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| Genesis P-Orridge |
|
| Background information |
| Birth name |
Neil Andrew Megson |
| Also known as |
DJ Doktor
Megatrip, Megs'on, Neil Andrew Megson, P. Ornot, PT001, Vernon Castle |
| Born |
February 22, 1950 (1950-02-22) (age 57) |
| Genre(s) |
Industrial
music |
Associated
acts |
COUM
Transmissions
Throbbing Gristle
Psychic
TV
Thee
Majesty
Splinter
Test |
| Website |
http://www.genesisp-orridge.com/ |
Genesis P-Orridge (born Neil
Andrew Megson February 22, 1950) is an English performer, musician, writer and artist. His early confrontational performance
work with COUM Transmissions in the late
1960s and early 1970s along with the industrial
band Throbbing Gristle, which dealt
with subjects such as prostitution, pornography,
serial
killers and occultism,
generated controversy. Later musical work with Psychic TV
received wider exposure, including some chart-topping singles. Genesis
P-Orridge is credited on over 200 releases.
He has two daughters, Caresse and Genesse, with his former
wife and creative partner, Paula P-Orridge (aka Alaura O'Dell).
|
Contents
- 1 Early
life
- 2 Name
change and Early Worm
- 3 1971
to 1976
- 4 Throbbing
Gristle
- 5 Psychic
TV
- 6 Post-industrial
and Acid House
- 7 Trouble
in England
- 8 Recent
life
- 9 Discography
- 10 References
- 11 See
also
- 12 External
links
|
Early life
Neil Megson was born in 1950, in Victoria Park, Manchester.
His parents were involved in theatre and music. A photograph of Neil,
age five, appears on the cover of the CD A Hollow Cost.
In his teens he attended Solihull
School. Neil was interested in the occult, whilst his grandmother was a medium.
The Megson family lived at the edge of Epping
Forest, in Loughton,
south Essex.
His father, Ron, was a Jazz musician who liked Bebop and Nat
King Cole.
Neil was drawn to the manner and dress of The Rolling Stones band
member Brian Jones.
Name change and Early Worm
In 1965, while attending Hull
University,[verification
needed] Neil subsumed
himself into the character of Genesis P-Orridge. He used the name for
his first pressed recording, Early Worm in 1968 (of
which only one copy was pressed), and legally changed his name in 1971.
The follow-up to this album of improvisation on homemade instruments,
Catching the Bird, was never released.
At this point, the Megson family was living in Solihull, a
prosperous town near Birmingham. The attic of the house on
Links Drive was not only P-Orridge's den but his first sound studio,
where Early Worm was recorded.
According to Genesis P-Orridge, Deroy Sound, the lab where Early
Worm was pressed, also pressed speeches of Adolf
Hitler for serial killer Ian Brady,
recorded from radio and television by Brady.
The Throbbing Gristle song Very
Friendly is about Brady and his partner-in-crime Myra
Hindley.
The cover of Early Worm features
handwritten quotes by John Cage, his book Silence
being a source of inspiration for Genesis P-Orridge.
1971 to 1976
In 1971, P-Orridge met William
S. Burroughs after a brief correspondence. One of the most significant
outcomes of these exchanges was Burrough's introduction of GPO to Brion
Gysin. Gysin would become a major influence upon GPO's ideas and works
and was his primary tutor in magick. (P-Orridge, 2003)
P-Orridge dropped out of the University
of Hull in 1969, P-Orridge joined Exploding Galaxy, a commune in London's Islington
Park Street. Members abandoned all normal modes of living, all notions
of privacy,
and Britain's class structure. Discipline was expected and costumes
were the norm, as was role-playing and a rejection of all forms of
social convention.
He returned to Hull and formed a prankster
collective which eventually included Cosey
Fanni Tutti.
Tutti and P-Orridge became the focus of COUM events and
transformed COUM from a music and theatre operation into more of a performance
art group with a focus on sex, taboos, and the paranormal. In 1973 they
were joined by Hipgnosis's Peter
"Sleazy" Christopherson.
Tutti worked as a secretary, stripper, and pornographic and erotic
model. The now infamous "Prostitution" show, in 1976 at the Institute of
Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London included on display Tutti's
pornographic images from magazines as well as erotic nude photographs.
The show featured a stripper, used Tampax
in glass, and transvestite guards. Prostitutes, punks,
people in costumes, and general curiosities hired to mingle with the
gallery audience.
The show caused debate in Parliament about
the public funding of such events. In the House of Commons, Scottish Conservative MP Sir Nicholas
Fairbairn demanded an explanation from Arts Minister Harold
Lever and proclaimed P-Orridge and Tutti as "wreckers of civilisation".
Fleet
Street was not slow to pick up the story. The reviews were cut up,
framed and put on display for the remainder of the exhibition. This was
also reported in newspapers, so cut-ups about the cut-ups were also put
on display.
COUM had always been a confrontational enterprise, one example
of this being the Nazi-influenced
visual element. Toward the end of COUM, performances would often
consist of only P-Orridge, Cosey and Sleazy, the core group who went on
to form Throbbing Gristle.
Throbbing Gristle
Throbbing Gristle was formed 18 October
1976 at the ICA as a four-piece rock band.
The first Throbbing Gristle performance was at the Air Gallery
in London on July
6, 1976. The
band performed in one room with the music "appearing" in an adjacent
room. Peter worked in special effects and provided the
performers with simulated scars, and Chris used a razor to slash
himself.
At that point Throbbing Gristle headquarters was 10 Martello
Street, Hackney, in East London,
an address of an anti-West End artist collective.
P-Orridge and Tutti's living and work space was the mailing address of Industrial
Records. The IR logo was a faded, high-contrast black-and-white
photograph of Auschwitz's
main ovens.
The final Throbbing Gristle single was "Discipline."
The final IR release was called Nothing Here But The
Recordings, a best-of album taken from the archives of William
S. Burroughs, who had allowed P-Orridge and Sleazy access to his
reel-to-reel tape archive.
The final TG event, Mission Of Dead Souls,
was in May 1981 in San Francisco. Soon after, Genesis and Paula
P-Orridge (née Alaura O'Dell) were married in Tijuana.
Psychic TV
Psychic
TV was formed in 1981. Alex Fergusson of Alternative
TV had, over tea,
encouraged P-Orridge to start something new. The musical collaboration
between the two goes back to the very first ATV line-up, which included
Genesis as drummer.
According to a bit of writ on the official P-Orridge and Voiceprint
websites, the name was Fergusson's idea, with the "psychic" part
representing P-Orridge and the "TV" part representing Fergusson. "Just
Drifting" was the first PTV song, based on a poem by P-Orridge.
Psychic TV made its debut in 1982 at an event organized by
P-Orridge, David Dawson, and Roger Ely, called The Final
Academy. It was a 4-day multimedia celebratory rally held in
Manchester and at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton[South London]. It brought
performers and audience together with literature, performance, film and music.
PTV, Cabaret Voltaire, 23 Skidoo,
Z'ev, John
Giorno, William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Terry Wilson, Jeff
Nuttall, and The Last Few Days participated to honor the cut-up
techniques and theories of William S. Burroughs, Ian
Sommerville, Anthony Balch and Gysin. Video projection and early sampling
were used here, as well as whispered utterances by P-Orridge
reprocessed as a soundtrack to Gysin's Dreammachine
by the Hafler Trio.
Force Thee Hand Ov Chance,
Dreams Less Sweet,
Allegory and Self,
and Trip/Reset are
considered by P-Orridge, in an interview with Sonic Envelope, to be the
fully-realized PTV albums -- "metaphorical and very, very considered
and carefully constructed meticulous albums."
Psychic TV was an ever-evolving thesis but "thee mission"
remains to wake people up from the delirium of preconceived notions and
the sleepwalking
most of us subject ourselves to. Amazing shows, even on the many off
nights, are always part of what PTV was and continues to be. Jarring,
comforting, disappointing, fulfilling, exciting, mundane,
transcendental, unnerving, ugly, beautiful and surreal, in keeping with
the title of Derek Jarman's film of a Throbbing Gristle dis-concert, Psychic
Rally in Heaven (Heaven being a club in London), a PTV
event/experience/show or dis-concert often takes on the mood of a revival
meeting, wherein the collective consciousness takes a break from the
day-to-day and gets transported, in the tradition of Sun Ra, Grateful
Dead, Fela, George Clinton or
even, at times, with audience and performers becoming blurred,
akin to a Santería
ceremony
or kirtan.
Earning an entry into the Guinness Book Of
World Records for most records released in a year by a musical group,
Psychic TV set about, in the mid-eighties, to release 23 live albums on
the 23rd of each month for 23 months in recognition of the
23 enigma. The liner notes to each of these releases functioned
somewhat like mini-manifestos in the tradition of the Situationist
International or William S. Burroughs' Electronic Revolution
in addition to recounting aspects of the recordings contained therein.
For example, the fourth album in this series, Live
In Reykjavík, featuring part of a ritual from
Godhi Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson
includes liner notes that refer to Christianity as "sham X-tianity," in
reclamation of a Pagan heritage via an Ásatrú marriage,
over which Beinteinsson presided, below a statue of Thor in "thee
wilderness".
Psychic TV returned to the stage in 2003, with a concert in
New York under the guise of PTV3 and was accompanied by (with the
exception of Genesis) an all new line-up. In September 2004, an
extensive tour of Europe (covering 16 countries) and North America was
launched. 2005 saw the band return to the studio, recording their first
album in over 10 years (Genesis also spent 2005 working with Throbbing
Gristle on what will be their first album in over 25 years).
Additionally, a few more dates were performed in Europe throughout the
year. In January 2006, the new PTV album was announced by Genesis on
his website. HELL IS INVISIBLE...HEAVEN IS HER/E, the album, was
recorded in New York and features Nick Zinner (Yeah
Yeah Yeahs) and Gibby Haynes (Butthole
Surfers) guesting on some tracks. Genesis describes it as "Dark
Side of the Moon for the 21st century". Release is expected mid-Spring
(Northern Hemisphere) 2006 and it will be followed by a tour that may
last up to 18 months. [2] To inaugurate the release of HELL IS
INVISIBLE...HEAVEN IS HER/E, PTV3 hosted a five night residency in
September 2006 at Galapagos Art Space in Williamsburg,
Brooklyn,
USA that included collaborations with such cult luminaries as Kembra
Pfahler as well as many others.
Post-industrial and Acid House
P-Orridge was instrumental to the development of Industrial
(including ongoing influence in the form of Post-Industrial music) and Acid House
music. The extent of his involvement in the last genre is often
disputed, though it seems likely that he and his cohorts in Psychic TV
(PTV) were among the first to import the Detroit
Techno music to England.
A Psychic
TV picture disc was the first to have the phrase "Acid House" written
on it.
Due to a copyright problem with an image of Superman used
in the illustration, this disc was pulled and is much sought after by
collectors.
His former wife and PTV collaborator, Paula
P-Orridge, is no longer mentioned in liner notes of any of the reissues
of the music or writings since the mid-1990s.
P-Orridge and Paula have been associated with the culture of body
modification, as well as magical or religious movements. They founded Thee Temple Ov
Psychick Youth aka TOPY. In the mid-1990s Genesis chose to distance
himself from TOPY, even going so far as to claim that the project had
been ended, as he had done with Throbbing Gristle in the early eighties.
Trouble in England
In February 1992 GP-O, the family, and various members of the TOPY entourage, had
just come from Kathmandu, where they had distributed
rice, dal, and
clothing to those in need from a Hindu temple in an annual tradition of "giving
back" through PTV royalties. A disturbing telegram
arrived stating that there was "trouble in England".
Scotland Yard arrived at the
P-Orridges' house in Brighton on a tip in the hopes of finding
incriminating items. This was followed by a Channel 4
Television programme addressing a supposed growth of Satanism in
the U.S. and the UK. Geraldo Rivera had, with much
success, unleashed a similar program to the U.S. in 1987. According to
Genesis's account of the events, a fundamentalist lawyer in Liverpool
had convinced a couple of mental patients to relocate to a Christian safe house
in the North of England where, through various methods including sleep
deprivation they would confess to involvement in a Satanic cult, in
this case Psychic
TV. These individuals claimed they were forced to engage in various
ghastly and unspeakable acts in the basement of the (basementless)
house in Beck Road, Hackney, East London.
In Brighton, the swelling P-Orridge archives had already been
extensive for decades. Oddly enough, actual controversial items,
including sigils, were left untouched by the
police. Amidst the many items, eventually what was procured was a videotape,
some 10 years old at the time, of a supposed ritual murder which,
according to a Sonic Envelope interview with GP-O,
was actually made by John Balance and Sleazy. In
the years since this episode, it would all seem like bad blood between
Genesis and his ex-co-conspirators, as well as his homeland, has nearly
all been absorbed. All charges were dropped, not long after the
handover of power in the UK, and all the items returned.
Genesis and family heard from their lawyers in Britain that it
wouldn't be safe to return home. The P-Orridge family approached Michael
Horowitz who had offered them refuge if needed. Horowitz provided
needed shelter and new connections such as Timothy
Leary and Oliver Stone who hired GPO as a
consultant for his adaptation of Wild Palms. Soon after the relocation to
California, Genesis and Paula's marriage ended.
Recent life
Genesis relocated to New York City with his second wife,
Lady Jaye, nee Jacqueline Breyer and began an ongoing experiment in
body modification aimed at creating one pandrogynous being named "Genesis
Breyer P-Orridge". Genesis P-Orridge received breast
implants and began referring to himself as s/he.
A book of GP-O writings, poems and observations, called S/He
is Her/e, was published in Nepal.
In the mid 1990s, GP-O collaborated with different people in
music, including Pigface
and Skinny
Puppy. Interestingly, GP-O also performed with Nik Turner
and a reinvention of Hawkwind, a band with whom he'd
shared bills in the early 1970s.
In April 1995, GP-O won a $1.5 million lawsuit against
producer Rick
Rubin and his American Recordings label for
injuries he sustained while trying to escape a fire at Rubin's home.
According to P-Orridge's attorney, David D. Stein, P-Orridge was
staying at Rubin's home as a guest of Love and Rockets
when the fire broke out. P-Orridge tried to escape the house by
crawling through a second-story window and fell onto concrete stairs.
P-Orridge suffered a broken wrist, broken ribs and a pulmonary
embolism, as well as a shattered left elbow that will prevent him from
playing guitar or keyboards, according to Stein. The jury found that
the liability for the fire rested with Rubin and American Recordings
and awarded P-Orridge $1,572,000 for his injuries.
In 1999, Genesis performed with the briefly reunited late
1980s' version of Psychic TV for an event at London's Royal
Festival Hall. It was called Time's Up, also the
title of the Thee Majesty CD release. The MC for the event, via
pre-recorded video, was Quentin Crisp. A DVD was made of this
event, which included the Master Musicians of
Jajouka, ? & the Mysterians, Billy
Childish, and Thee Headcoats.
In the 1999 World Serpent
Distribution release of the Thee Majesty CD Time's Up,
Jaqueline Megson is credited as providing Point Of View,
Bryin Dall for Frequency Of Truth and Genesis as Divination
Of Word.
In December 2003, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, calling himself Djinn,
unveiled PTV3, a new act drawing upon the early "Hyperdelic" work of
Psychic TV with media theorist Douglas Rushkoff among its members.
On May 16th, 2004 all four former members of Throbbing Gristle
performed at the London Astoria for the first time in
23 years.
Genesis P-Orridge appears in the 1998 film and 2000 book Modulations.
S/he also appears in the 2004 documentary film DiG!
and in Nik Sheehan's 2007 feature documentary on the Dreamachine
entitled 'FLicKeR'.
Discography
Note: this is for releases specifically credited to Genesis
P-Orridge, for work with PTV see Psychic TV discography, for
work with Throbbing Gristle see Throbbing Gristle
discography.
- Interview By TOPYSCAN
- The Industrial Sessions
1977
- What's History
(1983)
- Je T'Aime (1985)
- Alaura/Slave Priest
(1990)
- What's History
(1990)
- At Stockholm
(1995)
- Vis
Spei (1995)
- A Perfect Pain
(1999)
- Direction Ov Travel
(2002)
- Painful 7 Inches
(2002)
- Wordship
(2003)
- When I Was Young
(2004)
References
- Ford, Simon. Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story
of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle. Black Dog
Publishing, 1999. ISBN
1-901033-60-0
- P-Orridge, Genesis, Douglas Rushkoff (foreword), and Carl
Abrahamsson (introduction). Painful but Fabulous: The Life
and Art of Genesis P-Orridge. Soft Skull Press, 2002. ISBN 1-887128-88-3
- P-Orridge, Genesis. "Magick Squares and Future Beats." Book
of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult. The
Disinformation Company, 2003: 103-118 ISBN
0-9713942-7-X
- Vale, V. and John Sulak (2001). Modern Pagans.
San Francisco: Re/Search Publications. ISBN
1-889307-10-6
- Williams, Sheldon. "Genesis P-Orridge". pp. 770-772 in
Naylor, Colin & Genesis P-Orridge (editors). Contemporary
Artists. Macmillan Press/St Martin's Press, 1977. ISBN 0-333-22672-0
See also
- List of unusual
personal names
External links
