GP-O transmission: TV debut for rock doc
Art provocateur Genesis P-Orridge led a life that had shock woven into its fabric. Now the BBC screens a new film about this lifelong Beat affiliate
BACK IN OCTOBER when the autobiography of the late Genesis P-Orridge was posthumously published, I wrote about my boyhood relationship with a neighbour called Neil Megson who would become, after his unhappy teenage years in the West Midlands, an artist of remarkable breadth and ambition but one who spent most of his 70 years engaged in a blitzkrieg of visceral shock and seismic sensation.
I wrote about how his early experiments with poetry and spoken word reflected an interest in Beat Generation writing – novel expression, candid revelation, convention cracking – and particularly the outrageous innovations of William Burroughs, a man who would not only become a long-term friend but influence P-Orridge as a creator and one who saw his mentor’s cut up technique as a key tool in his artistic armoury.
This weekend, BBC4 will screen a recently released documentary on Genesis P-Orridge and his circle, perhaps most notably Cosey Fanni Tutti, the partner with whom he would eventually fall-out acrimoniously.
The 2020 film Other, Like Me: The Oral History of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle, focuses on the 1970s evolution of a project which embraced rock music and radical theatre, performance art and visual imagery, most of which caused eyebrows to head skywards, media hackles to rise and even politicians to ask questions in Parliament about the legitimacy or even legality of these situationist happenings.
The fact that Genesis and co were coming to the fore as punk erupted in cities like London and Manchester was significant. GP-O was based in the capital and his band used the same rehearsal facilities as the Sex Pistols, but he also had a close affinity with the northern city of his birth and became a supportive associate of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis.
By the time the group called Throbbing Gristle had transmuted into an act called Psychic TV, this notorious gang of rule-breakers had conceived a new brand of rock termed industrial – an unsettling amalgam of punk energy and urban noise – which would go on to shape the sound of Marilyn Manson and Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails, so the extreme agitprop and disturbing soundscapes of this challenging cell would have a lasting impact on transatlantic music-making.
Trailing Other, Like Me, that pillar of the UK media establishment Radio Times reports: ‘In the late 1960s the COUM (Cosmic Organicism of the Universal Molecular) Transmissions collective emerged from a semi-derelict jam factory to take their distinctive brand of guerrilla art onto the streets of Hull.’
In 1974 the project moved from Yorkshire to London to form ‘the uncompromising band Throbbing Gristle’, who would later be described as ‘wreckers of civilisation’ by a Conservative MP of the day in the House of Commons.
The documentary, the magazine goes on to tells us, ‘draws on the group’s rich archive of photographs and video and examines the ways in which Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti explored sex, pornography and violence.’ The hour-long production goes out at 10:35pm on Sunday, December 5th.
Note: Rock and the Beat Generation published ‘Genesis and revelations’ on October 19th, 2021. It looks at my boyhood encounters with the rock star-to-be.