Text and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll

by Simon Warner

  P-Orridge points out that TG had already appeared on Grundy’s TV show six weeks earlier when Prostitution had been the controversial topic under the early evening spotlight. He states, too, that he was already immersed in TG activities a year before these two television items were aired. P-Orridge was rehearsing in the same building while Malcolm McLaren was attempting to forge a New York Dolls-like band in London. McLaren, who had managed the Dolls in their dying phases, tried, then failed, to lure Television refugee Richard Hell to England to front the new act.39 Instead, he turned to a spiky-haired hanger-on who loitered in Sex, the clothes shop the entrepreneur-rock manager and his designer partner Vivienne Westwood ran in the Kings Road, Chelsea. In place of Hell, therefore, Johnny Rotten would become vocalist.

  Yet there was more than just a rehearsal space to connect TG and the Pistols and the nascent style of punk. P-Orridge also temporarily became drummer in a band that would well reflect the possibilities that the new musical form was providing for creative but untrained musicians. Mark Perry’s Alternative TV were a minor moment in the punk chronology but their leader performed a more important role in the dissemination of the movement’s aesthetic. Perry had, in addition, founded the fanzine Sniffin’ Glue,40 a rough and ready, roneo-ed comic which incorporated hastily written text, photo-copied images, cut-out, ransom-note-style headlines, a publication that would influence punk culture throughout the land, encouraging followers to launch their own determinedly slapdash accounts of the new scene in cities like Manchester (City Fun), Edinburgh (Hangin’ Around) and Bradford (Wool City Rocker).

  Throbbing Gristle, however, the project to which P-Orridge was to speedily return after his passing sojourn with ATV, were never going to produce the digestible soundbites that the Pistols (‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘Pretty Vacant’) and the Clash (‘White Riot’ and ‘London’s Burning’) utilised, to induce slavish adherence in the burgeoning weekly music press of the time, and generate mass hysteria among the safety-pinned, ripped T-shirted fans who idolised them. Instead, P-Orridge’s band ‘created/explored an aural aesthetic frequently (although not exclusively) defined via extreme noise, and jarring splices of sound, randomly selected and presented, using the theories espoused by William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Ian Sommerville [another Burroughs associate] of the cut-up, tape viruses and infra-sound. The “musical” results of these sonic experiments range from the tranquil to the confrontational. Throbbing Gristle also utilised Gysin’s adaptation of Hassan I Sabbah’s credo: “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted”. ’41

  The group appeared to combine intensely applied art theory – a fierce loyalty to the principles of the cut-up – with a parallel devotion to a version of anti-art incompetence which owed much to the Dada influence that P-Orridge has certainly been happy to credit as significant in his own creative development. At the same time, the quartet also laid down their anti-rock position: they appeared to despise punk’s mere simplification of the rock sound, a cornerstone of the stripped down do-it-yourself ethic that McLaren had enthusiastically championed. That said, there are other arguments outlined in Savage (1991)42 and Marcus (1989)43 which reference the theories of Situationism, a later and more political outgrowth of Dada, speculating that these ideas had also been familiar to McLaren and had been applied to the band by the Sex Pistols’ commercially shrewd, tactically astute and media savvy manager. So the presence of Dada sub-texts in both TG and the Pistols has been construed by some well-regarded commentators on both sides of the Atlantic.

  P-Orridge succinctly described the template of TG in my interview with him in 2004:

  Throbbing Gristle, like all good bands when it works well, when the chemistry works, can only exist as the sum total of all of the four people involved – Sleazy44 wanted, quite consciously…he wanted to find a way to incorporate the William Burroughs/Brion Gysin cut up techniques, so he used six cassette decks or Walkmans, when they first came out, and that was his instrument and later on he actually built his own hand-made sequencers so that he could play sequences. They would come though in rhythms (suggests the beat of random electronic sounds) but it was actually from cassette tapes, so his raw material was cassette tapes and he was able to use them so both sides of the cassette could be played at the same time – and stereo – so each tape had four sound sources. Those sound sources could be just him walking down the street or anything, so the six decks he had, 24 different sound sources, and you could sequence them or play them on a little keyboard one at a time or just run them, so that was his contribution. The sound began as a result of what we could do. I got a bass guitar because somebody had left it behind when they’d hitchhiked and stayed with us for a while and they had an old broken bass guitar which they left. I got Chris to fix it, he put humbucker picks ups in it, in a bass, two of those, and because I had grown up playing drums I wanted to do something rhythmic, so I played bass, and I basically started out hitting on rhythm. Chris made home-made synthesisers. His favourite band was Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, all that German stuff, so he built those old, big analog synths and so he brought his big, huge analog synths and then we just said, ‘Well that means Cosey should play the lead guitar’, cause the one thing we knew we didn’t want, we didn’t want a drummer because we thought that if you have a drummer, it becomes rock music. You can’t stop it, somehow they can’t help themselves; they do 4/4 and they just do rock drumming. So we cut that – no drummer. One thing we were sure of was to resist the rock formula and that’s how industrial music began…it was the result of what we did have available and what we refused to do.45

  In Simon Ford’s Wreckers of Civilisation, several contemporary reviews confirm a general inability to recognise TG’s value as music-makers. Tony Parsons of New Musical Express, one of the main voices employed to write about punk on a paper that was enthusiastically backing the new sounds, was withering in his critique of the group’s contribution to the Prostitution show:

  After Genesis finished his opening speech of doom and destruction, the band went into their, uh, music, which consisted of lots of weird, psychedelic taped sounds rolling around random keyboards played plink plonk style, lead guitar that Patti Smith would have been ashamed of and moronic bass on a superb Rickenbacker by old Genesis P-Orridge himself […] Genesis seemed to be really enjoying himself but most of the audience were bored […] I went back to the audience to check out why so many kids decked out in punk outfits had come along to the ICA tonight. Surely they weren’t interested in this, uh, culture? ‘NAH, MATE,’ one of them told me while adjusting the safety-pin his carefully ripped tee-shirt. ‘We’ve come along to see Chelsea. [Note: A more conventional punk band of the day]. They’re on after the stripper.’ [Cosey Fanni Tutti].46

  It was by no means all negative and dismissive, however. Important critical voices did pin their colours to the TG flag, in the US and the UK. Richard Meltzer told Village Voice readers in 1978 that they were ‘the Velvets of a “new age”’47 and Paul Morley, writing in NME in 1981, commented: ‘One day TG’s music will sound rich and sweet. For now everything you feel about TG – septic, morbid, incomprehensible, gimmicky – think the opposite and wake up.’48

  But for Genesis P-Orridge, positive reaction was not perhaps that crucial. The band were more about gesture and the use of a rock format to criticise the system; punk was a useful platform on which to climb. ‘We didn’t take punk massively seriously. It was just something we thought was interesting and went along with it,’ he told journalist Jon Savage. ‘Because it was rebellious and was antagonistic to the status quo.’49 The ICA show would gain P-Orridge that slot on the same Today programme that would host the Sex Pistols several weeks later but his interest in punk was already waning. ‘We hadn’t thought of becoming part of the music business; we were a comment on culture, and hypocrisy and double values,’ said P-Orridge.50

  Yet if Throbbing Gristle, whose album releases included 20 Jazz Funk Greats (1978) and Heathen Earth (1981), had assumed a prominent place in the m
ythology of indie rock and were capable of drawing crowds of many thousands to their US shows, P-Orridge decided, at one of those concerts, that it was time to pull the plug. He felt his anti-rock band were becoming part of the musical establishment, his own Industrial Records, which named the musical genre, an influential, if still small-scale, operation. The death of Throbbing Gristle suggested that the rock ’n’ roll culture that had served his propaganda purposes well for five years would now be jettisoned, although this assumption would actually prove misplaced. Within two years, his musical persona would find a fresh outlet in a new band Psychic TV, whose 1987 single ‘Godstar’, a celebration of late hero Brian Jones, would become P-Orridge’s most commercially successful 45 release.

  However, during the early 1980s, P-Orridge’s relationship with William Burroughs strengthened and was underpinned by some important developments which allowed him to explore other aspects of his artistic vision rather than merely his creative output. Although he had known the American writer professionally for nearly a decade and had received his personal backing when seeking Arts Council51 support for COUM Transmissions in the early 1970s and a testimonial by the author in his favour when facing his mailart prosecution in 1976,52 from 1980 the connection was bolstered in a number of significant ways.

  Burroughs and Gysin had compiled a body of films during the 1960s and 1970s which recorded their lives and art in Tangier, at the so-called ‘Beat Hotel’ in Paris and in London. In fact, the celluloid documents, shot under the direction of another member of the circle Antony Balch, had been conceived as ‘an epic “beatnik” movie’.53 These three, plus Sommerville, were ‘in all kind of cahoots together. Re-inventing and exploring with their constantly deepening experiments in deconstruction; writing; painting; sexuality; scientology; film; collage; audio tape; and, of course, neurobiology and pharmacology’.54

  P-Orridge says that ‘[t]he result and legacy, with hindsight, is an incredibly significant and monumental celluloid archive. A body of documentary portraits that is truly unique. We have nothing that is so revealing, so experimental, so influential or so critically vital in preserving such important “Beat” figures and their unfolding, most radical ideas on film.’55

  In 1980, Balch died of cancer, prompting Gysin to make an emergency call to P-Orridge from Paris. Gysin explained that the rent on Balch’s Soho office had gone unpaid during an absence caused by his terminal illness. As a result the principal tenant of the rented space had decided to clear out all his effects. Among these were items from the filmed Burroughs-Gysin archive. P-Orridge explains that Gysin and his collaborators had agreed that, if he was able to save the materials from the dump, he could have them. Catching a taxi, P-Orridge arrived at the scene with little time to spare, but just managed to salvage the cans containing the film. There were 28 cans of reels of 35mm film which P-Orridge, with the help of a friendly taxi driver, was able to carry away. ‘I called Brion when I got home,’ he recalls, ‘to give him the good news. He told me William [Burroughs] had been pleased I was saving what I could and fully supported my being the new proactive custodian of these films.’56

  In the coming months, P-Orridge began a process of documenting the film materials in his possession. The important British film-maker Derek Jarman, who had directed the cult punk classic movie Jubilee (1977), was instrumental in helping him find the resources to study the footage. ‘Then came the archaeological process. I sat for days […] and laboriously wrote a meticulous list of every single scene, every single edit section, in every single decaying can by noting as best I could a verbal description of what seemed to be happening visually.’57

  These efforts bore fruit in 1982 when P-Orridge became further involved in a significant project with Burroughs. The Final Academy brought the two together in a live event involving readings, spoken word and musical ingredients. Commented P-Orridge: ‘I told William that there were a lot of people who were inspired by Brion and William’s idea of the cut-up and it would be a really great idea to put on an event and I’d already come up with the title, the Final Academy, because he mentions an academy in one of his books, it kind of comes into [the novel] The Wild Boys. And he basically said, “Fine if you can organise it, I’ll take part”. And so I got David Dawson, a friend of mine, and he then knew someone called Roger Ely, but basically David and I … somehow we pulled every string we could and we basically got it to happen…the nice part was that, because it was one of those wonderful upward spirals because of the attention the Final Academy drew to Burroughs and Gysin and their ideas, all of his books got re-published.’58

  The production was seen at the renowned Haçienda club in Manchester during that winter. Out of this grew a major television documentary on the writer. Shown on BBC2,59 in 1985, in the prestigious Arena strand, Burroughs: The Movie drew heavily on the very films that P-Orridge had saved and catalogued. But this fascinating episode – important for P-Orridge but also crucial in the telling of the Beat Generation history – had a disappointing conclusion. In 1991, P-Orridge’s Brighton home was raided by the police after newspaper allegations that the musician had been central to a Satanist cult.60 Although P-Orridge was in Tibet at the time, filmed material was seized, among it footage from the Burroughs-Gysin collection and items that Derek Jarman had produced while documenting the Final Academy proceedings. These films have never been recovered and are now thought lost or destroyed. The raid on P-Orridge’s premises was a key factor in his decision to leave the UK and move to the US.

  Yet that incident and the subsequent move to the States has, in no way, dented his desire to operate as an innovative and versatile artist – musician, writer, director, performer – ever pushing at the boundaries. All of those avenues he has continued to pursue, but arguably his boldest statement, in a life of bold statements, has seen him, in the early years of the new century, embark on a life-changing project. His interest in the concept of body art – the use of the artist’s own physical being as artwork – has seen him join forces with his wife Jackie Breyer as his essential collaborator in the project. The pair now operate this creative coupling under the name Breyer P-Orridge.

  Body art or body modification has a long and involved history stretching back to ancient times and lost cultures. Tattooing, piercing, branding and scarification have been a feature of cultures from all eras and all continents. But the more recent rise of a movement that has been dubbed ‘modern primitive’ has changed the emphasis of a practice that has been, in the past, linked to a cultural mainstream – the tribal, the ritual – to a contemporary one that marks the practitioner, or form of display, as outside the cultural mainstream. The book Modern Primitives, also published in the RE/Search series,61 focuses on individuals who draw on a range of body art forms to express their identity to the wider world. The volume examines ‘a vivid contemporary enigma: the growing revival of highly visual (and sometimes shocking) body modification practices’.62 Genesis P-Orridge was one of the figures given attention in the publication.

  Says Victoria Pitts: ‘Modern Primitives describes how individuals can create some form of social change […] through creating visible bodily changes, while also asserting a radical message of self-invention […] Modern primitivism does not replace, then, but rather displaces Western cultural identity and creates a subversive cultural style […] the gestures of modern primitivism call into question the fixity of identity as such.’63

  She also draws attention to Hebdige’s theories of subculture which have ‘much in common with the radical collage aesthetics of surrealism’.64 Hebdige remarks that ‘the radical aesthetic practices of Dada and Surrealism are […] the classic modes of “anarchic discourse”. Breton’s manifestos (1924 and 1929) established the basic premise of surrealism: that a new surreality would emerge through the subversion of common sense, the collapse of prevalent logical categories and oppositions […] and the celebration of the abnormal and forbidden.’65 This makes, and emphasises, that pertinent link, as P-Orridge’s interest in the Dadais
ts and Surrealists has been widely documented. He has claimed those artistic revolutionaries as influences and revealed his debt in his own creations. For example, in 1973, his work Copyright Breeches – a book which featured photographs signed by P-Orridge with the copyright sign – referenced Marcel Duchamp’s pioneering work with ready-mades.66 The same Dadaist would then inspire a 1974 performance piece called Marcel Duchamp’s Next Work, in which bicycle wheels, an item Duchamp famously employed in an art-piece of 1913, were transformed into a musical instrument.67 P-Orridge commented:

  When I was still at Solihull School the only things that excited me in art history […] the two things that excited me were Surrealism and Dada, definitely, and, of those two, Dada I found the more satisfying, in the same way that Jack Kerouac and the beatniks excited me in the end, first of all, because their lives became integral to their art – it’s pointless to try and separate them. In the same way with Dada and Surrealism, I enjoyed reading about their lives and their anecdotes about what they did as much as looking at the pieces they made […] with Dada there was a certain realisation in the Dada movement that life, that their lives, ultimately, were as valid as a piece of art, a material item.68

  The separation of those who utilise body modification as a sign of personal identity, however, and those who adopt the practice as a mode of artistic expression – like the performance artists Orlan69 from France, and the Australian Stelarc70 who are covered in Featherstone’s edited collection Body Modification71 – is a subtle one, raising more questions about the role and status of art in society, not to mention that of the individual and the use of the body as canvas. But P-Orridge seems to have made an early decision to include his own body in a holistic pursuit of his artistic oeuvre: for him, it could be argued, the subversive power of identity distortion was and is the artform.