by Simon Warner
Since then I have shared a curious, distant association with Genesis P-Orridge, or Gen, as he is known informally, or even Djin, a more recent signature on his emails, one that would not be re-kindled in any real sense for another 20 years after that, through letters and faxes in the later 1990s when an undergraduate popular music student of mine chose him as his final year dissertation topic, and, then again, not in person until 2004 when the book project I was working on would lead to our belated reunion in New York City that summer. Yet this account straddles a difficult path. My intrigue in P-Orridge is born of a slight childhood connection but it is, today, stimulated by a concern with his long-running links to members of the Beat Generation caucus. His collaborations with William Burroughs and Brion Gysin have become a key element in his journey, best represented in print by the special edition of San Francisco-based radical arts journal RE/Search which, not insignificantly, devoted itself to author, artist and the band TG in 1984.14
My account is not meant to be, in any way, a phony celebration of friendship – I am a fleeting figure in P-Orridge’s past, he in mine. We may have belatedly restored our connection in quite surprising circumstances, but I am not feigning an intimate relationship. Nor is it a testimony of fandom – I am much more interested by P-Orridge’s oeuvre than I am enamoured of it. But the fact that we have a history makes my enquiry into his achievement less straightforward than the kind of research we might pursue as journalist or academic into the life and times of a popular musician from whom we are essentially detached. I cannot write a completely objective survey of this artist and the baggage he carries but I hope I can, to compensate, consider what occurs when that kind of personal interaction is part of a factual overview you are attempting to compile.
What this account certainly reflects on is the private and public, personal, psychological and artistic rollercoaster that P-Orridge has relentlessly ridden since his teens, when he determinedly embarked on a life that placed art at its heart and almost inevitably embraced the role of outsider, a part he has portrayed with a mixture of stoicism and perverse celebration since the mid-1960s. In his taking on the persona of ‘a scapegoat’ like his late hero Brian Jones,15 he feels he is experiencing first-hand some of the trials and tribulations replicated in the lives of other subversive creatives who refused to toe the conventional line.
There is little doubt that a key catalyst in shaping Megson, the P-Orridgeto-be, was an experience in school when he was 14, one that had a strong bearing on his future activities but one that also lies at the heart of the arguments laid out in this thesis: that this artist owes much of his creative vision to the spirit of the Beat Generation writers. When we re-established our face-to-face connection in July 2004 he described an encounter with a teacher who had opened his eyes to a new body of literature. ‘There was an English teacher at Solihull School whose nickname was “Bogbrush” because he had a moustache that stuck out, that was all bristly under his nose,’ he explained. ‘I’d have to look in an old school magazine to check his name what his real name was. And I handed him an essay for homework one day and got it back with … I got a good mark but the thing was, it said “See me!” and I thought, “O-oh I’m in trouble again”. So I had to wait till after the class, went to see him and he said “I really, really liked what you were writing and I think that you’ve a got a very unusual perspective on life and I’d like to recommend some writers that you should read.” So he wrote them down for me … he said you should try to find anything you can by Jack Kerouac and you should look for books by William Burroughs, no Jack Kerouac was the main one, it wasn’t Burroughs …’16
He continued: ‘So I told my Dad that I’d been told I should try to get these books, On the Road in particular by Jack Kerouac, because he used to travel a lot with his work. He came back not long afterwards with a paperback copy of On the Road, Jack Kerouac, which I read straight through … I loved it and I asked the teacher about it and what else there was and I started to seek out the other beatnik17 writers because of that; I gave my father this list of names and I also realised that the Jack Kerouac books mentioned other people as fictional characters but they were actually really based upon other beatniks and that’s how I got into the beatniks, through that. I was already writing my own poetry and my own creative writing, but that’s the very specific sort of signifier of when I actually became consciously aware of the beatniks and started to look for them.’18
I wondered how that writing and reading that material had affected him? Did it influence the way he wrote poetry or wrote creatively? How in the years that followed did it impact on his artistic consciousness? ‘There’s no question that it affected the way I was writing. One of the things that most young artists do is they begin by mimicking the things they really like, same with rock bands, too. They’ll start out trying to sound something like their favourite and so, because I didn’t have a lot of support from my environment … it wasn’t a good thing to do, to write poetry and want to be writer and an artist. The social environment was very much against that, so I was kind of on my own, so I would improvise and I had a couple of friends, […] just two or three people I knew, and we would spend the weekends trying to write our own beatnik poetry, and exchanging it with each other, reading out loud, basically being our own schoolboy version of the beatniks, the best we could. We’d drink wine and go in the park and fantasise that we were the beatniks. But what it did was, through doing that and immersing myself in the writing to that degree and especially the acting out in the theatrical way…the characters, the first thing I know that it did for me was it really made me aware of the sound of the poetry when it was spoken out loud.’19
While P-Orridge recalls that he and his proto-beatnik associates experimented with tape and did record some of their own poetry, I asked him if he actually heard anything of the Beats maybe reading their work? ‘No. I’d never heard anything of that but the big impact upon me was definitely was learning to hear what I was writing, hear it as poetry and sound and song at the same time as I was writing it, instead of it being much more of an intellectual, academic exercise assembling words with meter and so on. I started to feel the actual natural rhythms of the words and the way that they were phrased and the sort of the pausing and the breaths, in a way not just the words, but also the non-words, the breath and the pacing and the slight hesitation and then all those sonic gestures, if you like, that one uses when you are doing things out loud, are not just another language of editing, which is one thing that they are, but it’s also a whole extra language of connection between space and sound, the rhythmic aspect and, in a way, the emotional connections that come with hesitation or with loudness. All of that was suddenly made very real and very vivid for me.’20
Did that notion of the power of an oral style start to inform his work once he became involved in performance and theatre and song at the end of the 1960s and the start of the 1970s? ‘I’m a great believer that everything you experience, everything you hear, everything you see, everything that you touch, that you have any interaction with mentally or physically, all of it influences what you create and people who kind of imply they have divine inspiration and what they make is unique and what they create, write or play or paint, that anything that they make is disconnected and a sign of their own personal genius, disconnected from things around it, I just think that’s not true. I think that the great joy of creating art in any form is that the artist is the voice for the sum total of connections at any given moment, all their emotions which resonate with those of everyone and everything around them. That’s why people can enjoy and be inspired by art; the reason is that they recognise themselves in it. So I’ve always felt that what you try to achieve is to build and project a voice which speaks for a person that doesn’t exist in the usual sense, that person is the audience, which may be two or three or two thousand or two million, that you are actually just building a temporary fictional character that represents a common experience. So that was what I got from it on th
at level but the other really important thing was just the idea that when you were writing poetry, everything, again everything, could be included, that there was a journalistic, anecdotal aspect that I hadn’t really understood before because growing up with Eng. Lit. where it’s all about the classics and form …’21
So, on the one hand there was a dominating, repressed, controlled form of expression, while the Beats showed him he could talk about personal experience and there was value to it. ‘Personal experience, anecdotes, experiments, social and political things that are going on around you; they could all be included and referred to in the poetry and it was completely valid and in fact it gave us much more confidence … it validates the experience of being an outsider in a way …’22
Did he already feel like an outsider in the Midlands in England in the mid-1960s? ‘Totally, I totally felt isolated and an alienated outsider and so when you read those books by the beatniks you see another possibility which is optimistic which is that somewhere out there in the wider world, there are others who may not be exactly the same as you, but they are enough like you or they perceive the world or they are experiencing life in a similar way, and that you can find them, so instead of having to accept your given family and your given social group, you can choose your own social group and your own extended family and that was very important for me as well, the idea that I could travel and go and seek out and find other people whose voices and whose experiences were more like my own and instead of being the outsider I could become at least affiliated with other people. I could recognise my kind, that something else was in there in the expression of life that would enable me to know when there were others who were more like me …’23
Eventually, in 1968, he would escape the clutches of Solihull – his home, his family, his hated school – and headed off to the University of Hull, in Yorkshire, to study, ostensibly, Social Administration, Economics and Philosophy. But the odyssey would quickly switch track as ‘he became connected with a group of kinetic/mixed media performers in 1969 known as Transmedia Exploration in Islington, England’.24 Not long after, Megson, already beginning to function under the guise of Genesis,25 became ‘the Founding Artist and Theorist of seminal British Performance Art group COUM Transmissions in Shrewsbury, England … [which] … created and performed more than 200 art actions, installations, video work and street actions in Art Festivals and Galleries all over Europe and in America. The project was terminated in September 1976 with a final but now infamous show called Prostitution at the ICA Gallery in London.’26
Such controversy would never stray far from the P-Orridge doorstep in the years that followed: his courting, indeed shaping, of the insurrectionary fringe – in music, literature, art and philosophy – has frequently left him vulnerable to mainstream attack. On several occasions he has felt the forces of authority bring their powers to bear against him. Even before Prostitution, that notorious live/art show at the renowned Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), featuring exhibits and a debut Throbbing Gristle performance incorporating a striptease contribution from P-Orridge’s lover-collaborator of the time Cosey Fanni Tutti,27 a production that would lead to heated Parliamentary debate and a suggestion by MP Nicholas Fairbairn that these performers represented ‘the wreckers of civilisation’,28 P-Orridge’s activities had drawn the attention of the law in 1975.
The phenomenon known as mailart, centred around the exchange of postcards, was at the core of P-Orridge’s previous brush with the British courts. Mailart’s roots lay in the activities of the New York-based art group Fluxus, a crucial gathering of US artists who strove to make the ordinary iconic and included Yoko Ono among its roll, which, for a number of years, encouraged its members and others to exchange communications by post – sending and sharing visual images of their own making through their letter-boxes, a pre-internet ritual that was cheap and also subversive as it relied on post office services across the globe to deliver its bounty. The products of this cottage art with a wider vision were sometimes eventually shown in galleries. ‘Mailart contained no curator. Even during the height of the movement’s popularity [in the 1970s], mailart galleries had an all-inclusive policy. Famous artist such as Ray Johnson and Fluxus-ian Ken Friedman were shown alongside obscure sendings from joe schmoe and his overseas pals. Mailart wasn’t even about being an artist, stressing instead creative communication’.29
As for P-Orridge, ‘while his work both within and without the postal medium has often dealt with erotic material, in the mid-1970s, he’d been combining images of pornography and royalty in his queen postcard series, citing “kitsch and the national sense of taboo”, as his inspiration’.30 Charged with indecency for his incorporation of Queen Elizabeth II’s portrait into a series of juxtapositions, including one with a naked woman, the artist was prosecuted. He was fined a large sum (at the time) of £400 ($750, in current values) and given minimum time to pay under the threat of a 12-month jail sentence.
It is interesting that the collage or cut-up art should feature early in his history. Not long before, as a consequence of P-Orridge’s involvement with mailart and the publications File and Vile (the titles each lampooned mainstream news magazine Life) which celebrated the form, he would first make contact with one of the principal figures linked to the writing of the Beat Generation, William Burroughs, whose cut-up approach to writing novels had become widely discussed and critically admired by the start of the 1970s. Although his debut work, Junkie (1953), had been built on a representational narrative, a thinly veiled autobiographical novel, his books Naked Lunch (1959) and The Soft Machine (1961)31 were much more innovative in their approach. In these titles, he had experimented with the idea that texts could be written, taken apart and re-ordered to produce a new literary work. This form of deconstruction – and re-assembling – would pre-empt structuralism and poststructuralist theories of art and literature, developed and explored by French philosopher Jacques Derrida and others, which emerged in the 1960s and during the years that followed.
P-Orridge met Burroughs, based in London in 1972, as a result of an item the writer had placed in File. As part of the mailart network, Burroughs had invited correspondents to send items that evoked ‘camouflage for 1984’, the musician recalled,32 to his home address. ‘I just thought, that can’t really be William Burroughs’ address but, just in case it was, I thought I’d write. So I wrote a very cheeky letter to the address which began with “I‘m tired of you and Brion Gysin and Allen Ginsberg and everybody saying that you know me and please stop … you’re just trying to be hip by saying that you know me”. And, lo and behold, a few weeks later I got a postcard back from William Burroughs, a friendly postcard, so I began a correspondence with Burroughs. He just said whenever you’re in London, cause then I was still living in Hull, just call me and come over and let’s have dinner. I hitchhiked to London one weekend and rang the number and … [gravelly Burroughs impression] “Get in a taxi and come over” and I said, “I can’t afford a taxi” and he just said, “I’ll pay for it, just come over”. So I went to Duke Street and there he was – Uncle Bill, William Burroughs. And he was ready for me – he had a bottle of Jack Daniels and his television with a remote so we could do cut-ups while we were talking. That’s when we became friends. We drank the bottle of whiskey, he took me for dinner at the Angus Steakhouse, and we stayed friends until he passed away.’33 It was the start of an association that would extend to the end of the novelist’s life in 1997.
The link forged with one of his beloved ‘beatnik writers’, P-Orridge’s interest in cut-up intensified and also drew him to the man whom Burroughs was quite willing to credit with devising the process – Brion Gysin. As Burroughs himself wrote in RE/Search: ‘At a surrealist rally in the 1920s Tristan Tzara the man from nowhere proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words from a hat. A riot ensued and wrecked the theatre. Andre Breton expelled Tristan Tzara from the movement and grounded the cut-ups on the Freudian couch’.34 He added:
In the summ
er of 1959 Brion Gysin painter and writer cut newspaper articles into sections and rearranged the sections at random. ‘Minutes to Go’ resulted from this initial cut-up experiment. ‘Minutes to Go’ contains unedited unchanged cut-ups emerging as quite coherent and meaningful prose. The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and still camera. In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are the unpredictable factors of passersby and juxtaposition cut-ups.35
In the same issue of RE/Search, Gysin was interviewed by prominent UK rock journalist and P-Orridge associate Jon Savage, and also by P-Orridge with fellow Throbbing Gristle member Peter Christopherson. The conversations were part of a sequence that P-Orridge would edit into a collection of interviews, clearly making explicit the artistic alliance between the old guard of cut-up theory and the young Turks who were appropriating it. Gysin told Savage that the concept of cut-up had been ‘an accident … but which I recognised immediately as it happened, because of knowing of all the other past things – I knew about the history of the arts, let’s say. And it seemed a marvellous thing to give to William [Burroughs] who had a huge body of work to which it could immediately be applied’.36
By the time P-Orridge and Christopherson’s interview with Gysin took place in 1980, the band Throbbing Gristle were in their final throes and would actually play their last concert the following year.37 Yet TG, formed in 1975 as an extension of the art group COUM and a band who played their premiere set at the Prostitution event, had, by then, left a significant mark on the fringes of the new music which erupted in the UK from the middle to the end of the 1970s. In fact, P-Orridge claims a vital part in launching the tide of punk, most usually linked, in Britain at least, to the rise of the Sex Pistols in late 1976, and tied in to the release of their first single ‘Anarchy in the UK’, the Anarchy in the UK tour and their expletive-charged appearance on the capital’s regional ITV news show, Today, with presenter Bill Grundy, on 1 December, which won the group nationwide tabloid front page coverage the following day and, with it, ongoing notoriety.38