Genesis P-Orridge
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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).
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Early life
At the dawn of the fifties, Neil Megson was born and raised in Manchester to parents who were involved in both theatre and music. A photograph of Neil, at age five, appears on the cover of the CD A Hollow Cost, complete with combed hair, piercing eyes and a black tie.
It seemed that the young Megson was afflicted with asthma; he was given steroids and has needed them since. This may partly explain his obsession with a shattered view of reality, the cut-up techniques, and the constant observation of the jigsaw puzzle aspects of life.
Early inspirations
An avid reader, Megson was familiar with the occult. According to the essay "Effects Of Childhood: Genesis P-Orridge", found on the official website, Neal'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. It's through the lens of improvisation that one can view the former Neil Megson. The importance of Jazz cannot be overstated when experiencing Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV or Thee Majesty. Knowing how to improvise in art and life allows for more possibilties, creativity, higher understanding of the esoteric relationships within and between the spiritual and temporary worlds. Improvisation allows people to break through boundaries, survive, triumph and, ultimately, transcend.
In Gadley, a Manchester suburb, Neil found his strength and inspiration when he first heard, via Radio Luxembourg, The Rolling Stones. He'd previously not found any real sense of identity in Elvis Presley or the general swagger of Rock 'n Roll itself but when the track "Come On" came through the radio, everything changed. At this point he became obsessed with The Stones, especially Brian Jones. It was Jones' way with visual presentation, his androgynous side, the effortless appearance of his mannerisms and dress, and, of course, his telepathic way with music and sound. Indeed, the North West boy's psychological prison life had finished. According to the liner notes of Godstar: Thee Director's Cut By Psychic TV, as well as other places, he eventually even 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 over-the-top dandy attire, the rest of Neil'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. He also found a clique of fellow mods with which to share ideas and gain strength.
Other sources of inspiration and for the ideals, visions, and ideas of Genesis P-Orridge include, but aren't limited to: Frank Zappa and the Mothers Of Invention, The Velvet Underground, The Fugs, The Doors, John Cage, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, John C. Lilly, Carl Jung, Aleister Crowley, Austin Osman Spare, Brion Gysin, and William S. Burroughs. For P-Orridge, these people cut up or otherwise re-arranged reality itself. It is safe to say that these figures addressed and challenged the common perception of writing, art and ways of viewing reality.
COUM Transmissions
In 1965, Neil decided to let the character of Genesis P-Orridge become his artistic self, to let him loose on the world. In 1971, he legally changed his name to Genesis P-Orridge. In the same year, he met William S. Burroughs after a brief postal correspondence. His first question to Burroughs was, "Tell me about magick?" after which Burroughs took him under his wing and taught Genesis the magickal reality-altering technique of cut-ups. (P-Orridge, 2003)
In interviews toward the end of the 20th Century, Genesis talked of re-evaluating the GP-O identity and wondered about Neil, the maker of fine art.
In 1968, Genesis P-Orridge made his first record, Early Worm.
After dropping out of the University of Hull in 1969, where he had been studying Social Sciences, Genesis joined Gerald Fitzgerald's Exploding Galaxy upon invitation, a commune in London's Islington Park Street. Members abandoned all normal modes of living, all notions of privacy, all middle class strangleholds, 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 enfante terrible and like-minded future Cosey Fanni Tutti, still (Christine) Carol Newby, a native of Hull. Carol rented a room in the 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, came into being, comparable to a native Northern English Sun Ra.
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 prankster operation, in the Fluxus tradition. The sexy, the taboo, the ghastly, the ghostly, and the goulish 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 it down to Hackney, a part of London wherein Creation Records was born many years later. They pushed the envelope of sexual taboo even further when Hipgnosis's Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson joined.
Cosey worked as a secretary, stripper, and pornographic and erotic model. The now imfamous "Prostitution" show, on 18 October, 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. 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 exhibition was, especially in Gen's mind, COUM Transmission's farewell to the Art World. Playing at the opening party for the exibition was Throbbing Gristle, a band made up of four members of COUM, including Chris Carter. It shouldn't be forgotten that there is a COUM film that features a ritualized castration of Carter. Prostitution was fun and exciting for many in attendance. After all, featured was a nice looking stripper, used Tampax in glass, transvestite guards at the doors and punk rock youth, people in amazing costumes, actors, prostitutes and general curiosities were all brought in and were mingling among the cocktail-sipping gallery set.
The show caused debate in Parliament about the public funding of such events. In the House of Commons the flamboyant Scottish Tory MP Sir Nicholas Fairbairn (deceased) demanded an explanation from Arts Minister Harold Lever and proclaimed Genesis and Cosey as "wreckers of civilisation". Fleet Street was not slow and thanks to the Daily Mirror, Genesis and Cosey were household names in Britain for a little while. The reviews were cut up, framed and put on display for the remainder of the exhibition. This was also reported in papers, so cut-ups of 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 later genre is, for whatever reasons, often debated though it seems likely that he and his cohorts in Psychic TV were among the first to import the Detroit Acid 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 Genesis collaborator Fred Giannelli includes himself among the people who believe Acid House was created by and belongs solely to people who aren't white, aren't English and aren't short but who do live in Detroit, as in the scene that is symbolized by Juan Atkins.
The Psychic TV picture disc that was the first that had 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, rumored to sometimes appear on eBay.
His former wife and PTV collaborator, Paula, 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 the 12 years of PTV that Paula was so much a part of. This is certainly a rewriting of history.
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 has been ended, as he'd 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 1965, Neil was spliced into the beat generation because of his quirky English teacher, someone nicknamed Bogbrush. Bogbrush suggested he read On The Road by Jack Kerouac. From there, William S. Burroughs' P-Orridge discovered Dead Fingers Talk, appropriately, in a motorway service station.
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 few truly underground/counterculture magazines, which stated that the two of them were outsiders even within their outsider commune. Clearly the world of the present and future didn't seem to be what the sixties idealists hoped it might be. GP-O is both the wide-eyed and ever-young idealist as well as the wise and ancient cynic. Both of these characteristics and contradictions are seen in his life and work.
The American Monte Cazazza is a sensitive and talented "bad boy" and kindred spirit of TG-related people. A controversial performer and prolific artist from San Francisco, living in London for three months, Cazazza spoke often with Genesis about all manner of topics germane to what Genesis would later call "cultural engineering". He'd become familiar with COUM during an event in Los Angeles in 1972, and through the international community of mail artists. He was living in a squat in London, in the East End with Gen. 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, this industrial music has an official birthdate and birthplace of 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, especially by the mid-1970s, with Genesis and Cosey having lots of fun and being naughty around the world in variegated settings, including some very stuffy art gallery environments, provoking viewers -- raising some some eyebrows, grossing out some and making others laugh, gaining converts and enemies alike and all the while, getting even more commissions to do so. There was a Nazi visual element from early on, in part due to the influence of COUM's Foxtrott Echo, according to the P-Orridge in an interview found on the FOPI website. 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 Gen, Cosey and Sleazy. Some were the four people who turned into TG.
Throbbing Gristle
The birth of Throbbing Gristle, or TG as the individuals usually referred to the project, was on 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 this ICA one was the ritualized beginning. One message of 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 TG 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 TG HQ GB 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, where various animals and people were always coming and going, 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 was only a technician and didn't appear in many of the earliest TG performances. Both Sleazy and Chris 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 famous military-industrial lightning bolt TG logo, sinister and memorable, was designed by GP-O one day on graph paper, as he said in an interview. 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 Martins. When this look appeared to be catching on with many of the faithful attendees of the events, it was dropped. TG would appear in white wearing large grins and 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. A list of what's on Genesis's bookshelf is also included. A similar treatment is given to Monte Cazzaza and Cabaret Voltaire.
In an ultimate ironic and Dadaesque act, TG had hand-printed camouflage gear designed in Paris. "Guaranteed To Disappoint" was, after all, 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 was in 1981, May, in San Francisco, recorded and available as a videotape called Mission Of Dead Souls. Soon after, GP-O and Alaura O'Dell, aka Paula P-Orridge, 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. Peter Christopherson also joined as did Cazazza, in a somewhat non-commital fashion, on occasional guitar and once as a Genesis stand-in at a gig in Holland. Pix of shaven-headed GP-O and Christopherson, each also sporting clerical collars, were to be seen in various rock and pop publications. Genesis's wife Paula also became part of the collaborations, on percussion, vocals and tapes. Paula is alive and well despite her being cropped from the story by GP-O, and now goes by her real name. She continues to live in Northern California, where she first landed with GP-O and the children and runs her own sacred sites exploration organization for women, called Sacred Journeys. The organization hosts travel tours to places around the world, including England, Ireland, Scotland, South America and Hawaii.
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, early OZ Magazine editor Richard Neville, 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 is an ever-evolving thesis but "thee mission" remains more or less the same and that is 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. 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 Reykjavik, 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". Significant within this series is this fusion of Ásatrú and Thelema, as 23 is the ninth prime number, and 9 is 3 squared, 23 serves as a neo-pagan algebraic mirror to the Thelemists' "thelema/agape=93"; see also wikipedia entries for the 23 enigma and 93 (Thelema).
Trouble in England
In the winter of 1991 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".
Something was afoot at the family home in Brighton. Scotland Yard -- which Genesis said on the blurb found on the case of his VHS tape describing the event, Exile And Exhileration< as "23 members of Old Species Yard" -- along with a team of journalists, eager for a big story, arrived on a tip in the hopes of finding incriminating items. What had happened was Channel 4 Television had broadcast a program the night before this invasion 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. TV-watching public in 1987. That program worked wonders for giving publicity to Satanism and Anti-Satanism alike. When the smoke cleared, it became apparent that the whole thing was a setup from a right wing Christian organization, receiving funding from the U.S., hoping to make a big splash in Britain. According to Genesis's account of the events, a truly inspired fundamentalist lawyer in Liverpool had convinced a couple of hapless mental patients, after much records searching in various psychiatric hospitals, to be relocated to a Christian safe house in the North of England where, through various methods including sleep deprivation they would confess to anything. They confessed to involvement in a Satanic cult, in this case "Psychic TV," and were forced to engage in various ghastly and unspeakable acts in the basement of the (basementless) house in Brighton, the selling of which was eventually handled by Paula.
Gen, a former Sunday school teacher, 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. There was an election coming up in England and it doesn't take a superlative imagination or even a keen sense of observation to notice that headline-grabbing national scandals and tragic events occur in timely fashions.
This queer but life-changing incident has, like many of the incidents in GP-O's life, as of the 21st century, received none of the attention it deserves. Fortunately, there are books available, including Wreckers Of Civilisation and Painful But Fabulous.
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 film, transferred to 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.
So, while far away, Genesis and family heard from their lawyers in Britain, who said it wouldn't be safe to return his home, for which he was homesick. They also informed him that his children may be taken by the state. In the end, the parents of actress Winona Ryder were approached as they had offered GP-O and family refuge if needed. In an article by Tom Lanham in the San Francisco Chronicle on 31 October, 2004, GP-O explained that Michael Horowitz and Cindy Palmer had seen Psychic TV perform in England when there daughter was there for the filming of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Caresse and Genese stayed in Winona's old bedroom in Petaluma, California. The family of the former Megson then moved to a 10 acre (40,000 m²) estate nearby wherein two members of Love & Rockets would ride motorcycles. Soon After the relocation to California, Genesis and Alaura's marriage ended. Genesis relocated to New York with his new partner. Alaura, both the girls, Caresse and Genesse and her new partner Andrew Frith (an Australian video artist who worked with Timothy Leary amongst other) remain in Northern California.
During this early exile era, GP-O collaborated with different people in music, including Pigface and Skinny Puppy. Funnily enough, GP-O also connected with Nik Turner and performed with a reinvention of Hawkwind, a band with whom he'd shared bills with in the very early seventies performances and outdoor events in Britain.
Like John C. Lilly before him, Genesis P-Orridge got actual breast implants and from that point on 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. This, among many other unique items, is available at the official Genesis P-Orridge website.
May 1 is a day celebrated around the world for its cosmic and terrestrial significance for several important world events. It is May Day as well as the day the British Colonies abolished slavery.
Recent life
Thinking he'd never return to his homeland, Genesis surprised many including himself when, persuaded by David Sefton (the head of artistic development at South Bank in 1999) on Beltane, he 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, which is also the title of the Thee Majesty CD release, the MC of which was non other than the gay English eccentric, writer, activist, and legend Sir Quentin Crisp. There's a photograph of Crisp and P-Orridge standing next to each other, wearing tiaras. A DVD was also made of this event, which also included the Master Musicians Of Jajouka and ? & the Mysterians, Billy Childish and Thee Headcoats. This has been recorded as GP-O's first physical return to England since the "exile." In the early 21st Century, GP-O has returned and reconnected since for lectures and performances as GP-O and with Thee Majesty, PTV3 and, reunited, Throbbing Gristle.
New York State is the tract of land that spawned The Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol and other influential figures. It is also the home of people like George Pataki, Bernard Kerik and "the peoples mayor," Rudy Giuliani, KBE. Since the mid-1990s, s/he and his other half, Lady Jaye, (there is a Rolling Stones song called "Lady Jane"), nee Jayne Breyer, sometimes called Mother Jack or Jacqueline Megson, while living in a brownstone somewhere in Brooklyn, NY, have also been engaged in an ongoing experiment in extreme body modification (the most recent of which is Genesis's breast implants) aimed at creating one "Pandrogenous" combined being named "Genesis Breyer P-Orridge" out of the two of them.
It is interesting to note that as of the 21st Century, similar British music innovators have relocated to the U.S.A., namely John Lydon; Steve Jones and Morrissey to Los Angeles and David Bowie to Manhattan and GP-O to Brooklyn, NYC.
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. They performed songs like "Roman P", "God Star" and "Discipline".
On 16 May 2004, having recorded new material for the first time in 23 years, all four reunited members of Throbbing Gristle performed at the London Astoria and the event was made into a CD and DVD for a 2005 release.
There was another TG reunion show on 3 December 2004, a headlining appearance in the 3-day Jake & Dinos Chapman-curated event called Nightmare Before Christmas at the Camber Sands Holiday Centre in Sussex wherein Peaches, Mercury Rev, Shellac, The Fall and Violent Femmes performed. TG dedicated the event to John Balance.
References
- Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle. (1999), by Simon Ford. Publisher: Black Dog Publishing. ISBN 1901033600
- Painful But Fabulous: The Life And Art Of Genesis P-Orridge. Introduction: Carl Abrahamsson Publisher: Soft Skull Press (2002) ISBN 1887128883
- P-Orridge, Genesis (2003) Magick squares and future beats. Book of Lies, 103-118 ISBN 0-9713942-7-X
External links
- Genesis P-Orridge Official Website (http://www.genesisp-orridge.com/) All Breyer P-Orridge information and most everything covered in this entry is to be found here.