Genesis P-Orridge

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Template:Cleanup-date Genesis P-Orridge (born Neil Andrew Megson February 22, 1950, or May 22, 1949), is an English performer, musician, writer and artist. His early confrontational performance work with COUM Transmissions in the late 1960s - early 1970s along with the original Industrial band Throbbing Gristle, which dealt with subjects such as prostitution, pornography, serial killers and occultism, generated controversy. Later musical work with Psychic TV received wider exposure, including some chart-topping singles. GP-O can be found on well over 200 releases.

He has two daughters, named Caresse and Genesse, with his former wife, and creative partner, Paula (aka Alaura O'Dell).

Image:Genesis p orridge.jpg

Early life

Neil Megson was born in 1950, in Victoria Park, Manchester. His parents were involved in both theatre and music. A photograph of Neil, aged five, appears on the cover of the CD A Hollow Cost.

As a child he was diagnosed with asthma and prescribed steroids, medication on which he is still reliant. In his teens he attended Solihull School.

Early inspirations

An avid reader, Megson was familiar with the occult. In his essay "Effects Of Childhood: Genesis P-Orridge", it states that Megson's grandmother, Edith Swindells, was a medium. The Megson family lived at the edge of Epping Forest, in Loughton. His father, Ron, was a Jazz musician who, Genesis says, had strong affinities for Bebop and Nat King Cole.

In the Manchester suburb of Gadley, listening to Radio Luxembourg, Megson first heard The Rolling Stones. At this point he became obsessed with The Stones, especially Brian Jones. It was Jones' way with visual presentation, his androgyny, the effortless appearance of his mannerisms and dress and, as Megson saw it, his telepathic way with music and sound that resonated. According to the liner notes of Godstar: Thee Director's Cut By Psychic TV, Megson eventually met Brian and the Stones during a taping of the British pop TV show called Thank Your Lucky Stars, on 21 March 1966 in the early evening, Aston, Birmingham. This experience, along with an earlier meeting with some very androgynous mods dressed in dandy attire, ensured that the rest of Megson's life, as Genesis P-Orridge, was focused on self-discovery through writing, performance, theatre, painting, film, music, and various ritual, spiritual and physical disciplines.

Other sources of inspiration include: early Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, The Velvet Underground, The Fugs, The Doors, John Cage, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dalí, John C. Lilly, Carl Jung, Aleister Crowley, Austin Osman Spare, Brion Gysin, and William S. Burroughs.

Name change and COUM Transmissions

In 1965, Neil subsumed himself into the character of Genesis P-Orridge. He released his first record, Early Worm, as Genesis P-Orridge in 1968 and legally changed his name in 1971. In the same year, he met William S. Burroughs after a brief correspondence. Burroughs took him under his wing and tutored Genesis in magick. (P-Orridge, 2003)

After dropping out of the University of Hull in 1969, Genesis joined Exploding Galaxy, a commune in London's Islington Park Street. Members abandoned all normal modes of living, all notions of privacy, and Britain's class structure. Discipline was expected and costumes were the norm, as was role-playing and a rejection of all forms of social convention.

He returned to Hull in the north of England, and set about the formation of a collective, which eventually included fellow enfant terrible Cosey Fanni Tutti. The group rented space in a former jam factory, on 8 Prince Street, a kind of thinktank for pranksters which Genesis called "Ho-Ho House". It was also called "The Alien Brain" after a Nam June Paik-style sculpture located in the middle of the common area. COUM Transmissions, which began as a band in the Captain Beefheart tradition but was also concerned with improvisation and Genesis' trance-inducing African-style drumming.

Cosey Fanni Tutti and GP-O became, more and more, the focus of COUM events and transformed it from a theatrical music and theatre operation into more of a performance art in the Fluxus tradition. The sexy, the taboo, the ghastly, the ghostly, and the ghoulish were all explored with equal parts mischief, ritual, discipline, and excitement.

The two of them became local oddities in Hull and, during 1973, they moved to Hackney in East London. They pushed the envelope of sexual taboo even further when Hipgnosis's Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson joined them.

Cosey worked as a secretary, stripper, and pornographic and erotic model. The now infamous "Prostitution" show, in 1976 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London included on display Cosey's pornographic images from magazines as well as erotic nude photographs. The show featured a nice looking stripper, used Tampax in glass, and transvestite guards. Prostitutes, punks, people in amazing costumes, and general curiosities hired to mingle with the cocktail-sipping gallery set. Like the Dadaists, the Situationists, the Surrealists they were calling into question ideas about what is offensive, what is mundane and what is art.

The show caused debate in Parliament about the public funding of such events. In the House of Commons, Scottish Tory MP Sir Nicholas Fairbairn demanded an explanation from Arts Minister Harold Lever and proclaimed Genesis and Cosey as "wreckers of civilisation". Fleet Street was not slow to pick up the story and thanks to the Daily Mirror, Genesis and Cosey became household names in Britain. The reviews were cut up, framed and put on display for the remainder of the exhibition. This was also reported in newspapers, so cut-ups about the cut-ups were also put on display.

Cultural engineering

Genesis P-Orridge was instrumental to the development of numerous musical scenes, most especially the Industrial, Post-Industrial and Acid House scenes. The extent of his involvement in the last genre is often disputed, though it seems likely that he and his cohorts in Psychic TV (PTV) were among the first to import the Detroit Techno music to England and to fuse it with a psychedelic attitude via a series of pseudo-compliation albums designed to suggest that such a scene already existed. In an extremely critical interview found on the FOPI website, the prolific former P-Orridge collaborator Fred Giannelli includes himself among the people who believe Acid House was created by and belongs solely to people who, as he puts it, aren't white, aren't English and aren't short. For Giannelli, Juan Atkins and others in the Detroit scene were the true innovators.

However, it was a Psychic TV picture disc that was the first to have the phrase "Acid House" written on it. Due to a copyright problem with an image of Superman used in the illustration, this disc was pulled and is much sought after by collectors.

His former wife and PTV collaborator, Paula P-Orridge, is no longer mentioned in liner notes of any of the reissues of the music or writings since the mid-1990s. Sometimes this cropping is extremely awkward for those familiar with the 12 years of PTV that she was a part of.

GP-O and Paula have been associated with the culture of body modification, as well as magical or religious movements. They founded Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth aka TOPY. In the mid-1990s Genesis chose to distance himself from TOPY, even going so far as to claim that the project had been ended, as he had done with Throbbing Gristle in the early eighties -- Thee Mission Is Terminated. This statement was and is dismissed by those still active within the TOPY Network.

In 1975 GP-O was bored with the remnants of the flower children culture that he was once, if peripherally, a part of. With Cosey he made tie-dyed clothing and sold OZ Magazine, one of Britain's underground/counterculture magazines, which stated that the two of them were outsiders even within their outsider commune.

A controversial performer and prolific artist from San Francisco, Monte Cazazza spoke with Genesis about topics germane to what Genesis would later call "cultural engineering". He had become familiar with COUM during an event in Los Angeles in 1972, and through the international Mail Art network. He was living in a squat in London, in the East End with Genesis. It was in those circumstances that the concept of "industrial music" was born. According to GP-O's essay, "Remembrances Of Ian Curtis Of 'Joy Division'", Cazazza and P-Orridge had a telepathic understanding. An earlier idea was "factory," inspired by Andy Warhol, or a "Factory Records," however Cazazza's phrase "Industrial Music For Industrial People" is what stuck. Thus, industrial music was born on 3 September 1975in London Fields Park. A name and a concept were there and, with the help of people like Sleazy and Chris Carter, a mutual friend and ABBA enthusiast, instruments and effects were constructed in an ad hoc fashion, as Genesis explained to Grid Magazine in 1998.

COUM had always been a confrontational enterprise. The Nazi visual element from early on was, according to P-Orridge, in part due to the influence of COUM's Foxtrott Echo. The bleak themes, the Nazi visuals, and Industrial music that included found and ambient urban sounds, all clicked with the already established thread of acknowledging cults and cult leaders like Charles Manson. Toward the end of COUM, Peter/Sleazy was more involved and COUM performances would often consist of only GP-O, Cosey and Sleazy, the core group who went on to form Throbbing Gristle.

Throbbing Gristle

The birth of Throbbing Gristle (TG) was 18 October 1976 at the ICA It was a kind of four-piece rock band, or "chaotic sound laboratory," as GP-O says. There was some overlap. There were a couple of TG performances previous to this but the ICA one was the ritualized beginning. One message given at this event was that whereas COUM was hard to bottle on purpose, Throbbing Gristle was an intentionally marketable project. This was the anti-rock band who gave dis-concerts. The reporter from NME who attended was among the unimpressed.

The first actual Throbbing Gristle gig was at the Air Gallery in London on July 6, 1976. The band performed in one room with the music "appearing" in an adjacent room. Peter worked in special effects and provided the performers with simulated scars, and Chris used a razor to slash himself. As Genesis wrote in a letter to Anarki & Kaos< in 1978, it "was a mixture of the real/unreal, no one knew which, ambiguous as ever."

At that point Throbbing Gristle headquarters was 10 Martello Street, Hackney, in East London, an address of an anti-West End artist collective, one of 13 such places, leased by SPACE Ltd. The Genesis and Cosey living/work space was the mailing address of Industrial Records. The IR logo was a faded, high-contrast black-and-white photograph of Auschwitz's main ovens. The Death Factory was where TG and associated bands rehearsed, including 23 Skidoo, who were evicted in the 21st Century.

At first, Sleazy worked as a technician and didn't appear in many of the earliest TG performances. Both Sleazy and Chris Carter had solid and established grounding in the audio/visual world as well as their own artistic careers as solo performers even prior to their involvement with COUM and TG.

The military-industrial lightning bolt TG logo was designed by GP-O on graph paper. Representing a short circuiting of the power paradigm, the logo was made for mass production and appeared in stickers, badges, arm bands and t-shirts. GP-O had a suede head cut and the whole band appeared in camo gear and Doc Martens. When this look appeared to be catching on with many of the attendees of the events, it was dropped. TG would appear in white wearing baseball shoes. San Francisco's RE/Search #6/7: Industrial Culture Handbook, from 1983, includes extensive TG information, methods, philosophy, music, photographs and interviews. The members of Throbbing Gristle are pictured wearing YMO touring clothing in one photo, which is arranged like a Martin Denny record cover.

In an ultimate ironic and Dadaesque act, TG had hand-printed camouflage gear designed in Paris. "Guaranteed To Disappoint" was a TG slogan. The idea was to never be stationary, never be vulnerable to what stagnation brings and has brought.

The final Gristle single, "Discipline", featured the phrase "Marching Music For Psychick Youth". Just as TG was already forming within COUM so was Psychic TV being born during TG. The whole "psychick" element was meant to be TG's next phase of going deeper into the concepts addressed beyond the bluffs, the satires and mind games, as GP-O told Gnosis Magazine's Jay Kinney. He was creating some buzz by releasing leaflets to the public that read "from the Psychick Youth Headquarters." The idea would be to deconstruct magic, strip it of its mysticism, and let it re-enter popular culture. Everything, including the television (or any other such modern gadget), should be investigated as a possible tool with which to perform rituals and thus discover the self, the other, and the divine.

The final IR release was called Nothing Here But The Recordings, a best-of taken from the archives of William S. Burroughs, who had allowed GP-O and Sleazy access to many rare and unheard reel-to-reel tapes stored in various locations.

The final TG event, Mission Of Dead Souls, was in May 1981 in San Francisco. Soon after the acrimonious disolution, Genesis and Paula P-Orridge (neè Alaura O'Dell) were married on a day trip southward to Tijuana.

Psychic TV

In 1981, at 50 Beck Road, Hackney, the flat where Genesis and Paula were living, Psychic TV came into being. Alex Fergusson of Alternative TV had, over tea, encouraged a somewhat down-and-out GP-O to begin writing songs and start something new. The musical collaboration between the two goes back to the very first ATV line-up, which included Genesis as drummer. According to a bit of writ on the official GP-O and Voiceprint websites, the name was Fergusson's idea, with the "psychic" part representing Genesis and the "TV" part representing Alex. "Just Drifting" was the first PTV song, from a poem by Genesis stuck to his water heater.

As with previous projects, Psychic TV was unveiled as part and parcel of an event. Organized by GP-O, David Dawson, and Roger Ely, The Final Academy was a 4-day multimedia celebratory rally held in Manchester and at the B2 Gallery in South London in 1982. It brought performers and audience together with literature, performance, film and music. PTV, Cabaret Voltaire, 23 Skidoo, Z'ev, John Giorno, William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Terry Wilson, Jeff Nuttall, and The Last Few Days all participated to honor the cut-up techniques and theories of William S. Burroughs, Ian Sommerville, Anthony Balch and Gysin. Video projection and early sampling were used here, as well as whispered utterances by GPO reprocessed as a soundtrack to Gysin's Dreammachine by the Hafler Trio.

Force Thee Hand Ov Chance, Dreams Less Sweet, Allegory and Self, and Trip/Reset are considered by GP-O, in an interview with Sonic Envelope, to be the fully-realized PTV albums -- "metaphorical and very, very considered and carefully constructed meticulous albums."

Psychic TV was an ever-evolving thesis but "thee mission" remains to wake people up from the delirium of preconceived notions and the sleepwalking most of us subject ourselves to. Amazing shows, even on the many off nights, are always part of what PTV was and continues to be. Jarring, comforting, disappointing, fulfilling, exciting, mundane, transcendental, unnerving, ugly, beautiful and surreal, in keeping with the title of Derek Jarman's film of a Throbbing Gristle dis-concert, Psychic Rally in Heaven (Heaven being a club in London), a PTV event/experience/show or dis-concert often takes on the mood of a revival meeting, wherein the collective consciousness takes a break from the day-to-day and gets transported, in the tradition of Sun Ra, Grateful Dead, Fela, George Clinton or even, at times, with audience and performers becoming blurred, akin to a Santería ceremony or kirtan.

Earning an entry into the Guinness Book Of World Records for most records released in a year by a musical group, Psychic TV set about, in the mid-eighties, to release 23 live albums on the 23rd of each month for 23 months in recognition of the 23 enigma. The liner notes to each of these releases functioned somewhat like mini-manifestos in the tradition of the Situationist International or William S. Burroughs' Electronic Revolution in addition to recounting aspects of the recordings contained therein. For example, the fourth album in this series, Live In Reykjavík, featuring part of a ritual from Godhi Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson includes liner notes that refer to Christianity as "sham X-tianity," in reclamation of a Pagan heritage via an Ásatrú marriage, over which Beinteinsson presided, below a statue of Thor in "thee wilderness".

Trouble in England

In February 1992 GP-O, the family, and various members of the TOPY entourage, had just come from Kathmandu, where they had distributed rice, dal, and clothing to those in need from a Hindu temple in an annual tradition of "giving back" through PTV royalties. A disturbing telegram arrived stating that there was "trouble in England".

Scotland Yard arrived on a tip in the hopes of finding incriminating items. This was followed by a Channel 4 Television program addressing a supposed growth of Satanism in the U.S. and the U.K. Geraldo Rivera had, with much success, unleashed a similar program to the U.S. in 1987. According to Genesis's account of the events, a fundamentalist lawyer in Liverpool had convinced a couple of mental patients to relocate to a Christian safe house in the North of England where, through various methods including sleep deprivation they would confess to involvement in a Satanic cult, in this case "Psychic TV". These individuals claimed they were forced to engage in various ghastly and unspeakable acts in the basement of the (basementless) house in Hackney, East London.

GP-O believes that all these extremists -- he and his family as well as the right wing pawns in the aforementioned events -- were actually being used, as everyone is, by those with the power to play both sides against the middle, and, in such a way, ultimately benefit those in wealth and power.

In Brighton, where Aleister Crowley was cremated, the swelling P-Orridge archives had already been extensive for ages. Oddly enough, actual controversial items, including sigils, were left untouched. Amidst the many items, eventually what was procured was a videotape, some 10 years old at the time, of a supposed ritual murder which, according to a Sonic Envelope interview with GP-O, was actually made by Jhon Balance and Sleazy. In the years since this episode, it would all seem like bad blood between Genesis and his ex-co-conspirators, as well as his homeland, has nearly all been absorbed. All charges were dropped, not long after the handover of power in the UK, and all the items returned.

Genesis and family heard from their lawyers in Britain that it wouldn't be safe to return home. The P-Orridge family approached the parents of actress Winona Ryder who had offered them refuge if needed. Soon after the relocation to California, Genesis and Alaura's marriage ended.

Recent life

Genesis relocated to New York City with his second wife, Lady Jaye, nee Jacqueline Breyer, and began an ongoing experiment in body modification aimed at creating one "Pandrogenous" being named "Genesis Breyer P-Orridge". Like Brian Zembic before him, Genesis P-Orridge got breast implants and began referring to himself as s/he. A book of GP-O writings, poems and observations, called S/He Has Arrived, was published in Nepal.

In the mid 1990s, GP-O collaborated with different people in music, including Pigface and Skinny Puppy. Oddly, GP-O also performed with Nik Turner and a reinvention of Hawkwind, a band with whom he'd shared bills with in the early 1970s.

In 1999, Genesis performed with the briefly reunited late 1980s' version of Psychic TV for an event at London's Royal Festival Hall. It was called Time's Up, also the title of the Thee Majesty CD release. The MC for the event, via pre-recorded video, was Quentin Crisp. A DVD was made of this event, which included the Master Musicians Of Jajouka and ? & the Mysterians, Billy Childish and Thee Headcoats.

In the 1999 World Serpent release of the Thee Majesty CD Time's Up, Jaqueline Megson is credited as providing Point Of View, Bryin Dall for Frequency Of Truth and Genesis as Divination Of Word.

In December 2003, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, calling himself Djinn, unveiled PTV3, a new act drawing upon the early "Hyperdelic" work of Psychic TV with media theorist Douglas Rushkoff among its members.

On 16 May 2004, all four former members of Throbbing Gristle performed at the London Astoria for the first time in 23 years.

References

• Ford, Simon. Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle. Black Dog Publishing, 1999. ISBN 1901033600
• P-Orridge, Genesis, Douglas Rushkoff (foreword), and Carl Abrahamsson (introduction). Painful but Fabulous: The Life and Art of Genesis P-Orridge. Soft Skull Press, 2002. ISBN 1887128883
• P-Orridge, Genesis. "Magick Squares and Future Beats." Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult. The Disinformation Company, 2003: 103-118 ISBN 0-9713942-7-X

GP-O appears in the 2005 film "dig"

External links

• Genesis P-Orridge Official Website All Breyer P-Orridge information and most everything covered in this entry is to be found here.