UK Edition
Review
Rock star, artist, sex worker: the incredible life of Cosey Fanni Tutti
"The wreckers of civilisation” was how one Conservative MP described the COUM transmissions art collective after its 1976 Prostitution show at the ICA, which displayed decomposing sanitary products, strippers rolling in fake blood, pornography and glass-eating. The outraged tabloids had a field day, and the opening night ended with “fists, feet, bottles and glasses flying in all directions”.
Looking back, COUM’s Cosey Fanni Tutti now feigns not to have understood “what the fuss was about… the five-foot-long double-ended dildo smeared with blood, syringes we’d used for injecting blood and urine, knives, my soiled bloody tampons and other relics were everyday objects to me, but were obviously shocking to other people”.
At 65, with an acclaimed career in art and music behind her, you’d think she could admit that she got a kick out of sticking two fingers up at society’s hypocrisies. The MP who condemned them, Nicholas Fairbairn, was, after all, well known for his drunkenness and marital infidelities. But she doesn’t. And it’s this strange lack of honesty, or perhaps self-awareness, that leaves a question mark hovering over the reliability of Tutti’s Art Sex Music, a memoir that still manages to be entirely gripping, despite its wrist-buckling heft and sprawling cast (many of whom have more than one pseudonym) that would give Tolstoy a run for his money.
Tutti was born Christine Carol Newby in Hull in 1951. “Yours was a difficult birth,” her mother told her, “and you’ve been difficult ever since.” Her father was a fireman: cold, detached and abusive. He addressed her like a dog and beat her until she left home. She remembers him holding her only once, when she was six, after she had had some teeth removed. She says she later came to understand his behaviour as a consequence of his own childhood and wartime experiences, but gives no further details. On the plus side, he shared his passion for electronics with her, kindling an interest that would lead to the music she made with her groundbreaking industrial band, Throbbing Gristle.
Tutti gives a salty flavour of post-war Hull, swarming with Teddy boys, mods, skinheads and brawling trawlermen. She loved it. Her childhood playgrounds were dumps and bomb sites: no wonder she developed a fascination with exposing the intimate, dirty details of life. When a flasher tried to scare her little gang with his member proudly displayed on a “pure white handerkerchief”, they whipped him with branches and sent him scrambling for safety, still exposed.
Early sex games thrilled Tutti. She loved a game in which boys would put their hands up a girl’s skirt to see how far they could get before the girl shouted “Nervous!” “Unlike the other girls,” she says “I never said ‘Nervous!’ – and also, unlike them, I reversed the roles and played the Nervous game on the boys. Some boys said ‘Nervous’, but I didn’t always stop.” She got a detention on her first day at secondary school for wolf-whistling at a male teacher.
Though Tutti was a wild teen – dropping acid, staying out late at gigs, wearing skirts so short they could pass for belts – she also worked hard at school, excelling at art and science, gutted that her dad ruled out university. The violent struggle to be accepted by such a controlling father would become the template for her early relationships with men, and fed directly into her disturbing bond with fellow COUM and Throbbing Gristle collaborator, Genesis P-Orridge. He first saw her dancing to Sugar Sugar by the Archies at a disco and sent a guy over to summon her: “Cosmosis, Genesis would like to see you.” It turned out that Genesis, born Neil Megson, had decided they were meant to be together and proprietorially renamed her Cosmosis.
Tutti was warned that he was extremely selfish but she fell for him anyway, moving into the old warehouse he called the Ho Ho Funhouse and shared with other counterculture thinkers. Tutti didn’t have all that much fun, though. Her new man preached hippy clichés about freedom and equality but she went out to work to support him, then came home to do the cleaning. “Gen had a thing against vacuum cleaners,” she writes. “I had to clean with an old carpet sweeper and broom, usually when he was out.”
He also “had a thing” about aggression, and in a rage would attack her and hurl their cat. He emerges from these pages as a wannabe cult leader, spouting bunkum about sex magick cribbed from occultist Aleister Crowley and giving his “Cosey” another alter-ego as Scarlet Woman, pushing her into sex acts with other men (although only those of his own choosing).
Initially encouraged by P-Orridge, she began a career in pornography (both film and camera) and stripping in pubs. It is clear from her blunt recollections how little glamour was involved. We meet strippers who station Alsatians at either side of the stage to protect themselves, and magazine editors who refer to the women as “it”. When Tutti is required to shave herself for one shoot, then loses work for weeks – nobody then would hire a porn star without pubes – we see how times have changed.
She is unapologetic about her sex work, and how it played into the patriarchy. “I was transgressing rules – feminist ones included,” she says. “I live my life as a ‘person’, seeing all options as being equally open to me and everyone alike. I refuse to be defined or confined by my gender… I was no ‘victim’ of exploitation. I was exploiting the sex industry for my own purposes, to subvert and use them to create my own art.” It was all “an adventure”, she says, this life peopled with souls called Figleaf, Far Out John and Gasmantell. Everyone’s identity was up for grabs, and P-Orridge (who has since had surgery to resemble a woman and now identifies as “third gender”) cast a long shadow.
As they began COUM, the boundaries between their complicated sexual relationships and artwork dissolved. Inevitably, P-Orridge’s sex games backfired when Tutti fell for one of the men he pushed on to her, Chris Carter, who would become her life partner, musical collaborator and father of her only child, Nick. After she left P-Orridge, he threw a breeze block at her while she was sunbathing. It landed beside her head.
It’s a testament to Tutti’s strength of character that she wrestled free of P-Orridge, both artistically and emotionally. P-Orridge has repeatedly claimed ownership of much of their collective work, and Tutti is understandably keen to reclaim her essential (and deeply personal) contributions to both COUM and Throbbing Gristle.
Direct and funny, if occasionally conflicted, Tutti’s version seems mostly credible. She is still engaged in artistic “actions”, although they’re less messy now. Back in the Seventies she struggled to keep her used tampons from disappearing down the dog (she was “embarrassed” helping him with his business at the park by pulling out the string) while these days it’s the more hygienic ashes of tampons from her final period that she sprinkles around Disneyland.
Tutti left Throbbing Gristle behind after a fractious reunion between 2004 and 2010, and now she and Carter make dark, tribal electronica as Carter Tutti Void. She gave up the sex work in the Eighties, once she’d earned enough to put down a deposit on a house with Chris, in a quiet Norfolk village where she admits she didn’t have much in common with the other mums. Today she spends much of her time peacefully working on their organic garden. When her heart stopped briefly after an operation, she was disappointed to see nothing: no tunnel, no light.
Recently, the couple attended their son’s wedding. On their way to the reception, the taxi driver misunderstood them and headed for a lap dancing club where Tutti had once worked. They laughed and got the taxi to turn around, opting for the buffet instead.
Art Sex Music by Cosey Fanni Tutti
512pp, Faber, £14.99, ebook £8.96. To order a copy of this book from the Telegraph for £12.99 plus £1.99 p&p, call 0844 871 1515 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk