Art Sex Music

by Cosey Fanni Tutti

  We were in distant touch with Gen again about Cherry Red releasing a TG DVD. The decision to accept the offer was delayed as Sleazy’s father had died, but when Sleazy got back in touch he refused the deal outright, saying we could get a better deal somewhere else.

  He later called me one evening sounding fed up, which wasn’t like him. He’d just got back from a Coil gig at Sonar: Geff had started drinking again and he’d had a nightmare journey back home with him. I had some understanding of the problems he faced with Geff from when they played as part of Julian Cope’s two-day festival at the Royal Festival Hall. The gig had technical problems and Geff was drunk, so we decided not to go backstage after the show. Sleazy had enough on his plate. His video promo work had dried up. ‘The music industry has completely collapsed,’ he said, and announced that he was going into fine art, starting with a show at Whitechapel Gallery that Paul Smith was involved with. I gave him Matthew Higgs’ contact details, who I’d met when I was in his and Paul Noble’s ‘Protest and Survive’ Whitechapel show, as Matthew had shown interest in Sleazy’s Sex Pistols photographs.

  I was busy forming ideas for a new art action series on the theme of identity, entitled ‘Self lessness’ … as in the lack of a sense of self. Jack Sargeant introduced me to a guy from the Arts Council, and Andrew and Paul Buck were helpfully encouraging in my applying for funding from them. I’d been there before and didn’t want to be answerable to them after my past experience with arts funding in the 1970s. I found the process of application complicated, too restrictive. How could I describe an action that had yet to take place or evaluate (and justify) how it would be of benefit to the community? Also, the actions and the elements within them could easily cause offence and rejection. I wasn’t going to compromise or inhibit my work to fit funding criteria, so I funded myself.

  But first I had to prepare and install a solo show of my work at Galerie Station in Frankfurt, Germany. I scanned, outputted and framed one entire magazine action as well as three A0 diptychs from another, and compiled a video entitled Fall Out. The installation took me and Chris two days to complete, and it looked great. When we got home, I got a call from Alex Fergusson (who was by then living in Germany) to say he’d seen the exhibition and loved it, and would be coming to see us. He stayed for a few days and came with us to recce Ely before my degree graduation ceremony there. We checked out a restaurant by the river and had a meal together before roaming around the antique shops. He was still the same Alex: fun, talking ten to the dozen and squeezing my bum when Chris wasn’t looking.

  *

  For the previous six years, and in between the many other activities, I had studied hard, written many assignments, sat nerve-racking exams, and now I was finally being awarded a first-class honours degree. I was stunned and felt like it wasn’t really me that had done it all. Even the graduation ceremony at Ely Cathedral seemed otherworldly. The building dates back to the eleventh century and is an incredibly spectacular and evocative space. That day it was filled with graduates and guests as Bach organ music accompanied the gowned procession of dignitaries making their way to take their places for the conferment procedure. I was all dressed up in a graduation gown and mortarboard, with everyone staring at me. The one thing that made it seem more real for me was John Peel receiving his honorary degree at the same ceremony. For a brief time all the worries of debt and TG matters had been forgotten.

  7 July 2001

  All this TG bootleg business has really escalated. Gen is quite excited by us all ‘talking’ again … it’s business. It’s rather taken over all my time.

  27 September 2001

  We went to our 24hr TG meeting at Mute. If I hadn’t got the bootleg sorted and made contact with Gen again none of this would have happened. Chris and I have totally been instrumental in all this falling into place.

  One of the consequences of the first bootlegging of TG material was that the unofficial licences were then re-licensed for more bootlegging. I once again took on the task of tracking some down and started negotiating more contracts to make the bootlegs retrospectively ‘official’, securing our copyright and royalties. It hadn’t been easy and it was extremely time-consuming, but it also reconnected us all with Gen, which in turn led to us discussing the TG24 project.

  After many emails and phone calls about TG24, me, Chris and Sleazy went for a meeting at Mute (Gen was unavailable). It was the first time I’d seen Sleazy in years and he looked very different. Gone was the lithe, youthful body and much of his hair – except for a little goatee beard – and he had an assertive business air about him. An open office environment where you could be easily overheard wasn’t the best place to meet up again after so long, and Sleazy was a little guarded until we moved to somewhere more private. His mood had a lot to do with him recently retiring from doing promotional videos. He was very jaded about the music business and ranted about how ruthless it was, having recently been on the receiving end of some bad experiences.

  The deal was done for the TG box set, and Mute were liaising with Gen. Daniel was excited and fired up about the release, talking about setting up interviews to promote it and then (again) asking if we thought TG would be up for playing live together.

  ‘When hell freezes over!’ Sleazy replied, adding scathing comments about Gen.

  I just said, ‘No’, and Chris remained silent.

  We’d worked together and Sleazy had even asked Chris to join Coil on tour as their ‘analogue synth man’. Chris assessed the reality of the offer – when, where, rehearsals in Weston-super-Mare, Geff’s three-day drunken comas. He’d also just sold his ailing analogue modular system to buy a Mac G4 and laptop. He said no to the Coil offer.

  Me, Chris and Sleazy working together was no problem – working as TG was a whole other thing. It was the third time we’d been asked to re-form TG. A year or so earlier, a multinational corporation got in touch to ask if TG would play a one-off concert for a birthday party for one of their directors, who apparently was a huge TG fan. As we had no interest in playing live together we told them the fee would be a million dollars, knowing it would cut the offer off at the knees. It did.

  After the Mute meeting we walked to the Tube together. It was a warm, sunny day and we laughed and talked about old times, in between times, and the present-day grim realities of Sleazy’s ongoing difficulties with Geff’s alcoholism. He painted a dark picture of his day-to-day struggle of coping with Geff and the recent trip to A&E when Geff had a suspected heart attack while trying to ‘dry out’. We lightened the mood before we went our separate ways – us to Norfolk and him back to Weston.

  20 October 2001

  Now we’ll have to go and bring baby home. It’s more upsetting than I thought it would be. Where do I put her/him? It’s all very formal and I’m scared of how I’ll feel when we actually hold it in our hands.

  A few months after the Alder Hey Children’s Hospital babies’ organ scandal, I happened to pick up the local paper, which had a front-page story on a woman whose miscarried foetus had been stored in a jar at the local hospital without her knowledge. Then I saw the date of the woman’s miscarriage was the same year as mine.

  I called the hospital helpline and later received a letter informing me that they would investigate and get back to me. My mind went into overdrive – what would I do if they had our foetus? I’d have to bring it home. I couldn’t leave it there. So many thoughts, trying to work out how to face and deal with the loss all over again.

  Then the phone rang. It was Pam, calling to tell me Dad’s Parkinson’s was so bad he was now in a wheelchair and his short-term memory had gone. He was being put in a respite home for six weeks. I felt for her. She’d been looking after him for so long and he’d not treated her well. I just thought him being in a respite home would give her a rest.

  A week after my call to the hospital, I received a letter from them telling me that they had our foetus in the form of a wax block and slides. I got a call from the hospital chaplain, who told me of th
e formal procedure that I had to go through. It was his job to consult with us on what would happen next. He was such a kind man but I was angry that after all this time the hospital still dictated what we could do with our foetus. And it had to be done through the church. I’m an atheist. Having to find a way of getting my hands on what was a part of me and Chris was a miserable situation to be in. In the end the chaplain ‘released’ our foetus to us, and with great sensitivity placed it in a small wooden casket that he’d bought himself. We took baby home. Both of us felt that was the right thing to do.

  *

  The month before our meeting with the chaplain I’d fallen over in the garden and broken my ankle, so I had a plaster cast on for my fiftieth birthday. Celebrations lasted for five days, with various parties, fireworks and visits. It was a fantastic happiness boost after an often tough year. Chris bought me a beautiful ‘koru’ pendant, a symbol of new life and purity.

  I had no clue what news was waiting in the wings to bring me back down to earth. Pam rang on the morning of 6 December to tell me Dad had died early that day. She broke down, and it upset me so much to hear her cry that I started to cry too. As is the way with grief, the tears are irrepressible, then logic kicks in. She spoke quite remotely, giving me an account of how Dad had died. It was a horrible death, suffice to say: he’d had a fatal heart attack following complications from acute peritonitis. Pam organised everything with some help from my dad’s partner, Marian. She wouldn’t hear of me going there – she had her children, Debbie and Danny, with her. I knew she was finding it hard enough to cope without me, the outcast daughter, turning up and causing upset on upset.

  My uncle Mike called me in the evening to ask how I felt. I said I really didn’t know. ‘Likewise,’ he said. He was confused because he’d just lost his brother and didn’t feel sad. So many feelings came surging over me – anger, regret for what could have been had Dad not been such a stubborn, hurtful bastard, sadness for Pam and even more so for Mum.

  Les rang and was predictably caustic about Dad after he’d tested how I felt. He really let rip, saying Dad was evil, never a father at all, and more of the same. But Pam surprised me by her revelations about her feelings towards Dad – how I was his and she was Mum’s … Dad had said so, and she knew she could never be the daughter he wanted. She’d felt in my shadow all the time, unloved. That upset me. Apparently Marian had been on at Dad to reconcile his differences with me, but he wouldn’t have any of it. He’d lose face. What a price to pay for pride.

  I told Nick his grandfather had died. He was shocked and said he’d hoped and fully intended to see him at least once. I said maybe it was better he hadn’t, in case he got a rejection full in the face. That was odds-on.

  It’s perverse that I had input into Dad’s funeral and would attend when I was excluded from Mum’s, who I loved so dearly. Pam talked through the choice of wreaths with me – one from the grandchildren, Debbie, Danny and Nick. It meant a lot to me that Nick was included. The funeral was a week later. Me, Chris and Nick drove to Hull. When Pam answered her door and our eyes met, we wept in each other’s arms. It was too much.

  My auntie Irene came to the funeral. I was glad she was there. I discovered she’d gone to school with Dad and they’d got their first jobs together in a shoe factory. After fifty years I finally understood why Mum and Dad chose her as our latchkey carer, and why she was our loving auntie.

  We got ready to set off to Dad and Marian’s house to be picked up by the funeral hearse. It was weird being in Dad’s house. There weren’t any pictures of him anywhere, just a photo of Marian and her kids. Marian was nervous to see me, but welcoming. I sat in the only empty armchair. The room went quiet. Everyone looked at me. I thought it was because I was the estranged black sheep returning for the funeral, but it wasn’t that at all. Completely by chance I’d sat in ‘Dad’s chair’. That seemed just right to me.

  6

  1 January 2002

  It’s all rained down on me at once. I feel like I’m stuck on one of those knife thrower’s boards and someone’s throwing knives at me. I can’t dodge, I’ve got to accept and assimilate.

  The events of 2001 had a huge effect on me: endings, beginnings and reconnections, as well as facing the dreaded menopause and everything that big hormonal change presented me with. I threw myself into my art, preparing ‘The Kiss’ photographic work for a show at the Marc Foxx Gallery in LA, and was over the moon to be told I’d made my first sale with Cabinet. The thrill was short-lived: the buyer died from a heart attack and the work was returned – sold then unsold. I shrugged it off with some relief. Selling my work was a new thing I wasn’t totally happy about. My work was so much a part of me that I was reluctant to let go of it.

  Simon’s Wreckers book had made COUM and TG visible again. My friend André Stitt also had a new book out and I was asked if I’d do an ‘in conversation’ with him for the launch at the Courtauld Institute. The event wasn’t quite what I’d anticipated. I thought I’d mainly talk to André about his work but I ended up being asked to talk about my own. Sarah Wilson, a professor at the Courtauld, gave an introduction in which she presented André’s book, then delivered a long, detailed and interesting description of my solo and COUM work, mentioning Simon Ford’s book in glowing terms.

  *

  It was largely through Skot and his friend Russell, who worked at Disneyland on sound design, that my art action there was made possible. Skot knew the place so well, having done his own guerrilla puppet shows there when he was fourteen. Russell had got us in for free and we arrived early in the morning to avoid the crowds. To our utter amazement it was all but deserted. We were expecting to operate around hordes of tourists and noisy, excited children but I only saw about six people and the park was eerily quiet and calm. How perfect for me. I was very aware of security and surveillance cameras and had made sure that the action was something that fell within the context of ‘usual behaviour’. Nothing that would draw unwarranted attention and get me thrown out. I wasted no time and executed my action next to the twelve-foot ‘C’ of ‘California Adventure’, Chris and Skot filming and taking photographs.

  I was instilling myself into the fabric of the site. I’d made a homeopathic solution from pure, distilled water and the burned tampon ashes of my last-ever period, decanted into a water bottle. I poured the solution on to the ground in the shape of my ‘4’ tattoo. As the solution ran away, soaking into the dry, sloping pavement, it mutated, rather appropriately, into the anarchy symbol. It was all over so quickly and we moved on as regular tourists to go on the rides. To document the piece, and as an added essential element, I purchased a commemorative hexagon paver inscribed with my name and the date of ‘Self lessness One’. That paver now sits among many others on the entrance concourse to Disney California Adventure Park.

  Back from our LA adventure, we returned to working on the TG24 box set. Chris had already completed the transfer of all the cassettes and mastered them for CD. The four of us working together again had quickly descended into a disappointing experience. It was a vexing process at times, with limited communication from Gen. Many of our emails to him about the box set went unanswered. Sleazy was better but, considering we were on a release schedule with Mute, he wasn’t as prompt or helpful as we’d have liked. It seemed that only me and Chris were willing to prioritise TG above our own work, removing other projects from the timeline to facilitate TG matters.

  Maybe we were wrong to do that, but I don’t think so. It was important to do it right or not at all – which would have happened had me and Chris not been so bloody-minded and driven about preserving the TG legacy. It seemed that, for whatever reason, Sleazy and Gen elevated their own projects over and above TG. That was their prerogative. But with that attitude came an underlying subtext that TG, which included each of them working with me and Chris, was inferior to them and their other work. It was an odd denial of the past (and present) that I had trouble understanding. I was happy to acknowledge that TG had a cultur
al importance that was different to, and in some ways greater than, Chris & Cosey or CTI. Me and Chris were aching to record our own material but were realistic that TG offered a solution to our struggling finances, and to Sleazy’s, as he’d started doing Coil gigs to help fund his and Geff’s indulgent lifestyle. When he wasn’t giving all his attention to Coil, he got on board with us and worked on patch and badge designs and sorted through his TG 35mm negatives for photos to use. Sleazy’s work practice was very much based on only working on the project most immediately at hand. Consequently we’d done most of the work by the time he’d joined in. But Sleazy being ‘sleazy’, he had the knack for ingratiating himself back into your good books.

  12 April 2002

  This is my first foray back into that phase of my life and I’m still uncovering things I’d put well into the back of my mind. I don’t know what to think about how I feel. It’s so long ago and I’ve come so far since then.

  I’d started Confessions, a new work based on one of my 1970s magazine actions. It proved to be an intense period and writing a postscript text for the edition was uncovering all kinds of buried feelings. I was hit by the double whammy of revisiting TG as well as my sex-magazine experiences. As I read my diaries and looked at myself in the magazines, I’d veer from being curiously interested to being drawn back into my feelings from that time, and the vivid memories of the turmoil in my life back then.

  This all coincided with a Richard Kern exhibition at the ICA and my being invited to a panel discussion with him and Lucy McKenzie, who had done nude modelling for him in his book, Model Release. Our individual perspective on the nude model experience was an interesting topic for debate and the difference between how each of us had approached, performed and realised our work had potential for a good talk. Richard and Lucy had both worked as artists in the art world to produce their photographic works, whereas I’d operated outside to procure mine and bring them into the gallery. We each had our own perspective and opinion on the roles we played: Richard as artist and photographer, Lucy as an artist taking on the role of artist’s model, and me as an artist adopting the identity of a regular nude model within the sex industry. I found Richard beguiling and disarming and I could understand why girls surrendered to his creative requests. The techniques of negotiating and persuading played a big part in the sensitive and sexually charged collaborative process between nude model and photographer, whether it be for art or in the sex industry. The persistent manipulation was endemic in the sex industry and the techniques blatant and unsophisticated, which (for me) often directly accounted for some tense, creepy experiences that all that time ago had instigated my suggesting the topic of ‘persuasion’ for what was now an infamous TG song.