Genesis P-Orridge: The Mr. Skin Interview

By C.G. Hilliard

Born Neil Megson in Manchester, Genesis P-Orridge is a living legend of underground culture. Along with doing dozens of collaborations over the years, Genesis was a founding member of experimental collective COUM Transmissions and the pioneering bands Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV and Thee Majesty.

On October 9th 2007, Genesis’s second wife and Psychic TV bandmate Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge died unexpectedly. The two were in the midst of a series of surgeries designed to make the pair into identical “pandrogynes.”

Genesis has carried on the Pandrogyny Project and an amazingly prolific creative output. Genesis’ band Psychic TV has a new album out called Mr. Alien Brain Vs. The Skinwalkers on Cargo/Sweet Nothing Records.

A few months back, Genesis did a phone interview with Mr Skin’s C.G. Hilliard and this is an excerpt of their long, fascinating conversation.

What are you most focused on now? Is it music, art, writing, magick, or what?

(Laughs) The easy answer is all of the above. Gosh. We’re- oh, by the way, we’re trying to say “we” instead of “I” because of the Pandrogyny Project. Jaye now represents both of us in the other dimension and this body that I’m in represents us both here.

I understand.

It’s confusing. We don’t always get it right, but we’re trying to learn to do it that way. But we just finished a brand new album by Psychic TV and, in all honesty, we think it’s the best album we’ve ever made!

Really?

It surprised me, yeah. But the answer is that, in terms of activity, it’s been very much on the music lately. We’ve discovered we really enjoy just touring and playing live with this particular lineup of Psychic TV.

The new album is basically recorded live, straight to tape, and we hadn’t played for six months when we recorded it.

The bulk of it was made for National Public Radio and it’s just uncanny how much everyone was focused on each other.

The excitement of being with a band that can really improvise and then get tight and has so much energy has really gotten us excited about music again after years of being disillusioned.

Music is a love, you know? We love missing stuff for other people. It’s collaging. Ultimate, if you say what we’re focused on, it’s collaging, whatever the medium.

Making art is a collage, and the life that we lead, the Pandrogyny Project, books and essays that have grown out of that material- it’s one big animal.

It feeds itself. When the band is playing, the book becomes relevant and that makes performing relevant, and then poetry becomes relevant, and it goes round and round like that.

What’s the name of the new album?

It’s called Mr. Alien Brain Vs. The Skinwalkers. (Laughs) It’s really straight-ahead psychedelic rock. There’s a cover version of Foggy Notion by The Velvet Underground with a twist in the middle, where—and this is an example of what we were talking about—we get quiet and make up a story about Andy Warhol and Candy Darling having an argument about him being a bit of a creep.

Basically, at this point in our life, it’s just so much fun to play anything, anything at all.

Can you talk about the Pandrogyny Project?

Yeah, we can. That’s still happening. The surgeries we’re having tomorrow are a breast reduction and some work on our face. We spoke to the doctor about doing one more procedure to make us look more like Jaye when she passed away.

And then that’s the end of the physical side of it, but the ideas behind it…

We started it as a very romantic, loving idea. When you fall in love you want to eat each other up. There’s no way you can get close enough to each other. You just become one, especially when you’re making love and you have a mutual orgasm.

We were so obsessed with each other that we very literally wanted to be as much each other as possible.

So we started to have the surgeries to look like each other as a romantic idea, but as we thought more about it, we thought about something William Burroughs said to me a long time ago, which was “How do you short-circuit control?” and “Where is control?” And we decided that control is the biological limitations of the body and DNA, that DNA enforces our expected physical appearance. And it would be very interesting to challenge something at that level and say, “We refuse to accept the limitations that you’ve given us.”

Why should we be either/or? Why should we be good or bad or Muslim or Christian? Why should we be male or female? Surely the future of the planet is for the human race to look for similarities rather than differences and to take control of its own mutation and its own evolution.

So in a theoretical way, we’re doing cut-ups and collages with DNA. So when you look at DNA as a recording, we were thinking “Where is the human race going to go with the world in a state of crisis?” And crisis is always based on difference. So that for any social group, anything that is outside their realm of experience or their way of perception is seen as a threat, or something to be fearful of.

And that’s a prehistoric way of viewing the world. And it happens on a big level with governments and on a small with people bigoted about other people being gay or whatever.

What happened to Neil Megson?

We wonder about that a lot (This would be an “I” because it was before Jaye). When I was younger I applied my analysis to the culture and then it was pop art and Andy Warhol, who created the idea of superstars.

Looking at that, Neil thought, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if, instead of being gallery art, that idea was applied even deeper, and that you could go beyond the celebrity idea and create a character that you could live as your whole life?” And that would be Genesis P-Orridge.

So Neil thought, “I’m going to become Genesis P-Orridge and that will be my living work of art.” So Neil visualized it as a conceptual piece.

But he had no idea that Genesis would get so notorious or so entrenched. It’s really hard to imagine where Neil is. Looking back, it’s a stranger with a smart idea. But we feel like we’ve become a parasite on Neil, we’ve occupied Neil.

It would be lovely to go back in time and say, “Is this what you wanted to happen? Or would you rather have gotten married and lived in the suburbs and worked for an advertising agency?”

Can you talk about the sexual performance art you were doing in the 1970s with COUM Transmissions?

(Laughs) Well, COUM Transmissions began very much more as a sort of traditional 1960s “happenings” experimental theater group, exploring identity in different ways.

We had a series of costumes that were characters. There was the bigoted old woman, the vicar, the clown, the alien, the rebel and the baby. And when you put those costumes on that weekend, you had to live as if you were that person and respond as if you were that person.

And from that, we got very interested in human behavior. Why were people shocked by something in one context but not in another?

A simple example would be: On the beach people sunbathe topless a lot, but if they were topless in Barnes & Noble, people would be offended. But the breasts are the same breasts.

Who’s drawing the line in terms of taboo and transgression and why are the doing it? Why does sexuality have to be policed at all?

And it has to be because sexuality is so powerful and potent for a human being that it can undermine the authority of people who are addicted to control in any society.

Wherever you look in the world, the most rigorous rules are around marriage and sexuality. And we wanted to find out what that was, where that was going to go.
For example, what would it be like to masturbate in front of an audience?

We felt that sexuality in all of its forms is one of the most revolutionary energies that one can access in terms of change- personal change and social change.

So from the theater pieces that were much more traditional we moved more and more into focusing on male-female physical intimate relationships.

At the beginning it would be more straightforward. Cosey [Fanni Tutti] would be in female blue outfit and I would be in a male pink outfit and we would be surroundings by things that were all those two colors. And gradually during the performance we would switch clothes completely. The boundary between male and female was getting broken and blurred.

We found that if we slowed things down it became more resonant with people who were watching. It became a much more religious atmosphere as opposed to being a sexual atmosphere.

Speed made a big difference. It made people perceive what was happening in a much more respectful way.

Sometimes I would have these out-of-body experiences. I would speak in tongues. I could withstand much more pain in this trance state. So gradually we started looking into various shamanic cultures.

Slowly but surely, we got to these very minimalist performances. One of them was in Los Angeles where we looking not just on sexuality and how it worked for people, but also at that thing we were just talking about- the context.

Cosey would begin in a leotard with lots of fruit and feathers and soft things, sort of like a nest. And then I would be across from her and I would have ice cubes on the floor and small carpet tacks and sharp things that would hurt.

And then we would very slowly start to explore like children the environment we’d made for ourselves. And Cosey would strip off all her clothes and create really violent-looking scars and wounds on her body by crushing up peach pulp and strawberries so she would look more and more like she had been attacked by a machete. But there was this really nice fruit smell.

People were riveted! At the same time she was doing that, I would stand on the ice and the carpet tacks but no one could tell that I was actually in a lot of pain and I was getting real cuts and wounds.

We got into liquids for alchemical reasons. So sometimes I would have a milk, whiskey, and blood enema, and urine. It was a very biological approach I was doing while Cosey’s was more lyrical. But people would always focus on Cosey because it was more dramatic. It was a Hollywood version of violence, an illusion. People would be much less impressed with my body and yet mine was the one that was having real suffering.

Who was your favorite actress when you were growing up?

Oh, that would by Diana Rigg, Emma Peel from The Avengers, because that’s where my fetishes began for sure. We have every episode here.

Really? So you had sexual fantasies about Diana Rigg?

Actually, I had fantasies about being Diana Rigg.