If ever a person has tried to live life as exactly as one has wanted, it’s been Genesis P-Orridge. There are few people in the world of music or pop culture in general that have exerted the kind of influence or inspired the types of controversy that P-Orridge has. Perhaps best known as the founder of the bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, P-Orridge the musician has challenged his listeners countless times to try to pin down his definition of what music truly is. P-Orridge was also an important figure in the construction of the rave scene in England, and, after being chased away from Brighton, England, after unsubstantiated charges of satanism and child abuse springing from his creation of the magical order of The Temple ov Psychick Youth brought several raids down on his home, moved to San Francisco and helped foster the rave culture there.
These days, the sexagenarian Genesis P-Orridge is just as controversial a figure as always. Along with his wife, Lady Jaye, Genesis is currently the undergoing various surgical procedures and mental reconditioning to redefine his/her sexuality. Musically, s/he and Psychic TV have undergone a reformation as well, and the new PTV3 is currently on tour with a bunch of new material and ideals to spread willy-nilly around the globe. Along with the reformation of Psychic TV comes the re-release of much of the Psychic TV back catalog—remastered by Genesis--starting with the re-release of 1985’s Godstar: Thee Director’s Cut by Psychic TV, the score Psychic TV composed for a project that never came to fruition: Godstar, a movie based on the life of the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones.
H: Where did the name Genesis P-Orridge come from?
G: Oh, that question again? It was 1965, and quite a lot of my school friends went to a party together., I couldn’t go to the party, and they decided, when they were a bit stoned, to play a game. So they wrote down the names of all the people they knew on one column, and then they put Biblical names next to them that they felt were appropriate. And they put Genesis next to my name. And it was the only one that stuck. And that became first my nickname and then I started to sign poetry and artwork and paintings with “Genesis,” and it just stayed.
That was in ’65. Then, after I dropped out of University in 1969, I spent part of my time living on somebody’s kitchen table, because I had no money, and the only thing I could afford to eat was porridge. So whenever people did see me, which wasn’t very often—I only weighed about 85 pounds at that point—they only saw me eating porridge. And one of the people whose apartment it was was this kind of beatnick poet-type named J--, and he came in really drunk and high on LSD one night, and said, “Your name’s not just Genesis—it’s Genesis P-Orridge, and the P stands for Willow, but it’s spelled Pillow.” He was in this really aggressive and angry mood, even though he was high, so I just said, “Okay, J--, yes, it’s P-Orridge.” And that was it.
And then in 1970, I decided that since everyone knew me as Genesis P-Orridge, and no one really knew my original name anymore, that I might as well do it legally, and make it more exciting, just to see what happens when you did it with bureaucracy. I went to see a lawyer, and the lawyer said, “That’s hilarious! I’ll do it for free!” So I changed it legally in 1970. So that’s the name on my passports and everything. That’s my actual name.
H: So what drew you to music and being in a band?
G: Well, my father was in bands when he was young, before World War II. He was a drummer in jazz bands, so I grew up around drum kits and I started playing the drums when I was three or four years old. And I took piano lessons and I was in the cathedral choir in Stockport, so I used to do all that complicated medieval singing in the church, wearing those red and white robes. I was a pretty little choir boy. Innocent, I was (giggles maniacally).
So I started out listening to loads of jazz. I used to see Duke Ellington and Buddy Rich and Count Basie and those bands when they came to town—I lived in Manchester still—but then I started hearing records by the Rolling Stones sometime around 1962, and I thought that was fantastic. So I became a Rolling Stones fan first—in the days when Brian Jones was still in the band, and they doing being interesting songs for the time. There was a pirate radio station called Radio London, and then there was another one called Radio Luxembourg that was coming out of Europe, and they were the only ones to play new, modern music, and my friends and I would listen to these stations almost exclusively.
One day, one of my friends called Spidey came up and said, “You’re going to have to buy this album by this band called the Velvet Underground. You’ll just love it.” So I did. I bought it the day it came out, The Velvet Underground and Nico, and that was the really, really sort of liberating moment for me. I’d already started listening to John Coltrane and John Cage and started to lose interest in form in its traditional way, and then I heard the Velvet underground with the electric viola and I was smitten. Smitten with the possibilities. And also the fact that the lyrics weren’t just “I love you, you love me, you don’t love me anymore.” It was more like journalism. The lyric was liberated, too, in many ways. It also gave me the sense that you could actually take any, any topic at all, and it was valid to become some form of song where the lyrics were a piece of music.
H: How did that background translate into what you did with Throbbing Gristle and Psychick TV?
G: Well, when I was still in school from 1966 to 1968, I already recorded lots of tapes. I started recording tapes when I was 10, doing cut-ups and loops and feedback and so and so. I was already utilizing tape recorders as instruments from the age of 10 on. I’d do that pretty much every other day--all the time, I was experimenting with tape. And then in 1969, I joined a performance art group in London. When I left University, I went to London and joined this group called The Exploding Galaxy. Actually, a book just came out about them. It was like a psycho-therapeutic commune of artists, so it was very much to do with challenging anything that was normally accepted. For example, if somebody was still using the original name that they got when they were born, people’d say, “Well, why have you still got that name?” and then, “Why have you got hair?” and “Why have you not got hair?” “Why do you eat with a knife and fork?” and “Why do you eat?” and “Why do you eat that?” It was a kind of constant questioning of things, that nothing had to be the way it was last time. That was a really good discipline.
From that experience, I ended up doing my own performance artwork with Coum Transmissions, which was very much in the art world, and that was the material that it was about. Eventually, it became to do with transgression and sexual taboos, identity as a fictional narrative, the idea that male and female were really as arbitrary as anything else. I basically took the earlier ideas of The Exploding Galaxy and became even more rigorous with them, really, in a sense, chopping up every aspect of consensus reality and then reassembling it in unexpected ways. Very much a collage approach, but to one’s own personality and one’s own world. So we would invent characters, like cartoon character ideas, and then make a costume and then live that character, and you would have to answers questions in the voice of the character, from the point of view of the character, and walk and behave like the character, and you might do that for several days until you switched costumes, and you’d have to be somebody else, and go into that character. It was very tough, but it was fascinating. Some people literally had sort of semi-nervous breakdowns because they were unable to let go of all their preconceptions. But a lot of people are still in touch with me that with through that process with me, and it was incredibly positive for them in terms of dealing with all sorts of aspects of their lives since. They’re really good at focusing on the real issues, and improvising and being very pragmatic. It’s given them a real strength in that area.
So that was what was going on from ’69 to 1975, and then in 1975, with Coum Transmissions, we’d started adding in sound, tape collages and ambient sound tracks and bits of newspaper reports, bits of television news, to emphasize aspects of the performance art pieces. And there were four of us at that point: there was Sleazy, Cosey, Chris, and myself. And we just started to become more and more interested in the power of music and its ability to have a direct effect on the mind and body. So we started to look at Tibetan music, where they use certain frequencies to release endorphins, and ritual tribal music where they used specific patterns of drumming to induce trance states, and thought we had found a way to do that kind of music, but make it totally relevant to modern post-War and pre-technological society. We wanted to find a way to do an equivalent tribal music for European industrial culture. And so that’s what we started to experiment with first in our basement. We built our own speakers, we built all our own amps. Chris even built his own synthesizers and effects pedals. We started to just experiment with rhythms and loops and noises, and record everything, and listen back to it and whichever bits we just felt we liked we would see if we could copy them and do it more than once. So for the whole of 1975, we did that for 3 or 4 days a week, just constantly experimenting with sound, and building equipment.
One day, I was walking through the park in Hackney in London with my friend [and future Psychic TV guitarist] Monte Cazazza, and we were talking about the music, the Throbbing Gristle music, and I was saying ,”We’ve got to have a name for this music. There’s already dada and surrealism in art movements, and this is, in a way, a music movement, or it could be, so it has to have a name.” Because it always makes things more effective when you inject them into popular culture—it’s just one of those facts of life. So we were walking on, and I was throwing all these ideas at Monte, and I said, “Well, we could call it ‘factory’, because of Andy Warhol, but really it’s more about industrial society,” and I was saying all these things, and he said, “Gen, you keep saying ‘industrial.’ That’s obviously what it’s meant to be.” And so it was him that pointed out to me that I was stating the obvious, and I hadn’t really realized it, and that was the first time that music was called “industrial music.” Which is unusual, very, very unusual, if not unique, to have a new genre of music named consciously, and know the day that it happened, which was the 3rd of September, 1975. From there on, there was industrial music—before, there wasn’t.
And now, of course, people all over the world use the term “industrial” to refer to music, and a goodly number of them don’t even think about the fact that once upon a time, it didn’t exist, or how it became named thus, and what it was intended to represent. In fact, I’ve had people actually say to me, young people in St. Mark’s, that I was lying, that there had always been industrial music. I could slap them! Just check your history books! It’s one of the sad sides of modern media, especially television media, VH1 and MTV in particular, that they’ve deliberately miswritten the history of music. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I don’t see a VH1 “Behind the Music” on the Velvet Underground, or Captain Beefheart, or all kinds of groups that were very significant to an awful lot of people. Or even of the famous punk bands. They’ve also never ever mentioned Throbbing Gristle or hardly ever mention Nine Inch Nails anymore. It’s a very, very skewed and twisted interpretation of what popular music is, and it seems quite possible that they’re very, very deliberately rewriting the story of music, because that way, they can control the product. They don’t want people interested in things they don’t have to sell, and they want people to believe their stories. It’s a classic control technique.
H: What brought you to the United States, and what keeps you here?
G: I came here because I could do everything I wanted and not be attacked. I was left alone. In England, it was just becoming impossible to do anything. The newspapers were just printing all these ridiculous articles about me being the most evil man in Britain, that I was corrupting the minds of the youth—and I hope I was—from their perspective, anyway. And it was just becoming impossible to do anything. They were opening my mail, they came and took away two tons of my archives from the house and destroyed it. It was clear that they were just going to keep on and on and on attacking my lifestyle, until I was incapable of doing anything. And so I thought, Okay, I’ve been here forty years. That’s long enough to be in any one country. I’ll go somewhere else!
So first of all, I went to Thailand and Nepal, and in Nepal, I worked with Tibetan refugees spending most of the money I made out of record sales on helping to put together small hydroelectric schemes for monasteries in the mountains and in the little villages. You can do it for about $5,000, because they have so many streams coming off the mountains. You basically just put a big, metal tube in the stream, with a small dynamo in the middle, and you get enough electricity for light bulbs in the village and to warm and sterilize water, and then they don’t have to cut down the trees. So I was doing that while I was being accused of being evil in England. (laughs). Kinda funny. I spent a lot of time meditating with the Tibetan monks and finding my own place in the world.
H: Well, you weren’t converting the little brown people. That’s why England thought you were still evil.
G: Right! I wasn’t being a missionary. I was listening. And no, they were converting me! There was one day when I finally found out that while I’d been in Katmandu, that my house had been raided and all this stuff was taken, so I went and saw one of the Tibetan refugees, and I said through a translator friend, “Guess what? I’m a refugee in exile, too, now.” And we both burst out laughing, and had a nice cup of Tibetan tea, and it didn’t seem so bad. You know, I’d spent six months with all these other refugees who had had much worse things happen to them, and it kept it in perspective. And then I was sitting in the hotel room, and the hotel was owned by Tibetans, afterwards, and as soon as they heard what happened to me, they said, “Hey, you can stay as long as you want for free. You’ve been nice to use for six months, and now we can take care of you.”
So I was reasonably safe—and I had my children with me, too—and I was thinking about everything, and I noticed that there were some letters that I’d picked up as I was leaving England, and had just thrown into my suitcase but never looked at them. And so I was opening this letters, just trying to process what was going on, and I opened one of them from Michael Horowitz, who turned out to be the man who was taking care of the Timothy Leary archives. And inside his envelope was a little postcard with a letter on it, and it said, “If you ever need a refuge, call this number.” And I just looked at that, and thought, “How weird! How did he know I would need a refuge six months ago?” So I rode back into Katmadu, found a phone where you could phone internationally, called his number, and he answered and said, “Just come over. You can stay with us for as long as you want.” So I thought, “Okay! I guess that’s where I’m meant to go next.” So that was how I ended up in America. I just followed the signs.
I lived in his spare bedroom for about six months with my two children. I raised money by helping with some raves in San Francisco—it was kind of the beginning of the rave movement there. It had just started about a year before, maybe less. And one of the rave kids came and up to the house one day—they found out where I was staying, and turned up at the house and said, “We want to help you get somewhere to live, so we’re going to do a couple of raves, and you can have all the money.” It was extraordinary! That’s what I’d been hoping people would get back in England, you see, that you make a difference with your art, where sometimes you’re helping someone out with money or whatever through your creativity, and then later on, that person may be able to help you out through their own creative endeavors. There really is this much more exciting version of everyday life that comes from living like this, if you just surrender to the nonlogical, the illogical version of reality—the magical version of reality, to put it in a very simple way.
So anyway, it all worked out fine. That’s how I got here, and I was able to stay because of that, people who’d seen things years before when we were touring, helping out. And then I fell in love. Madly, crazy in love! With my darling other half, Lady Jaye. And I’m still here. We’re still here.
H: So as the founding father/mother of industrial music, what do you think is the future of music?
G: The future of music? Well, it has to be something that’s not on television. I think television has basically completely destroyed the natural patterns of music for it to evolve. Now, if something seems even vaguely interesting, it’s signed, packaged, pushed out into the marketplace, and then, after a brief surge of interest, without it having had time to mature or for the group to really think about a lifelong series of ideas they would like their music to incorporate and change with—and then all of the other companies get copycat versions of that one band and sound. Within six months, all that creative activity is corrupted and destroyed, and turned into just commodity. For music to have a future where it’s creative, it has to return to live events, more independent radio, like college radio or even more independent than that. I think the Web will become important for music because in a while, people will be able to access bandwidths, and do their own programming, a bit like in the days when industrial was often just heard on a friend’s cassette tapes.
So I think that the impact of the Internet for independent new music still hasn’t really been seen, but it will.
And as for style, it’s hard to imagine what’s potentially been lost, style-wise, because of this mass-marketing process, but usually, music changes significantly when technology changes. 60s psychedelic music went hand-in-hand with wah-wah pedals, electric guitars, new amplifiers, and so on, so when the technology allowed for loud, electric music, it sort of happened. And usually, there’s a drug and/or dance and clothing that goes with that, too. So perhaps there’ll be a new designer drug and some new technology that’ll come along. I think there’s going to be quite a long lull, and people are going are drift, work more slowly at what I think is going to be the real cutting edge: mixed media events, as we’re doing, with PTV3, with video and sound, performance, basically an emotional experience rather than a musical experience. An emotional experience triggered by sound, in that the sound and the style will be less important than the effect. I think people need exhilaration, and they need excitement, and they need joy in their lives. So the next music should be about that discussion, and how to make those feelings happen, and the style doesn’t matter.
