PTV3 2012 dis-concerts
February:
Sunday, February 26th @ The Echoplex - Los Angeles, California
http://www.attheecho.com/2011/12/20/sunday-02-26-12-echo-slow-motion-present-psychic-tv-beastial-mouths-echoplex/
March:
Saturday, March 3rd @ Adelaide Festival - Adelaide, Australia http://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/2012/music/dreamers_genesis_breyer_p-orridge_and_psychic_tv_and_philip_brophys_stadium
Saturday, March 24th @ Johnny Brenda's - Philadelphia, PA
http://www.johnnybrendas.com/event/89045/
May:Friday, May 18th Gig @ S.K.I.F. 16, Sergey Kuryokhin International Festival - St Petersburg, Russia
http://www.kuryokhin.net/
Sunday, May 20th @ P!PL club - Moscow, Russia
http://piplclub.ru/
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Monday, January 23, 2012
Just confirmed! PTV3 Russian gigs...
May Friday 18 Gig St Petersburg @ S.K.I.F. 16
http://www.kuryokhin.net/
May Sunday 20 Gig Moscow @ P!PL club
http://piplclub.ru/
Furthur details forthcoming...
http://www.kuryokhin.net/
May Sunday 20 Gig Moscow @ P!PL club
http://piplclub.ru/
Furthur details forthcoming...
Friday, January 13, 2012
The Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Interview w/ Wes Holland jan 2012
The Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Interview w/ Wes Holland
Interview originally published in the January issue of Rhythms magazine, 2012
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is a legendary artistic figure. Beginning his career in the late 1960’s with the confrontational performance collective COUM Transmissions, he later fronted the highly influential industrial music group Throbbing Gristle. In the early 80’s he formed the trans-media psychedelic band Psychic TV in conjunction with his community based Temple ov Psychic Youth fellowship.
Since then he’s remained incredibly prolific, but is perhaps best known in recent times for his ‘Pandrogyne’ project he undertook with late wife Lady Jaye - “for he and her to fuse and become one single being.” Lady Jaye tragically passed away in 2007, and to this day Genesis has remained dedicated to the pandrogyne (evident by the continual way he refers to himself as ‘we’ instead of ‘I’).
Ahead of his first ever Australian appearance as part of the Adelaide Festival, Wes Holland delves deep into the life and art of GPO.
I’m always intrigued to read about your work with COUM Transmissions. Stuff you were doing in the 60’s and 70’s would turn heads even if it was happening today… what was COUM all about and what fuelled it artistically?
We were at Hull University in England’s north and after three weeks of doing economics and social history we knew we’d made a terrible mistake in our choice of subject. So we stopped going to lectures all together, and started to do my own interventions, performance and improvised weirdness on campus and in the streets. In the summer of 69 a performance art group called The Exploding Galaxy arrived from London headed by David Medalla, a kinetic artist of note from the Philippines.
They were short of people because some of them had gone on the hippy trail to India, and so they put the call out to anyone on Campus who’d be interested in performing with in their weird and wonderful improvised performance group. Everyone said ‘Get Genesis!’.
So we joined them and hitchhiked to London. There, we hung out with William S Burrows for a while. The Exploding Galaxy was a very rigorous psychological therapy designed to destroy habitual behaviour of any kind. To try and de-condition all social and familial and peer group influence so that you could truly begin to create a unique and personal narrative for the story of your life.
COUM started out much more as street theatre and provocations. I remember one of our favourite activities was at the beginning of the weekend, we had a room called the costume room. There were various stereotypes of what we considered the British public at the time. There was a middle aged arrogant, bitchy Christian woman called Harriot Straightlace as well as a baby, a clown, a vicar and an alien brain - a visitor from some other planet. And there were costumes to go with each character. Each Friday you’d draw lots to become one of those characters. But then you had to be them 24 hours a day for the whole weekend… three days. Shopping, sleeping, and everything. You’d stay in character as if you were them. That’s an example of one way we were breaking down archetypes and inherited stereotypes trying to find out where behaviour begins, who controls it, which of it is necessary and how much of it is about control.
It got us more and more fascinated. We became friends with Burrows and then Brion Gysin. Burrows said to me in 70 or 71, “How do you short circuit control?.. That’s your task Genesis. To find out.” That was the beginning of the real evolution. COUM went from street theatre down to eventually just me and (soon to be Throbbing Gristle members) Cosey Fanni Tuti and Sleazy (Peter Christopherson). We were starting to do role play switching… Cosey would start out as female and me as male, and then we’d switch to become the opposite. It got even more intimate with sexual taboos and transgression and who decides where and what is appropriate? Because it’s different in every country and culture. Therefore it’s arbitrary. Therefore it can be chosen. That was COUM.
From out of COUM came the legendary Throbbing Gristle, what did you set out to achieve as a rock and roll group?
COUM started out very underground. We got more and more extreme and started to include bodily fluids and blood in our work as well as fake and real injuries… what is real? What is not? What is trickery? What is not? Where is the borderline between real and unreal? Awake and asleep? Alive and dead? Where are those lines and who decides? And are they even relevant?
Suddenly, we found we were being accepted by the British council and getting grants and performing at big arts events. We even represented Great Britain with Gilbert & George in Milan in 1976. As soon as all of that started to happen, we just thought “This isn’t what we want. We don’t want to become another member of the establishment, we have to change direction. What else can we NOT do? Ahh, none of us can play instruments! Let’s be a rock band! Let’s reconstruct rock music!”
The first thing we all agreed on was NO drummer. Drummers inevitably set up certain patterns that are so traditional that the responses of the other musicians are sort of drawn to expected techniques and sounds. We wanted to get away from that, and mirror the world we lived in which was post-war Britain. We grew up playing in the bomb craters in Manchester. We’d seen the results of war. We wanted our work to be a reflection of the Western European experience after a huge war. What was relevant to us? The decay and the industrial landscape. The steam engines we’d go past on the way to school were being cut apart and turned into scrap metal. The mills that used to make cotton and natural fabrics were closed because of nylon and manmade fabrics. We saw this contradiction. This fake modernity of Harold MacMillan’s slogan ‘you’ve never had it so good’. There was nothing relevant to the youth of the time at all.
We experimented with cut-ups to completely make it impossible for our conscious, habituated memory of music, to control what we play. If we do cut ups using tape recorders and so on, then we’ll create music that’s new. Music that is irrational and illogical to average ear. To reflect what we saw as the decay of British power and capitalism and fake freedoms.
I asked Richard Fearless from Death In Vegas recently about his love of Throbbing Gristle. He described you as the first electronic band to have a punk energy. He said the first time he ever saw TG, you came on stage and slammed the house lights on. It was blindingly bright, deafeningly loud, but incredible. Take me through a Throbbing Gristle live gig in the early days and that energy that came out of the shows.
We used to find unusual places to play. We played in a closed down school run by Spanish anarchists. It was semi-derelict and they’d created a rough stage out of scrap wood and burned bonfires inside the building to keep it warm. We’d use halogen lamps pointed at the audience as one of our ways of rejecting the normal idea of ‘audience looks at the band/band looks at the audience’. Instead its people almost blinded by the lights so that they have to address the music and the sound.
In those days there were no samplers and there were no synthesizers. (TG’s) Chris Carter, who is an electronic genius, built his own synthesizer. Sleazy built the equivalent of a sampler by using eight walkmans that went through a keyboard that could create rhythms so he could play it with his fingers and jam. All those tapes could be anything. He did lots of field recordings; he bugged the offices of a mercenary group and recorded them. He tape recorded illicit gay sex in public toilets and added all those things in subliminally – all of that was directly influenced by Borrows and Dysin.
We also built all the speakers ourselves, and they were loud. For my bass guitar we had bass bins taller than me that we could climb into. And four 4x12 amps as my monitors! A 200 watt bass amp just to moniter my bass so when we hit it, it made your clothes move. For a gig at Butler’s Wharf (London) we had two PA’s. One at the front was ours, and a normal one at the back which had a feed of our mix. We mixed everything ourselves, Chris Carter mixed everything live on stage. So for the audience, if they tried to back away from the extreme volume, it actually got louder!
We did all sorts of tricks like that. We once played inside a square cube of scaffolding covered in tarpaulins and we had cameras on us, so you could see us playing through the monitors inside a building. So if you wanted to SEE us play, you had to be inside watching the televisions, but there was no sound. If you wanted to HEAR us play, you had to go on the roof and look down five floors.
We did all kinds of things to mess with the idea of the band being the focus and the music being the really important effect. We thought of it as functional, metabolic industrial music. When Lady Jaye saw the first reunion gig at the Astoria in London she said “We’ve always loved these records… but now I get it. Now I get what people used to talk about.” Just today we were talking to some people who saw us when we played in New York at the Masonic Temple and they said the same thing; “We saw you live and we felt how loud it was, and how our bodies were affected, at that moment we understood the legend.”
I’ve heard you say that Throbbing Gristle was a band built on anguish, while your band that came afterwards Psychic TV, together with your Temple ov Psychick Youth fellowship, was about joy, friendliness and happiness.
Yes. That’s based on my position as the singer and the lyricist. In Throbbing Gristle, all the lyrics and melodies were dark… if you can call Maggot Death, Blood Bait or We Hate You (Little Girls) melodies!
In those days, between ‘75 and ‘81, we were really angered and disgusted. Just as much as all the people who formed punk bands. Disgusted at the hypocrisy and the bigotry and the attempt to continue this fake concept of the perfect England. That was not our experience. Our experience was in Palace Square demonstrating against Vietnam and seeing people beaten with clubs and trampled by horses. Our experience with Britain was very disillusioned. Disillusion and a lack of power to change things. The slogan from the 60’s rang true: ‘No matter who you vote for, the government gets in.’ That sense of helplessness and the inability to truly change things leads you to look for experimental alternatives of your own and to analyse what it is you would like life to be like, what it is you would like to see the human species do to evolve. To take away it’s primitive, disgusting love of violence, depression, power, control and riches for its own sake. The things that we believed was destroying the world.
So Psychic TV was our attempt to look for ways to set up communities and alternative networks where those who have enough in common could recognise each other. By the end, in Brighton in the late 80’s, we had five Temple Of Psychic Youth houses. Every Monday we’d all meet, one house would make the food and you’d all debate and analyse our issues with the world, our issues with ourselves and how we were operating as a community and failing…
Earlier this year I managed to track down a copy of the book Genesis P-Orridge book ‘Painful But Fabulous’. One of the most interesting parts was the selection of press clippings from articles written about you and your work with TOPY in the 1980’s. Tell me about being called names like ‘the sickest man in Britain’ and it leading to you being exiled from England?
“Put him in jail and throw away the key!” they used to write. In the early 70’s we squatted a whole street in Hackney and we moved in artists, writers and other creative people with families into the houses. We convinced the local council to allow us to stay legally and pay rent, and then after a few years they gave everyone the right to buy their house plus they put on new roofs and renovated the buildings. To this day there is this whole street of houses that is still part of this co-op in Hackney. Practical stuff. In Brighton we closed down the dolphinarium. Every weekend for a year we picketed the dolphinarium. Politely. We gave people leaflets explaining the dolphins were in this tiny circular pool with so much chlorine they were blind and when the dolphins died they give a new one the same name so nobody knows. After a year, they closed down. They used to make 1.5 million pounds profit a year, and the year we picketed them, they went bankrupt. Meanwhile, we’re being attacked by English newspapers for being ‘degenerate, evil monsters’ when we’re actually doing more good work than most people.
I’m in intrigued by the story behind the Psychic TV song Godstar - the theme from the unreleased Brian Jones film. Tell me about growing up obsessed with Brian Jones and the impact he had on your life.
I met the Stones in 1965. My father worked for a company that did corporate cleaning contracts, and we got two free VIP tickets to this show called Thank Your Lucky Stars. By luck, the Stones were there doing 19th Nervous Breakdown. As we had a VIP pass we were backstage, and all of a sudden I banged into Mick Jagger. I said “I’m so sorry Mick, could you sign my VIP card?” He took me upstairs and introduced me to the rest of the band and we spent half an hour there, talking and hanging out. Brian Jones had this incredible atmosphere around him. Very ethereal, as if he was partly here and partly in another dimension. Of course he was incredibly androgynous. All of the Stones became more androgynous through his influence. Even today, if Brian Jones walked into a club or a shop dressed in his clothing, people would stare and say “My goodness, how exotic!”. So that had a profound influence on me as a 15 year old. He became symbolic to me of both the exotic idea of androgyny but also experimentation. He did all the musical arrangements. He brought in the sitars and the marimbas and the harpsichords and all these instruments that were involved in the most classic Stones songs. Of course he did the first real world music record with the Master Musicians of Joujouka for the Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka album. I’ve still got one of his jackets. We were doing a gig and afterwards a guy comes up to me and says “I know how much you like Brian Jones, I used to be one of their roadies.” We recognised his name, and he gave me this jacket. It was a Houndstooth jacket they wore at the beginning to be more like The Beatles, and when I put it on, it fitted perfectly. It was almost spooky.
The film The Ballad Of Genesis and Lady Jaye was released this year. It’s an intriguing story… take me through yours and Lady Jaye’s experience with Pandrogeny?
It started out as instinctive. But it’s Lady Jay who deserves the notoriety.
The first day we met was in a dungeon where she worked as a dominatrix. We’d been up for three days on ecstasy and finally crashed on the floor amongst all the torture instruments. When we woke up when we heard voices and we saw this woman walking back and forth in the other room. We could tell she was wearing all original 60’s clothing with a Brian Jones bob. She started to undress smoking her cigarette very glamorously, as she changed into a fetish outfit. We found ourselves saying “If we can be with this woman for the rest of our lives, that’s all we want”. She was being told things like, “Don’t go in there… the guy in there is a weird English artist and you don’t want to go near him,” So of course she’s thinking “I must meet this person!”
She took me home and dressed me in her clothes the very first day I met her, then she took me to a slave auction. We were standing there watching this auction happen, and then we noticed a man next to us who was moving in a strange way. We looked down and she had one of her five inch high heels on the back of a naked man’s hand. He’d crawled up and begged her to hurt him. She was just grinding his hand with her high heel for 20 minutes while she was talking to me, so nonchalantly. We just thought, this woman is amazing.
We fell in love at first sight. It was so all-consuming that we wanted to become each other, to never be separated. So to represent that obsessive desire to fuse and become one being, we began to dress alike and do our hair alike.
Then we thought about it more theoretically and thought about what Burrows had said… “Where is control?” We thought control is DNA. DNA is the ultimate recording device. It’s the biological tape and in order to cut it up, you have to deny its power. How do you do that? By changing yourself in a way that DNA wouldn’t make you. By rejecting the body that DNA would give you. It wasn’t that we wanted to look identical, so much as, we didn’t want to grow to be the body that DNA wished us to be. So we started to do little things at the beginning. We got tattoos of her beauty marks on my face. We got our lips made the same size. She got her eyes surgically made more like mine. Then her nose and her chin. Then we got our cheeks done to match. Then on Valentine’s Day 2003 we went for it full on with matching breast implants. We woke up holding hands, looked down and thought “these are our angelic bodies.”
At that point it became a much more serious problem. We were out of the binary system of male/female, which is what we wished to do. We wanted to reject inherited systems of thought, inherited values, archetypes and stereotypes, genders - to truly build ourselves as two halves of one. That’s what we called the pandrogyne… the positive androgyne. The powerful androgyne. The political androgyne.
From that we started to think about cutting up DNA and the future. We thought about Bryan Gysin and how he said “We’re here to go into space”. How would we go into space? If you reject the idea that the human body is finished and is sacred, then to go into space we could become cold blooded. We could hibernate. We could grow fur. We might not needs legs anymore because of weightlessness. Once you dismiss the idea that the human body looks way that DNA wishes it too, and you let your imagination run wild, you could have gills and go under the sea. You could have feathers or fur, or horns and suddenly anything you imagine you can be, you’re liberated to actually choose, not just the narrative, but the physical logo of the human body that you present to the world. “Viva la evolution!”
You’re originally from Manchester, one of rock music’s great cities. One Mancunian who had a profound effect on your life was your friend Ian Curtis…
In the 70’s we became very good friends. He started writing to Throbbing Gristle as just a fan to buy the Second Annual Report album through mail order. He would ring me whenever they (Joy Division) came to London. He’d always ask me to take him around all the secret military shops that we knew of in Islington where he could buy uniforms and memorabilia, mainly from the second world war. We’d go shopping together, we became very good friends. When they were recording the Closer album he invited me down to the studio pretty much every day to listen to them recording. He told me that he was really influenced by Frank Sinatra, and so was I. The phrasing of Frank Sinatra is what got both of us.
We were the last person he spoke to the day he died. He rang me up from Manchester and he would often ring me late at night, very depressed. This particular night, he sang the song Weeping from our D.O.A. The Third And Final Report Of Throbbing Gristle LP, and he sang it word perfect. There was something so eerie about the way he sang it. That was actually my song about trying to commit suicide after Cosey left in 1978, the same year as the record. We just knew intuitively that Ian was going to commit suicide that day. In those days there were no cell phones. Hardly anyone had answer machines. We were ringing everyone we knew in Manchester, including Factory records people, saying “Somebody’s got to get around to Ian’s house, because he’s going to try and top himself!” Those who answered their phones just laughed and said, “He’s always saying stuff like that, he doesn’t mean it,” but we said “No, he really means it, please go to his house!” But no one would go. That’s why we wrote the (Psychic TV) song I.C. Water for him. The ‘I.C.’ is for Ian Curtis, but it’s also ‘I.C.’ as in ‘I See White’ and ‘Icy Cold’.
I’ve heard you describe yourself as a cultural engineer… what do you mean by that?
On September 3rd, 1975 in London Fields Park we said to (industrial music pioneer) Monte Cazazza “this music that we’re making needs a name”. We were explaining what we thought it should be like. He said “you’ve already named it, you keep saying ‘industrial’.” It was Monty who pointed out to me that I’d named this genre of music, industrial music.
The Modern Primitives book about piercing and tattooing was suggested to be researched by me. We arranged for most of the interviews and most of the content. In those days there were only about three people in the world doing that kind of tattooing. That book changed the world. Piercing, tattooing and liberation of the body and the skin became a way of expressing one’s self. The innate power of it remains. And now every town and village in the world has got a piercing and tattooing expert.
It’s not only industrial music and piercing and tattooing. We were very involved in the early days of rave. We also predicted in the industrial culture handbook that occult magic would become trendy again, and be reassessed which it did.
That’s being a cultural engineer. Literal manipulation of the culture almost subliminally, hiding behind the camouflage of being a silly eccentric rock star. Lady Jaye used to call it ‘dazzle camouflage’. You do it so obviously in front of people, they don’t see what you’re doing.
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge & Psychic TV will perform at the Adelaide Festival on Saturday March 3. Details at adelaidefestival.com.au
Interview originally published in the January issue of Rhythms magazine, 2012
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is a legendary artistic figure. Beginning his career in the late 1960’s with the confrontational performance collective COUM Transmissions, he later fronted the highly influential industrial music group Throbbing Gristle. In the early 80’s he formed the trans-media psychedelic band Psychic TV in conjunction with his community based Temple ov Psychic Youth fellowship.
Since then he’s remained incredibly prolific, but is perhaps best known in recent times for his ‘Pandrogyne’ project he undertook with late wife Lady Jaye - “for he and her to fuse and become one single being.” Lady Jaye tragically passed away in 2007, and to this day Genesis has remained dedicated to the pandrogyne (evident by the continual way he refers to himself as ‘we’ instead of ‘I’).
Ahead of his first ever Australian appearance as part of the Adelaide Festival, Wes Holland delves deep into the life and art of GPO.
I’m always intrigued to read about your work with COUM Transmissions. Stuff you were doing in the 60’s and 70’s would turn heads even if it was happening today… what was COUM all about and what fuelled it artistically?
We were at Hull University in England’s north and after three weeks of doing economics and social history we knew we’d made a terrible mistake in our choice of subject. So we stopped going to lectures all together, and started to do my own interventions, performance and improvised weirdness on campus and in the streets. In the summer of 69 a performance art group called The Exploding Galaxy arrived from London headed by David Medalla, a kinetic artist of note from the Philippines.
They were short of people because some of them had gone on the hippy trail to India, and so they put the call out to anyone on Campus who’d be interested in performing with in their weird and wonderful improvised performance group. Everyone said ‘Get Genesis!’.
So we joined them and hitchhiked to London. There, we hung out with William S Burrows for a while. The Exploding Galaxy was a very rigorous psychological therapy designed to destroy habitual behaviour of any kind. To try and de-condition all social and familial and peer group influence so that you could truly begin to create a unique and personal narrative for the story of your life.
COUM started out much more as street theatre and provocations. I remember one of our favourite activities was at the beginning of the weekend, we had a room called the costume room. There were various stereotypes of what we considered the British public at the time. There was a middle aged arrogant, bitchy Christian woman called Harriot Straightlace as well as a baby, a clown, a vicar and an alien brain - a visitor from some other planet. And there were costumes to go with each character. Each Friday you’d draw lots to become one of those characters. But then you had to be them 24 hours a day for the whole weekend… three days. Shopping, sleeping, and everything. You’d stay in character as if you were them. That’s an example of one way we were breaking down archetypes and inherited stereotypes trying to find out where behaviour begins, who controls it, which of it is necessary and how much of it is about control.
It got us more and more fascinated. We became friends with Burrows and then Brion Gysin. Burrows said to me in 70 or 71, “How do you short circuit control?.. That’s your task Genesis. To find out.” That was the beginning of the real evolution. COUM went from street theatre down to eventually just me and (soon to be Throbbing Gristle members) Cosey Fanni Tuti and Sleazy (Peter Christopherson). We were starting to do role play switching… Cosey would start out as female and me as male, and then we’d switch to become the opposite. It got even more intimate with sexual taboos and transgression and who decides where and what is appropriate? Because it’s different in every country and culture. Therefore it’s arbitrary. Therefore it can be chosen. That was COUM.
From out of COUM came the legendary Throbbing Gristle, what did you set out to achieve as a rock and roll group?
COUM started out very underground. We got more and more extreme and started to include bodily fluids and blood in our work as well as fake and real injuries… what is real? What is not? What is trickery? What is not? Where is the borderline between real and unreal? Awake and asleep? Alive and dead? Where are those lines and who decides? And are they even relevant?
Suddenly, we found we were being accepted by the British council and getting grants and performing at big arts events. We even represented Great Britain with Gilbert & George in Milan in 1976. As soon as all of that started to happen, we just thought “This isn’t what we want. We don’t want to become another member of the establishment, we have to change direction. What else can we NOT do? Ahh, none of us can play instruments! Let’s be a rock band! Let’s reconstruct rock music!”
The first thing we all agreed on was NO drummer. Drummers inevitably set up certain patterns that are so traditional that the responses of the other musicians are sort of drawn to expected techniques and sounds. We wanted to get away from that, and mirror the world we lived in which was post-war Britain. We grew up playing in the bomb craters in Manchester. We’d seen the results of war. We wanted our work to be a reflection of the Western European experience after a huge war. What was relevant to us? The decay and the industrial landscape. The steam engines we’d go past on the way to school were being cut apart and turned into scrap metal. The mills that used to make cotton and natural fabrics were closed because of nylon and manmade fabrics. We saw this contradiction. This fake modernity of Harold MacMillan’s slogan ‘you’ve never had it so good’. There was nothing relevant to the youth of the time at all.
We experimented with cut-ups to completely make it impossible for our conscious, habituated memory of music, to control what we play. If we do cut ups using tape recorders and so on, then we’ll create music that’s new. Music that is irrational and illogical to average ear. To reflect what we saw as the decay of British power and capitalism and fake freedoms.
I asked Richard Fearless from Death In Vegas recently about his love of Throbbing Gristle. He described you as the first electronic band to have a punk energy. He said the first time he ever saw TG, you came on stage and slammed the house lights on. It was blindingly bright, deafeningly loud, but incredible. Take me through a Throbbing Gristle live gig in the early days and that energy that came out of the shows.
We used to find unusual places to play. We played in a closed down school run by Spanish anarchists. It was semi-derelict and they’d created a rough stage out of scrap wood and burned bonfires inside the building to keep it warm. We’d use halogen lamps pointed at the audience as one of our ways of rejecting the normal idea of ‘audience looks at the band/band looks at the audience’. Instead its people almost blinded by the lights so that they have to address the music and the sound.
In those days there were no samplers and there were no synthesizers. (TG’s) Chris Carter, who is an electronic genius, built his own synthesizer. Sleazy built the equivalent of a sampler by using eight walkmans that went through a keyboard that could create rhythms so he could play it with his fingers and jam. All those tapes could be anything. He did lots of field recordings; he bugged the offices of a mercenary group and recorded them. He tape recorded illicit gay sex in public toilets and added all those things in subliminally – all of that was directly influenced by Borrows and Dysin.
We also built all the speakers ourselves, and they were loud. For my bass guitar we had bass bins taller than me that we could climb into. And four 4x12 amps as my monitors! A 200 watt bass amp just to moniter my bass so when we hit it, it made your clothes move. For a gig at Butler’s Wharf (London) we had two PA’s. One at the front was ours, and a normal one at the back which had a feed of our mix. We mixed everything ourselves, Chris Carter mixed everything live on stage. So for the audience, if they tried to back away from the extreme volume, it actually got louder!
We did all sorts of tricks like that. We once played inside a square cube of scaffolding covered in tarpaulins and we had cameras on us, so you could see us playing through the monitors inside a building. So if you wanted to SEE us play, you had to be inside watching the televisions, but there was no sound. If you wanted to HEAR us play, you had to go on the roof and look down five floors.
We did all kinds of things to mess with the idea of the band being the focus and the music being the really important effect. We thought of it as functional, metabolic industrial music. When Lady Jaye saw the first reunion gig at the Astoria in London she said “We’ve always loved these records… but now I get it. Now I get what people used to talk about.” Just today we were talking to some people who saw us when we played in New York at the Masonic Temple and they said the same thing; “We saw you live and we felt how loud it was, and how our bodies were affected, at that moment we understood the legend.”
I’ve heard you say that Throbbing Gristle was a band built on anguish, while your band that came afterwards Psychic TV, together with your Temple ov Psychick Youth fellowship, was about joy, friendliness and happiness.
Yes. That’s based on my position as the singer and the lyricist. In Throbbing Gristle, all the lyrics and melodies were dark… if you can call Maggot Death, Blood Bait or We Hate You (Little Girls) melodies!
In those days, between ‘75 and ‘81, we were really angered and disgusted. Just as much as all the people who formed punk bands. Disgusted at the hypocrisy and the bigotry and the attempt to continue this fake concept of the perfect England. That was not our experience. Our experience was in Palace Square demonstrating against Vietnam and seeing people beaten with clubs and trampled by horses. Our experience with Britain was very disillusioned. Disillusion and a lack of power to change things. The slogan from the 60’s rang true: ‘No matter who you vote for, the government gets in.’ That sense of helplessness and the inability to truly change things leads you to look for experimental alternatives of your own and to analyse what it is you would like life to be like, what it is you would like to see the human species do to evolve. To take away it’s primitive, disgusting love of violence, depression, power, control and riches for its own sake. The things that we believed was destroying the world.
So Psychic TV was our attempt to look for ways to set up communities and alternative networks where those who have enough in common could recognise each other. By the end, in Brighton in the late 80’s, we had five Temple Of Psychic Youth houses. Every Monday we’d all meet, one house would make the food and you’d all debate and analyse our issues with the world, our issues with ourselves and how we were operating as a community and failing…
Earlier this year I managed to track down a copy of the book Genesis P-Orridge book ‘Painful But Fabulous’. One of the most interesting parts was the selection of press clippings from articles written about you and your work with TOPY in the 1980’s. Tell me about being called names like ‘the sickest man in Britain’ and it leading to you being exiled from England?
“Put him in jail and throw away the key!” they used to write. In the early 70’s we squatted a whole street in Hackney and we moved in artists, writers and other creative people with families into the houses. We convinced the local council to allow us to stay legally and pay rent, and then after a few years they gave everyone the right to buy their house plus they put on new roofs and renovated the buildings. To this day there is this whole street of houses that is still part of this co-op in Hackney. Practical stuff. In Brighton we closed down the dolphinarium. Every weekend for a year we picketed the dolphinarium. Politely. We gave people leaflets explaining the dolphins were in this tiny circular pool with so much chlorine they were blind and when the dolphins died they give a new one the same name so nobody knows. After a year, they closed down. They used to make 1.5 million pounds profit a year, and the year we picketed them, they went bankrupt. Meanwhile, we’re being attacked by English newspapers for being ‘degenerate, evil monsters’ when we’re actually doing more good work than most people.
I’m in intrigued by the story behind the Psychic TV song Godstar - the theme from the unreleased Brian Jones film. Tell me about growing up obsessed with Brian Jones and the impact he had on your life.
I met the Stones in 1965. My father worked for a company that did corporate cleaning contracts, and we got two free VIP tickets to this show called Thank Your Lucky Stars. By luck, the Stones were there doing 19th Nervous Breakdown. As we had a VIP pass we were backstage, and all of a sudden I banged into Mick Jagger. I said “I’m so sorry Mick, could you sign my VIP card?” He took me upstairs and introduced me to the rest of the band and we spent half an hour there, talking and hanging out. Brian Jones had this incredible atmosphere around him. Very ethereal, as if he was partly here and partly in another dimension. Of course he was incredibly androgynous. All of the Stones became more androgynous through his influence. Even today, if Brian Jones walked into a club or a shop dressed in his clothing, people would stare and say “My goodness, how exotic!”. So that had a profound influence on me as a 15 year old. He became symbolic to me of both the exotic idea of androgyny but also experimentation. He did all the musical arrangements. He brought in the sitars and the marimbas and the harpsichords and all these instruments that were involved in the most classic Stones songs. Of course he did the first real world music record with the Master Musicians of Joujouka for the Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka album. I’ve still got one of his jackets. We were doing a gig and afterwards a guy comes up to me and says “I know how much you like Brian Jones, I used to be one of their roadies.” We recognised his name, and he gave me this jacket. It was a Houndstooth jacket they wore at the beginning to be more like The Beatles, and when I put it on, it fitted perfectly. It was almost spooky.
The film The Ballad Of Genesis and Lady Jaye was released this year. It’s an intriguing story… take me through yours and Lady Jaye’s experience with Pandrogeny?
It started out as instinctive. But it’s Lady Jay who deserves the notoriety.
The first day we met was in a dungeon where she worked as a dominatrix. We’d been up for three days on ecstasy and finally crashed on the floor amongst all the torture instruments. When we woke up when we heard voices and we saw this woman walking back and forth in the other room. We could tell she was wearing all original 60’s clothing with a Brian Jones bob. She started to undress smoking her cigarette very glamorously, as she changed into a fetish outfit. We found ourselves saying “If we can be with this woman for the rest of our lives, that’s all we want”. She was being told things like, “Don’t go in there… the guy in there is a weird English artist and you don’t want to go near him,” So of course she’s thinking “I must meet this person!”
She took me home and dressed me in her clothes the very first day I met her, then she took me to a slave auction. We were standing there watching this auction happen, and then we noticed a man next to us who was moving in a strange way. We looked down and she had one of her five inch high heels on the back of a naked man’s hand. He’d crawled up and begged her to hurt him. She was just grinding his hand with her high heel for 20 minutes while she was talking to me, so nonchalantly. We just thought, this woman is amazing.
We fell in love at first sight. It was so all-consuming that we wanted to become each other, to never be separated. So to represent that obsessive desire to fuse and become one being, we began to dress alike and do our hair alike.
Then we thought about it more theoretically and thought about what Burrows had said… “Where is control?” We thought control is DNA. DNA is the ultimate recording device. It’s the biological tape and in order to cut it up, you have to deny its power. How do you do that? By changing yourself in a way that DNA wouldn’t make you. By rejecting the body that DNA would give you. It wasn’t that we wanted to look identical, so much as, we didn’t want to grow to be the body that DNA wished us to be. So we started to do little things at the beginning. We got tattoos of her beauty marks on my face. We got our lips made the same size. She got her eyes surgically made more like mine. Then her nose and her chin. Then we got our cheeks done to match. Then on Valentine’s Day 2003 we went for it full on with matching breast implants. We woke up holding hands, looked down and thought “these are our angelic bodies.”
At that point it became a much more serious problem. We were out of the binary system of male/female, which is what we wished to do. We wanted to reject inherited systems of thought, inherited values, archetypes and stereotypes, genders - to truly build ourselves as two halves of one. That’s what we called the pandrogyne… the positive androgyne. The powerful androgyne. The political androgyne.
From that we started to think about cutting up DNA and the future. We thought about Bryan Gysin and how he said “We’re here to go into space”. How would we go into space? If you reject the idea that the human body is finished and is sacred, then to go into space we could become cold blooded. We could hibernate. We could grow fur. We might not needs legs anymore because of weightlessness. Once you dismiss the idea that the human body looks way that DNA wishes it too, and you let your imagination run wild, you could have gills and go under the sea. You could have feathers or fur, or horns and suddenly anything you imagine you can be, you’re liberated to actually choose, not just the narrative, but the physical logo of the human body that you present to the world. “Viva la evolution!”
You’re originally from Manchester, one of rock music’s great cities. One Mancunian who had a profound effect on your life was your friend Ian Curtis…
In the 70’s we became very good friends. He started writing to Throbbing Gristle as just a fan to buy the Second Annual Report album through mail order. He would ring me whenever they (Joy Division) came to London. He’d always ask me to take him around all the secret military shops that we knew of in Islington where he could buy uniforms and memorabilia, mainly from the second world war. We’d go shopping together, we became very good friends. When they were recording the Closer album he invited me down to the studio pretty much every day to listen to them recording. He told me that he was really influenced by Frank Sinatra, and so was I. The phrasing of Frank Sinatra is what got both of us.
We were the last person he spoke to the day he died. He rang me up from Manchester and he would often ring me late at night, very depressed. This particular night, he sang the song Weeping from our D.O.A. The Third And Final Report Of Throbbing Gristle LP, and he sang it word perfect. There was something so eerie about the way he sang it. That was actually my song about trying to commit suicide after Cosey left in 1978, the same year as the record. We just knew intuitively that Ian was going to commit suicide that day. In those days there were no cell phones. Hardly anyone had answer machines. We were ringing everyone we knew in Manchester, including Factory records people, saying “Somebody’s got to get around to Ian’s house, because he’s going to try and top himself!” Those who answered their phones just laughed and said, “He’s always saying stuff like that, he doesn’t mean it,” but we said “No, he really means it, please go to his house!” But no one would go. That’s why we wrote the (Psychic TV) song I.C. Water for him. The ‘I.C.’ is for Ian Curtis, but it’s also ‘I.C.’ as in ‘I See White’ and ‘Icy Cold’.
I’ve heard you describe yourself as a cultural engineer… what do you mean by that?
On September 3rd, 1975 in London Fields Park we said to (industrial music pioneer) Monte Cazazza “this music that we’re making needs a name”. We were explaining what we thought it should be like. He said “you’ve already named it, you keep saying ‘industrial’.” It was Monty who pointed out to me that I’d named this genre of music, industrial music.
The Modern Primitives book about piercing and tattooing was suggested to be researched by me. We arranged for most of the interviews and most of the content. In those days there were only about three people in the world doing that kind of tattooing. That book changed the world. Piercing, tattooing and liberation of the body and the skin became a way of expressing one’s self. The innate power of it remains. And now every town and village in the world has got a piercing and tattooing expert.
It’s not only industrial music and piercing and tattooing. We were very involved in the early days of rave. We also predicted in the industrial culture handbook that occult magic would become trendy again, and be reassessed which it did.
That’s being a cultural engineer. Literal manipulation of the culture almost subliminally, hiding behind the camouflage of being a silly eccentric rock star. Lady Jaye used to call it ‘dazzle camouflage’. You do it so obviously in front of people, they don’t see what you’re doing.
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge & Psychic TV will perform at the Adelaide Festival on Saturday March 3. Details at adelaidefestival.com.au
Psychic TV - "Thank You Part 2" @ Reggies Chicago 2011
Recent performance of "Thank you part 2" from Chicago.
Audio Release of "Thank you"
In time for our upcoming United States dis-concerts, PTV3 presents an entirely original new song about our Beloved Lady Jaye called "THANK YOU". Clocking in at over 17 minutes, this intensely moving and psychedelic track is split on to 2 sides as "Thank You (Parts I & II)". Utilizing recycled colored vinyl, each slab is completely unique and comes housed in a recycled craft paper jacket emblazoned with a removable embroidered patch attached to the front cover. Insert features handwritten Breyer P-Orridge lyrics. Each package was lovingly stamped and assembled by hand. This release, limited to 230 copies only (hand numbered on the back), is the first in a new series of Angry Love Productions "Handmade" vinyl records. Please note that the image shows variation of vinyl color and your purchase will contain ONE slab of vinyl. Available at the gigs and exclusively at our webshoppe at: http://www.porridgeshoppe.myshopify.com/
Better Living Through Circuitry Genesis P-Orridge interview
Segment of interview segment with Gen from the year 2000 electronic music scenes documentary "Better Living Through Circuitry"
Genesis P-Orridge 2001 intro Of Ohgr show
This paticular Ohgr performance in 2001 had Genesis P-orridge
coming out before the show starts, doing a short introduction.
ohGr
June 19th, 2001
New York City, New York @ Limelight
coming out before the show starts, doing a short introduction.
ohGr
June 19th, 2001
New York City, New York @ Limelight
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
original collage by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge on new Prurient double-7″ release
The tirelessly prolific Dominick Fernow aka Prurient is back, this time with a double-7″ release entitled Wrapped In The Flame Of Illusion, Masked In The Clay Of Behavior.
The release comes courtesy of LA-NY label Dais Records, purveyors of all that’s good and grim in industrial, noise, neofolk and black metal (past releases have come from the likes of Cold Cave, aTelecine, Lord Foul and Tor Lundvall). It’s comprised of four tracks, which Dais describe thus:
“Recorded within the bleak transitional period immediately prior to the sessions that would now become known as Bermuda Drain, Dominick Fernow sketched out four compositions which can only be framed as ‘ambient power electronics’. Some of Fernow’s most destitute works to date, this release captures Prurient at its most vulnerable and sedate, reflective and rapt. Compositions that throw away that past decade of experience, only to start at the foundation of his art.”
Bermuda Drain, which was one of FACT’s top 10 albums of 2011, was something of a break-out success for Fernow; it was virtually a synth-pop record, albeit a superbly angsty one, influenced by stark European techno and also doubtless by Fernow’s now permanent role as keyboardist in Cold Cave. Wrapped In The Flame Illusion is the first vinyl offering from Prurient since Time’s Arrow, an EP addendum to Bermuda Drain which came out late last year.
The cover design of Wrapped In The Flame Of Illusion – which is limited to 500 copies, and available to pre-order here http://www.daisrecords.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=62
– features an original collage by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. The Throbbing Gristle co-founder has enjoyed a fruitful relationship with Dais in recent years, issuing several records of his own through the imprint, including archival offerings from COUM Tranmissions and Psychic TV.
The release comes courtesy of LA-NY label Dais Records, purveyors of all that’s good and grim in industrial, noise, neofolk and black metal (past releases have come from the likes of Cold Cave, aTelecine, Lord Foul and Tor Lundvall). It’s comprised of four tracks, which Dais describe thus:
“Recorded within the bleak transitional period immediately prior to the sessions that would now become known as Bermuda Drain, Dominick Fernow sketched out four compositions which can only be framed as ‘ambient power electronics’. Some of Fernow’s most destitute works to date, this release captures Prurient at its most vulnerable and sedate, reflective and rapt. Compositions that throw away that past decade of experience, only to start at the foundation of his art.”
Bermuda Drain, which was one of FACT’s top 10 albums of 2011, was something of a break-out success for Fernow; it was virtually a synth-pop record, albeit a superbly angsty one, influenced by stark European techno and also doubtless by Fernow’s now permanent role as keyboardist in Cold Cave. Wrapped In The Flame Illusion is the first vinyl offering from Prurient since Time’s Arrow, an EP addendum to Bermuda Drain which came out late last year.
The cover design of Wrapped In The Flame Of Illusion – which is limited to 500 copies, and available to pre-order here http://www.daisrecords.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=62
– features an original collage by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. The Throbbing Gristle co-founder has enjoyed a fruitful relationship with Dais in recent years, issuing several records of his own through the imprint, including archival offerings from COUM Tranmissions and Psychic TV.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)