Genesis and revelations
Six months after the death of an artist who signed up enthusiastically to Burroughs and the cut-up, his autobiography emerges
I WAS only eight years of age and the teenage boy who lived two doors down from my West Midlands detached home was around twice that: a 16-year-old who struck even me, a skinny and bespectacled know-nothing, as slightly otherworldly.
Neil Megson was my almost next door neighbour. My parents and his parents became quite friendly in those mid-1960s days because all four of them were refugees from Manchester, two fathers moved to Solihull by their respective employers.
Neil was a dark-eyed, black-haired, rather sallow adolescent with a somewhat perplexing look: he seemed quite distant and far from happy despite the fact England was swinging, Carnaby Street was cavorting and a World Cup win was on the way.
However, setting aside such snapshots from a younger kid yet to discover much of the world, our respective mothers saw an opportunity for some social engineering of the simplest sort. Muriel, Neil’s mother, and my own Mum Joyce chatted about the possibility of my visiting the elaborate train set that filled his loft.
Like all eight-year-old boys this to me seem like the most enticing prospect: a fantasy landscape in miniature brought to mechanical life. For the 16-year-old, this appeared the least enticing venture he could imagine. But compliantly, the older boy led the junior one up a drop-down ladder into the arch of his house and we briefly pottered among the papier-mâché alpines and the Hornby steam engines as they circled an imagined world of over-stacked mountains and quaint village stations. Quite exciting, I felt.
I also remember distinctly that in the Megsons’ hall was a poster of an actor who shared my name. David Warner had recently played Hamlet with the Royal Shakespeare Company and Neil’s older sister Cynthia had something of a crush on the actor of the moment.
We know now, of course, that my youthful host was going through some of the unhappiest periods of his life, attending the town’s minor public school and hating every minute of it. Solihull School was my intended destination, too, but it never happened: we returned north and state primary and secondary schools were where I would and up.
Neil Megson had not yet dreamt up his future alter ego Genesis P-Orridge, but it would not be long before he was expressing his personal rebellion through literature and performance art of the sort. He caused a bit of a stir in the conservative, middle-class community by tearing up haikus in the street and casting the pieces of paper as a fake snowstorm, a piece he dubbed Beautiful Litter.
The next 30 years would see him form a radical theatre troupe called COUM Transmissions, two rock bands named Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, concoct an Institute of Contemporary Art exhibition in league with his then partner Cosey Fanni Tutti, that would lead to questions in the Houses of Parliament, and a serious run-in with the British law over his own religious cult that would see him abandon the UK for the US.
In the process he would become a friend and collaborator with the American Beat author William S Burroughs and be drawn to the aesthetic practices of the cut-up, a Dadaist concept developed by the writer in Paris with his artist friend Brion Gysin, which then saw a number of novels adopt that random technique to relate their fractured and dystopian narratives.
By the time I met Megson/P-Orridge again, in Brooklyn in 2004, his extraordinarily colourful and controversial course had seen him stick firmly to the cut-up principle. Except now the actual body of the singer/actor/poet had become a canvas for the surgical scalpel. What Genesis described as pandrogeny was his scheme to transform himself physically into his wife Jackie and eventually alchemically re-sculpt his own lover as her husband, a sex change strategy of the most curious and astonishing sort.
It was the ultimate art experiment and I spoke to him at length about it as we re-convened, after so many decades, in New York for a day and a night. We spoke about the distant past of train sets and common room miseries, about Burroughs and about the astonishing accident that had seen him fall from an upper floor of a blazing recording studio in the mid-1990s, when acting as producer on a record by Love and Rockets.
The conversation would form part of a chapter of a book only just commissioned by Bloomsbury called Text and Drugs and Rock’n’Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture, a volume that would eventually appear in 2013.
The radical body art plans would eventually end in tragedy, not because of the self-inflicted wounds, but because Jackie would die for quite unconnected reasons not many years after Genesis and I chatted at his home and then later at a trendy fish restaurant called Sea, where my partner Jayne and this most unusual of couples got on like a house on fire.
Genesis P-Orridge would die, too, in 2020, but his posthumous autobiography, Nonbinary: A Memoir, has just been released. I doubt that my childhood visits to see his loft train set, nor our much later reunion in the States, will feature very prominently. But I look forward to checking out some of the details of his unique journey, an unconventional odyssey by a one-off in every sense.