London Calling (61 page)

In Hull they acquired a three-ton Austin truck that they named Doris. In the back they built a four-poster bed complete with
curtains and bolted down an old rocking chair by the back doors. They painted the interior pink and silver and made it really
pretty, ‘faggotized’ it as Genesis put it. They began to put on C O U M Transmissions performances all over the country and
soon they knew a number of artists living in London. Robin Klassnik and Jules Baker in particular encouraged them to move
to town. Genesis: ‘They said we were wasted in Hull. It was better for us to come to London with what we were doing.’ In 1973,
with only four weeks left on their lease, they had to either find another place in Hull or make the move. Robin and Jules
both had studio space at 10 Martello Street, e8, in Hackney, a large factory premises containing forty artists’ studios leased
out through the S P A C E scheme, across the street from London Fields. In 1970 the S P A C E scheme had been allocated 200
short-term studio spaces by the G L C but 10 Martello Street proved to an exception and remained in the hands of artists.
The rents were very cheap, but the artists had to clear the space and build their own walls. They weren’t supposed to live
in them but many artists did. Genesis rang and explained their predicament and Robin told him there was one space available
in the basement but that it was in terrible condition. Genesis said: ‘We’ll take it.’

The basement was the one derelict room that no-one wanted: it was damp, it had no floor, no electricity and no water supply.
They drove Doris down, complete with their dog, Tremble, and three cats, and parked outside while they did the place up. The
floor was so rotten that it had to be replaced. Genesis drove around Hackney until he found a site where several houses were
being demolished. He explained to the workmen that he was working for a children’s charity that was renovating a building
and they needed timber for new floors. The men gave him as much timber as he could take. They inserted a series of beams and
built a suspended floor above the original one. This was where Throbbing Gristle later played and rehearsed. Because no-one
was allowed to live in the studio spaces, Genesis and Cosey built a giant box in one corner of the derelict room made to look
like a pile of timber when in actual fact it was hollow. Inside was a single mattress and a tiny light running off a battery.
It was a snug little nest and at night Cosy and Genesis would sneak inside. There was one sink. They fixed the water and an
eccentric Arab neighbour who liked to visit the artists’ studios turned out to be an electrician and provided them with sufficient
electricity to work and
make cups of tea, though not enough to cook. So 10 Martello Street became the new C O U M headquarters and later, when they
started Throbbing Gristle, it was renamed the Death Factory (London Fields across the road had been a plague pit, and it was
already a factory).

They did not have to live in a box for long. They met the girlfriend of a member of the band Rinky Dink and the Crystal Set
who were squatting a terraced house at 50 Beck Road, just around the corner. The band had just received a contract from the
EMI Harvest label and were about to move out. Beck Road was scheduled for demolition by Hackney Council, which was intending
to build an extension to Hackney College, but as they moved their tenants out, more and more of the houses were squatted by
artists, among them Helen Chadwick and Mikey Cuddihy. In the end, after a successful campaign to save Beck Road, the council
made the squats legal and gave their management to the Acme Housing Association, an artists’ housing charity set up in 1972.
By the time Genesis and Cosey got involved, Acme was managing thirty-one properties in the East End of London. Between them,
Acme and S P A C E are largely responsible for the East End becoming known as an artists’ area.

Genesis and Cosey quickly got to know others at 50 Martello Street, including Gary Wragg, Ian McKeever, Roger Bates, John
Fassolas, Noel Forster and Mike Porter, who all had studios there. The building operated much like an art collective. Rather
than each having a traditional painting studio, many of the artists had left their studios open-plan so they could share with
each other, and there was an emphasis on inflatables, film-making, the manufacture of multiples, and theatrical and performance
events rather than easel painting. The caretaker, who also had a studio there, was Bruce Lacey, one of the first performance
artists in Britain, whose robots had performed at the 1965 Albert Hall reading. He had continued to investigate this area
and in the early seventies he and his family put on a week-long event called
The Laceys at Home
. They built a three-walled room on the lawn outside the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park and proceeded to live in it as normally
as possible, cooking meals, watching television, while completely ignoring the onlookers. One evening David Bowie managed
to attract their attention and told them he was a fan of their work. They returned the compliment. It was at Martello Street
that they made the film
The Lacey Rituals
, which documented the way they made toast, boiled an egg or put on makeup throughout the whole of a day. Their son John was
studying fine art at Goldsmiths and soon became involved with Genesis and Cosey. He began to perform with C O U M using the
name John Gunni Busck. Inevitably C O U M’s own actions were
influenced by those of the Lacey family, but mostly they performed within a relatively well-defined form which began more
than a decade earlier with the happenings artists Yves Klein, Joseph Beuys, Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow and Jim Dine and
which continued into the late sixties and beyond. Within this genre, C O U M’s approach seems closest to the confrontational
style of the Viennese Action school of Hermann Nitsch, Otto Mühl, Günter Brus and company.

Their own bleak, harrowing vision was from a distopian future. They were concerned with getting their audience to confront
the darkest areas of their being: the most unacceptable and most forbidden. They were not operating on the outer limits –
except possibly of the law – because they saw no limits. Their performances took them into areas that were traumatic both
to their audiences and to themselves. Continuing the ideas Genesis had absorbed during his three months with Transmedia Explorations,
he set out to shock their audiences into a clear recognition of present time, devoid of prudery, hypocrisy or any preconceived
notions of behaviour. Like William Burroughs’s
Naked Lunch
, he wanted them to see what was on the end of the fork. C O U M appeared naked, they slashed their bodies with knives, they
sloshed around in stage blood and real blood, they performed and simulated sex, they drank urine and vomited, and the audience
vomited too: even the famously theoretical performance artist Victor Burgin – notorious for having himself crucified on the
bonnet of a Volkswagen – and conceptualist John Baldessari had to run from the room during one performance after fifteen minutes.
They said afterwards: ‘It’s sickening and disgusting and it’s not art!’

The general direction of C O U M at this point was one of exploring preconceived notions of sexual differences and attitudes.
In Hull and when they first moved to London they had made a number of collages, usually in the form of mail art to send to
other artists, often using girlie pin-ups and other sexual images. Now they concentrated on more commonplace elements of everyday
female experience which were normally never mentioned, such as menstruation and the use of tampons. The problem that many
members of the audiences had with this was that rather than celebrate the female experience or make it inclusive, the actions
were often so disgusting that preconceived notions were reinforced rather than demolished as Genesis chewed on used Tampax,
poured milk over his naked body and drank menstrual blood. One such action was described by Cosey in an interview as involving
‘anal and vaginal sex at the same time using a beautiful object we had made from a length of wood with 6 inch metal spikes
all around it and dildos on each end.
It was very tribal and ritualistic, an initiation ceremony. It wasn’t sexually arousing at all.’ The unplanned, intuitive
approach to their actions often led them in directions that possibly contradicted their original intentions. In this particular
instance there was an opportunity to analyse the event as it was held at the Arts Meeting Place (A M P), an artists’ co-operative
at 48 Earlham Street, in Covent Garden, which held a Sunday afternoon open house where artists could meet to discuss their
work. A M P had everything from traditional painting exhibitions to performance art and music. There was music on Friday nights
and open meetings on Thursdays.

In 1974, Cosey’s exploration of attitudes to female sexuality led her to give up her job as a secretary and begin full-time
modelling for an agency specializing in pornography. Many people have questioned whether this was simply a way of making money
but Cosey told
Kinokaze
magazine that it was part of her ongoing exploration of the female body. She told André Stitt: ‘We’d used a lot of girlie
magazines for the collages etc., and I wanted to be able to use myself.’ In her
Time to Tell
booklet she wrote:

My photographic and Striptease projects were you might say like any other investigation but with a real purpose… Through working
in a wide variety of photographs/films and venues and with an equally wide variety of men and women, all involving sex in
its many guises, I have lost the element within me which suggests as a woman I must always appear sexually presentable. Sex
is beautiful and ugly, tender and brutal both physically and mentally.
²

Her employers naturally didn’t know her ulterior motive and when the fact emerged some time later many of the magazines refused
to use her again. For several years, however, she appeared regularly on the pages of
Curious
,
Alpha
,
Oui
,
Pleasure
,
Obey
,
Fiesta
,
Park Lane
,
Gallery
and
Men Only
, as well as in a number of sex films and working as a stripper.

Meanwhile, Bruce Lacey’s son John had introduced Cosey and Genesis to Chris Carter, a sound engineer who had worked with a
number of television stations, including Granada, Thames and L W T. They became friends and he became a regular visitor to
Martello Street. Most weekends were spent experimenting with bits of second-hand electronic equipment, exploring the various
possible sounds. C O U M didn’t want to work just within the elitist avant-garde art world and thought that they would have
a better chance of reaching a wider audience of young people by performing as a group. On 3 September 1975 they formed Throbbing
Gristle, featuring Chris Carter on keyboards, Genesis on vocals, bass guitar and amplified violin, Cosey on lead guitar and
special effects – she was taught piano as a child and passed
her exams so naturally she was given a different instrument – and Peter Christopherson on tapes and trumpet. Christopherson,
known as ‘Sleazy’ for his interest in sex, had joined C O U M early in 1975. In their first performance he read aloud a text
describing the sadistic castration of a teenage boy, pushing C O U M into an ever more extreme form of performance art. He
was a member of the Casualties Union, volunteers who play the part of casualties in Civil Defence and emergency services exercises,
and was trained in the application of stage makeup to create horrific wounds and mutilations, a talent that C O U M immediately
utilized. He told Simon Ford: ‘As a consequence of my joining C O U M they became more visceral in their interests.’ It also
meant they had a brilliant designer on board as Sleazy was a member of the Hipgnosis design team, responsible for, among other
things, the design of the Pink Floyd album sleeves. For a while, C O U M and Throbbing Gristle’s activities overlapped with
T G, as they came to be known, giving their first public performance at the opening of a week-long C O U M programme held
at the ICA on the Mall on 19–26 October 1976.

The opening-night party involved strippers, a blue comedian, Throbbing Gristle, and the punk band Chelsea, renamed L S D for
the night as a way of countering the anti-hippie rhetoric that people like McLaren had been spreading. They brought along
Mick Jones and the Bromley Contingent. It was through this connection that Bernie Rhodes was able to get the Clash booked
in later that same week as part of C O U M’s programme. C O U M had been marginally involved in the Sex Pistols when McLaren
had asked Sleazy to take some photographs of them. The results made them look like ‘psycho rent boys’ according to Jon Savage
and were altogether too strong for McLaren, who did not use them. The exhibition space was devoted to Cosey Fanni Tutti’s
Prostitution
show and consisted of the props used in C O U Ms past performances: an unsettling collection of anal syringes, meat cleavers,
jars of Vaseline, used tampons, chains and so on. There was a display of framed photographs of C O U M in action and of photocopies
of press cuttings about C O U M. But it was the fourth element of the show, available for viewing only on request, that drew
the attention of the tabloids. These was a series of framed tearsheets from the various men’s magazines that she had posed
for as art works. Although none showed actual sexual intercourse, many of them were explicit. The exhibition was accompanied
by a leaflet, written by Genesis, in which he explained:

Cosey has appeared in 40 magazines now as a deliberate policy. All of these framed form the core of the exhibition. Different
ways of seeing and using
Cosey with her consent, produced by people unaware of her reasons, as a woman and as an artist, for participating. In that
sense, pure views.
³

The Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn saw the show and fulminated in the
Daily Mail
that it was ‘a sickening outrage. Obscene. Evil. Public money is being wasted here to destroy the morality of our society.
These people are the wreckers of civilization! They want to advance decadence.’
⁴
The
Daily Telegraph
felt that ‘every social evil is celebrated’
⁵
, whereas the
Sun
, home of the topless page three girl, thought that the show attacked traditional British values: ‘It has nothing to do with
the Britain we are proud to promote. Mr. Orridge is prostituting Britain – and sending us the bill.’
⁶
These wonderful new cuttings were framed and added to the exhibition. But C O U M had touched on a raw nerve. None of the
papers wanted to discuss the issues raised by the exhibition, or by the radical and unorthodox way that Cosey had chosen in
order to investigate and critique pornographic imagery. They just saw it as obscene. Questions were asked in the House and
the Home Secretary was asked if he had any plans to amend the legislation on the law of obscenity. Genesis and Cosey explained
their intentions on television but the furore dragged on and on until everyone was thoroughly fed up with it, including the
other residents of Martello Street, who had to put up with Fleet Street hacks trying to get to Genesis and Cosey. Pressure
was put on the ICA and they were forced to close their controversial theatre. Their grant was suspended until they submitted
plans for further cost-cutting and the director, Ted Little, and Robert Loder, chairman of the ICA council, resigned two
months later.