...

..no career hopes.

And he pulled out the cat, squirted lighter fuel on it, set it on fire

and then pulled out this gun and said, "You can't leave the room."

And we just thought, "Wow, he sounds interesting.

"Sounds like my kind of guy."

He was there when industrial music got named.

It was him that was saying, "Well, you keep saying industrial, Gen.

"So it's industrial music." And we went, "Yeah, you're right.

"It's industrial music."

It was industrious, there was a lot of research involved.

Chris was obviously very industrious with his technical experiments

and building equipment.

And that's where it came from with the irony of the factory,

which is where we were.

In London Fields park, which we were next to, there were the plague pits

from when the Black Plague happened.

And so hundreds of plague victims had been buried under the ground

in the park, and as we were in the basement, we were actually

at the same level as all the plague victims.

And I called it the Death Factory.

It was fairly on the cards that she was going to leave.

They'd fallen in love.

That can't be helped.

Me and Chris were together but trying not to be for the sake

of the band, and my relationship with Gen, which was in trouble

big time by then.

How are we going to cope with that now?

You know, Gen's going to go off and do his thing.

You're going to be doing your thing.

And someone like Gen, you know, he's got a lot of personality and a lot

of energy there, so he was a difficult man to be around.

And he could throw some serious, serious tantrums.

That sort of display of anger

can be quite frightening.

It was never going to be an easy parting, and there was a lot

at stake.

We were much more focused by then and more serious

about the things we were interested in and what we wanted

to communicate to people.

It wasn't frivolous any more, and neither was the climate

in the country, and I think that had a lot to do with it.

We met Al Ackerman - Blaster - who we'd been doing mail art

exchanges with and who in the end ended up writing the lyrics

to Hamburger Lady.

He'd been in Vietnam...

..as a medic, and he was working on the night shift in a hospital

in Eugene, and there was a woman who'd been in a car crash.

Been burnt so badly, she was known around the wards as

the Hamburger Lady.

Her ears had got burned off and she couldn't hear, her eyes

had been melted and gone, so she couldn't see.

And her throat and tongue had been so damaged,

she couldn't speak.

And we thought, what would it sound like

in that ward, you know?

And it became probably one of the, strangely enough, the most popular

songs we ever did.

People weren't sort of turned off by it.

They were...they were driven to a place of compassion.

# Medical advances... #

There was always an element for most of TG when I was writing

all the lyrics of it being closer at times to a newspaper. The darkness

in TG came from the time, the political state of the time,

and also from our own personal histories.

When I was growing up, there was the Moors murders.

And then, of course, you go from there in the '60s

and there's Charles Manson.

There was obviously the post-war thing going on and our parents not

talking about it because they were so traumatised.

People always go on about the Nazi element of TG, which just wasn't

there at all.

It was just that we were willing to discuss that thing.

Human beings have done horrendous things to one another.

Put it out there for discussion.

It's not something you should hide away.

Why is there this unwritten boundary or a limitation

on what you can discuss in a lyric?

Just because you mention it doesn't mean you approve of it.

You know, journalists write about all sorts of terrible things

and they're not accused of endorsing it.

People had started looking up to us for some reason,

like we had all the answers. We didn't. We were just posing them.

At the beginning, we did lots of weird stuff, like once

we had just big mirrors in front of us. That made people angry

because they couldn't see us.

We did another one where we had halogen lamps along the front

of the stage on the audience, so that they were blinded.

But we could see them, you know?

But there's only so many ways you can play with the audience/band

dynamic before it becomes just trickery.

Yeah, Oundle.

Some guy had heard about us and written to us and said,

"I could get my music teacher to book you."

We said, "We'll come and play as long as we can have a tour of the

"school and have lunch with the boys in the huge dining area."

It was very strange but interesting because... I mean, Sleazy knew

what it was like because he'd gone to public school

and Gen did to some extent,

and we just did what we did

and they really didn't know what hit them.

And in the end, they started singing Jerusalem.

It was quite amazing.

Beautiful moment, full of testosterone.

MUSIC: Don't Do As You're Told, Do As You Think

Monte said something interesting, he said, "You know they all want

"you to die on stage, don't you?"

I said, "What?"

He said, "It would suit everybody

"if you took it so far, you would... ..you died on stage.

"Stay alive out of spite, Gen."

I'd never thought of it that way that you could actually end up a bit

too much like a sideshow. "What will Gen do to Gen next?"

And in the end, we're all going to watch Gen die.

No, that's not what we're trying to say.

# Persuasion... #

No, I always thought of TG as a concept that I wanted to see

if we could change music and change popular culture and give it some

extra weight and intelligence

and new systems of expression.

And it worked.

We did that.

But suddenly, it was part-time for three out of four. We felt

that it became a pastiche of itself and we'd taken

it as far as we wanted to take it without it becoming some kind

of demon or beast that was not totally within our control.

I think we'd...we'd finish with the, you know, shouting

in the face and hitting people on the head with a hammer

kind of approach.

And now we were more interested in exploring areas that almost

we had no right to enter.

You know, real music, like Giorgio Moroder territory kind of thing.

And even Abba.

But it interested us in how we could approach it and do

it our way.

One of these myths that seems to circulate is that TG ended in

1981 because of bedroom politics and because I was jealous of Chris.

But I wasn't jealous of Chris.

When we were in the studio recording,

it was still really great.

Yeah, because that was important to, I think,

to all of us, including Gen.

You know, that whatever you decide

to do in your extracurricular time,

you could say, I felt should have been kept separate

and could have been. I mean, we were all grown ups, you know?

And, you know, we're going to get into dodgy territory here.

I don't want to go into it. Sure.

Can you tell us a bit about some of the concepts

that you're dealing with?

No.

# When all the numbers swim together and all the shadow settle

# Windows forced open shut again, a fly trap and a petal

# My eyes burn and claws rush to fill them

# And in the morning I fall in love with the light. #

# Sometimes I felt I had to run away... #

Mute Records wanted us to...

They put feelers out.

Would it be at all possible for us to regroup to publicise

their release of 24 Hours on CD?

To be really frank,

I still thought, would it just become like it was last time?

And I'm sure they thought exactly the same thing,

but we all decided to see.

And so it took place.

When we did the Astoria,

that just totally blew me away.

When the cheer went up,

when we came out, I didn't quite know what to do.

It was one of those moments where you look behind you like someone

else is there that they're cheering for.

I had no idea that we'd had that effect on people, and such

a wide range of age groups as well, wasn't just the people

that were around when we first did it.

And that was good because it more or less said to me

that it functioned well at its time,

and since.

this is a band called Throbbing Gristle - Chris, Cosey,

Sleazy and me.

It's been almost 23 years to the day

since we played together.

Wouldn't you just know it?

Oh, it's so hard trying to do this after so long.

# There's never a way

# To convince people... #

The first time we went to the studio together after such

a long time, after 20 years or more,

we fitted in, we slotted in together and gelled and produced music

within minutes, and it just seemed like we'd never been away.

It was like being in a time warp or something. As it went by,

it developed and we did more albums that were new music

that were equally as interesting.

So it just was one of those things,

it would have mutated naturally if it kept going.

The music of Throbbing Gristle featuring Peter Christopherson,

who has died aged 55.

There's a part of me that wasn't totally surprised,

because he'd lived a life of massive indulgence,

of anything and everything

that could take him into new dimensions and delirious realms

and then his strange, twisted imagination.

Maybe that's why I called him Sleazy.

You've got a kind of a few conflicting memories,

but there is a truth in there, which is all about using

your imagination, being open to experience,

not being afraid to experiment.

It's allowable to be sad, to be...or happy, to find humour

in something you shouldn't find humour in because it's like a

safety valve. And that's what we are.

Try and find a way to come to terms with being alive and the strange

mystery of being alive, but also the mortality.

And for me, art should deal with those, the great mysteries.

And that's why we thought life and art are inseparable.

You know, it's not just random and death's not the end, you know,

but I can't explain why I believe that or why.

To me, you just know.