The Veterans’ Hall was the penultimate TG gig and billed as a ‘Modern Music Concert’. That was pretty accurate. Don Bolles’ band played first, then TG headlined. The place was full of adulating TG fans asking for autographs – not something I was used to or sure about. What had TG come to when what we did was liked and our confounding expectation neutralised by acceptance?
The LA show was a nightmare. It was as if Gen had turned into Ted Nugent. He was behaving like a rock star guitarist and lead singer. Then Paula wandered nonchalantly on stage during the set, which totally disrupted the flow. I ushered her off. Me and Chris seemed an irrelevance to Gen. This was not TG. I was disgusted and walked off mid-set into the dressing room. I’d have stayed there until the gig came to a grinding, shambolic halt if it hadn’t been for two couples fucking up against the lockers. I walked out and went back on stage.
Afterwards I tackled Gen about what had happened and said I wouldn’t do the San Francisco gig unless he got back in line, that we all pull together as one and play as TG. Everyone agreed and TG moved on to San Francisco. Monte was now on board and we visited Rough Trade Inc. to say hello and thank them for distributing TG over the years.
Arriving at Kezar Pavilion for the very last TG gig, I was taken aback by how vast the space was and the massive PA stacked up, awaiting our arrival and instructions. A stage had been installed at one end and we talked with Flipper, who were our support band, about where we could set up all our combined equipment. Ted, their lead guitarist and vocalist, was a Vietnam veteran and wasn’t having a good day. He was freaked out and frantically trying to get some cigarettes. No one seemed to want to help. If all it took to make him feel better was a packet of fags, it was an easy fix. I went and got him some.
San Francisco turned out to be my favourite TG gig. The energies that had originally brought us together and the raw wounds of what had torn us apart clashed head-on, suffusing TG with tremendous power – so charged that I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience, as if I was hovering above the stage, a feeling probably helped by the sprung floor and people jumping up and down in unison to the TG rhythms. It was a fitting end.
Before we left for the UK we all went to Bobby Bonbon’s. His house was a large, luxurious place just across from George Lucas’s in the hills of Marin County. He cooked us all a meal. The mood was a bit sombre, all sitting around a long table eating our last meal together with Monte and everyone. It felt like the Last Supper. I don’t recall ever seeing any money from those two TG gigs. But I didn’t care. I was the happiest I’d ever been and couldn’t wait to return home to start our life free from the burden of what TG had become. I wasn’t sad TG had ended. It had run its course.
5
A scorching summer in 1981 befitted the mood me and Chris were in as we started our life together. Free at last, everything seemed brighter than bright – blazing sunshine, laughter and positivity. First stop after our return from America was to visit Pam and Les to tell them about the baby. We went to the seaside at Scarborough. A carefree break prior to tackling the TG fallout and our future plans.
There was so much to do. For one thing, I couldn’t continue stripping once my baby bump began to show. That came sooner than I expected. The landlord at the Old Red Lion commented on my boobs looking great ‘that size’. He thought I’d had breast implants. Although I was only fourteen weeks pregnant, I told my agency I was leaving. I fulfilled one last job, performing a striptease to Bowie’s ‘Fashion’ for a new format, the LaserDisc. It ended up coming out on video, with me being introduced by the actor Keith Allen.
With our new era came the task of dealing with residual TG matters. We all agreed to complete any outstanding projects and announced the official end of TG with a funeral card that simply stated ‘The Mission Is Terminated’, dated 23 June 1981. Me and Chris visited Beck Road at appointed times. Gen insisted I take everything that he deemed to be my belongings, as Paula was moving in: all my ICA framed magazines, my darkroom equipment – Gen didn’t want it, he didn’t know how to use it, and in any case he had Sleazy to do all that for him. I also took some of my negatives and asked Gen for copies of photos of our time together. He put some in an envelope and gave it to me. I thought that was amiable of him. But when I got home and opened it, he’d cut himself out of every one of the photos. It struck me as strange and childish to go to the trouble of making a symbolic gesture of cutting himself out of my life. I took that and his reaction to my pregnancy as a sign writ large that he was ready to let go at last. It was a relief.
There was more purging to follow. I was told by Gen that Paula was allergic to cats, so they had to go too. I couldn’t let them be sent away to strangers or be put to sleep so I said I’d take them. However, I was only allowed to take Hermes and Razart; Gen wouldn’t let me have Moonshine. Paula’s allergy aside, he regarded Moonshine as his cat. By the beginning of July, the era of me and Gen was over. The saddest final part was dear Tremble passing away on 5 July. She was buried in Chris’s parents’ garden, her grave marked by the twelve red roses I’d been given on my final stripping booking just two days earlier.
*
Before the TG split, Geoff Travis of Rough Trade had asked Chris to play him some of his solo tapes and offered him a solo album deal. Me and Chris went for a meeting with him at their Blenheim Crescent offices in Notting Hill after the TG USA trip. It was an incredibly hot and sunny day. Everything seemed to be in slow motion as we walked hand-in-hand down the street lined with cherry blossom trees, being gently showered by the falling pale-pink blossoms and treading softly through the drifts of flowers that had collected underfoot.
The meeting was just as uplifting. Rough Trade were very supportive and offered to front the cost of manufacturing and handle distribution, and Geoff also extended Chris’s solo album offer to include the release of the first Chris & Cosey album. We’d started compiling ideas and sounds while in LA and soon after we got back we began recording in the small studio Chris had set up in one of our old bedsit rooms after we’d moved into a larger flat downstairs. We used a TEAC four-track, then took the tape to Meridian Studios, under the Southern Music offices down Denmark Street (just next door to Hipgnosis). Mick Garoghan was the resident engineer and worked with us over the two weeks, with Alex (Fergusson) helping out on guitar and vocals. It was a fun few weeks working with them both. Alex was amazing to work with, always happy and game for trying out ideas. We were cutting the album with Steve Angel at Utopia by the end of August, then completed the artwork and delivered everything to Rough Trade on 7 September.
The album as a whole was peppered with references to the huge transitional period in our lives. Not just the music, which was a crossover between TG and what was to come, but also the artwork. The front cover was an image of the first scan of our child, the title, Heartbeat, a reference to our new ‘life’. We recorded the baby’s heartbeat and used it on the title track and dedicated the album to Tremble.
During the recording of Heartbeat me and Chris had resumed our search for a cheap property to buy. I asked a local estate agent if they had any run-down properties and they showed us one that they’d just taken on, a very cheap ‘doer-upper’, a three-bedroom terraced house in Tottenham, North London. The last owner was a Mrs D’Eath, which didn’t sit well until Chris’s mum dismissed it outright: ‘Oh, there were a lot of people with that name when I was young.’
That intense Inland Revenue meeting had paid off, as the self-employed accounts I’d had to supply also qualified me for a mortgage. The house needed a lot doing to it to make it habitable, and we continued living in a rented flat in Crouch End while it was renovated. We were overseeing the builders while also working on and promoting the new album, and meanwhile I was learning to cope with the increasing size of my baby bump. Claude Bessy, who we met in Los Angeles when he worked for Slash music magazine, was now living in the UK and working as press officer for Rough Trade, so we saw a lot of him and his wife, Philomena (Pinglewad’s sister), duri
ng the run-up to (and beyond) the release of Heartbeat.
In October we were asked to support Grace Jones on her ‘One Man Show’ tour but had to decline as I was seven months pregnant and airline restrictions didn’t allow flying at that stage. I think we had enough on our plate already anyway, as TG business was still being wound down. Fetish were releasing a five-album TG box set, with Neville Brody on board doing design. The box included a badge, booklet, liner notes by Jon Savage, the four official TG albums and the very last TG gig in San Francisco, entitled Mission of Dead Souls. Rough Trade were also releasing TG live in Heaven on cassette, under the title Beyond Jazz Funk, and Chris supervised the mastering for them. He’d also had an offer from Southern Publishing to do an album of incidental music for their BBC library series. So much was happening, and so quickly.
30 December 1981
‘Heartbeat’ was released and sold the first 5000 in a week. Re-pressing another 2000 now. Cassettes selling well too … We sorted out Industrial Records and shared out the equipment.
We’d spent a fantastic, boisterous family Christmas at Chris’s parents’, fourteen of us and the boxing promoter Frank Warren and his wife Sue, close friends of the family, all tucking into a festive feast while being entertained by crazy mad stories of past pranks and near misses. I laughed so much I thought I was going to go into labour.
Heartbeat had sold well, was licensed to France and Italy, and Rough Trade suggested we do another album and a single for the following year. That was a great counterbalance to the sombre task of the dispersing of TG and IR assets. We shared out TG equipment – well, I say share: there didn’t seem much left in the studio when me and Chris got there. We weren’t interested in the fight over the TG/IR spoils. For one thing, it was New Year’s Eve when Gen told us to collect everything, and I was due to give birth in just two weeks’ time, so I wasn’t best pleased about the timing of it all. We left a lot behind.
*
At 3.30 p.m. on 12 January 1982, TG gathered at the offices of Peer Music on Denmark Street to sign off from our contracts with them. It was the end of TG and the beginning of a new life for me and Chris.
I thought I had the usual backache, but I’d actually gone into labour during the meeting. By the time we got home to Crouch End at about six thirty, I was under no illusion that this was labour for sure – the pains were coming every four minutes. I had to abandon my cake and cup of tea and we set off in my blue Mini to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead. The sudden panic of imminent birth had Chris driving in the wrong direction at first, like some comedy sketch. We were laughing, which only made the pains worse.
Just before 11 p.m. that evening, and on my mother’s birthday, our son, Nick, was born after a short but intensely painful four-hour labour. I’d requested no epidural or pain relief. I had the natural birth I wanted.
I wrote a letter to Monte about the intensity of the pain, how I seemed to transcend my body when it reached a critical level. I was euphoric, if exhausted. I’d had one of the most momentous experiences of my life but didn’t talk about it at postnatal classes. I was silenced by my respect for the other women’s pain. Everyone else in the class had tales of postnatal depression, unsupportive partners, agonising births, and one woman had walked across the ward leaving a trail of blood as she went. I was also lucky with my postnatal hormonal plunge into ‘baby blues’. It was brief and shared with a woman in the next bed to me during my week-long stay in hospital. We’d both been given strong painkillers and were a bit out of it for a couple of days, laughing and clowning around as best we could with stitches and the agony of humongous boobs as our milk came in.
Giving birth and the physical aftermath it wreaks on women’s bodies doesn’t tally with the idyllic picture of motherhood. A week before me, Chris’s sister Vicki had her son, Peter, who was renamed Nicholas after our Nick was born. Two babies born within a week of each other in the same family meant that there was a lot of love and support. I couldn’t have managed half as well without Rose and her sister, Pat. Nick was adorable and adored by the family and fitted into our lives seamlessly. I settled into motherhood without any angst or hang-ups. Nick was my child, he was dependent on me and Chris, and like most new parents we revelled in the marvel of the precious new life we’d created.
*
Just six days before Nick arrived, we’d mastered our second album, Trance, an instrumental in a more minimal style, still under the name Chris & Cosey but adding ‘The Creative Technology Institute’ (CTI), which stood for both our own label and the collective name for any forthcoming collaborations and Chris & Cosey side projects that also went under the moniker of Conspiracy International. Although we released our work on Rough Trade, we continued the independent DIY approach we’d practised as IR and TG with our own CTI label, including distributing newsletters and operating a mail-order service to our own mailing list. Such a short time after the demise of TG we were fully up and running with unprecedented fervour, a sense of freedom and an expanding fanbase.
Recording Trance had been a new experience. There was no lingering trace of TG, and the tracks came together so easily and quickly that we thought of it as more of a stopgap between C&C albums and proposed that it be sold at a budget price. It was to wholesalers, but generally shops sold it on at full price. That was a lesson learned. Trance marked a distinct shift in our musical style as we were now using a Roland TR-808 drum machine and TB-303 bassline. We had no idea it would gain status years later as one of our most successful and influential albums.
The cover artwork was as easy-going as the music. As part of my postnatal fitness plan, we took regular walks with Nick through Crouch End and up Highgate Hill to Highgate Cemetery, where we’d walk around, then have tea and cake at a cafe. On one of our walks we set up my Nikon and took the photos for the cover of Trance in front of the entrance gates to a tomb not far from the Karl Marx monument, with Nick in his pram just out of shot next to the camera tripod. Back then the cemetery was quite run-down and access to the catacombs wasn’t difficult. Many a horror film was shot there.
As news got round that me and Chris were no longer involved with Gen, a lot of friends reconnected with us. John Lacey had kept in touch and called round to our flat late one night to tell us that he’d bought a house and was now living in Todmorden, West Yorkshire. After we’d moved to Tottenham, we called John and invited him to stay. That visit rekindled our creative working relationship. Me and Chris had started recording music for Elemental 7 and John joined us in collaboration. We decided to make a video of the whole album.
I’d been invited to give a lecture on my work at Leeds College of Art. I put together some slides to base my talk around and we drove up there, with baby and all the video and lighting equipment we’d need to do some filming. We were making use of the trip to visit Hull, then go on to John’s place in Todmorden for more filming for Elemental 7. The Leeds lecture went very well, with me feeding Nick in a small room just before, leaving Chris to rock him to sleep. The talk was taped and transcribed to form the basis of ‘Time to Tell’, a special edition of Ian Dobson’s fanzine, Flowmotion. The issue covered the past ten years of my work as a musician, artist, model and striptease dancer, and included a cassette of a solo music recording I’d made in our small studio in Crouch End.
John’s house in Todmorden stood on a hill in a row of stone Victorian terraced houses. Just up the road was Robinwood Mill, a huge disused Victorian cotton mill. We did a recce of the place as a potential site for filming. The main part of the mill was five storeys high and we used the old rickety goods lift that was just about operational as we explored each of the floors. Emptied of their machinery they looked vast. The dusty, worn, wooden floorboards were solid underfoot and light streamed in from the windows that lined the walls. There was an underlying feeling of some lurking presence, giving it a creepy atmosphere that was magnified tenfold when we returned to film there in the evening.
There wasn’t much lighting and we needed torches an
d the video lights to help us find our way. The lift had iron concertina doors that had to be latched into place for the thing to operate. They didn’t always latch properly or would spring open with the jolts and jerks – and the lift would sometimes stop between floors, stranding us until we got the thing going again. That and unexpected and unaccountable moving shadows and noises amplified by the echoing vastness gave us a feeling that we were not alone, intruders at the mercy of the building and whatever lingering forces were at play. But we were determined to get some video footage. As we played the album track off a cassette machine, Chris filmed me and John as we danced, leaped and ran across the wooden floor. When we finished, the atmosphere had changed. It felt as if our actions had disturbed the equilibrium of whatever energies were present – that we were not welcome. Behind the lights was a blanket of blackness that none of us wanted to look into. The hairs stood up on the backs of our necks and it was fast approaching midnight. We didn’t care how irrational our reactions seemed as we scrambled to pack the equipment up and get out as fast as we could, praying the lift didn’t come to a grinding halt and leave us stuck in the mill overnight. We were delivered to the ground floor, slung the lift gate aside and rushed out the main entrance and up the road to the safety of John’s house. We called the track ‘Dancing Ghosts’.
*
I returned to stripping when Nick was five months old. I’ve barely touched on my stripping yet so I’ll start at the beginning, even though by now my involvement was nearing its end.
My first introduction to stripping was while modelling for magazines. I worked with two girls, Janet and Lynn, who were also striptease artistes. Despite their encouragement, I didn’t start until late 1977. My stripping work ran parallel to my music and art activities and any modelling jobs that cropped up. There were still a few photographers who hadn’t blacklisted me after the ICA exhibition.
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