There have been few individuals in my life who have had more influence on it than one Neil Andrew Megson, aka
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. For nearly four decades of my existence on this planet, S/he has impacted my conception of art, life and the nature of reality in ways both subtle and profound. With He/r recent passing, after a protracted battle with
chronic myelomonocytic leukaemia, I felt compelled to unravel that long, twisting thread of incursions into my consciousness in order to assess its true measure. I’m not going to focus on a detailed history of He/r career, there are many others far more adept at such a task (see journalist
Michael Mitchell’s recent article). Instead, I’d like to offer a very personal journey through my own adult experience, focusing on those moments when the life and art of Genesis had their greatest presence.
Though the name,
Throbbing Gristle (TG), had crossed my gaze in the music press on at least one occasion prior to this, my story starts, in earnest, sometime around the summer of 1983, shortly after moving into the downtown core of Vancouver (BC). I had made friends with a fellow who worked at the local import record shop and was visiting him at his home one day. He was quite a musicologist/audiophile and, knowing my penchant for the unusual, had pulled out a few TG records for me to check out. One was the recently issued semi-bootleg Italian double set,
The Mission Is Terminated. He played me a bit of this and some tracks from
20 Jazz Funk Greats. At the time, I was intrigued, but not overtly impressed. It didn’t strike me as anything too special, frankly. However, while the impact was not immediately apparent, there was something of a seed planted in my head. I found myself frequently thinking about TG afterwards.
I recall hearing Still Walking again in the record shop and something about it kept nagging at me. On the surface, when I thought about it “rationally”, it seemed almost too easy as a concept for a piece of music. It was just a lot of strange noises flailing away atop some bonkers drum machine pattern. How hard could it be to do something like that? Yet that very concept was oddly compelling and I couldn’t help notice how much I liked it, despite my superficial assessment of its apparent technical shortcomings. So TG kept sticking with me and, one day, I even plucked out a copy of
DoA at another record store and brought it over to the listening station for a spin, but I still didn’t get it. I dropped the needle into a few different grooves on the record and nothing jumped out at me. Was I missing something?
That confusion and bemusement changed, however, when I had my first truly “revelatory” experience with TG. It was a night in the autumn of 1984 and a friend and I had decided to drop some blotter acid and hang out listening to music all night. We were working on some of our own material, which we wanted to review in an “altered state”, and he brought over some TG records to listen to as well. Once we got deep enough into the trip, he put on the backwards
Fetish Records reissue of Second Annual Report, the one with the classic lightning flash cover. Now, I should point out here that the tabs we’d dropped had a street name of “Flash” and each tab had a little lightning bolt printed on it, very much like the one on the LP cover. As we sunk into the sounds on the record, something magical started to happen. Previously, I’d tried to listen to the
regular version of Second Annual Report, but the abstract sound of it didn’t connect with me at all. The complete lack of rhythm, melody or even apparent tonality only left me hearing noise. Yet in this state, with my senses attuned and my mind engaged, this “noise” suddenly seemed to have intent and purpose. There was meaning in these sounds now. At times, it was like listening to prehistoric monsters battling. Then it came to me what TG were doing.
I was quite familiar with musicians going “primitive” and heading into tribalism or deconstructing rhythms and melodies.
Public Image Ltd had done that in breaking down song structures in a way which allowed for more primal building blocks that could be arranged in ways which broke free from the usual “verse-chorus” conventions of popular music. But what TG where doing was beyond merely taking apart the skeleton and rearranging the bones. They were going down to the very DNA of sound. It was like hearing proteins colliding with amino acids to form the first cells of life. Then, in what was the most stunning moment of synchronicity I’d ever experienced, a word came echoing out of the murk, clear as day from the backwards recordings, saying “FLASH”. It’s there. It really is. You can hear it for yourself on the first side of the album. It was a “MIND=BLOWN” moment of the highest order. We listened to a few other things that night including the
Discipline single, which had nearly as impressive results, sounding like being dropped into giant blender.
After that, I became rather obsessed with TG. The strangest thing was how my perception of the music changed that night and stayed that way forever. It wasn’t just the drug making it sound a certain way at the time and then it went back to being meaningless “noise”. Once I heard it this new way, it stayed that way and I became spoiled for that kind of sound. “Normal” music became almost unlistenable for me. It consequently changed the way I played as a “musician”. As Gen was so fond of saying, while punk had stripped things down to three chords, TG didn’t need any at all and my conception of what constituted a performance, and even an instrument, was radically altered and expanded.
I subsequently started to collect TG records whenever I found them and it soon became about much more than just the music. Everything about them was a source of fascination, even the runoff grooves could hide secret messages, both in the sound or scratched into the vinyl. The album covers each featured their own subversive twist to them.
20 Jazz Funk Greats and
Greatest Hits had that glossy “commercial” appeal, but you knew they were a trick, a ploy to deceive and manipulate. There were also the stories about their live shows, times where they’d dress all in white, performing in front of huge mirrors with blinding floodlights aimed at the audience. I even heard one apocryphal rumor about Gen living in a cave until he nearly starved to death in order to find out what it was like to die. Bullshit, but it was part of the mythology.
There was another night, sometime in 1985, when we were hanging out with the guys from the newly formed
Skinny Puppy and getting “altered” when someone pulled out a copy of
RE/Search’s
Industrial Culture Handbook. That was another game changer. It was the first time I’d had a chance to really dig into the TG philosophy of what Gen was trying to say. It was shocking and disturbing and alarming, but also triggered recognition that there was truth in it and purpose and that this whole idea of confronting taboos and exposing the dark side of humanity had a goal and needed to be done. Unfortunately a lot of people saw only a fashion statement rather than an anti-fascist one and went down the wrong path, missing out on the beauty that was lurking in the shadows of TG. They only focused on things like the warped perversion of Persuasion or Hamburger Lady or the totalitarian crypto-fascist aesthetic and completely missed the pastoral drift of something like Beachy Head or the gentle innocence of Hometime.
Another occasion in 1985 would give me a chance to experience some of the weirdness that was the precursor to TG,
COUM Transmissions. I’d read about them in that same
RE/Search book and it all sounded pretty “out there” and, frankly, I had my doubts about whether it was really that extreme. But those claims were confirmed when I got a chance to see some of the original COUM videos from circa 1974. Some friends and I had taken an interest in video art and had become acquainted with local producer,
Paul Wong. Back in the early/mid 1970s, he was involved in the same mail art network which COUM were part of. When COUM started getting their hands on the first consumer level video recorders, those 1/2” open reel jobs, the same ones
Bob Crane famously made his porn videos on, Paul got in on the scene too and even helped found Vancouver’s first public video art facility, The Video Inn (now known as
VIVO Media Arts). COUM’s videos were some of the first international contributions to the Video Inn’s now massive archive.
One night, Paul invited a few of us to a private screening of various works from the the archive. Knowing our interest in “Industrial” music, he pulled out a number of videos of relevance. These included
Derek Jarman’s
In the Shadow of the Sun (featuring a soundtrack by TG) and
CTI’s
Elemental 7, both of which had just been released in the UK on
PAL format VHS. The facility’s screening room had compatible equipment, so we were able to view these alongside two old 1/2” open reel videos by COUM. We stared off “easy” with the CTI tape, which was magical and dreamy, next was In the Shadow of the Sun, which amped-up the intensity with hauntingly ritualistic looking scenes of fire and supplication, and then dove into the deep end with the COUM videos. One of them featured
Cosey Fanni Tutti and Gen in a room with Gen dressed in a little girl’s outfit on a swing while Cosey went about the room painting arrows on the floor. It was bizarre and surreal in a grainy, surveillance video kind of way. The other video was much more extreme. I recall it started with a scene of someone sewing up a long gash in their arm, ending by attaching a porn magazine to it. Then there was a long scene with Gen sitting in a corner on the floor and giving himself various enemas of milk and other unknown substances, then releasing the fluids onto the floor. All very messy, perversely sexual and mind shattering in the heavily altered state I was in. The impact was intense and made me rethink so much about the nature of sexuality to a point which totally shifted my sense of what was possible and acceptable and change my sense of expression and sexual comprehension from that day forward. This reevaluation of physical limits further expanded when I came across another RE/Search book in 1986,
Modern Primitives, which featured an extensive interview with Genesis & Paula about their exploration of piercing and other forms of body modification.
Beyond TG, which had “terminated” their “mission” in 1981, I began to explore the various post TG projects.
Chris & Cosey’s works were an easy transition and, though more accessible, still contained the basic elements of the electronic sound which had appealed to me in TG.
Psychic TV, on the other hand, came across as a far more intimidating proposition. Something about it seemed even more subversive and dangerous. Some of the early record covers didn’t help either.
Force the Hand of Chance featured a horrifying looking skull, pierced on all sides by what looked like poison darts, with twine binding it together and bolts screwed into it. It looked like some sort of ritual murder victim cursed to eternal damnation. Then there was the live LP,
Berlin Atonal, with a picture of Gen on the back cover, shaved head and “Porky Pig’n” it with no pants while yanking on his pierced cock. Eventually, however, my curiosity got the better of me.
Force the Hand of Chance was where I started and it was an abrupt decimation of pretty much every expectation of the band I could have. The album starts off with a pretty lullaby, sung sweetly and sincerely by Gen to his newborn daughter, Caresse and accompanied by gently strummed acoustic guitar and an actual string section. What the fuck was this? This is the same guy who screamed about Nazi death camps against a searing wall of noise on TG’s Subhuman? While some may have dismissed it as a sellout to “normalcy”, after my initial shock, my own sense of irony and mischief allowed me to appreciate the deliberate misdirection of it all. As the album progressed, its subversive layers slowly began to reveal themselves. Terminus plodded mercilessly though an
Ennio Morricone style spaghetti western twang of guitars and an ominously tolling bell towards a terrifying self immolation. Ov Power offered up a mutant post-punk-funk proselytizing of the potent magickal virtues of sexual fluids. Finally, Message from the Temple delivered it’s creed of a new way of being and a systematic methodology for dismantling the brainwashing of society in order to identify one’s true nature. The pristine production values of the album also heralded an abrupt shift away from TG’s distortion and murk, even if 20 Jazz Funk Greats had tidied things up a bit. Never before had such state of the art recording technology been used for such perverse musical subterfuge.
Each new record by PTV that was added to my collection subsequently proved that “style” was not at all the focus of this project. Credits for participants on each record were always different, always phrased in the past tense as “For the realization of this projected, Psychic TV were…” acknowledging the temporal nature of the product, that it would change as they saw fit and as different people were involved. One time it might be an almost normal rock song (
Godstar), but then they’d do some strange ambient tape loop album (
Themes 2) or an avant-garde soundtrack to a dance performance (
Mouth of the Night). A live show might be a ritual ceremony or a fairly traditional band playing guitar, bass & drums. Pretty much anything was possible and it was something I admired and integrated into my own approach to creation - don’t be limited by genres! Let function dictate form. Frankly it was also the modus operandi in TG as well, to a slightly lesser extent, but the precedent was not entirely new.
Probably the most striking course change in PTV’s initial career came in 1988 after Genesis had stumbled upon an emerging style of electronic dance music from Chicago. In another instance of synchronicity, I had found myself exposed to this very same music as well by the previously mentioned fellow working at the same import shop who now happened to be waving this 12” single in my face one day when I walked in the store, insisting I hear it. It was the
Acid Tracks single by
Phuture. He put it on and my head immediately turned. I’d heard a
TB-303 demo’d in 1982 when they came out, recognized the sound instantly and something about this raw, primitive groove, with that squelchy bass synth, clicked with me from the start. I could hear that it was a cornerstone to build on, that there was a flexible framework in its structure which could be adapted to many purposes. I immediately thought of dropping in samples of voices and incidental noise. A couple of weeks later, after I’d been messing about with my gear at home, I was back at the record store again and there it was, right on the wall in front of me, a new
PTV 12” with the words “ACID HOUSE” emblazoned on the hype sticker of its plain white sleeve. Little did I know about the conspiracy between Genesis, psychedelic music journalist,
Richard Norris, and the musical half of
Soft Cell,
Dave Ball. Abetted by DJ
Andrew Weatherall, Genesis had been inspired by the term “ACID” and sort of re/misinterpreted it as a reference to psychedelic drugs and had come up with the idea of creating psychedelic electronic dance music. Together, unbeknownst to me at the time, they created the
Jack the Tab “compilation” album in 1988, followed closely by
Tekno Acid Beat and the
Tune In single, secretly working PTV into the dance floor under a slew of temporary pseudonyms. This would set PTV’s course through the remainder of the 1980s and beyond. Though I wasn’t initially inspired towards techno music creation by PTV, the coincidence of our mutual interest reaffirmed the sense that I was on the right path, creatively. Even though many of my creative musical peers at the time scoffed at this new trend, I figured, if it was worthy of PTV taking up the banner, I hadn’t misjudged the significance of it. Indeed, this shift would play a massive part in setting the course for electronic music from that point on and to this very day.
In the early days, PTV was promoted as a “video band”. With
Peter Christopherson moving into producing mainstream music videos for the burgeoning
MTV market with his
Hipgnosis cohorts, he had the resources to incorporate this medium into the framework of PTV, which started to produce “Transmissions” with an eye towards the concept of eventually having the ability to broadcast this material on their own channel. To start, they created 2 hour long VHS compilations of various materials, including music videos, ambient pieces, rituals, interviews and whatever else they might imagine broadcasting on a dedicated channel. As much as I wanted to keep up with this end of the project, it was very difficult to get any of these tapes over here in Canada. I never got to see many of them until years later, well after they’d become fodder for the media smear campaign of the early 1990s, which would result in P-Orridge and family being chased out of the UK into exile in the US. After Sleazy and
Geoff Rushton’s rather acrimonious departure, the emphasis on video seemed to diminish significantly, with most of the works produced being either simply live documents or music videos, rather than the more extreme and controversial ritual material. But their emphasis on the medium did inspire me to keep it as part of my own creative toolbox throughout my various projects.
Psychic TV, of course, was merely the publicity arm for the real purpose of Gen’s post TG activity,
Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth (TOPY). The nature and scope of this organization wasn’t immediately apparent to me until PTV ended their relationship with their record label, after their first couple of LPs, and started their own
Temple Records imprint. Once this happened, the records became far more critical in disseminating TOPY information in the form of philosophical and metaphysical texts, primarily on the backs of the record covers. This was particularly prominent with the “
History” and “
Live” series of releases, with their strikingly distinctive & uniform black & white covers with the red PTV banner/tab. Record collecting became something of a challenge during the period from 1986 through 1990 as the label kept a steady stream of releases hitting the market to the point where PTV even secured an entry in the
Guinness Book of World Records for most albums issued in a year. I think it’s safe to say that my record buying habits of the time were directly responsible for my terrible credit and the bankruptcy I went through in the early 1990s.
Though there was something of a deluge of product, not all the material pressed in those grooves was of an essential nature on its own. Sometimes the albums were collections of demos, like
Pagan Day or experiments like
Themes 2. The live recordings had multiple purposes, one being to thwart bootlegging, but they were also useful in recouping some of the money PTV lost when the group’s manager took off with the profits of the minor hit single,
Godstar. Back then, a limited edition meant usually 1000 to 5000 copies, so an indie label could make some decent money selling recordings. They were also intended to be a reference resource, to demonstrate the evolution of the music from raw ideas through to successively more refined interpretations. Roman P. was a perfect example of this, starting off live as a churning, Industrial dirge on the
N.Y. Scum &
Those Who Do Not LPs in 1983, then mutating into a neo-folk lament on the
Sordide Sentimental single in 1984 and ultimately emerging as a blazing “Hyperdelic” rock anthem on
Thee Magickal Mystery D Tour EP of 1986. It was so refined in this last version that it eventually got used in a US car commercial in the 1990s (though I’m sure the car company had no idea the song was actually a condemnation of a pedophile). It was this insistence on releasing virtually everything (again, something started in TG) that got me approaching my own work in a way which treated every creation as worthy in its own right. This got to the point where the concept of a “demo” effectively disappeared from my vocabulary and every production I embarked on became a releasable, finished product.
Regardless of the nature of the audio contained on the record, the texts, in some cases, offered more value than the music. The records also let collectors know about the publishing arm of TOPY, which offered items like Thee Grey Book and various periodical “Bulletins” containing more essays, theories, news and catalogues of live cassettes and even lectures. Though I invested much into these materials, something which was a challenge given my often estranged relationship with a working income throughout the decade, I never became an official member of TOPY. The whole
SIGIL process; sending in the “3 fluids” from rituals performed on the
23rd of each month at 23:00 hrs for 23 months, was just a bit too much of a commitment for me. I simply wasn’t comfortable with joining organizations at all, really, no matter how much they positioned themselves as an “anti-cult cult”. But the documents I amassed did have a profound impact on the avenues of exploration I’d take in terms of reading and study. They also encouraged me to start exploring my own writing abilities, adding yet another item to my creative toolbox. Adding essays and theoretical texts as a component to my projects because a natural extension of whatever work I was doing.
Ultimately PTV/TOPY were a spur to pick up threads and explore. It might be something mentioned in the tests or a sample used in the audio or a reference to someone or some tradition in the graphics. These threads led me down numerous paths of inquest. For example, the
Supermale B-side of the original Je T'Aime 12” was particularly significant because of the use of the voice samples in its mix. The track featured a hypnotic rhythm section driven by a drum machine and bass guitar groove overlaid with two voices, mixed nearly subliminally, one panned to each side of the stereo spectrum. On one side was the voice of
Pope John Paul II, prattling on in a dull monotone about faith and obedience and the usual Catholic drivel. On the other side was
Anton LaVey, espousing the core principals of his
Church of Satan. I had no idea of the organization at that time, but the idea of a “church” which didn’t actually believe in a literal Satan, but used the symbolism of this character to counteract the irrationality of mainstream Judaeo-Christian dogma, had an immediate appeal to me. Philosophically, I’d come from a humanist, rationalist, atheistic perspective, but appreciated the theater & showmanship of LaVey. His sense of style was undeniable, albeit he sometimes appeared to get his gear from the local discount costume shop! It wasn’t long until I got curious enough to pick up a copy of The Satanic Bible to discover what this system was about for myself. On the one hand, there was the TOPY messaging regarding self analysis, to discover one’s true desires, freed from the expectations of others and the conditioning of society. On the other was the CoS principals of rational self interest directed towards fulfilling one’s nature here and now, rather than waiting for some imagined “afterlife”. These hit home with me in a huge way.
I’d struggled with my sexual identity ever since I became aware that I had a disposition which wasn’t aligned with what a “normal” little boy should be. My attraction to the same sex had vexed me throughout my adolescence and my early adulthood. I denied myself this expression. I ran from it, tried to reshape it to what was expected of me, but my efforts were, always and inexorably, tragic failures. However, once I got onto the path of true self realization, I made determined efforts to blast down this wall I’d built around myself. Using the principals of applied, practical magick, I developed techniques for discovering my true “will” and setting things into motion which eventually made it manifest. I “came out” and finally, in 1990, began to enjoy the fruits of my birthright, the joys and pleasures I’d denied myself for so long. I owe that all to the messages and motivations I derived from TOPY and it’s processes and the paths upon which it placed me.
Eventually, I found I wanted to delve deeper into this “Occulture” and was led to the arenas of
Kabbalah/
Cabbala and the works of
Aleister Crowley. I spend several years studying the symbolism of the
Tree of Life, the
Tarot and the alignments of mythical traditions from Greece, Rome and Egypt. These led me to investigate a variety of spiritual paths from
Buddhism to
Taoism to
Hindu texts. As an artist, this information became invaluable to me. I learned how to maximize the effectiveness of my work by ensuring that I understood the relationships between the elements I was working with. As a painter learns how to mix colors, how to create harmony from complementary tones or how to use contrast for dramatic effect, I learned how to combine media and methods and attributes to ensure that the message I was communicating was reinforced by all the components I was using. While I was never too attracted to overtly traditional “greater” ritual ceremony, all that “
Harry Potter” robes and wands business, I did dabble in it enough to discover ways to adapt it to certain uses, such as performing for audiences. In these contexts, learning to use ritualistic constructs helped to increase the impact of the performance. Starting a live show with the right “invocation” could mean the difference between a mediocre or a great show. One had to “summon” the appropriate spirits, depending on the type of event being presented. But it was the “lesser” magickal techniques which had the greatest value in terms of day to day methods for improving effectiveness and efficiency.
Being in Vancouver, opportunities to see Genesis perform were rare, but I did manage to attend two events. The first was in the spring of 1988 in Seattle at the Showbox Theater. It was not a “band” performance, however, but a multimedia presentation called, Stations Ov Thee Cross. It was part of a small series of installation type events which were done around Easter and which were meant to explore the symbolism of the holiday, the crucifixion, it’s components, its Pagan origins and its incorporation into Christian traditions. A bunch of us sorted out a road trip down from Vancouver, not really knowing what to expect. When we got there, what we found was a stage set up with some 16
CRT type TV monitors, about 27” each, all stacked up inside a metal frame in the shape of a Psychick Cross. Two large projection screens flanked the cross on either side. Video and audio systems were set up behind this rig to live mix various audio and visual materials into the PA, monitors and screens. Signals were routed to allow for multiple image and sound sources to be presented at any one time. The result was a kind of “
cut-up” of media, both original and found sources, including images of religious ceremonies and TOPY rituals, with material being enhanced through various effects processors. All together, it was a hypnotic barrage of stimulus, but a lot of people were expecting a “band” performance, so the reception was a bit muted or frustrated. Personally, I was quite inspired by the use of the media and it opened me up to incorporating some of these techniques into live performances of my own. Gathering up a bunch of TVs and making weird videos for them to play while I performed seemed like a great way to augment a live show and any venue with a projector was never left without some visual accompaniment.
The second time I got to see a live presentation, it was a full band concert on May 21st, 1990 in Vancouver at The Town Pump. This was the last major PTV acid house era tour of the US before the whole mess with Gen’s “exile”. This was when they’d expanded their live set to be something of a marathon of dance music, lasting for nearly three hours, if I recall. The club was boiling hot as it was packed full and everyone was dancing up a storm. I squeezed myself up to the front in the center of the stage and was close enough to Gen to count the little white painted sperms which were covering his black track suite and beret. It was a frenzy of a show and was a clear demonstration of the ability of electronic based dance music to be taken to a level where it had just as much power and energy as any old “rock” band.
After this last major flourish of PTV as a touring band, the presence and influence of Genesis, TOPY and PTV started to wane in my life thanks to the whole fiasco with Scotland Yard, which resulted in Gen and family being essentially forced out of the UK under a cloud of controversy during the “Satanic Panic” of the early 1990s. At the time it was happening, being before the days of the internet, I only heard about it through word of mouth well after the fact and the occasional press articles, which were rare on this side of the pond. After the exile, it didn’t take long for TOPY to be officially shut down with an announcement being mailed out advising of “changed priorities”. By this point, the organization had grown to thousands strong throughout the UK, Europe and the USA. A lot of people in those enclaves weren’t too thrilled about another “mission” being “terminated” and various factions attempted to keep the network active, sometimes persisting with the name, terminology and iconography while others abandoned them, sometimes after threats of legal action, for reinvented alternatives.
During this period of confusion and instability, there were still recordings coming out; a few more techno albums like the 1991
Ultrahouse compilation and the exceptional 1993
Peak Hour, plus some tracks from an aborted 1994 session finding their way onto a few compilations (United 94, Godstar 94, Snowflake). There were a few spoken word & ambient experimental things and then the last proper PTV studio effort, 1996’s
Trip Reset, recorded shortly after Gen was nearly killed in a house fire in LA and severely injured by a fall trying to escape. These occasionally managed to find their way to the local shops. Trip Resent was effectively the end of Psychic TV for the 20th century, though there was a one off reunion show in the UK in 1999 (documented on the
Time’s Up video) which included
Alex Fergusson from the original lineup. The show was Gen’s somewhat triumphant return to the UK after his years in exile in the US. But the latter few years of the 1990s were sparse and offered only some minor new projects like
Splinter Test and
Thee Majesty. For a few years, as the century came to a close, it seemed like the story had mostly come to an end. At least it appeared like that to me, being focused on music and not being too aware of Gen’s shift back into the gallery art world of New York City, He/r new, adopted home.
With the expansion of the internet at the turn of the millennium, however, I started to look around online to see if old Genesis was still out there doing anything. This is when I encountered the Next New Way On, which was the website S/he was running at the time. This was when the next big twist happened in the story as I had my first look at Gen’s early stages of transition into what would be known as the “Pandrogyne”. Seeing Gen embracing this more feminized look and style was rather unexpected at first, but then I thought back to some things I’d remembered from old COUM pics and little hints I’d seen over the years and I wasn’t too terribly surprised. I also discovered Gen’s relationship with Lady Jaye / Miss Jackie and their bond and objective towards creating a unified, “pansexual” expression of gender. Having spent so much time exploring the TAROT and Tree of Life symbolism, I quickly recognized the symbolism of the
Hermaphrodite as being foundational to this new project and how this would fit into the process of spiritual enlightenment. This balancing and blending of genders was a critical step “along the path” towards achieving higher states of being. But this was more than a decade ahead of the curve when it came to where we’d end up in our modern day with gender identity now taking center stage as one of the most critical points of contention in contemporary life. As we now grapple with the expanding world of personal pronouns, it’s impossible to view this project as anything less than prescient.
When some of my friends and acquaintances first saw this new look and direction, I was somewhat disappointed by the response, which often fell back into awkward ridicule or nervous derision. Some of the old “Industrial” folk were too stuck on the more masculine attributes of TG’s work, missing out on the other avenues they’d explored and weren’t ready to embrace this. As the new millennium advanced through the early 2000s and both PTV and TG found themselves being reactivated, with live performances, collectible reissues of back catalogs and new recordings being issued, people had to get used to Genesis in dresses, new boobs and lipstick. It was all just another chapter in the long strange trip for me, however and I was simply happy to have He/r back in action in a big way again. At this time, I was doing pretty well with my career, so I was able to fully indulge in virtually every item, edition and collectible these projects issued and did so wholeheartedly. This culminated with the publishing of an updated, expanded version of Thee Psychick Bible, collecting together all those texts from the old albums, pamphlets, booklets and news bulletins from the TOPY days along with some new material. Reading it all again, or for the first time, was a great way to reinvigorate a lot of those interests and inspirations.
This inaugural decade of the 21st century would come with a high personal price tag, however. All this new activity and exposure ran parallel with a series of significant losses which, cumulatively, took their toll. First, in 2004, was the tragic loss of early PTV member and Coil founder,
Geoff Rushton, aka Jhon Balance. Then another gut wrenching loss when Lady Jaye would die of a congenital heart condition in 2007. The decade would be topped off with a final tragedy when
Peter Christopherson suddenly passed in December of 2010. By then, the cracks were starting to show as the mythos of Genesis began to peel somewhat while the decade closed. Shortly before Sleazy passed, TG had performed their last reunion show in London, after which, Gen mysterious bailed from the mini tour, forcing the remaining members to hastily regroup as
X-TG and play two shows as a trio. No public explanation was ever really given for this sudden departure, but I have often wondered about health issues as audience video of the show revealed Gen had become noticeably bloated, likely the result of a diabetic condition and required meds. I’m only speculating here, mind you, based on my own experience with this condition and the medication involved and comments made by Genesis afterwards. There were some subsequent terse comments made on Twitter between Gen and
Chris Carter, particularly over the release of X-TG’s
Desertshore album, a project initiated by Sleazy in 2007 before Gen's departure, but they soon ceased after Chris warned against arguing in public and things which such actions might reveal.
Around this time or just before, Genesis had set about reactivating TOPY in a new, revised form. This time, it would be referred to as OTTT, the “One True TOPI Tribe”, with TOPI standing for “Temple Ov Psychick Individuals”. While this new network would have many of the same aims towards self realization as the first incarnation, it would focus more on community building, encouraging it as a survival tactic for the coming “dark ages”. Genesis sought to use almost a kind of “biker gang” type of infrastructure, utilizing “colors” and “patches” to denote kinship and community as these types of organizations would be most likely to survive in a post civilized environment. With the stringent requirements of monthly SIGILs being dropped, the proposition seemed much more open ended and attractive to me.
To facilitate this, a web service had been found which allowed anyone to set up social media networks using a model based on the functionality which was then popular on MySpace. It was possible to set up your own version of that kind of web community without having to invest in developing the platform to do it. I was one of the first wave of people to join up and soon began to get acquainted with others also looking to get this experiment back in action. I ended up meeting some great creative people and it didn’t take long for us to start working on projects together. The first of these was to do a
compilation album of original music, celebrating the OTTT spirit. This came together very quickly and with no particular issues, so we were all very encouraged about the possibilities the OTTT offered. Around the same time, Facebook became very popular and many of us started to join up. The platform used for OTTT, while serviceable, was rather primitive compared to Facebook and lacked a lot of the features that were common there. As a result, one of the people I was collaborating with set up Facebook group to help us communicate better. A lot of people moved over to Facebook and started planning our next project there, though we’d post updates on the OTTT site when we had something figured out. This was working great until one day when the shit hit the fan.
Genesis, out of the blue, had posted a long, rambling condemnation of our group, claiming we were some sort of cheap imitators and that we’d stolen He/r symbols and iconography and were not representing what S/he had wanted for the OTTT, particularly slamming the person who set up the Facebook group and accusing him of misrepresenting OTTT. This material was even posted on the main page of Genesis’ official website. We were all left stunned and deeply hurt by the attack. As far as we were concerned, we were doing only what we’d been encouraged to do and had only moved over to Facebook out of convenience. Gen had rarely ever commented on the OTTT site about anything going on, only posting the occasional text of theories, but not really getting into active involvement with the members, at least we didn’t see any direct contact. We attempted to explain ourselves, but were dismissed and then some members began to be deleted from the OTTT web community by unknown administrators without any process for appeal or any explanation for the removal.
This was all a big blow to many of us and hugely dispiriting and disillusioning. I found myself at a loss and felt the whole reaction was completely hypocritical. It was like a garden was set up for some flowers to grown and then, when they started to sprout, the gardener came along and ripped them all out by the roots. After that, I lost interest in Genesis and PTV and what the OTTT were about. I still kept an eye on their activities, but I wasn’t particularly keen to spend any more time or money on that particular branch of activity. I did still hold onto the idea of “community” which had been promoted by the OTTT and did undertake some projects in 2011 & 2012 which attempted to put those ideas into creative action. But the 2010s also started off with me losing my job of some 16 years, so I found myself using up my cash reserves after a few years of unemployment. As a result I started having to sell off all those TG & PTV collectibles I had gathering dust on my shelves. A painful process, but it kept a roof over my head and food on my table.
It was not long after this that I came across the
Genesis Survivors Facebook group and discovered there was quite a trail of broken hearts left in Gen’s wake over the years. I didn’t know much about He/r divorce from
Paula (Alaura O’Dell), but I had noticed that all the PTV reissues which came out since about 2000 had her credits removed, as if she’d never been part of the band or TOPY, something that made me very sad for her. There were also certain ex-PTV members who made no bones about their contempt for Genesis. The real kicker in all this happened with the publication of
Cosey Fanni Tutti’s autobiography in 2017,
Art Sex Music. It was here where all the stories of Gen’s abusive behavior came into sharp focus as she relayed one tale after another, several of which could easily have merited legal consequences, had they gone slightly differently or she’d bothered to go to the authorities. In all, it was a difficult decade of having to re-assess someone who’d been so important in my life as a source of inspiration and admiration. Reconciling these polarities has been difficult and is an ongoing process.
All of this bloom coming off the rose of P-Orridge’s reputation ended up being tempered, however, by the news that S/he was suffering from chronic myelomonocytic leukaemia. Over the course of the past few years, we’ve all seen He/r deterioration as the disease has taken its toll. S/he was very open about the whole thing, providing details on hospital visits (the “horse-pistol”, as S/he would say), sharing photos and going into details of the various side effects of the condition and what was necessary for it to be managed. Touring effectively ended shortly after the release of the final PTV3 studio album in 2016, though occasional appearances did occur and a number of high profile art shows were commissioned both in New York and LA.
A few years ago, responding to a post I made in a fan group where I was looking to sell some of my books, Genesis messaged me privately to inquire about the copy of Rapid Eye I was selling. We had some very lovely email exchanges and S/he even gave me He/r personal address and phone number, though I never got up the courage to call, worried I’d disturb He/r or just end up babbling like an idiot. And despite all the negative press from Cosey’s book, which included several articles on surviving abuse and an exposé on the goings on behind the scenes in the original TOPY days (
Groupthink and Other Painful Reflections on Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth), there are still plenty of those who have nothing but nice things to say. There are children who love their dad and even an ex-wife, Alaura, who has apparently found some forgiveness in the end.
Personally, I’m left in a quandary in terms of how I feel about Genesis. On the one hand, I can’t deny the decades of positive influence He/r actions and ideas have had on me. I’ve done things and pushed myself in ways I may never have had the courage to do were it not for those words, those songs, those images and those ideas. I’ve experience so many moments of great joy and satisfaction thanks to the determination I gained. But I can’t ignore the pain inflicted on so many, both intimately and at a distance. I have too much respect and admiration for Cosey to dismiss what she has to say. Cosey’s been an enormous inspiration and influence for me as well. I have to acknowledge her experience at the same time I do my own.
Scholars, thinkers, theorists and social commentators are going to spend a long time trying to unravel the life and work of Genesis P-Orridge. Hearing of He/r loss has invariably made me feel like there’s a void in the world, like a link to an entire state of consciousness has vanished. S/he was one of the last living conduits to a school of though which has had a profound influence on the world at large. The lineage from the occultists of the turn of the century through the surrealists and dadaists pre-WWII, through the modernism of the 1950s and the radical experimentalism of the Beats and the 1960s hippie culture, all found expression at one time or another in the works of this being who was once Neil Andrew Megson. Shoulders capable of carrying on those traditions in the 21st century are rare.
As I write this, the world is in the throws of a paradigm shift of massive proportions. We’re being forced to reexamine out values and priorities in ways we were not at all prepared for. It’s odd timing that Genesis leaves us at this pivotal point, a time when the “dark ages” S/he warned of and attempted to prepare us for, seem to be looming upon our doorstep. We’re facing an uncertain time in human history and so much is going to depend on how we handle it in the next very short while. Were there enough lessons learned? Are there enough of us who studied the patterns and see the steps we must take? Those communities Genesis tried to foster are going to be put to the test now and we shall see what holds and what falters and falls.
Whenever or however my own termination comes, whatever pains and disappointments I might endure before it, I can at least look back and know that there are quite a few ticks on my “bucket list” that made it all worthwhile and a lot of them were thanks to the courage and inspiration I gained from the work of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.
OUR AIM IS WAKEFULNESS, OUR ENEMY IS DREAMLESS SLEEP - old TOPI proverb
