Genesis P-Orridge

Our present entry is a tough one; today's subject identifies as third gender and their preferred pronouns are they, them. They are an English singer-songwriter, musician, poet, performance artist, and occultist. A controversial figure with an anti-establishment stance, they have been heavily criticised by the British press and politicians, while being cited as an icon within the avant-garde art scene; they accrued a cult following, and been given the moniker of the "Godperson of Industrial Music".

P-Orridge - today

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge was born Neil Andrew Megson, 22 February 1950, in Manchester. How did cute little Neil Megson become the notorious Genesis P-Orridge? "Solihull School radicalized me in terms of who are the enemy. All the other kids were being told: 'You are the future leaders of Britain. You will be MPs or military generals.' Then there was me. We started an underground magazine complaining about the school rules and actually got some of them changed, like the one which insisted that boys of 6ft 4in with stubble should always wear their school cap. It was ridiculous! "

P-Orridge as a child

Genesis loves The Avengers, the ’60s spy thriller television show. Emma Peel was “the first real sexual fetish Alpha female on TV,” they say. Wearing the golden Patrick Ewing sneakers, white skinny jeans, and a black T-shirt printed with the cross sigil of Psychic TV, Genesis speaks in a lucid gossamer drawl, in breathless anecdotes of chance encounters and mystic phenomena. “You know, skin-tight leather outfits, kicking and knocking down men whilst Steed, the partner, flounces around with his bowler hat.”

By the time The Avengers ended its six-season run in 1969, P-Orridge had just begun kicking up dust in the art and music world, founding the freak-alley English collective COUM Transmissions that year. P-Orridge and crew, including then-partner Cosey Fanni Tutti (born Christine Newby), lived in squats and communes in environments reflecting the brutish, visceral antagonism COUM helped originate. The landmark industrial act Throbbing Gristle would flow out of that in 1976.

P-Orridge as a young adult

The band comprised Genesis P-Orridge (bass guitar, violin, vocals, vibraphone), Cosey Fanni Tutti (guitars, cornet, vocals), Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson (tapes, found sounds, horns, piano, vibraphone, synthesizer) and Chris Carter (synthesizers, tapes, electronics). Christopherson was a gay man.

One of their concerts was captured on tape and released on cassette in 1976 under the title Music From The Death Factory. Their first "proper" album, however, came a year later.

This is Throbbing Gristle with Slug Bait, the opening track of their first studio album, The Second Annual Report (1977).

Throbbing Gristle's second album, D.o.A: The Third and Final Report (1978) contained the band's first single, United, which was called "one of the first electropop singles."

The album itself was described as "a nauseating masterpiece, and an essential recording" by Pitchfork. Also on this album is Dead on Arrival:

Their next album was called 20 Jazz Funk Greats (1979). The album was returned to the shops by irate jazz-funk fans complaining: "This isn't jazz funk. It's horrible noise!" Still, Pitchfork ranked 20 Jazz Funk Greats at #91 in its list of the 100 greatest albums of the 1970s and UK magazine Fact named it the best album of the 1970s, writing that "This album is a rupture. It’s an open crack into the unpronounceable dimensions into which tumble important streams of 20th-century pop, art, and underground culture, to seethe around each other, mingling, festering, sprouting new and unpredictable forms which in turn would ooze out to infest vast sections of what comes after."

This is the title track:

This is Hot On The Heels Of Love:

... And this is What a Day:

Their next album, Heathen Earth (1980), was a live album. Then Mission of Dead Souls was a recording of the final performance of Throbbing Gristle before their initial breakup. The concert took place in San Francisco on 29 May 1981. Here's Dead Souls:

... And this is Guts on the Floor:

Throbbing Gristle disbanded in 1981. As Cosey succinctly put it, "TG broke up because I and Gen broke up". Shortly after, P-Orridge and Paula P-Orridge (née Alaura O'Dell) were married. The couple had two daughters, Caresse and Genesse.

Following the breakup of Throbbing Gristle, in 1981 P-Orridge founded a band with Peter Christopherson, Alex Fergusson, and Geff Rushton, a.k.a. John Balance that they named Psychic TV. After a short time in Psychic TV, Christopherson formed Coil with Balance, which lasted for just under 23 years, until Balance died of a fall in the Weston-super-Mare home he shared with Christopherson. They were life partners. After Balance's death, Christopherson relocated to Thailand, where he lived until his own death in 2010.

It is worth listening to a few tracks by Coil, from their best album, Horse Rotorvator (1986), which was ranked 73 by Pitchfork Media in its list of the Top 100 Albums of the 1980s. The opening track is The Anal Staircase:

This is Ostia (The Death of Pasolini):

This is The First Five Minutes After Death:

This is their cover of Leonard Cohen's Who By Fire:

It is also worth listening to the B-side of their debut single (1985). The single's A-side features the remixed version of the song Panic, which initially appears on the album Scatology (1984). Co-written by Balance, Christopherson, and Thirlwell, Panic deals with the theme of an initiatory approach to experience, as well as the using of fear. The B-side features a cover version of Ed Cobb's song Tainted Love, drastically re-arranged to reflect HIV/AIDS epidemic, emerged in early 1980's; a controversial video for this song, directed by Christopherson and featuring Marc Almond, was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art.

Psychic TV's music was more accessible than Throbbing Gristle's or Coil's was. One, if pressed, could label it experimental pop. Their debut studio album, Force the Hand of Chance (1982), was very well received. Ned Raggett of AllMusic wrote: "The first Psychic TV album in many ways remains its best". From this album, here's a song that I like, called Just Drifting:

In Stolen Kisses, Genesis shares vocal duties with Marc Almond:

... And this is Message from thee Temple:

Dreams Less Sweet followed in 1983. This is The Orchids:

This is Clouds Without Water:

Those Who Do Not (1984), features recordings from a live performance in Reykjavík, Iceland in November 1983. This is the title track:

... And this is Oi Skinhead:

A few months later, another live album, N.Y. Scum was released, one of many to be released in the 1980s. In 1985 they released a soundtrack album called Mouth of the Night. It was the soundtrack for a ballet. From this album, here's Dawn:

The 1985 album Themes 2 was dedicated to Derek Jarman. The closing track is Rites of Reversal:

The closest they came to a mainstream hit single came in 1986: Godstar, a song inspired by the late Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, was a big hit in the Indie singles chart in the UK. It was a hit in the actual UK singles chart as well, spending 7 weeks in the top 100 and peaking at #67. Here's Genesis telling us how it all came about:

"We were playing at the Hacienda, in Manchester, and Alex did that Godstar riff just out of the blue. We’d been reading biographies of Brian Jones, so we started to sing about Brian Jones. Afterwards, our then-manager, this awful man called Terry Maclellan, came running in the dressing room, saying 'What was that new song you wrote?' 'What new song?' 'About Brian Jones!' 'I don’t remember, we made it up.' 'Oh shit! Do you remember how it went?' 'No, only that it was about Brian Jones.'"

"He found somebody who recorded the gig and got them to give him a cassette. We took it home and played it back and went, you know what? That is a totally natural pop song. So we went to Muff Winwood with a demo of Godstar and I played it to him. He [asked] for more experimental stuff like Dreams Less Sweet. I went, 'We’ve done it. This is what we want to do now. We want to do hyperdelic pop.' We were into Between the Buttons Rolling Stones, and Satanic Majesty’s and the 1960s. I want to do all this stuff, and Muff said, 'no, no, no, no.' I said, 'Muff, I have to say this. You don’t understand my imagination. And you cannot afford my brain. So we’re not on your label anymore. I'm going to do it myself.'"

"And that’s what we did. We walked out, and we went into the studio at [British record label] DJM. It was about to be demolished. It was where Elton John had made his first hit records. John Lennon had recorded there. David Bowie recorded there. It was this beautiful, old, analog studio, and we got it really, really cheap. We moved in, and my dream record was made: Allegory and Self, including Godstar. And, lo and behold, it was number one on the indie chart for weeks, and it got to number 29 in the national chart." (Let me just say that Genesis doesn't rightly remember the single's peak position; it was #67).

"At that point, if any record entered the top 30, Radio 1 had to play it a certain number of times a day. We thought [claps] we’re in! This is going to be a big hit! Because it’s just a really good, catchy pop song. Then we got a phone call from Radio 1, to our manager. He says, 'The Rolling Stones' office rang up Radio 1 and said, if you play that song at all, we will never let you play the Rolling Stones again.' So they wouldn’t play it and it didn’t go any higher. Mick Jagger stopped it in its tracks."

The above is taken from a July 2017 Genesis P-Orridge interview in Spin. I can neither confirm nor deny the veracity of these claims. Here's the song:

Their only other UK Top 100 entry came 6 months later: it was the Magickal Mystery D Tour (EP). It spent 2 weeks in the top 100, peaking at #65. It included their version of the Beach Boys' classic, Good Vibrations:

The EP also included Roman P; it concerned Roman Polanski.

Speaking of Roman Polanski, I can't resist the temptation of playing Roman Roman (1979) by the Australian band the Boys Next Door. That's a very young Nick Cave on vocals, you guys!

Allegory And Self was released in 1988 and comprises a varied selection of their work. Godstar is on it, as well as Just Like Arcadia:

In 1981, P-Orridge also founded a loosely organized network of occultists named Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY), with the aid of Balance, Tibet, and a number of members of the Process Church of the Final Judgement, a group which had exerted an influence on P-Orridge's occult thought. TOPY was conceived not as an occult order of teaching, but a forum to facilitate discussions on occult ideas by like-minded people, and from its beginnings was understood by its founders to be a successor to the late 19th and early 20th century Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), especially as the latter had been run under Crowley's leadership. Evans described TOPY as "a 'fusion' organization, creating a crossover of punk/experimental music with chaos magical thinking and practice", making particular use of the sigilisation practices of occult artist Austin Osman Spare. Journalist Gavin Baddeley described TOPY as "perhaps the most influential new occult order of the 1980s". P-Orridge had never wanted to be seen as the leader of an occult order, although many of those involved in TOPY were frustrated that outsiders regularly described P-Orridge as the group's leader. Accordingly, P-Orridge separated from TOPY in 1991, although it continued as a fan community after the departure.

Having been encouraged by Christian groups involved in propagating the Satanic ritual abuse moral panic, in 1992, the Channel 4 documentary show Dispatches claimed to have discovered videotapes depicting P-Orridge sexually abusing children in a ritual setting. Police from the Obscene Publications Squad subsequently raided depicting P-Orridge's home and confiscated several tons of artwork. At the time, P-Orridge was in Thailand undertaking famine relief work and fearing that they would be arrested on their return to the UK and lose custody of their children, they stayed out of the country for several years, settling in the United States. P-Orridge believed that the press and police attacks on them were as a result of a vendetta conceived by a right-wing fundamentalist Christian group. It was subsequently revealed that the footage obtained did not depict child abuse. Instead, it was a video artwork titled First Transmissions that had been made in the early 1980s, part-funded by Channel 4 themselves; the footage depicted sex-magical rites between adults, blood-letting performances, and scenes of the filmmaker Derek Jarman reading passages from the work of Geoffrey Chaucer. Embarrassed by these revelations, Channel 4 retracted their initial accusations.

In 1992 Kim Cascone (founder of Silent Records) introduced P-Orridge to Larry Thrasher, co-founder of the mid 80's San Francisco experimental noise band Thessalonians. This began a new period with Psychic TV returning to its psychedelic pop roots with Thrasher co-producing and co-writing the critically acclaimed Trip/Reset. The album includes a cover of Pink Floyd's Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun:

... It also includes a tribute song to Pink Floyd's founder, Syd Barrett, called A Star Too Far (Lullaby for Syd Barrett):

In January 1993, Genesis and his later second wife, Lady Jaye (née Jacqueline Breyer), relocated to Ridgewood, Queens in New York City. It was here that the couple embarked on what they termed the "Pandrogeny Project"; influenced by the cut-up technique, the duo underwent body modification to resemble one another, thus coming to identify themselves as a single pandrogynous being named "Breyer P-Orridge". In doing so, the pair underwent $200,000 worth of surgical alteration, receiving breast implants, cheek and chin implants, lip plumping, eye and nose jobs, tattooing, and hormone therapy, while also adopting gender neutral and alternating pronouns. With this project, P-Orridge's intent was to express a belief that the self is pure consciousness trapped within the DNA-governed body. The couple adopted the term "pandrogyne" because – in their words – "we wanted a word without any history or any connections with things - a word with its own story and its own information." They also stated that:

"We started out, because we were so crazy in love, just wanting to eat each other up, to become each other and become one. And as we did that, we started to see that it was affecting us in ways that we didn't expect. Really, we were just two parts of one whole; the pandrogyne was the whole and we were each other's other half."

P-Orridge kept making music, collaborating with a number of avant-garde and underground artists. They also got involved with books, and films, and multi-media happenings. There were reunions of both Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV.

On 9 October 2007, Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge died. The cause of death was a heart condition that was possibly related to stomach cancer. Psychic TV canceled its North American tour dates in the aftermath of Lady Jaye's death. A memorial was held at the PARTICIPANT INC. Gallery in New York City on 8 March 2008. P-Orridge's official website said, "Since that time Genesis continues to represent the amalgam Breyer P-Orridge in the material 'world' and Lady Jaye represents the amalgam Breyer P-Orridge in the immaterial 'world' creating an ongoing interdimensional collaboration." Thus, P-Orridge continued the Pandrogyne Project, having further surgical operations to alter their body and using "we" when in reference to themselves; however, to a reporter P-Orridge admitted that without Lady Jaye, "It's very hard. The bottom line is that we know she would continue. She wouldn't stop because it was complicated." From this point, P-Orridge began referring to themselves in the plural in order to keep Breyer's memory alive.

Let's close with the answer to the question "do you have any regrets?" from P-Orridge's interview in Spin:

"Of course. Any times that you’ve even unwittingly been selfish or mean, or said something bitterly without thinking - the usual stuff. In terms of career, we’ve been blessed. The only person we didn’t work with we would’ve liked to is Captain Beefheart. We did hear through people that mine was the only other voice in rock music that he respected, which was the biggest feather we could ever put in my cap. Iggy Pop just said he’d wished he’d thought about Throbbing Gristle more at the time, but they’re still locked into a business. Bless him for it. He’s survived, and that’s what he does. But he would be the first to admit he’s not trying to change the world. We are. And that’s the most important task, beyond everything else. Can we possibly at least contribute to making this a better place? Right now, that’s a pretty dark future we’re looking at. So there’s time to really reassess how we do things, what we say, and where’s the next bridge. We’re a bridge to my generation and now to the Beats. And where’s the next bridge? What do you see out of there?"

"It is pretty daunting right now. We started fighting against the status quo in the mid-‘60s. We’ve been fighting inequity and injustice as we saw it; we’ve tried to be thoughtful; we squatted buildings and shared them with people. We’ve done all these different things to incrementally move us all a little bit toward a place of common sense, which is what it really is. Of course, everybody’s equal."

"Before we survive and deserve to survive as a species, we have to revisualize our place as a species. If you imagine that what we call the humane species is an organism and each one of us is just a piece of the organism, when an organism is damaged or injured, it will martial all of its resources to heal the damage. If it’s suffering lack of nourishment somewhere, it will channel nourishment to that place. If we did that as a species, when there’s suffering somewhere, we automatically fix it. When there’s famine somewhere, we fix it because it’s damaging the whole organism. It will change everything. But everyone wants everyone else to go first, and so as long as there’s that paranoia, we’re just going around in this very slow decreasing spiral."

"There are some very evil people out there, waiting opportunistically to exploit us. No matter how hard it is, we have to start taking care of each other. That doesn’t mean becoming social workers. We can all just, thinking through, why am I doing this tonight? Is there a way I can make it relevant to how I’m feeling and share that in a way that touches someone else? That’s a beginning: to be recognized by someone else as being in the same sort of place. But it’s a long, tough road."

"It’s interesting, though, because science, and especially quantum science, is so much like Tibetan Buddhism and philosophy of different types and explorations of psychedelic consciousness. It feels as though this right-wing backlash is exactly that. It’s a rearguard action of fear for all the potential that’s just waiting to overwhelm you. If you can hold on until those fuckers are dead, and they’re all in their seventies, then maybe we can then follow opportunities of science and get out of this mess."