Genesis P-Orridge

Last month, industrial performance artist and provocateur Genesis P-Orridge performed her final concert at London venue Heaven. It wasn’t just a farewell to her audience, but also a means for Genesis P-Orridge to bid farewell to herself. Recently she told the New York Times that the course of her chronic myelomonocytic leukaemia meant that she had “less optimistically, a year, maybe six months. And then I’m on the downward slope to death”. As with the Fall’s Mark E Smith in January this year, it’s difficult to imagine the UK music underground without this constant fixture.



The death was confirmed by Genesis's daughters, Genesse and Caresse, the musician and artist, who had been battling leukaemia for two-and-a-half years, was 70. “It is with very heavy hearts that we announce the passing of our beloved father, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge,” Caresse and Genesse P-Orridge said in a statement shared online. “S/he will be laid to rest h/er other half, Jaqueline “Lady Jaye” Breyer who left us in 2017, where they will be re-united.”

With Throbbing Gristle, Genesis helped pioneer the genre of industrial music. In later life, they became a "body evolutionist", proposing a new gender that was beyond male and female. Her/his other band Psychic TV, in whose oeuvre a playful pop music sensibility could be discerned, among experiments with electronic noise, psychedelia and droning repetition, seemed to favour subtle infiltration rather than the bludgeoning approach of Throbbing Gristle.



Throbbing Gristle were an English music and visual arts group formed in 1975 in Kingston upon Hull by Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter Christopherson, and Chris Carter. They are widely regarded as pioneers of industrial music. Evolving from the experimental performance art group COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle made their public debut in October 1976 on COUM exhibition Prostitution, and released their debut single "United/Zyklon B Zombie" and debut album The Second Annual Report the following year.

Cosey Fanni Tutti in her studio.

The band released several subsequent studio and live albums—including D.o.A: The Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle (1978), 20 Jazz Funk Greats (1979), and Heathen Earth (1980)—on their own record label Industrial Records, building a notorious reputation with their transgressive and confrontational aesthetics; they included the extensive use of disturbing visual imagery (such as fascist and Nazi symbolism and pornography), as well as that of sound manipulation (noise and pre-recorded tape-based samples) influenced by works of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin.

Throbbing Gristle dissolved in 1981 due to interpersonal differences; the individual members went on to participate in other projects, such as Psychic TV, Coil, and Chris & Cosey. The band was reformed in 2004, and released three more studio albums—TG Now (2004), Part Two (2007), and The Third Mind Movements (2009)—before disbanding again after P-Orridge's departure and Christopherson's death in September 2010. The band's final studio project, a cover version of the 1970 Nico album Desertshore called The Desertshore Installation, was released in 2012 under the moniker X-TG.

Psychic TV has continued well through the 80s and P-Orridge has released 37 studio albums with the band since its conception. In 1993, P-Orridge moved with Lady Jaye to Ridgewood, Queens in New York where the pair began the Pandrogeny Project, identifying themselves singularly as “Breyer P-Orridge”. In a recent (2011) documentary by French director and curator Marie Losier, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, P-Orridge is shown to be heartbroken, weak, struggling to pay the bills. But Losier allows P-Orridge to steer the course of the film away from the more controversial, problematic aspects of her early years – a celebration bordering on hagiography.