Genesis P-Orridge - interview from Only Magazine

Beyond the Body (an interview with Genesis P. Orridge)

The lead vocalist for the band Throbbing Gristle and one of the founding minds of Psychic TV, Genesis P-Orridge has been charged with having invented industrial music, acid house and some even lump Brit Pop into that mix. A musician, performance artist and social provocateur, Orridge has made it his, or her, life’s work to push the boundaries of social behavior. From the early days of living in an anarchist commune fueled by the infinite frustration he experienced in the 60s and 70s he has always worked to explore the intellectual and very human experience of why do we do the things we do. His art has taken many forms, it is both playful and confrontational and has covered ground ranging from pornography, totalitarianism, Nazism, love, peace, evolution and especially gender. Both his art and music often defy the conventional, in fact they mischievously and intelligently deny the use of conventional expression as words and symbols and definitions become altered, removed, unnecessary. Throughout his career his life has become inseparable from his art and most recently he and his other half, Lady Jaye began a physical, living art project that saw them both undergo body modification and plastic surgery in an philosophical and artistic effort to explore the concept of what they call Pandrogeny – the realization of a third entity that exists beyond the sum of either one of them. Unfortunately the project has since ended with the abrupt passing of his partner Lady Jaye in October 2007. Regardless, he continues with his work, having recently released an new Psychic TV album and DVD and his intelligent and thoughtful ability to articulate his ideas and heartfelt hope for the survival of the human race has helped him find a new and excited audience in Universities around the world. I spoke to Genesis on the phone from New York.

ONLY: How are you?

G.P.O: It’s been a really hectic week. Tomorrow we’re the visiting artist at NYU so we have to get things organized.

ONLY: I can imagine that there is a lot to talk about on your behalf.

G.P.O: I suppose, but it’s been interesting lately, in the last 8 weeks maybe even the last 6 weeks we’ve given a lecture at Rutger’s University, at Columbia and at the gender studies department at NYU and now we’re doing the art department. And at Rutger’s the Head of Graduate Studies said afterward that our lecture had the largest attendance in the history of the University.

ONLY: That’s great.

G.P.O: Isn’t that interesting? That there is that much awareness of the project that Jaye and I were doing?

ONLY: I certainly think that that kind of reaction is quite compelling and an interesting testament to the awareness of both the project and for the ideas and the concepts that you have been working with and towards for so long.

G.P.O: That’s funny to think about for an old codger like me.

ONLY: It must be an exciting time to discover that there is an audience for you.

G.P.O: It is, but obviously it’s tragic that Jaye’s not here to share that with us.

ONLY: Of course. But I’m happy to hear that you have found the strength to continue.

G.P.O: Well it’s partly the fact that there is such a positive response to what he have been doing that encourages me to keep going. It’s an irony isn’t it? Derek Jarmen once said to me, when he just turned fifty and been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, he said : “You know Gen, now that I’m dying they’re going to throw money at me to make movies and they’re going to give me all this praise and publicity, but they won’t do it until you’re either dying or dead.”

ONLY: I think that anyone who is pushing boundaries or concepts, like yourself, that seems so far ahead of the general public consciousness has to expect that it will take time for the public to catch up. For example so much of what you have contributed culturally and even philosophically has been ahead of the curve. It can sometimes take a generation or two to catch up to what were originally seen as radical ideas.

G.P.O: A good example would be something like industrial music. We did the first Throbbing Gristle gigs to less than 20 people, most of them throwing things and screaming abuse that it was just a racket. Of course, now it’s a global phenomenon and most young people would look at you wide eyed and startled if you said there was a time when there was no industrial music.

ONLY: Of course and obviously you were at the absolute forefront of that. I’ve heard you be referred to as a cultural engineer…

G.P.O: Yeah that phrase popped out one day. I can’t remember where it was but somebody who had enough importance to me to merit that thoughtful said: “How would you sum up what you do in two or three words”…and out pops this phrase, “cultural engineer”. And the minute it popped out we thought it does sound arrogant but there’s enough evidence out there to justify that as an explanation. I mean we have actually taken the flows and the ebbs and the underlying subtexts of popular culture and then submitted it to a detailed analysis and then proposed the next mutation. It’s not so much that we’re claiming that we’re geniuses in an isolated world where we come up with these marvelous ideas, it’s more that we’ve become skilled at reading what’s inevitable in the culture and we have the nerve, the stubbornness or the stupidity to then see if we can make it happen.

ONLY: I wonder how these sorts of expressions, that you seem to naturally migrate towards, begin to form. Is it a result of being engaged with a sympathetic collective group? Do these ideas come about organically?

G.P.O: It’s very much the result of dialogue. It really begins with when we were….oh by the way you probably realized that we’re trying to use “we” instead of “I” so we can represent both myself and Lady Jaye in the physical…

ONLY: I had yes.

G.P.O:…So when we dropped out of university in 1969, we joined an artistic, psycho-therapeutic commune called the Exploding Galaxy, that’s really one of the root influences, one of the basic training camps for a lot of what has come since. It was a very brutal, very analytical environment. You would constantly be interrogated as to why you still looked how you did yesterday or why your hair was the same, or why you wore the clothes other people were wearing…why you were following any habits. That sort of environment of living with no privacy and being constantly intellectually harassed, to be de-conditioned in every possible way has left a very deep imprint on my way of perceiving nonsense reality as we prefer to call it. The other really, really important methodology of course is the “cut up”, in all of it’s infinite variety, which could simplistically be called “collage” refers to the way that we edit our experience of reality, the way that the media edit what they present, the same reality and the underlying themes of that nonsense reality that can be revealed by unexpected collision and frictions and the rearranging the linear structures. All of those techniques, we’ve applied, not just to the mediums of writing, film, video, music and art…we’ve applied it to behavior. And that was where we got into the Shu shamanism and the majik and the focused orgasm and eventually, the body itself. The cheap suitcase as Lady Jaye would call it. Which is where the battle rages between the software program of DNA and the concept at least of intellectual free will.

ONLY: It seems to me that you have treated your whole life as an art project really…

G.P.O: Absolutely.

ONLY: And one of the integral aspects of being an artist is the concept, or rather the process of evolution. To not be mired in one specific approach or by simple repetition of form.

G.P.O: Except here’s the irony and one of the issues that remains problematic. If for example you are Briget Reilly the painter and you see a canvas with stripes and you go: oh that’s probably a Briget Reilly, you see silk screen images and you say: oh it’s an Andy Warhol, you can recognize a Dali. Now how can you recognise these pieces of art? It’s because they are so similar to all the others that went before. That there’s a basic formula, a branding if you like in contemporary language. So the problem for the artist is change and evolution and mutation are absolutely-we would agree with you- the essence to us of creation. and yet to fully live with that means that you are always outside the bounds of the art world, the art market or the music market. The commercial cultural world wants recognizability. As if to say you’re investing in this and you can tell this is what we’ve given you because it looks like all the others. It’s a horrible problem for every artist…do we try to make a living at making art, is creation about making a living? Is it possible to make a living and maintain an obsession with novelty and change? Or do you have to surrender to that and hope that you can still have content? Obviously you know that with me, we did not surrender. (laughs)

ONLY: Your entire career could be seen in the context of this kind of conflict. Particularly in relation to perceived convention or normal behavior. But at the heart of all of this there is also a pattern of love that transcends your work. From the earliest Throbbing Gristle days which were perhaps more directly confrontational and maybe even personally violent, but never has your work openly advocated violence. In fact it goes against violence, so there is an interesting contradiction that your work elicits violent reactions from certain people…

G.P.O: …those who maintain the status quo…

ONLY: …but denies any form of appeal to conventional violence.

G.P.O: Well with Throbbing Gristle and COUM Transmissions we sort of went from theater of the absurd street theater, into again inevitably looking at the intimate structure of personal taboos and behavior. Why for example is it okay to masturbate in bed at home and not to masturbate in the shopping center? the action is exactly the same but the location is changed. So what is it? Is it context? What makes the parameters? Where are the boundaries and why are they there? And who creates the boundaries of what’s acceptable and not in any culture? And of course you can go from one country where is acceptable to have five wives and then to another country where it’s not allowed, and so culture changes in accordance to geography, and therefore it is malleable because the rules can contradict each other depending on where you are. So culture is contrived by human beings, but what is it contrived to do…to control them. In particular to police the aspects of personal experience we find liberating, that’s why sexuality is policed by culture. Because it has so much power. And while it is also linked to love it is a very powerful force. So when we were doing COUM we went from generalized attacks on the absurdity of society’s contrived ethics into a very, very intimate exploration of that interface between the individual’s sexual and imaginative life and how that causes friction and anger sometimes. And to look at the role of male-female as well. While that was all happening we discovered that from having been rejected by the art establishment, we were beginning to be courted and embraced and we felt uncomfortable with that. So we started to move away from that world and look again at what was happening in the outside. we wanted to not be elitist and to just talk to a few people in galleries. We wanted to see if we could change society. If we could actually apply the things we’d learned about behavior and make something else happen. So we experimented with Rock music because that seemed to be one of the most easily accepted vehicles for ideas amongst younger people.

ONLY: Music certainly has the opportunity for the shared experience.

G.P.O: But with both COUM and Throbbing Gristle there were times in our explorations of ideas where people were shocked by the content, but in fact we weren’t trying to shock people we were trying to find out why they were shocked.

ONLY: Interesting. It wasn’t simply a case of “here is the line and we are going to push it just to push it”.

G.P.O: No it was about asking “why is the line here and who created it.” And with TG, we were in our mid twenties and we have to confess there was a lot of anger and frustration in me, as a vocalist and performer at the hypocrisy and the bigotry of the society that we found ourselves in. And also anger that this incredibly unique moment in human history, the 60s, had been battered to pieces by propaganda. It was the only time in human history where millions and millions of young people chose to explore peace, love and consciousness instead of just accepting what went before and accepting violence as an answer to things that were surprising and confusing. It was this amazing experiment, whether people realize it today or not. And yes there was a lot of anger in me and the anger and violence that we felt was directed inwards, because we felt as the artist that we were somehow failing the human species if carried on behaving in these negative self-destructive ways. Why can’t we get them to wake up and realize that war is insanity. And it’s still true. We can’t understand how there could have been a second war…ever. surely after one war thousands of years ago people would look at the dead bodies and wounds and grief and go: “we’ll never do that again.” And yet we keep on and on with these self-destructive, species threatening behaviors. So what is that? Is that what people mean when in organised religion when they talk about the fatal flaw? The original sin? Is that what they mean that in the recording, the software of our behavior there’s something that keeps on and on keeps leading us to self destruction? and if there is…where is hidden? What is it and can we get rid of it? That’s really been the center of all of my work.

ONLY: Your work has always reflected a transformative aspect, even here where you mentioned that you have begun to replace “I” with “we”, and I read this somewhere, in an effort to better represent the multiple aspects with any one person. To use “I” refers to a singularity of personality when in fact most people have many facets to their identity better embodied by the use of “we”.

G.P.O: Absolutely. Yes.

ONLY: You have also consistently taken the use of language and of cultural signifiers and played with them and reorganised them, as you might see in the influence of the “cut-up”, and all of this helps to create a somewhat cohesive narrative for you and your work.

G.P.O: Well thank you. When I first met William Burroughs, way, way back in 1972…it’s kind of funny, but he said to me: “Genesis, this is your task. How do you short-circuit control?” And somehow that instruction has stuck with me really deeply. and when Lady Jay met me, we both, for different reasons had focused on this same issue. “Where is that special flaw in us, where is control and are they the same thing.” And we came to the conclusion that the answer is in the DNA. that the DNA is a software program and in that program, originally, when we were man apes, we needed to have an element of our genetic structure where the male of the species was protective of the female which were the breeders. and in order for the species to survive the males had to be violent to get food, to protect themselves. so anything that was not understood, that was different was attacked. So that genetic program of violent reaction originally helped us survive, it was if you will, a friendly gene at that point.

ONLY: What I find interesting is with that is that the one thing that greatest things that separates us from other creature on an evolutionary scale is our brain. It has allowed us to create complicated social structures, great works of art. It has allowed us to create and appreciate all of these things…

G.P.O: Well we are very clever chimpanzees if you like, and we became toolmakers because of the brain, but what’s happened in a simplified form is that over the next few thousand years from that original situation, we have created and taken control of our environment. So now we have this 21st century environment that is miraculous. We have people floating around in space labs, we can talk to people across the world on these little boxes, we have the internet, computers and it’s mind boggling. But we have not bothered to apply the same amount of effort, finance and thought to our behavior. We now have the same behavioral patters that we had in prehistoric time but in this amazingly futuristic environment. Of course that’s a recipe for disaster. You wouldn’t put a bunch of clever chimpanzees in a room with a bunch of red buttons that set of an atomic war. But basically that’s what we’ve done. we’ve ignored the need to maintain and evolve consciousness on a par with technology. We assumed it took care of itself. Or even worse we’ve assumed that the human body as it is right now is the final version of our evolved self. That it’s somehow sacred. It’s not. It’s a work in progress just like everything else. the brain is still evolving, and getting larger. And now that people are semi-cyborgs with new technologies like ipods and cell phones their brains are going to change again. But we’re not taking it into account and we’re not looking at it as an absolutely necessary are of research in order to maintain our survival. And that’s where pandrogeny comes in. We believe that DNA is the program and the program is out of date. So we need to look at how we can adjust that program in order to evolve, in order to realize our innate potential and to ultimately explore both inner and outer space. But we will never be able to escape this planet and escape disaster if we ignore behavior.

ONLY: Your relationship with Lady Jaye and the living art project that you both embarked on with the creation of the pandrogyne as the realization of the third entity, has at this stage taken on a directly physical manifestation. Would you imagine the next phase of this be a collective conscious recognition and an attempt to transcend the body?

G.P.O: Oh absolutely. That is definitely the next step. It’s worth going back to how the idea of pandrogeny evolved when Lady Jaye and myself began working together. When we met it was a meeting of equal minds, as she was already a quite stunning intellect and it was actual Lady Jaye, who on the first day we met, started dressing me in some of her clothes. That was an intuitive and traditionally female intuition. that the minute she saw me she was beginning to manifest what became this pandrogeny project. And we were so in love, and still are, but you know when you love someone so much you say things like “I wish I could just eat you up” as if to just totally adsorb the other person? Well we felt like that and when you have a mutual orgasm you reach this supreme otherworldly state of bliss. So at the beginning it was an expression of our love for each other and we began to look the same. Very superficially. Doing our hair the same, wearing the same clothes, we got tattoos. I got beauty spots on my cheek to match hers, then she had her nose done to match mine. As that happened we were thinking about why we were drawn so compulsively to become a hermaphroditic middle ground of each other. What was this that was making us feel this way. And we went back to the idea of the “cut ups” and the idea of the third mind where the collaboration reveals something beyond which either participant is the actual author. These “cut ups” were the creations of what Brion Gysin and William Burroughs called the third mind. And we thought that maybe we could take that even further and apply that to identity and to gender stereotypes. Then perhaps we can adjust behavior by neutralizing difference. So we began to take plastic surgery more seriously as a way to get us as close as possible to realizing a third person. By removing differences. To draw a third way that got rid of binary systems and made the discussion become much more conceptual and less rooted in difference.

ONLY: In an interview Lady Jaye discussed how this wasn’t a project directly linked to sexuality and that the idea of, say you having your genitals removed to become more feminine was not the point because that would deny you the possibility of pleasure. Instead that it would be more to the point if you both could have both sets of genitals.

G.P.O: Yes we even spoke to surgeons to see if it was somehow possible to create both genital for each of us. And so far that’s not feasible. But we’d like people to not get bogged down in the male female aspect. Yes we wanted to become hermaphrodites because that would work for human beings culturally as a statement of neutrality, saying lets forget about either or and male, female because that simply encourages polarity. If we remove the binary symptoms and become hermaphrodites and chemical symbols then we can discuss evolution in a much more positive and useful way. This is why pandrogeny digs so deeply into some of the most embedded issues in western society, because it is saying that we need to completely re-imagine ourselves as a species and we need to make decisions socially, politically and economically as a species that is fighting to survive. And once it can maintain a reasonable expectation of survival it must then think of evolution as its primary program. That should be what we all devote ourselves to in one form or another…the mutual and positive and potential rewarding evolution of the whole species.

ONLY: If I were to think of one particular trait that was both a blessing and a curse in the human species I would suggest that our curious nature is something that of we could refine, might help us. It’s what has given us this idea of exploring new frontiers that might be of benefit to us as a species.

G.P.O: Of course that comes back to what you were saying at the beginning about the artist, for us, for Lady Jaye and myself. We absolutely believe that to be an artist, to be a creator is a calling, just like it would be for a priest or a doctor. Lady Jaye was also a nurse. It’s incredibly important to look at things in that way. For us it’s a sacred calling and it’s an act of devotion to the species to become an artist.

ONLY: Is it this idea to give yourself over to something…

G.P.O:…without knowing the frustrations ahead.

ONLY: Yes.

G.P.O: And that’s where what you said about “love being a thread in the work” is so true. There are many tyime when we wish we didn’t care as much as we do, and that we could turn away and say “so what it’s their own problem.” But we just can’t. We are duty bound and honor bound to do everything we can to keep a dialogue of survival and evolution and change alive. In a way pandrogeny seems to be the project that ties together all the threads that have been part of my life before and we see it and its various implications is more than enough to deal with however long we still have left in physical form. The ultimate objective of pandrogeny for myself and Lady Jaye as individuals was always that post physical death we could still be together and still be absorbed into each other and become one new form of self-aware consciousness but that was made of the two of us.

ONLY: If the thread of everything here is that the programming construct is DNA, it seems then that the hope would be at some point to be able to extract or combine genetic material from different sources. For example you and Lady Jaye have shared physical qualities to an extent, but let’s say for example that you loved her sense of humor, or her laugh, it would be of interest then to seek out that genetic material related to the programming for those kinds of things.

G.P.O: That would be fine.

ONLY: I guess the big fear and the big question then is how as a public and as a species do we maintain control over, or even access to that kind of powerful, scientific technology when so much of this technology already lays exclusively in the hands of an elite group.

G.P.O: One of things that tends to happen is that with technology the research costs are so high that the people who are subsidizing it, i.e. the big corporations, that luckily for us, they tend to share the spoils of their research in order to recoup their costs. It’s not altruism; it’s a strange form of greed. Like personal computers and Polaroid cameras and cell phones and all the other things that have come back to us as spillage from the program and so on. The people who invest are so self centered that they let it filter down. Having said that, of course there is going to be fear of totalitarianism but listen, we are entering a state of totalitarian capitalism right now…

ONLY: …whether we like it or not.

G.P.O: Exactly, and so from our perspective it is better to challenge that in any way we can and try to utilize to subvert one obviously disastrous future into at least the option of a future that might be more positive. And perhaps that shift will bit by bit create more shifts until as a species we wake up and think “my goodness, we don’t need to listen to these people.” I man there is probably only five thousand of them, why should we let them control three billion? And then we turn our back on them, at which point their power is gone. So we have to have faith in ourselves and in our intentions. And if we have pure intentions then we will not add to the disaster, if we do nothing we will add to the disaster.

ONLY: Well, hope is a powerful force.

G.P.O: Definitely. The human species is so frustrating to observe because on one level it is so self-destructive and self-obsessed and greedy and violent that keeps on repeating the most ludicrous, nasty and shocking mistakes, especially socially and politically, but we are also the most wonderful creatures, full as you said, of curiosity and pragmatic invention and inspirational imagination…and that’s what you have to hold on to. And we need to nurture those qualities. If we all do that then we would be shocked at what we could achieve.

ONLY: Let’s hope that we get to live, in some form or another to see that day. But speaking of achievement, and this is a bit of a departure, but you have just released a new album.

G.P.O: Oh yes.

ONLY: I thought it was really interesting in the way that it sort of spans a lot of your previous work, but offers new and fresh interpretations of the genres and sensibilities you have touched on throughout the years.

G.P.O: Well we have always done that, taken things and reworked them at certain points.

ONLY: The title of the album, “Mr. Alien Brain versus The Skinwalkers”, I have to wonder if it doesn’t somehow relate to everything we have just talked about.

G.P.O: Hopefully.

ONLY: Well immediately it made me think of the alien brain as something foreign or otherworldly and then the skinwalkers simply being bodies covered in flesh that are in essence automatons.

G.P.O: Yes. Of course the alien brain is the title of the first public theater piece that the COUM Transmissions did, so there’s a reference there that says that this record is covering a whole spectrum of work. For me personally, this is our most favorite album we have ever done. It feels as if it were made by someone else.

ONLY: The accompanying DVD is also a definite bonus. You can really see the hypnotic joy in the performances.

G.P.O: There is a lot of commmaradery in the band. But it’s worth mentioning that all the main tracks were recorded live. There were no overdubs. We were invited to do a program for National Public Radio and they asked us if we would be interested in doing a live broadcast of some songs in honor of Lady Jaye, and we hadn’t played at all since she dropped her body. We had a one hour rehearsal the night before we went. And we recorded live, very much like Abbey Road, in a great big live room, straight to tape so to speak. So we basically improvised most of the arrangements and some of the lyrics spontaneously.

ONLY: That’s quite amazing because to listen it feels so intuitive and together.

G.P.O: It’s quite mind-boggling. We think Lady Jaye was there helping.

All credits: Only

Genesis P-Orridge - interview in Wire Magazine - #271 | Kool Keith | September 2006

#271 | Kool Keith | September 2006

The Wire
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

* Issue #271 (September '06) | In Writing
* By: Alan Licht | About: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

MARK PERRY "Death Looks Down" from Snappy Turns (Deptford Fun City)

GPO: (laughs) I haven't heard Mark Perry's voice for a long time.

A: This is from his first solo album. How did you get acquainted with him and Alex Fergusson?

G: I'm pretty sure what happened was I met Sandy Robertson, he was working at Sounds writing things, and he also had a fanzine called Piss Factory about Patti Smith. They [he and Alex] both moved to London from Glasgow at the same time, and were living in the same squat. So I met Mark P through Sandy Robertson and Alex Fergusson. Mark at that time was going out with the original Sue Catwoman, who's on the front of the No Future newspaper. I got to know Mark P quite well and I even wrote a page for an issue of Sniffing Glue and got involved in that. And then Sue Catwoman got really ill with appendicitis. I went to see Sue Catwoman in hospital and I gave her a great, big, giant latex pool of vomit with "Get Well Soon" written on it. And she was quite taken with that and actually ended up being my girlfriend after that. So I ended up, through her and Mark P, going around all the early punk gigs, the Roxy and various places, and seeing The Jam when they first played and Eater, all those early punk bands. And then Mark P decided that he would like to have his own band. Alex Fergusson and Sandy Robertson had originally had a band which they called the Nobodies in Glasgow, and the Nobodies played only one song which was "European Son" and they would play that for as long as they could, about an hour, and that was the entire set.
Throbbing Gristle was already in existence, and we had our rehearsal space at the Death Factory, so I invited Mark P and Alex to come down there and rehearse and jam and come up with ideas for how the band would be. I had a drum kit, and actually began-strangely enough, not many people realize I began as a drummer, my father was a drummer in big bands. So I was the drummer, for a while, until Alternative TV were invited to play at the first punk rock festival in Birmingham, and I said I can't be in two bands at the same time. When I started my own band after Throbbing Gristle, Alternative TV were in a hiatus at that point, so I took Alex Fergusson and formed Psychic TV.

A: How long was Alex involved in Psychic TV?

G: Alex was the original co-founder of Psychic TV, before anyone else it was just me and Alex, and that would have been 1981, and he stayed in Psychic TV right up until after Godstar, 1986. Alex and I wrote that wonderful song, Godstar, which was number one in the indie charts for fifteen or sixteen weeks and got to number 29 in the national charts. And we had experimented with getting a manager, this guy Terry McLellan. While we were in California filming the video for the follow-up single, "Roman P", he went into Rough Trade and said he was collected the money on our behalf from the record (Godstar) and he disappeared with all the money. It was the last straw for Alex. He'd been in ATV and got critical acclaim and written amazing songs, like "Love Lies Limp", all these really really great, memorable riffs; and then he'd done the Psychic TV thing, with all these seminal ideas, holophonic sound right through to the hyperdelic pop songs, and he never made a cent. Likewise, neither had I, but for Alex, it was just too much, he was just disgusted with the whole music scene, and being ripped off. And he made a decision that that was enough, enough is enough. So he didn't just quit PTV, he quit music.
Once in a while I tempted him back to co-write songs with me, and he performed at Royal Festival Hall with Psychic TV in 1999. And just recently he sent me a solo CD that he'd done on a very small indie label in Germany, which was lots of really catchy little songs, and he's now living in Germany with his girlfriend in a small town. He came to see Throbbing Gristle play in Berlin, in January. So we're still friends, it was amicable.
He's a genius. You can sit him down with any lyric and he'll come up with a really catchy riff, he's like a computer, just endless classic pop tunes. It's a tragedy, really.

A: The other reason I picked this track is because Mark is playing violin and I know that you played violin way back when you did that one record in a high school project and throughout these other bands. It's not an instrument you studied, so I'm wondering how playing the violin came about or how you picked it.

G: Oh that's easy. In 1966 in England I was doing my O Levels and I also was going out with this girl called Jane Ray, and she played violin at school. My other friend, Spidey, rang me up, having listened to John Peel on pirate radio, and said "You've got to hear this band called the Velvet Underground. They've just released a record in America, and you're gonna love it, you've got to hear it, you've got to hear it." I went to school one morning, I had a Vespa scooter, did some O Levels, and at lunchtime I got on my scooter and went to The Boots. And I'd already pre-ordered this record on import, from America, it had just come in that very day so it was the first day it was available In England. They still let you listen to the records in the booths in those days, and they put on "Black Angel's Death Song." I listened to that on my lunch hour, and I got so engrossed in that that I was late for whatever O Level was next, missed an exam. I bought it there and then, and I used to put it on my record player, and I played it and played it and played it until I wore it out-I've had three copies now that I've worn out. And that was it, that was my epiphany, which was the violin could be electrified and put through effects. It touched me in a very special way. I felt that was something that had been the missing link in terms of my being able to visualize an electric form of modern music. I didn't ever want to be the guitarist in a band, I had no particular interest in being a vocalist, I didn't know what I wanted to do, maybe drum-but once I heard that I wanted to play electric violin in some way or another. So I developed my own style, hours a day I would play.
After I dropped out of university in 1969 and moved to Islington to be in the Exploding Galaxy, around the corner were the Third Ear Band. I used to hang out with them and play violin with them too, just sort of jam. Later on I heard Jean-Luc Ponty with Frank Zappa. I still often take the violin with me on tour, in case I want to play it, it's kind of a talisman for me. I can't imagine not having a violin there... I still play it with Throbbing Gristle.

A: Bill Breeze also played violin with Psychic TV at one point, right?

G: That's right, yeah-he plays viola. Bill Breeze is a really remarkable viola player, he went to Juilliard and studied viola and composition and Indian tonalities, which is how he ended up meeting Angus Maclise. He played on the album Trip Reset, which I still consider the lost classic PTV album. It was meant to be promoted and toured with in 1995 before the fire, so it was lost because I was busy being... injured. He improvised parts, and we built the tracks around what he played.
People think that improvisation is an easy option but my experience is it's actually one of the most difficult things to make convincing and potent, because it requires listening almost in advance of hearing. And that requires a sublimation of ego, really, in a very particular way. It's almost prophecy as well, if you understand the way each other emotionally and intellectually operate then you can guess and imagine what the other people involved will most likely do in response to the other things happening. So there's a great degree of empathy and prophecy as well as reaction. That's why there's a spiritual sense, often, with Coltrane or people like that, the spirituality one feels I think is because of that need to empathize, like a seer imagining a future before it happens.
Was that enough for one song? (laughs)

TERRY FOX: "5" from Echo: The Images of Sound II (Het Apollohuis)

G: I was going to guess it was La Monte Young, but it has a more electric almost pre-Velvets, early 66 sound to it too.

A: It's Terry Fox.

G: Terry Fox, remind me who Terry Fox is.

A: He was a body artist in the early 70s and he did a lot of sound installations like this with piano wires, stretching piano wires.

G: Ah, okay, okay... that makes sense with why there's a certain quality in sound of the strings that I wasn't quite getting, wasn't sure what it was. There was a German artist named Albrecht D, who was sort of a minor Fluxus artist, somebody I met through mail art, and was also an associate of Joseph Beuys, and he made installations in parks because of that whole socialist approach to art, that art should be brought to people and with the people, in the streets. But his installations were with piano wires.

A: I was wondering to what extent, in the transition from COUM Transmissions to Throbbing Gristle, if you were aware of people like Terry Fox or Charlemagne Palestine who were doing both music and body art in the same period.

G: I heard of Palestine, and I heard about Albrecht D; I was aware of Fluxus, which obviously was performance that involved radical ideas of a concert, nailing down the keys of a piano as a piano piece and so on, so those theories and the anecdotes that I read about those movements certainly helped break down what few barriers I had to complete freedom, if there were any. When we lived still in the north of England in a semi-commune, with COUM, we had two semi-derelict houses, and between 1970 and 973 we'd collect any old tape recorders we could find, take out the speakers from radios and so on, and we gradually wired the entire house so that there were speakers and microphones in all the rooms, and speakers hidden outside, and it was a shortcut to the open market which was open on the weekends. We had a room just with drums in it, so the whole house could be played, in a sense. And on the weekend we would also have a microphone outside the house hidden so that people were walking along, the sounds of them talking in the street would be picked up, amplified, manipulated and played back out into the street, plus we would also be saying things about people's clothing... so we were inevitably involving sound as part of the performance ideas. In fact, the main reason I eventually quit the last remants of the Exploding Galaxy was because they wouldn't include sound, they were very prissy about the idea of including sound and they thought that was somehow was going to lead to "entertainment" in some sort of demeaning form.
After 73 COUM moved to London and started to be more art gallery oriented, starting to be given grants and taken more seriously, if you like. We began to create sound collages on tape that we would include in performances as well as noises that were made either by us or by the audience, we saw those as being part of the performance. We even wrote a piece called "Marcel Duchamp's Next work" where we had 12 bicycle wheels/sculptures, and the score was a circle that looked like a bicycle, and each spoke was an instruction of different ways to play the wheels, stroking them, and so on. It's hard to explain in a short way, but by 1975/76 COUM was becoming so integrated with the art world and the art avant garde and included in retrospectives of modern British art with Gilbert and George and things like that, that we, in a typically perverse way, shied away from that moment of potential success, and decided to revert to something that was more potentially chaotic and anarchic which was music. We rejected the art world in favor of exploring what became Throbbing Gristle. But we had learned so much from our art world explorations, and by meeting people. There was a German sound poet, Ernst Jandl, who played me a lot of sound poetry tapes, and they were very influential on my approach to vocals with Throbbing Gristle, in terms of freeing up the idea of what it could be. It didn't need to be literal sense, and it didn't need to be melodic in any traditional rock and roll way. And also John Giorno, is another person whose experiments with delays and loops and so on I definitely utilized, especially in "Hamburger Lady." I was distinctly thinking of him as one of the ways I wanted to resolve what I wanted to do with that piece.

A: What about Hermann Nitsch? The noise orchestra was part of the actions.

G: Well I knew about Hermann Nitsch and the Viennese actionists but I hadn't actually heard any of the sound or seen any of the videos until later so that didn't have any direct effect. With Hermann Nitsch, he was in a difficult situation which was, first kill one sheep and drink its blood and then next time kill three sheep and then kill thirty sheep and then kill a hundred sheep, and then where does that take you? He was confronting excess for its own sake, almost, and that struck me as problematic in the long term.

MIKE HERON "Spirit Beautiful" from Smiling Men With Bad Reputations (Elektra)

G: Guess who this is... Incredible String Band?

A: It's Mike Heron-

G: Yeah-

A: From the solo record.

G: Which one?

A: Smiling Men with Bad Reputations. And this is the track with Dr. Strangely Strange on backing vocals.

G: ooh, you're crafty. God I love his voice so much.

A: What do you think about the current rediscovery, or interest in, this scene?

G: (laughs) It's strange how quickly it happened. When I did that piece for ARTHUR ("My Ten Favorite Psychedelic Folk Songs" November 2004 issue) most people looked at me with a completely blank face... and yet within six months most people looked at me like "Oh yeah! I've got one of those... " Devendra Banhart obviously has something to do with that too. I always think these things are inevitable, you know, there's a kind of reactive cause and effect with music, almost like hopscotch, or leapfrog. And when you've had something like grunge, and then that died very slowly as it merged into (whispers) "boy bands", and superficiality beyond anything you might have imagined, not that long ago. And there's obviously gonna come a point where a new generation want to hear a radically different sound, and it often goes very simply-whatever you did last time, do the exact opposite. You get this bouncing, between loud, noisy things and soft, gentle things. It's part of that biological... flow, that happens through culture generally. Then a few people who are really enthusiastic, if they have a voice that's heard, can have quite an effect. David Tibet, who's an old friend of mine, we're still in touch almost every other day, he got turned on to a lot of this through my collection, and I got turned on to some of it through his. I've still got my Jan Dukes du Grey albums, I actually saw them play, and sit and talk with them when they used to play in Hull.
I remember a lot of this from the first time around, in fact some of the Exploding Galaxy left to become Stone Monkey, who were this dancing performance group that worked with Incredible String Band.

A: The influence is a little more evident in a lot of David Tibet's music than it is in your own.

G: Yeah, people were always really surprised when they looked at my record collection and almost all of it is psychedelic folk music and there's hardly anything recorded after '69. It was my private world, it was the one thing I had which was my secret. Nick Drake's voice... I think it's the voices as well, Mike Heron's voice, Nick Drake's voice, Strangely Strange, they have this beautiful, multiple tone in their voices that goes to tape so well. That particular of singing to tape-and I do think that it's important that it's on tape and it's not digital. It's like a violin-it contains more emotions per square inch than anything else can. I don't care what nick Drake sings, I just listen to the sound of his voice. It's warmth, and melancholy, a million experiences, and dreams, and lifetimes, and love affairs go by in a couple of minutes. Some people have that capacity, and there's no need for any bombast in order for that to occur. Whereas those who are less gifted tend to have to use theatrical tricks, noise, and surprising sculptural, symphonic structures to make the same sort of thing happen.
I think we're in a moment in time, in social and cultural history, where there's so much noise and bombast and crudeness and violence; people are being inflicted with negative, bigoted, apocalyptic tornadoes of media overload-you're going to want somewhere to sit back and be touched in a different way. You want a safe place to remember kindness and simplicity and the connection between people and nature and... subtleties. So it somehow makes sense to me that in an age where we have this ugly culture that there would be an urge and an appetite to move towards simple, gentle, poetic music and forms of expression that give hope and healing, and have at least in some way a sense of optimism. Why do you think it's become popular again?

A: Especially with people like Devendra it seems like people really focus in on his voice, and there's people like CocoRosie or Antony who are singing in roughly the same style-and that becomes the voice of the moment. Even if you go back to the 70s punk era there's a lot of similarities in the singing styles of David Byrne, David Thomas, Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell. There's something in the vocalization, not necessarily the words, that speaks to and for a certain moment in time. I think also there was so much laptop and electronica at the end of the 90s and people wanted to unplug from that, that's where the interest in acoustic music comes from.

G: Yeah, exactly, that's what I meant when I said leapfrog or hopscotch.

A: When you mentioned grunge before, even that was a reaction to the much more polished music of the 80s.

G: Punk claimed to be a reaction against prog rock and disco... and Industrial was a reaction against all of it (laughs). But also in a way it was nostalgia, TG for example, was trying to find a continuation point for what the Velvet Underground had been doing, not to copy it, but to explore what could be lyrics, and what you could talk about lyrically above and beyond the "I love you, oh you've left me", what else is there. And what could be excluded in terms of instrumentation, if you take out the elements which are most recognizable of a previous era then you are inevitably going to develop something that's different, and often that's a useful exercise, even if it's only an exercise, and sometimes it becomes an epiphany or a revelation.

PATTI SMITH "Birdland" from Teenage Perversity And Ships in the Night (bootleg)

G: (after listening intently for several minutes) Amazing.

A: You know who it is?

G: Surely it's Patti Smith? (laughs) Hope so, otherwise it's a very good impersonation (laughs). I just wanted to hear as much as I could for a change (laughs). Very nice. And the band is just totally following everything...

A: What I love about this in particular is the improvisation she does, that monologue in the beginning, and you used to improvise a lot of vocals on stage.

G: I still do. We saw Patti Smith at Warsaw and it was amazing. The previous time I saw her was at Wembly Stadium, when she had that big hit ["Because the Night"], and the majority of people who were there were there because of this pop song. And they kind of tolerated the first section, and the rest of the band wandered off and she stayed on stayed on stage with a clarinet and did a seventeen minute clarinet solo. And slowly but surely I saw the entire audience's mood shift, from anger to alienation to confusion to dislocation. There's this fabulous moment with great art where there's dislocation between conscious thought and expectation and the actuality of what are the sensations of that? And that's the same as an orgasm, it's that secret moment when the conscious and the subconscious are all opened up. All the pores open simultaneously and they all line up, so that the messages slip through into the nervous system in a way that can't happen any other way. And that's the joy of improvising and allowing random chance and surprise and novelty to be part of the formula of what you do. If you don't pay homage to the spirit of the fool or the shapeshifter or the joker then you're never going to reach... inspiration. And all music, all art, all writing, all performing, all conversing, all loving is about inspiration.

A: Uh, right.

G: (laughs) I feel very strongly about it, as you can tell (laughs).

A: When you were conceptualizing TG was improvising vocals something you had in mind from the outset?

G: At the outset, I didn't expect to be doing vocals. I expected it to be more like the Sonic Arts Union, something like that, a kind of post-Fluxus rock band. But it soon became obvious that for it to be convincing enough to get people's attention or even to allow us to perform in public spaces that were not art-oriented, pubs and rock venues and so on-we wanted to slip into these places as a surprise. So we had to compromise, as we thought, at the beginning, by having vocals sometimes. And it fell to me just because I protested the least. I did sing when I was younger, I was in a cathedral choir, I had four or five years of proper vocal training and did medieval plain chant. But with TG the music was so different that I had to look for voices that sat in this new sound. So that was a whole extra experiment, and that could only happen by experimenting and improvising and letting go and not feeling intimidated or embarrassed, just making noises with my throat and how it interacted with the other noises.
I've done some work with gestalt and also some with Gurdjieff techniques and the Tibetan tecnique of finding your true voice by getting stones to resonate with your voice. So I started to incorporate those ideas into the microphone and I got to make friends with the microphone, and I discovered that it was possible to make the microphone vibrate and resonate the same way stones or metal did. And once that happened I realized there were no limitations at all except... inhibitions. There was a whole new landscape available, populated with different characters. And each character would sing it's own separate songs. Even now I experiment with a song lyric or an idea for a song until I get a voice that goes with it. So in a way each one of them has a person that talks. None of them have to be me. And none of them have to be the voice I usually speak with. They can be all kinds of people. And on the new (PTV3) album, you'll hear that very clearly. Sometimes I tease the band and say there are dozens of people living here (points to head) and they all want a turn to say something. I always found it odd that people would sing every song, no matter what the subject, with more or less the same voice. The song is a story, and it's a compact message and hopefully it's a communication that will be recognized or will have some kind of resonance and empathy with other people you've never met. They each have a storyteller... that's why I'm so fascinated with troubadours, as time goes by, I've got more and more interested in troubadours in France, and how they would travel ¡®round and they were responsible for what became history. Whoever records the songs is the one who tells the story that is going to be accepted as what happened. So it's a huge responsibility as well as being a fascinating thing.

A: And it's an oral history.

G: An oral history, exactly. I think the reason that music is still so profoundly important, especially in adolescence, is because people still sense that somehow, the truest story of what is happening, and what has gone before, is contained in songs.

A: Patti Smith is someone who people associate with the Beats, as a descendant of that, in particular William Burroughs, and I know you had a long personal association with Burroughs. The underground music of the 70s brought Burroughs an audience he didn't necessarily have before, and I was wondering how you felt about other people at the time who were extolling the virtues of Burroughs.

G: You mean David Bowie? (laughs) Ever since I met William Burroughs and then later Brion Gysin, my entire body of work in every media is without any doubt influenced by them. And I'm a great believer in telling people who your influences are, not pretending that everything is divine inspiration and unique, and your own personal prophecies... you're just part of an ongoing formula that's all integrated, it's a tapestry, it's woven together into this fantastic fabric. So I think anyone who makes sure that the importance of their proselytizing of cut-up, of random chance, the whole depth of the third mind, but most of all the cut-up, the idea that linear thinking and linear time and linear explanations and linear existence are both a fraud and pointless way of envisioning our experience of being alive. Anything that keeps their message alive or expands on it is a good thing.
It's often easy to forget that we're often talking about a limited territory in the West, and there are great sections of the planet who have no interest whatsoever the unfolding of so-called rock and roll... it's irrelevant to them, they just want to eat. It's important to get things in perspective and remember that we're very privileged to debate how we decide to talk about what interests us, and that's one of the things that Patti Smith includes in the sound of her voice. A modesty, and an anguish, and a humility all simultaneously with messages, and that's a very noble and difficult thing to do.

IRA COHEN "Kathmandu Dream Piece" from The Majoon Traveller (SubRosa)

G: Ira Cohen.

A: You issued a book of poetry by Ira, and Angus MacLise, who did the music on this track, in 1991 had you known them or their poetry before that time?

G: Only Ira. I had met Hetty MacLise. But I was always fascinated with the whole Factory scenario, so it seemed appropriate to have the three of them together. I'm very proud of putting that book out actually, it's not that well known.

A: Is poetry something you've a long interest in? I'm bringing this up in relation to Thee Majesty, where you recite poetry with musical backing.

G: yeah, I've been writing poetry, seems like forever... It was a great way of learning how words work with each other so that when it came to me doing improvised vocals and music I had a really deep relationship to the structure of the words themselves. I started writing poetry when I was 12. From then on I started sending poetry to poetry magazines, when I was 13 or 14, and got things published occasionally from then on. I guess I was very determined to try every style and read every book of poetry I could find and then strip it down and try and find out how it worked and why it worked, or why certain things were very touching and other things weren't. I write something every day. That's the thing that I've spent the most consistent and serious attention to, poetry and words. Everything else sort of flowed around that. If I have anything that's sacred it's that. Which is one reason I love the Incredible String Band; the lyrics still blow my mind, and Syd Barrett's do too.
To talk about Thee Majesty, what happened was after I was hurt in the fire in 1995, for various reasons I felt betrayed by people that I knew in the music business and let down by them. Once I was a damaged and hurt animal, like a bird with a broken wing, they couldn't be bothered. They only wanted me when I had pretty feathers that I could display. After one or two years of being convinced I would never, ever have anything to do with music again, it was Lady Jaye who said, "sit down, and think what is it you love? You never have to do anything again, you have no obliagation to do music again." I realized it was words, the incredible magic of putting words next to each other in ways that surprise and reveal something you never expected from the simplest interactions, in the same way you can do that collage, you can create worlds that don't exist, but you can illustrate them, and you can do that with words too.

A: Have you done poetry readings without musical backing?

G: Sure, oh yeah, since the 60s. The earliest ones were probably '64, '65. When I was in University in '69 I was doing more Fluxus type things, and there was a poetry reading and I took an orange, and a knife, and it was my turn to read a poem, and I just waited and waited, would let the tension build up, and then I took the knife very fast and slammed it down and split the orange in two. And that was it (claps hands).
Lady Jaye thinks that the less music there is the more she likes Thee Majesty. And there is definitely a sense that sound is a crutch, you know? That by having sound you're saying the words don't work enough.

MASTER MUSICIANS OF JAJOUKA "Festival Part 2" from MmoJ: Tribe Al Serif (Musical Heritage Society 2xLP)

G: (immediately) Jajouka.

A: When did you first hear of MMoJ, was it the Brian Jones LP?

G: Yeah, Brian Jones, pretty sure that was it. It could have been before, it could have been through Burroughs, or Gysin. I don't think I would have bought the record, in all honesty, if it hadn't been Brian Jones. Somewhere I've got a tape of Brion Gysin talking about how the Stones dumped Brian Jones in Morocco. It's very sad. They drove to Tangier, Brian got really ill and got left behind in the hospital in Spain and during that time Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg started having an affair, so by the time Brian jones got there he was in the way, so the rest of the Stones were encouraging Brian to go off to Jajouka with Brion Gysin and record this music. And it was while he was doing that that they all went back to England; he got back to the hotel and the rest of the Stones and Anita were gone. And didn't even leave him any money to pay the hotel.
In 1980 I saw that MMoJ were performaning at the Commonwealth Institute in London, so I went and got tickets for the front row of the two days that they played. At that time I think there were about 30 musicians still, plus dancers. They did do some of the rites of Pan and had the boy in the goatskin dancing. It was fantastic, Bachir Attar's father was still a Master Musician, and Bachir was just a teenager. I recorded that with their permission, and it's lucky because that's the only recording of that performance, and since then the musicians have been dying of old age, and the young people of the village don't want to be musicians, they don't want to spend their life learning this oral tradition of music with thousands of different permutations, they want Nikes and hip hop, so they're all leaving the village and living in different towns, a lot of them are taxi drivers in Paris. So the music is literally dying out, there's only about 5 left. And legend has it that when the music stops being played that's when time stops. So, combined with the Mayan calendar saying 2012 is when time stops, the two things are gonna intersect-which is kind of spooky, isn't it?
I used to go see Brion Gysin in Paris, and on one of my visits he said, "Oh, Gen, there's a couple of people staying with me at the moment from Jajouka, Bachir and Mustapha," so I got to meet them and they cooked me a special meal with Moroccan lamb and played sacred, secret flute music while I was eating a meal with Brion Gysin, and then we all took the Dreamachine listening to side two of Heathen Earth (Throbbing Gristle). I remember thinking you couldn't buy this evening if you were a millionaire, you know? It's about as good as it gets. We stayed in touch with Bachir after that. In fact, Thee Majesty grew from conversations between Bachir and myself and Lady Jaye. Bachir performed in the first two or three performances of Thee Majesty.

A: Was your interest in Tibetan singing bowls and thighbone trumpet related to your interest in Jajouka?

G: I was actually interested in Tibetan music and Tibetan culture from the age of 10. I was ill, as I often was when I was younger, asthma and so on, and my father gave me this book, Seven Years in Tibet. I heard about the music and how it was completely functional, it was for healing and for interdimensional travel. I tend now to think that all these functions are included in the interesting music that's made in Western culture, but its done sometimes in ignorance, so sometimes it can backfire and music can do lots of damage.

JOEY BELTRAM "Energy Flash" from Simon Reynolds' Energy Flash book companion CD

G: We're in the acid house era here.

A: Yeah, this is maybe a little late for that by a year or two.

G: It's not as squishy, is it? I don't recognize it, specifically.

A: It's a track by Joey Beltram. You had done dance oriented tracks all along, like "United" with TG, but what was the particular attraction of acid house?

G: Well... TG had experimented with rhythms, "Discipline" funnily enough has turned out to be our classic dance track; since we reformed, as soon as that begins the audience all start going crazy, bouncing up and down. There was always a rhythmic sense and as a drummer I grew up being fascinated with rhythm. And I was listening to Tibetan music more seriously, and I was realizing that high frequencies release certain endorphins and learning about the metabolic side of music, that low frequencies affect the stomach... I started a conversation with Dave Ball from Soft Cell and Richard Norris from Bam Caruso, Andy Weatherall, which became, the title Towards Thee Infinite Beat, saying what we were looking for was... I had two big enthusiasms in music at the time, one was psychedelic music, garage psychedelic music and the other was rhythmic music, ethnic music, trance music that actually had a function, so functional trance music. It was a discussion group, almost... there must be a way to create a sort of rhythmic trance/dance music that's also psychedelic. Then on a tour of America with Psychic TV in mid-80s I'd already started experimenting with radio shows, instead of doing interviews I would do mixes, and I would have this box of tape decks so I could play six cassettes, mixing them all together and start doing these live, long rhythmic mixes that would have one basic beat, then fly all the other stuff in and change it. When I got to Detroit I went on the radio doing this for about an hour and a half, and at the end of it was Derek Carter there and they said we really liked what you were doing on the radio you should come and hear some of the stuff people are doing in Chicago and Detroit. So they took me to this tiny record shop in the ghetto and Derek Carter was playing records, this really early white label acid house thing. I said what's that and they said oh that's acid house. I said "acid house? Wow, what is it?" I said I'll buy every single thing you've got, and it was only 4 records, but I bought all four. That was it really, I took them back to England, made a cassette, and put it in the stereo in my car, got Dave Ball and said "this is it, this is the solution to what we've been trying to do" and drove around London playing it really loud.
Then we did Jack the Tab. I knew that if we did it as Psychic TV or Soft Cell there would be prejudice, so we pretended that it was early tapes that we'd found like those compilations on Rhino or Bam Caruso, Pebbles, Nuggets, and we'll make up names for these different bands, so we'll see what happens. And it got rave reviews. I started to DJ as Jack the Tab and Dave Ball started to do remixes. Already the Psychic TV gigs, we were calling those raves, and there was Towards thee infinite beat and Beyond the Infinite Beat, and we used to be really good friends with the E dealers, when you came to our gigs there were free tabs of E, our things became like parties, so it was a big crossover for a while, all the different threads-Andy Weatherall was a big PTV fan, with a psychic cross tattoo and everything. It was an exciting time. Then I worked on this single "Turn On, Tune in to the Acid House", which for what it's worth was the first record to actually have acid house in the title, although the phrase came from America. And it got banned, not because of the acid house bit, but I used a picture of Superman as the label, and Warner Brothers sent a really heavy letter saying "We own Superman-you've got to destroy all the copies, and give us the masters and apologize." They sent someone around on a motorbike, got the tapes, then went to the warehouse and got all the copies they could find of the record. What they didn't realize was that 5,000 had been already shipped to America (laughs).
I was really disappointed with the way it (acid house) unfolded, it became very conservative, formularized, the DJs became stars just like the singers in bands. There were less and less surprises every time the records came out and then there were experts, all of a sudden, and then there were subgroups, or cliques. And then the raves weren't these secret parties anymore, 20,000 people paying thirty dollars to get in-and it's not what we were thinking at all.

A: Do you think it's partially because it's tied in to a physical experience, not only dancing but drugs, that people aren't listening to what the actual music is-that it's more about a beat than a music listening experience?

G: Yeah, probably. We miscalculated, in a way we were elitist, we were thinking conceptually, it didn't cross our minds that it would just be like going to the pub and getting drunk. Same thing that happened with acid in the 60s, I should have known, at first acid was setting, and trying to travel and change one's programming and then it was "let's go out and drop a couple of tabs and have a good time and feel weird." And then people would go out, drop two tabs and go out to the pub! So I guess there's a whole resilience in people to just enjoy the novelty of weird sensations without trying to think about what they imply. But certainly I very quickly lost interest in it and moved on; it was obvious that it had been co-opted, and also the drug thing was so big so fast, there were huge amounts of money to be made. There was one point where the police themselves estimated that 2 to 3 million people were taking ecstasy every weekend in England. So promoters, and gangsters, and dealers were all having to work together and making these massive events because it was the best way to make a profit. And so it all became about... money. I don't know if the West is ready to have a spiritual experience with music. I think our culture is so corrupted by commerce and so homogenized at this point that its going to be very hard for anything except small, autonomous, private groups, clans, and tribes having their own little scenes.

SWAMP RATS "Psycho" from Back to the Grave Vol 1 (Crypt)

G: (chuckling) Listen to that guitar sound. I don't know who this is. It's a fantastic sound. I like the way they go off rhythm too. Wow.

FLOWER POWER "Mt Olympus" from Beyond the Calico Wall (Voxx)

G: (laughing, and clapping his hands) What the hell were they all thinking? There's that freedom we were talking about earlier. What was that bit there, was that a guitar sound, like a strangled cat bit? (chuckling) Where did you find these? I've got quite a lot of compilations but these I've not heard before. (listening back to the track) The freakout doesn't go with the little kind of cutesy, nice song at all-

A: Yeah, it's still the same tune.

G: Fabulous. (track ends, Genesis laughs and applauds). Wonderful.

A: So the moral of the story is, rock music was pretty radical in the 60s (laughs).

G: I think so. When everything got amplified and there were very few effects, people had to push limited equipment to its limits. It brought out the best in people in terms of exploring, looking for something that was surprising even to them. I remember the progression; it got so that you would literally hear something, almost every week, that you'd never heard before. And that's a really fantastic landscape to be in. The first time you hear Strictly Personal by Beefheart, with all the phasing on it, first time you hear the Velvet Underground with the viola... logic seemed to become irrelevant, which I thought was wonderful. It was almost as if there was a competition to become as irrational as possible. It gave a lot of people the sense, just like punk did, that they could have a go, and opening for them to experiment and have a look at what could happen. The really early Pink Floyd, if you look at those films of them, they're slicker, but they're not that far removed from what's happening there, they just figured out a way to arrange it and place things so it just was more convincing. Syd Barrett was fascinating with sound in and of itself. Rolling ball bearings up and down the strings of the guitar... he actually converted the echoplex from the ones that the telephone company used for the automatic clock when you rang up.
Brion Gysin used to call those "hot spots"; there were certain moments in culture where there was a hot spot and all of a sudden for 2 or 3 years, usually not much more, there was this incredibly overwhelming explosion of possibilities and experiments because of a piece of technology, or a theory like the cut-ups. Often technology and/or a drug combined, for some reason those two things together often trigger the hot spots.
One of the things that I really find with records like that is somewhere amongst those 3 to 5 minutes there's one sound that's genius. So that's when we started to do the Electric Newspaper, just started to collect all our favorite moments from those. One weird guitar or bass line, or somebody screaming something, just collaging them together.

A: The other interesting thing about that era is the imposed time limit, where everything had to be under 3 minutes to be played on the radio, so people started to pack as much information into those 3 minutes as they possibly could. A band like the Music Machine, all those songs are very, very sophisticated in the way they're structured; "Talk Talk" is two minutes exactly, but it seems like there's a dozen different sections.

G: Yeah, yeah, there's a lot to be learned from how they can tell such a complex story in such a short time. I'm still endlessly studying how they do that, cause I find it really hard to make songs short. It's a skill; that's another example of limitations creating something very special.
Today it's almost a reflection of that inertia I was talking about in the culture, the equipment is built to impose a sort of mean average, it can't be overdriven or bent or twisted to do unexpected things it wasn't supposed to do. I'm surprised that it's inspiring, really, I don't know why people think the expected is exciting. I'm not surprised that more and more musicians I run into are collecting old equipment. Remember those circular fuzz faces? I used to have one of those in Throbbing Gristle, to go with my violin. I could just hit the button and it would go (makes noise) and I could do a rhythm with it, just amazing, completely over the top feedback but with a note in it. Then they decided to make them again because people were collecting them, so I bought one of the new ones and it didn't do that at all. You can't get all the little electrical parts, they don't make them anymore, and if you do get them they're not the same because they're so good at making stuff now, electronically, that it doesn't have any built in flaws. Makes me wonder what happens to the minds of young people growing up in a culture where everything is condensed and limited and compressed, what happens to the way they hear things and what happens to the way they see things. When I see modern movies now, it's the same software for all the special effects, and I find it tedious and irritating.
One reason I started PTV again was I think there's really room for people to remind the younger generation of the whole visceral, out of control live experience, a real live gig, a five minute song becomes 15 minutes and the lyrics are different, and there's all this visual stuff happening. We've played 20 countries already and the most common response is "Wow, I didn't know gigs could be like that."
We're in a very strange place now with culture becoming more global, MTV, VH1, satellite TV and the internet... there's less and less room for authentic experience, in terms of collective musical experience. Bands in the 60s, in the first explosion of electric groups, if you read the stories of the Beatles and the Stones, they're playing two or three times a night, and each gig was two sets, and then they'd be playing somewhere else the next night, and the next night, and some of them were doing 300 or more nights a year.

A: I remember seeing a schedule for an early Stones tour in the U.S. and they would play a show in Philadelphia in the afternoon and then a show in New York the same night.

G: What was exciting was the only way to experience the Stones, or whoever, was to go and see them. A live event is always a completely different experience to listening at home. And I've always felt very strongly that recordings, whether they be records or CDs, that those should be viewed as a completely separate project to playing live. You shouldn't be trying to play an exact replica of the record when you play live, that's pointless. I've always thought that a live experience should be as immersive and multisensory as possible.

A: I think people's listening, before the advent of records, was much more intense, cause they knew they wouldn't have a chance to hear an orchestral piece, or something like that, very often.

G: That's very true.

A: And even sheet music or a home piano was the idea of trying to re-create a live experience in the home, but a tinker-toy reproduction of it.

G: My father and my uncles would get together on a Saturday and they all played different instruments.

A: So much of performance is about image, that when you divorce the sound from that it's just harder to be sold on it; I find that I really have to see a band live to feel like I've gotten the full idea of what they're trying to do.

G: Sometimes it takes a long time. I've always liked the Pretty Things, they started to do gigs again a few years ago, and they were amazing. Everything that I'd liked was five times better, and they were fun to watch. It made me fall in love with them all over again on a much deeper level.

A: I saw ? and the Mysterians about 10 years ago at Maxwell's-

G: YEAAHH! Aren't they great?

A:--and they came out and they had Roland keyboards and I'm thinking "oh no, I hope this isn't some updated version of this." But they started playing and it sounded exactly (snaps fingers) like 1966, unbelievable. The way they built the set up, it got more and more and more intense, and they finally played "96 Tears", which was completely over the top.

G: We took him to England when we did Royal Festival Hall, we had ? and the Mysterians, and Billy childish and the Headcoatees, and MMoJ, Quentin Crisp introducing everything, and then Thee Majesty, and then the Alex Fergusson lineup of PTV. ? was fabulous. He was so excited, he got to play in front of 4,000 people.
A lot of bands are very lazy in terms of the way they perform these days. That's one reason I like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is that Karen O puts herself in 100%. Whether it looks ridiculous or not doesn't matter, she'll wear ridiculous things, deliberately trip up, it's great. In fact Nick Zinner plays on our new album. I remixed one of their songs from their last album, "Y Control". The other person who's guesting on our new album is Gibby Haynes from the Butthole Surfers.

CHARLES MANSON "ego" from Lie (ESP)

G: Charlie.

A: I hadn't heard this record in about 20 years, and I was really amazed at how much he sounds like Van Morrison in Them, and there's some songs that reminded me of Arthur Lee.

G: It would have been interesting if they'd given him an actual band to work with. I mean, Squeaky and everybody trying to keep the rhythm on bongos in the background didn't really help very much (laughs). There's no question he had some talent.

A: I kind of listened to it again wondering if he was a kind of original freak-folk character, but it really just sounds like he's another aspiring, California singer-songwriter, he must have heard Arthur Lee since Bobby Beausoleil was playing in one of Arthur Lee's pre-Love bands.

G: Yeah, and Love were playing constantly on the Sunset Strip. Did you read that book about Love that came out?

A: I actually played with Arthur Lee about 10, 12 years ago.

G: You did?! Is he as crazy as he sounds in the book?

A: He's a complex person, let's put it that way. You could almost see him changing gears, sometimes he would be really on the ball, saying "I should be making a cut of the bar at this gig, I've been in this business for thirty years, I know how it's supposed to work", and then you could see him slip out of that and be the kind of free-spirited, head-in-the-clouds guy most of his fans might imagine him to be. To some extent, he's crazy like a fox, but on the other hand, that over-complexity is exacerbated by the drugs and alcohol. One of his friends told me that he once saw Arthur drink two bottles of tequila in an hour.

G: (gasps) How's he still alive?

A: Good question (laughs).

A: I know you were interested in Manson's philosophy is that something you still reflect on?

G: No, no, that was a long time ago. It seemed more relevant when I lived in England and I had a very biased view of American culture, as did most Europeans. And having lived here now for 12 or 13 years I've moderated my disgust (laughs). I used to think that he was the classic thing in the 60s, when it first all came out. That he was the inevitable ghost in the closet of culture here. Someone had to end up being Charlie Manson because of the hypocrisy. He transcended his own limitations and lack of education and had sort of an epiphany through being given so much media attention, that he actually made some very astute criticisms of the corruption going on in American media and politics that were just being ignored. It was a very relevant critique, the reasons that American culture was losing its creativity and inspiration and becoming more paranoid and fear driven. Kind of ironic that something that created fear exposed a fear-driven society. I suppose like many people who live on the fringes of society, marginalized people, I initially would tend to root for the underdog. Nowadays I think there's also a side that one has to confess to which is that he was also a thug. Also there's no question in my mind that he didn't get a fair trial.

A: People tended to look at the Family as a kind of evil twin to hippie culture and the flower children.

G: I think that was exploited, though. I don't think it was the evil twin of the flower child at all, because there was Mel Lyman, there were lots of nasty cults. I think the LSD amplified that in ways that no one expected. That was one of the things that was revealed, all drugs are amplifiers in one way or another, and LSD was an amplifier of the crevices and cracks of the mind. It was the equivalent of splitting the atom with the mind, you don't always know what you're gonna get when you do that. I was friends with Timothy Leary but his gung ho, "everybody should take acid" was a flawed idea. It's not that straightforward. If you're going to tinker with the mind on that level, you've got to have an awful lot of safety measures in place. I think things became very irresponsible and thoughtless in terms of the accessorizing of alternative culture, until it reached the point that we were talking about earlier, of "let's take two tabs of acid and go to the pub, and maybe end up having a fight, like we always did." It wasn't the perfect pill to change people's personalities.

A: It's also interesting, all the nicknames that people in the Family had, and in the Factory too, and going into the punk era people were changing their last names.

G: I'm reading this book of Bob Dylan interviews, and a couple of times people asked him why he changed his name, and he said "we're born as nothing, a name is what you make of it, and Bob Dylan is a name I wanted to grow into." It's an old tried and tested technique which obviously I've used in my own life, the name you get given at birth I think should be seen as a temporary tag, and it goes with the families and the social groups and the expectations of what we're supposed to become, and if that tag doesn't fit what you imagine you want to become it should be discarded, changing names is a really potent form of magic. It's also well-known in any study of cults, that another way of controlling people is to remove their previous name and give them one of their own. Because when you do that you become parental, you're taking control of who they might become. When you join the Freemasons you get a secret name, and so on.

A: But criminals also use aliases as a way to elude identification, and to me being a musician, especially on an underground level, is a lot like being an outlaw. I remember looking at the back cover of No New York and thinking the pictures all looked like mug shots. (G chuckles)

G: I hadn't thought of that but it's true. I've actually been an outlaw, literally, as well. And since I changed my name legally it's kind of ironic, it starts as a statement of separation from traditional society, that I'm going to be this other character, that I'm building, but then it labeled me with this name that was really easy to spot when going through customs and so on. It makes moving around invisibly more difficult, there's pros and cons depending on how well known the alias becomes.

A: So much of songwriting is stealing, too. To go back to Dylan, a lot of the songs on his first records are appropriated from other people or are traditional melodies. Which is part of the folk tradition, but if you know that book Positively 4th Street, there's a story in there about how Joan Baez stole her entire early stage show--songs, singing style, everything--from this other folksinger in Cambridge, Debbie Green. She started off mimicking this person.

G: That's almost like voodoo or something, isn't it? I always liked that band name Pop Will Eat Itself, I always thought that was very true... it is an organic process. For example, with Throbbing Gristle, "Zyklon B Zombie" is exactly the same structure as "I Heard Her Call My Name", and because it was so apparent, to me, I sang "and then my mind split open" to make it clear that I knew that it was the same structure. And then I found out years later that the other members of TG didn't realize.

YA HO WA "Journey Thru An Elemental Kingdom" from Penetration (Higher Key)

G: Sort of sounds like Can.

A: It's Ya Ho Wa, they were a rock band in the 70s but also sort of a cult centered around this guy named Father Yod in California. With Psychic TV you had the Temple of Psychic Youth, a kind of cult, to go along with it; what was the beginning of that idea, how did you feel it turned out?

G: (Laughs) That's a big question isn't it. Funnily enough I hadn't thought of it, but there was actually a TOPY event where we sounded a bit like that (the track), going into this heavy drumming thing, with Alex Fergusson doing guitar over it. It was in an abandoned synagogue, the sound was amazing. If you whispered on one side you could hear everything on the other side. The TOPY idea grew from conversations with Monte Cazazza, we were throwing ideas back and forth. What would happen if a band actually accepted the adulation that happens, instead of seeing the fans as either the commoners, or maintaining a distance from them, seeing them as kind of a necessary but irritating part of what happens; what happens if you designed them, or took that energy and worked with it? There'd been an article about David Bowie where he'd come from the station and was driven in a car and done this kind of pastiche of being a German officer in an open-top car, there were all these scandalous bits in the paper about what if one of these people with all of their fans was a Nazi, or had a cult, and we picked up on that and said, yeah, what if? What if something took that and deliberately embraced it to see what would happen? That was the original premise.
So we thought of the idea of the uniform, even if you wear the same grey uniform it's the details that make you unique. That it's impossible to all look the same, it's a contradiction in terms.
Being a paramilitary occult organization sort of needed some content. I'd been getting more and more interested in the side effects of some of these shamanic rituals that I'd been exploring, basically designed it to be an open-ended exploration of if there was information and content beyond just music, why should the back of the record just be stuff about the band, why not have it be an essay about something that concerns you about what's going on in the world, or whatever. Much to our surprise, lots and lots of people wrote to us, we put some information on our first album, gave it this clear image and look, the shaved head and everything, and it worked, people wanted to know more. We did it as an anti-cult, really. We said ok, you have to send 23 pounds and we'll send you the grey book and it will tell you what you need to know. It said how to do a sort of simple sex magic ritual, and essay about fear controlled societies, and some propanganda about what we were thinking, and lo and behold, all of a sudden, there were 10,000 people involved worldwide. And the government of England got really scared by it (laughs). It was very effective. We had stations and autonomous groups that looked after different geographical areas, and we kept having to split it up because there were more and more people. People would organize events, and concerts, and do books, and records, start labels, all kinds of things-we had 2 or 3 book publishing companies, about 5 labels. Once a year people who were more active would come from all over the world and we'd go off to a farm up north, there was a big stone circle there, the farmer gave us permission to camp out. You could run around naked and take magic mushrooms and talk about what we thought was right with the world and wrong with the world... basically, we came to the conclusion that nothing would improve except by changing human behavior. And how do you do that? We realized that the rituals and all the things we were doing were cut ups, we were doing cut ups with behavior, the same way that you break up the linearity of literature with cut ups or the linearity of music with sampling. And it backfired, the wonderful design that was paramilitary made it very easy for the media to paint us as neo-Nazi. And then of course the sex part freaked them out, anything that pro-sexual is a threat... and the basic fact that we were trying, truly, to attempt to affect the evolution of the human species in a small way was seen as extremely threatening. Because we were a very active organization and very self-motivating, we were involved in closing the dolphin area, in Brighton where I lived, which was a 1 and a half million dollar a year business. We worked with the anti-apartheid movement, we worked with gay liberation... my way of explaining it is, if you think of one of those one-armed bandits in Las Vegas with the circles that go round, eventually Scotland Yard pulled the lever and my name popped up on all of them. Everything that they didn't like, all the activities that they were against, I was involved in some way. That's how it looked to them. Of course we were also involved with raves and acid house, so everywhere they turned, everything they were threatened by or scared of, or trying to stop, we were encouraging (laughs). There was bound to be a clash at some point.
It was always meant to be an anarchic organization with no one in charge, but I miscalculated how much people want someone to tell them what to do. We spent more time, in the end, trying to think of more ways to avoid there being any hint of hierarchy than we did doing anything useful. It got just ludicrous; and then, of course, the people who were at the center of it, doing the most work, who were also financing it-Psychic TV and everyone else involved was spending their own money to do it-were losing money as well. We just decided there was no way around it, we'd just have to quit, to stop it. We were driving along one day and there was a sign up by some roadwork that said "changed priorities ahead." And I said, that's it, that's what has to happen next (laughs). So we printed all these nice postcards that said "Changed Priorities Ahead" and then sent them to everybody, and that was it (claps hands), the end, they had to figure it out for themselves. We never figured out how to change behavior, it seems pretty obvious it's down to each person. It worked rather well but it caused me an awful lot of aggravation in the end.

WOLF EYES: from Live Scum (Hanson)

G: I don't know what that is.

A: It's Wolf Eyes.

G: Oh, Wolf Eyes, they played with us a couple of times. They didn't sound like that, maybe cause live it's much louder.

A: Olson is playing sax on that, which he doesn't always play. Those guys each have their own labels, and they release what seems like every single show they play (laughs), which is something TG did with the 24 Hours box on Industrial. Is this something you've taken notice of over the years? And what was the thinking in making that statement of releasing every live show at the time?

G: well, one thing was because none of us could play traditionally, certainly couldn't then, the only way to remember what we'd done was to tape it. Early on when I'd been going to hang out with Burroughs in London, I asked him what was the best tape recorder to get. And he told me to get this Sony tape recorder that had a nice condenser mic in it. The first TG album was recorded on that tape recorder in our space. From the very beginning when we started experimenting with sound in a band format, I just recorded everything, based on Burroughs' advice, thinking at the very least it would be raw material that something could be made out of. The first release we did was a cassette, The Best of Throbbing Gristle Vol. 1, and that was just bits that we thought worked the best, edited together. We used that as a template to see if we could reproduce any of those sounds. Our way of learning to play was creating bits of tape and each week we'd meet Friday, Saturday, Sunday and play hours and hours and record stuff and then listen to it, and then over the period of a whole year, we developed a sound, and enough proficiency to be able to do something for an hour. But it was loose enough that it was still worth recording to see how it sounded afterwards. So that just slipped from learning how to be TG to recording what TG was. We recorded the gigs so that eventually we could edit our favorite bits and that became the first album. One side was bits from gigs, and the other side was just playing in the space.
TG did, altogether, about 30 gigs, and I just came up with the title one day, 24 Hours of Throbbing Gristle. That worked... the others also thought that was witty and interesting, and what better way to show the development of the band from stage one right through, lay it out and just say there it is. There's every gig. Seemed like a good idea (laughs). We decided to do it on cassette tapes, Chris and Sleazy found these high-speed cassette duplicators so we could make 5 copies at a time. We rang up Virgin Megastore and said we've got this project, do you think you'd be interested in buying one or two to sell, and they said "we'll buy 120." I think we made about 118 and just couldn't stand it anymore.
We did our Industrial newsletters people started to send us cassettes of their music, so we would print all the addresses of people who'd sent us their music, so they started to swap them, so we did encourage people to start setting up networks and exchanging cassettes. So I think we played some part in that approach.

A: I think Wolf Eyes would admit that they were influenced by TG.

G: There seems to be a renaissance of bands that have been influenced by aspects of TG. They don't try and copy TG they'll take one aspects of our experiments which they particularly find interesting and they'll pursue that and explore it and develop it into something which flowers in its own way.

A: it's sort of like the Velvet underground in that way, that's its inspired a lot of bands that just take one aspect of it.

G: I always thought it would be nice to be in a band that people thought would be worthy of being influenced by but I didn't honest

© The Wire 2009

All Credits: Wire [Adventures in Modern Music Magazine]