I felt guilty for making Gen so unhappy. He knew that I’d be feeling bad. I did still care for him but knew the only way I could leave him was to remove myself and then wait for him to be the one to decide we’d part for good. We carried on with TG – him hoping I’d go back. It was a terrible time. He sent me mix tapes of my favourite albums. How nice, I thought – until the songs were interrupted by Gen’s voice, depressed, saying how he needed me to come home, declaring his love for me. Even though I’d left, he was invading the much-needed space I’d managed to put between us. I knew he was having women over to Beck Road so I couldn’t take his declarations of love and pleas for my return seriously, and besides, how could I go back after what happened when I left and all the years before that? Nothing had changed; his gestures – buying me flowers for the first time ever and cleaning the house – were out of character and way too late. The fact that he asked me not to tell anyone about my leaving him spoke volumes. He didn’t want to lose face and thought I would weaken and go back.
*
The TG gig at the Crypt was going to be a great night. Our friends Cabaret Voltaire, Robert Rental and Daniel Miller were to play too. All TG gigs were memorable but this one more so than others. We’d hired bouncers for the first time, supplied by a guy known as ‘Terry the Pill’, who also controlled a lot of the fly-posting in London. Sleazy had introduced us to him so that he could put up TG promo posters for us.
The Crypt club gig was in the basement of Trinity Church in Paddington and, on a mid-November night, freezing cold. Gen seemed OK – as usual he’d supped his whiskey – but as we started to play his behaviour changed. He climbed on to the PA speakers, which started to list precariously, and he tried to push them over, but someone was wisely pushing them back. The place was totally jam-packed and a speaker would have cracked someone’s head open if it fell. Sleazy looked over at me and raised his eyebrows with concern, then frowned as if to say, ‘What’s up with him?’ I shrugged my shoulders in reply. We both looked over at Chris and he shrugged too. By then Gen had returned to the mic and we all assumed it was just another stage act. After the gig ended we packed up the gear and all went home.
Later I was woken by the phone. It was Helen Chadwick. She lived across from us in Beck Road and we’d become friends. ‘Hi, Cosey. Gen’s taken a load of pills. He’s OK but I think you need to come and see him.’
There was stunned silence. ‘What pills? Is he unconscious?’ I asked.
‘Sleeping pills and his steroids. He’s conscious – he rang me up to tell me he’d taken them. I’m taking him to the hospital.’ I told her I’d be straight over but she was calm, even casual. ‘There’s no need. He’s fine. Go to the hospital tomorrow.’
The next morning I went to see him. Gen was all right. The doctors explained to me that the pills he’d taken wouldn’t have killed him. They’d kept him in overnight but weren’t very sympathetic. His mum and dad came to see him and took me to one side to ask what the hell was going on and to say we had to stop tearing each other apart. I couldn’t begin to explain the circumstances.
I saw Gen – he was very quiet. I didn’t know what to say or what I was supposed to do. Should I fall apart and say I’d come back? I said I’d drive him home, and we got in my Mini and set off. I was pulling away from the traffic lights when he opened the passenger door and went as if to throw himself out into the road. I was screaming at him, one hand on the steering wheel and the other dragging him back into his seat. I pulled over, fastened him in with the seat belt and shut the door. Deep conversations about how we’d continue followed for a few weeks and I visited him a lot, trying to ease the pain of our separation as best I could.
Our second TG album, D.o.A., was released just a month later. The signs of the interpersonal turmoil fracturing TG were clear to see and hear. We all did solo tracks. Gen’s track, ‘Weeping’, directly referred to my leaving him, while my track, ‘Hometime’, was from a recording I’d done at my sister’s while trying to decide whether to leave him. The photo of the little girl on the front was taken by Gen on a two-week holiday liaison with her mother, Ewa.
The TG sound was also changing. Chris’s ‘AB/7A’ track signalled a shift to more sequence-based melodic music, which was a move on from our ‘United’ single. It was then developed further when we recorded our third TG album, 20 Jazz Funk Greats.
Where possible we kept everything ‘in-house’. Through Sleazy’s contacts at Hipgnosis we were able to rent multitrack recording gear, mixing desks from Pink Floyd’s Britannia Row facility and then from Paul McCartney, so the gear was high-end. The lightness of some of the tracks on 20 Jazz Funk Greats was a huge departure from the previous darkness of TG sound. When it came to recording the album, me and Sleazy recorded some vocals, me on ‘Hot on the Heels of Love’, him on the title track, ‘20 Jazz Funk Greats’, and together on ‘Still Walking’. It was great fun deconstructing disco and Martin Denny ’s lounge music.
By the time we got to the single ‘Adrenalin/Distant Dreams’, which suggested similar vocals (if any) to ‘Hot on the Heels of Love’, we all sensed Gen felt his lead-singer territory was being threatened. We disagreed about ‘Adrenalin’: me, Chris and Sleazy wanted it to be an instrumental; Gen wanted vocals and wasn’t open to anyone else trying anything or joint vocals as a compromise. His discontent may have been down to him not doing anything else on the track or on ‘Distant Dreams’. The two tracks signalled the direction me and Chris would take as Chris & Cosey after TG split.
The confrontational and unorthodox presentation of TG gigs, not to mention the sound, meant we expected and nearly always encountered trouble when we played live. For our Architectural Association gig, we decided to place TG in a makeshift cage on a scaffolding platform covered by a large tarpaulin in the central courtyard, purposely separating TG from the audience and creating a funnel of sound within the surrounding buildings. The audience would either have to hang out of the windows to hear us (but not be able to see us) or watch (but not hear) us on the TV monitors that we set up around the building. It caused utter confusion, frustration and then anger, we had beer glasses and bottles thrown at our ‘cage’, and fights broke out as people tried to get to us. Much the same thing happened at the London Film-Makers’ Co-Op gig, which we’d agreed to play for free to raise funds. For the first half we played the After Cease to Exist soundtrack, hidden behind the mirrored panels to keep the focus on the music. The seated audience could only see themselves beyond the glare of the halogen lights directed at them. When we emerged to continue the set, there was a growing hostile restlessness. Some of the girls from the punk bands the Slits and the Raincoats were there and drunk, and came to the front swinging Robert Rental’s four-year-old son around. One of them hit Glen, our young TG fan and roadie. Then Fred or Judy Vermorel (who we were potentially going to be doing a film soundtrack for) threw a chair across the room and pandemonium broke out. The girls started to attack the stage, trying to unplug the equipment, throwing glasses and bottles at us, one hitting Sleazy. Chris jumped off the stage, grabbed one of the girls by her shoulders and pushed her away, while Gen went further and whacked another girl with his bass guitar – for which we received a threatening phone message. Me and Sleazy set about trying to safely unplug the gear and pack everything away while the room was in chaos, with chairs scattered everywhere and people either arguing or trying to calm things down. One of the Slits came over to me, trying to provoke me, saying she thought I was cool but now thought I was shit, then trying to talk friendly. I didn’t give a toss what she thought of me – at that moment she was far from ‘cool’ in my eyes and I wasn’t interested in having a conversation with a drunk.
*
I was stripping weekday lunchtimes and then going to Beck Road to do IR mail order or TG in the evenings and on weekends, unless I was doing my own art projects. Working with Szabo was both fun and intense. We’d formulate an idea for a set of photos, I’d use my own clothes, then he’d ruminate on the overall look, m
ood, colours, my make-up, hair and props. When I’d arrive at his flat to work he’d always point me to the mantelpiece, where the make-up and accessories had been carefully laid out. It was like an altar awaiting my presence, the point from which our creative collaborations began. As I applied my make-up he’d direct me, commenting on the position of colours. We were engaged in an intimate, ritualistic collaboration, working together to realise the aesthetic we jointly envisaged. He had an incredible eye for form and I trusted him to direct me for body shape and position.
I’d been selected to contribute to the Hayward Annual at the Hayward Gallery and used one of Szabo’s photos as the poster for my solo three-day art action. He also loaned me some transparencies he’d taken of me, which I had projected alongside images of my striptease work on a wall of the action space. These images were supplemented over the next three days by those taken by Sleazy of my three actions, creating a slide show juxtaposing my private and public ‘body’ of works projected as part of the live action taking place.
From this amalgamation of my separate activities evolved a new work, ‘Life Forms’ – modelling, striptease and art actions echoing one another in form but unrelated in context and framed in relationship to my art and life. I first exhibited ‘Life Forms’ in the group exhibition ‘Masculine & Feminine’ in Graz, Austria, two months later.
*
Me and Gen living apart didn’t seem to adversely affect TG; we were on fire with new ideas. We put together Industrial News, a small-format booklet containing updates on our progress, disseminating the information we’d accumulated, TG lyrics, collages and a contact page so people could get in touch with one another to potentially collaborate. TG and IR were about connection and communication and had soon built up a large mailing list through the album questionnaire and the newsletters, and had started receiving cassette tapes from people and requests to collaborate. The TG entourage had expanded to include Stan Bingo, Geordie Vals and Glenn Wallis, and also Kim Norris, who Gen had befriended at the local unemployment exchange. They helped out at gigs and with the increasing mail order workload, which had become difficult to cope with.
TG took a two-week trip to visit Monte, who was now living in Oakland in the San Francisco Bay Area with his girlfriend, Tana. Monte loved having us stay. We all slept on the floor of his living room, which was difficult as Gen kept wanting to sleep with me. The weather was sunny and hot and I took the opportunity to get an all-over tan for when I got home. I hated bikini marks – they didn’t look good when I was stripping. The back garden was a suntrap and Tana and me would sit there together, reading.
I was on my own in the garden one day, lying on my front on a blanket in only a red G-string, all oiled up, feeling the sun on my body and half-asleep. Suddenly there was a great thud at my side. I sprang up to see that a large cement breeze block had landed about six inches from my head. I looked behind me to see where it had come from. Gen had thrown it from Monte’s balcony and was stood there staring down at me in silence.
I was momentarily speechless. He could have killed me. I shouted at him and Monte came out to see what was going on. He was horrified and took Gen inside. The incident wasn’t addressed. Gen carried on like nothing had happened. In hindsight, it’s unbelievable that Gen wasn’t brought to account. Maybe Monte made Gen realise what a narrow escape he (and I) had had. That put a halt to any more sunbathing for me when Gen was around.
Our label, Industrial Records, had diversified, sub-licensing a single through Jean-Pierre Turmel and Yves Von Bontee’s French label, Sordide Sentimental, and also releasing material by other artists on IR – cassette albums by Cabaret Voltaire, Richard H. Kirk and Clock DVA, singles by Leather Nun and Monte, and our first non-TG album, The Bridge by Robert Rental and Thomas Leer. We really liked what they’d been doing together and offered for them to release an album on IR. They thought they’d record in the TG studio, using our gear, but we insisted they use their own equipment – bar renting them an eight-track tape recorder and Chris building Robert a Gristleizer. The whole point of their music was that it had its own idiosyncratic sound and we didn’t want that to be lost by using our gear. We took them out for a meal in Soho and had them sign a contract. It was formal compared to Monte’s, which was painstakingly written line by line and signed in his own blood. He’d cut his arm to get the blood flowing and had to cut it repeatedly as it clotted.
Monte had flown back to the UK, paid for by IR, and lived at Gen’s for about four months. He contributed to TG and IR projects, filming what would be the last studio recording by TG, Heathen Earth – but a studio recording of a very particular kind. To keep things unpredictable and ‘live’, we set up a gig in our Martello Street studio, inviting a small group of friends, TG associates and fans. Monte filmed the whole gig using one camera, with Stan Bingo on the mixer. Before we started, people were advised to go to the toilet as there would be no break in the proceedings. We then locked the studio door and started the digital clock we always had on stage to keep us to a strict one-hour set, and everything was filmed and recorded. The album had taken just one hour, with a short break in the middle of the set while Chris put a fresh reel of tape on the recorder. One young fan who attended had written to TG for some time and got talking to Sleazy. His name was Geff Rushton (aka John Balance), who later formed the band Coil together with Sleazy. They became lovers and lifelong companions and collaborators.
TG was now at the centre of my relationship with Gen. TG and IR seemed unstoppable and at times unwieldy. We’d been selling our live gigs on C60 cassette tapes and then as a twenty-four-cassette box set in an attaché case, 24 Hours of Throbbing Gristle. We’d bought two tape-duplicating machines and were spending hours every day copying tapes.
More vinyl releases came out, one after the other: singles by SPK, Dorothy (from Rema-Rema) and Alex Fergusson, Elisabeth Welch (from Derek Jarman’s film The Tempest), an EP by Monte, and of course TG’s ‘Subhuman’ and ‘Distant Dreams’ 7'' singles. The live recording of Heathen Earth saw the light of day with our first gatefold cover featuring individual portraits, and the first thousand copies were pressed in blue vinyl. Nine live performances contributed to the frenzy of activities, playing alongside Clock DVA, Cabaret Voltaire and Monte. We put on an Industrial Records event at the Scala cinema in London, with IR-associated bands performing throughout the night – TG, Monte, Leather Nun – and screenings of films by Burroughs and Kenneth Anger. We kept ourselves awake with Pro Plus tablets and paid the price with terrible stomach cramps the next day.
Our gig at Oundle was special. It was at a seventeenth-century private boarding school of the same name in the middle of leafy Northamptonshire, very Tom Brown’s School Days. One of the pupils had written to us and got his music teacher to agree to booking TG, saying we were avant-garde, a bit like John Cage. It was an earlier-than-usual start because we’d arranged as part of the booking that we got to eat lunch with the boarders in the old wood-panelled refectory and go on a tour of the school. Sleazy was in his element – it was so redolent of his school days. We videoed everything, including the dormitories and showers and, of course, the gig. The hall was packed with schoolboys, with the teachers sitting on the balcony opposite the stage looking decidedly worried. Monte played first and made the mistake of throwing back a toilet roll that one boy had hurled at him. That brought a hail of assorted projectiles. TG was next up and the sight of a woman (me) on stage seemed to calm the boys’ aggression a little, but it did increase their testosterone levels and shouts of ‘Show us your legs, show us your tits’ were directed my way. I smiled sweetly … then we absolutely blasted them with sound, drowning out their protests until, towards the end, we noticed singing … They were all singing the hymn ‘Jerusalem’ at the tops of their voices. It was a bizarre but beautiful moment. The performance ended on some Martin Denny lounge music and the very hyper boys were ordered to their dorms for the night. One boy came over to me and gave me his rugby shirt. I could hardly hold Sleazy back from gr
abbing it out of my hands and he nagged me for days to give it to him. I kept it.
The stress of working every day and then spending evenings stripping, while holding TG together and still not being at a point where Gen would accept me and Chris being a couple, was really getting to me. I knew it was taking its toll because my body was out of sync and I’d lost a lot of weight. I booked a holiday to a naturist resort in what was then still Yugoslavia and escaped for some sun, sea and a change of scenery. Kim came with me for company. It was so liberating to walk around naked to the bank and supermarket. Everyone was naked, including teenage boys and girls playing volleyball together, pregnant women and older people with surgery scars, people of all shapes and sizes and not a single voyeur.
When we got back to the UK, Chris and Gen met us at St Pancras. My eyes lighted straight away on Chris, although he was stood behind Gen, who seemed to be just a shadow in the foreground. All I wanted to do was run to Chris but I couldn’t as I was expected to go to Gen. Nothing had changed for him and things picked up where they had left off, with me going regularly to Beck Road and taking Gen’s new puppy, Tanith, to training classes. She was a Doberman–Alsatian cross-breed and needed careful handling. Tanith was an amazing dog and responded so well to me that the trainer said, ‘She could go far – she’s very quick to learn. She’d jump through a ring of fire for you.’ I told Gen but he said he didn’t have the time, couldn’t be bothered; it was up to me if I wanted to take her training further. I’d taken him to one of the classes but the trainer suggested he not come again, saying that Gen’s handling methods conflicted with the gentle training approach and my close relationship with Tanith. She obeyed all the commands I taught her and whenever I drove up she’d jump straight into my car, ready to go to class, sometimes through the open window.
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