Art Sex Music

by Cosey Fanni Tutti

  23 September 2007

  The whole TG situation is getting fragmented and fractured to boot. Sleazy hasn’t contacted us for over a month. We were busy with our own album and needed space from TG …

  We resisted getting embroiled in anything TG-related but then a series of unexpected events thrust us back into the centre of it. Having cancelled the TG shows to prioritise his own band’s gigs, Gen’s tour collapsed due to what they claimed on their Myspace page to be ‘mismanagement and agency incompetence’, blaming and sacking Gen’s manager, who in turn claimed it was lack of fans and ticket sales.

  Then, just over a week later, on 9 October, Gen’s wife Jackie died. Everyone was so shocked and rallied round Gen. Paul and Susan met up with him in New York to provide support. Me, Chris and Sleazy sent our heartfelt condolences and offered our help. We were all empathetic and sensitive to his needs at such a terribly sad time.

  I was torn by my feelings of sadness for Gen and guilt at wanting to enjoy the reviews and great reception our new album was receiving. It was hard to reconcile Gen suffering at a time when things were going so well for us. Chris had started a new solo project, Chemistry Lessons, and was building sound-making gadgets. It was great to see him lit up with excitement again, beavering away with his wiring and electrical tools scattered on his worktop.

  25 October 2007

  This has made me feel that it seems grief as ever is touching us all and I can’t help but think of ‘what if’. Each day I keep thinking I must hold and kiss Chris just in case. It’s no way to live but at the moment the events are constant reminders of one’s fragile mortality.

  Gen’s sudden loss brought me up sharp and I felt lucky me and Chris were still together. Sleazy was affected in a different way, as Jackie’s death was within a month of the anniversary of Geff’s fatal fall. He always found that time of year hard to deal with and every anniversary since Geff had died Sleazy would go away for a week – ‘up country’, as he called it – indulging in such wildly excessive hedonistic drug-fuelled sexual activities we feared he’d never return. As worried as we were for him, such a frightening prospect held a perverse appeal for him.

  Talking of perversity … Me and Chris went to Rome. I was doing an ‘in conversation’ with the writer Daniela Cascella at the British School at Rome, a prestigious archaeology, history and arts research academy housed in the beautiful British Pavilion, where we were accommodated. Not far from the pavilion was a park with an enchanting grotto where we’d take afternoon walks. On one of those walks we noticed a man staring our way. We moved on – there he was again, stood still, fixing his gaze on us both. It felt weird. It was weird. He slowly opened his raincoat to reveal his semi-erect cock. He was naked from his waist to his knees, with a shirt and braces that held up the cut-off trousers. He was dressed in what was a classic flasher’s outfit you’d see on a Benny Hill show. I looked at Chris, he at me, and we both laughed in disbelief, wandering off to have coffee, with me commenting on why flashers and perverts seemed so attracted to me.

  I also wondered how many women had had more than one encounter, like me. There was my childhood incident of the flasher in the woods, but others too. When I was about eleven, me and Jo went to a football match in Hull. As we were leaving, squashed in the crowd I felt a hand slowly moving up my inner thigh. I looked down, thinking it was a small child holding on as best they could, but it was a little middle-aged man, about four foot high, smiling up at me with his hand up my skirt. He’d already had a feel of Jo. We both pushed our way out of his reach. I’ve never been to a football match since.

  Short skirts are most definitely not an open invitation to sexual assault but mine appeared to be irresistible to opportunistic perverts, like the one who put his hand up mine as I waited in the bus queue in Hackney. I had my dancing bag with me, which was pretty heavy. I swung it at his head, shouting, ‘You dirty bastard!’ at him and knocking him stumbling across the pavement. The people around me hadn’t seen what he’d done and looked at me as if I were mad. ‘He put his hand up my skirt,’ I explained. The bus pulled up and he tried to get on it, but no one would let him.

  But by far the worst case was on the Tube in London when I was travelling home one day. A man was sat opposite me with a newspaper on his lap, which started moving rhythmically, then a spurt of semen shot down the front of the seat. Before I could react, the train pulled into the next station, he got off and a woman sat in his vacant seat with her long coat soaking up the wet patch he’d left behind.

  22 January 2008

  I’ve just returned from the doctor as I’d been getting more ill by the day.

  I’d had a bad cold and didn’t seem to be recovering. I was listless and easily exhausted. While standing cooking the evening meal, I got a sudden high-pitched tone in my left ear, then went deaf. I called my GP and got a locum, who told me it was nothing to worry about, but the next day, when the deafness was still there and I had numbness on that side of my face, I went to see my preferred GP.

  He recognised the symptoms and acted immediately. I had shingles in my left ear canal, with an added complication of a condition called Ramsay Hunt Syndrome that causes paralysis of the facial muscles. He put me on a regimen of bed rest and specific medication to try and limit any nerve damage. When I was told that recovery could take between three and sometimes up to eight months, with full recovery from facial paralysis and deafness being unlikely, I was speechless. I went on to the internet to see what information there was on self-help and found facial exercises that ‘may’ assist in regaining some facial-muscle control, and practised them three times a day, monitoring any slight improvement in a log I kept. I’m glad I did because, when I eventually went for my follow-up assessment months later, the consultant was impressed by the extent of my recovery.

  Chris had been incredible at looking after me, so encouraging and lovingly attentive to my many needs. I couldn’t have got through it without him. I was a physical wreck, impaired by the illness and the different side effects of the drugs I’d had to take. So many negative thoughts flooded my mind about what degree of recovery I would have, whether I’d have the facial problems and be deaf forever. If so, my public life could well be over, and my work in music would be affected. I certainly couldn’t blow my cornet and wondered if I’d ever be able to again, and I couldn’t sing either, as even pronouncing some words was impossible.

  With TG live gigs in the pipeline I had to break the news that I was too ill to do them. Paul, Sleazy and Gen wished me well and everyone awaited my availability for TG.

  21 June 2008

  Well where do I begin with all this 3 weeks of activities? My brain is buzzing with it all … The inner circles are shifting and they slip into deliberate acts of celebrity and opportunism and we pull back even more in disgust.

  It took me three months to feel anywhere near well enough to consider working. The facial paralysis and deafness had improved slightly. I was determined to play my cornet again but I just wasn’t able to pucker up my lips enough to deliver the powerful blast of air needed. To help my rehabilitation I bought a small ‘pocket’ cornet, which was used by beginners. During my recovery, TG plans went ahead largely to assist Gen’s financial situation in the wake of Jackie’s death. It was all hands on deck to help Gen at such a sad time.

  Then we learned of him going on tour with his band around the time of the TG shows – the usual debates over clashing with TG dates hadn’t abated. Nevertheless we provided support for him and made allowances based on him still grieving. He said he was feeling fragile and wasn’t sure about being able to deliver vocals for TG. That was understandable under the circumstances so we reassured him that the TG set-up was based on the more instrumental Second Annual Report.

  Sleazy came to stay with us to get ready for the two TG shows – one at the Primavera festival in Spain and one in Paris at Villette Sonique. We were going to play (and record) the performance as Thirty-Second Annual Report, a reference to the release of TG’s first
album, Second Annual Report, thirty years ago. We designed merchandise: TG pocket knives, a numbered limited-edition poster and large banners to drape on each of our stage tables.

  The TG outing was strange. It was the first time we’d seen Gen since Jackie died. He seemed to be coping well; he had a film-maker friend with him making the documentary they’d started prior to Jackie’s untimely death. There was a difficult moment when he asked for the TG gig and backstage to be filmed for inclusion, as well as for Sleazy, me and Chris to be interviewed on film about our working experience with Gen. As I was still struggling with the aftermath of my illness I wasn’t comfortable being filmed with a partially paralysed face, so I declined. Chris said no. Sleazy accepted. As much as we sympathised with his personal loss and how Gen chose to cope with it, it seemed like business as usual – his extracurricular activities planned around our two TG shows seemed more important to him than the TG shows themselves and smacked of opportunism, using TG as a platform to further his own activities, with us three as facilitators doing the lion’s share of TG work. We also screened our film After Cease to Exist and were told that the castration scene with me and Chris had caused fainting and vomiting among at least six members of the audience, and ambulances had been called.

  Barcelona had been a rather restrained TG concert in comparison to Paris. I think it may have had something to do with me, Chris and Sleazy recording the contemplative music for the TG audio sculptural collaboration with Cerith (Wyn Evans) – a work entitled ‘A=P=P=A=R=I=T=I=O=N’. Chris worked hard on the concept, which was based on using multiple highly directional speakers that he’d reviewed for Sound on Sound magazine back in 2004. He and Paul researched further options, finally deciding on the thin, flat, circular panel Audio Spotlight speakers invented by Dr Joe Pompei, founder of Holosonics. TG was going to use them in a live show but it never panned out, so they were suggested as the basis for the work with Cerith. He was to design the huge sculpture (requiring a space 9×9×10 metres high), using the speakers as part of a suspended ‘child’s mobile’-type structure. TG composed the audio, with Cerith providing Gen with the lyrics. Chris, me and Sleazy spent a week at our studio recording the sound.

  Chris took another two weeks to complete the audio, editing, manipulating, adding further recordings of additional parts from me and Sleazy, time-stretching some of Gen’s vocals, and he finally mixed the material to a length of nearly three hours. Sleazy was happy to have the piece on stereo ‘playback’ through the speakers, not wanting to spend too much time on it, but Chris and I saw the obvious potential to use all sixteen speakers and sub-bass speaker in a more interesting and innovative way. Chris developed a multichannel complex playback method using Ableton Live that would, as he described it, ‘simultaneously move each individual channel of the TG multitrack audio “through” each of the sculpture’s Audio Spotlights every three to five minutes in a sequential and relatively seamless process’.

  He, Paul and I took all our parts and audio gear to the fabricators for a trial run with Cerith, where we brought the sculpture together with the sound. It worked beautifully. The speakers were finished in highly polished aluminium, with mirrored backs that not only looked amazing but also added another interactive aspect. When fed through the speakers, the directional sounds shifted slowly, reflecting off the speakers’ mirrored surfaces, the sounds constantly moving from one suspended speaker to another as they slowly rotated. It all contributed to an indefinable, ethereal experience, with the sounds seemingly hovering in the air and each person’s experience being unique to them and never the same twice.

  Gen didn’t ‘get it’ and wasn’t interested. His only involvement was recording Cerith’s lyrics, which took five minutes. But us persisting in getting him to take part paid off. He received an equal share of the substantial amount of money when White Cube Gallery sold it to the Pompidou Centre.

  26 July 2008

  We’ve really pushed ourselves this year and after a month ‘off’ we’re only just getting the hang of relaxing. We’re promising ourselves that we won’t take on so many projects again … but we get so excited by things that we can’t resist them. But our illnesses have been due to fatigue and stress so it’s not a choice option anymore really.

  There were still unfinished TG matters to deal with – like the official reactivating of Industrial Records Ltd that we’d discussed during our last TG get-together. I wasn’t keen as, after a brief period of Sleazy managing the payments and not being reliably contactable, it was looking more and more like me and Chris may have to step in. Sleazy and Gen told us that being directors of a UK limited company could complicate their status in their adopted countries. As UK residents, me and Chris were proposed to be the registered directors. I didn’t want the responsibility and I knew I would incur the workload of doing the accounts and Chris the other admin connected with running a record label.

  But, with the eventual agreement of all four of us, the decision was made to go ahead. IR Ltd was registered in August 2008 and the first release was to be a framed, limited (777-copy) edition of Thirty-Second Annual Report. I was giving a talk at Frieze Art Fair and Cabinet were including the TG release on their Frieze stand in October, and we wanted it released in time for Christmas that year (in commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of The Second Annual Report). Gen suggested we all did ‘a mix’ but, it being a live album, it wasn’t that kind of ‘remix’ project and we only had three months to get masters and artworks done.

  *

  It was Halloween. Gen wasn’t in the UK when we had a TG meeting at state51 in London. We were all sat eating bags of chips when Paul and Susan arrived. Paul’s face looked grey and he’d been having chest pains and trouble breathing as he came up the stairs. We were all concerned, particularly Susan, but he’s not someone to fuss and dismissed our worries for him.

  Meeting over, we went off to a nearby pub to meet S.C.U.M., a very young band that me and Chris had initially seen play at Mute’s Harrow Road closing party in March 2007. The band were interested in TG and wanted us to remix one of the new tracks they were working on. They had a good restless presence about them and seemed to know a lot about TG. Having all said our goodbyes, with promises to be in touch, me and Chris headed home to do a final run-through of our Carter Tutti set for a gig we had in Poland.

  I was still worried about Paul and before we left I emailed him to see how he was. He said he was going to see his doctor, but before he could he had a massive heart attack, followed soon after by successful bypass surgery. We nearly lost him and it shook us up badly, and more so poor Susan.

  11 February 2009

  I gave Chris a big hug and kiss of appreciation from Sleazy … the audio is consuming us and I didn’t want to have to think of anything else being added to the already overwhelming TG workload on top of our non-TG lives.

  Paul was irrepressible even after his heart surgery, and we each received an email from him outlining TG live offers for the USA in April and Europe in June. Gen had been in touch with Paul asking if there were any TG shows in the offing. Sleazy could be persuaded out of his Thailand paradise. Me and Chris had many things on the go but TG had only ever played two shows in the USA, back in 1981, and an opportunity to play there again was appealing, especially as Paul had secured the elusive, expensive work permits for us.

  We’d had emails from Gen informing us that he was not only incapacitated through ill health but also very busy and had another new manager, who we must discuss all TG matters with. We saw this as hopefully avoiding previous problems and lapses in Gen’s memory (which appeared rather selective as far as TG was concerned) – especially as Gen was now going on holiday to Nepal for a month and wouldn’t be available.

  The TG gig sets and merchandise (to help finance the USA tour) had been mostly agreed but needed to be designed, sourced and ordered. Sleazy, me and Chris put all the essentials together. Chris did all the live TG rhythms and single-handedly put together the Third Mind Movements album using mu
ltitracks from the TG ICA jam sessions. That in itself was a substantial project and ended up being the final TG studio album.

  Paul coordinated and sourced the enamel badges, T-shirts and CD pressing for collection in New York. It was a frantic few months as Chris was also corresponding with an American guy who was reproducing the legendary TG Gristleizer effects unit. We got my original Gristleizer unit out of the archive cupboard for Chris to run some tests on it. We didn’t get far. I turned it on, it spluttered, then stopped working altogether. My first and only Gristleizer had died. A sad, sad moment.

  I, meanwhile, was trying to meet the continuing demand for my art, giving a talk with Andrew at the Stanley Picker Gallery in London and preparing work and catalogue material for a large exhibition called ‘Pop Life: Art in a Material World’ that was opening at the Tate Modern later in the year.

  17 April 2009

  Last night’s show was full on like the Astoria. Phew! Felt good amongst all that positive energy.

  The first TG New York show, at the Masonic Temple in Brooklyn, set the bar for what the USA audiences would be like. Their excitement was palpable and beyond anything we could have anticipated. I’m sure that contributed to the overall amicable feelings between us all as we flew from one state to another over the two weeks. Old fans and new filled the venues each night and we fed off their energy, driving into full-throttle TG mode then pulling back for the live film soundtrack performances we were all doing alongside the regular shows. We were a small team: Paul, Susan, Charlie and the four of us. I’d been worried about the stress having an adverse effect on Paul so soon after his heart surgery, but he was incredibly efficient and everything went so well, considering the mammoth task and all that came with a TG gathering. There were some annoying and unnecessary moments when Gen gave Paul a hard time, only talking to him ‘through’ Susan. Paul was as professional and pragmatic as ever, and got on with the job at hand. The gig that had made the whole tour possible was next: the Coachella Festival in Palm Springs.