I’d gone to an “acid test” at the union at Hull University. I walked in, paid my entrance fee and received my tab. People were already tripping when I arrived: they were on the floor groping one another or playing with a bathtub of coloured jelly. A guy was playing the saxophone, free jazz-style. The notes were so jarring, fast and scatty that it drove me crazy. As I went to leave, I saw what I thought was a hallucination: a small, beautiful guy dressed in a black graduation gown, complete with mortarboard and a wispy, pale-lilac goatee beard.
About a week later, I was out dancing when a guy came over to me and said: “Cosmosis, Genesis would like to see you.” “What?” It was explained to me that a guy called Genesis had seen me and named me Cosmosis. It was the man I thought I had hallucinated, and he wanted us to get together. “Gen was so beautiful,” reads an entry in my diary for November 1969. “His eyes were a clear blue, his hair dark brown and his skin a clear, golden colour. He smiled so beautifully.”
I started seeing Gen. I’d never met anyone like him. He was very well read, quite the archetypal revolutionary-cum-bohemian artist. He’d moved into a flat in Spring Bank, where my friend Graham also lived. Gen slept under the kitchen table, in a sleeping bag inside a polythene tunnel he called his rainshell. It was a strange and unromantic place to conduct our liaisons, but it made some sense: it was free, and warm from the cooker. My visits weren’t the hot, lusty love affair I’d come to expect from previous relationships, and there were arguments, unexpected at such an early stage. I put it down to Gen being very sensitive, and also his liberal view of relationships: that “no ties” posturing.
The Ho Ho Funhouse, which we later moved in to, was my first home away from home – a far cry from Bilton Grange housing estate. It was part of Wellington House, a Victorian building close to the fruit market on Queen Street. My room, which was small and dark, faced on to a dank alley at the back. Moses, as we called him due to the way he looked, and Gen shared a room opposite. Among all the other people living there was Roger, who had escaped from prison, taking the Midnight Express from Turkey and arriving back at the Funhouse after being severely beaten on the soles of his feet and suffering from dysentery. .
At first I felt a little out of my depth, being the youngest, and the only person who hadn’t gone to university. I was slightly in awe of Gen. I learned that he’d won a poetry prize while studying English at Hull University, that he and radical student friends had started Worm, a student magazine that was free from editorial control but shortlived because of its obscene and “dangerous” content. After he’d dropped out, he’d joined an artists’ commune in London, called Transmedia Explorations. Gen learned a lot from his short time with them – but he never mentioned to me the fact that much of what he presented as “his” concept for his new project, COUM Transmissions, came from Transmedia Explorations and its predecessor, the Exploding Galaxy: life as art, communal creativity, everyone is an artist, costumes, rituals, play, artworks, scavenging for art materials, street theatre, rejection of conventions, and the advocation of sexual liberation.
Gen and his friends would go on shopping trips, returning with a holdall full of books and other items “liberated” from various sources. I went shopping with Gen and a friend one day to the food hall in Hammonds (the Harrods of Hull). When we paid and went to leave, store detectives escorted us to a side room. I hadn’t taken anything, so handed my bag over without a second thought. They emptied our bags to reveal stolen food. I was gobsmacked. My attempts to explain that I hadn’t known or done anything fell on deaf ears.
We were all taken to the police station and charged with shoplifting. We were asked our address, but gave “no fixed abode”. If we’d given the Ho Ho Funhouse address, the police would have gone there and found drugs. They put us in cells for the night. After an hour, my door opened and I was taken to the front desk. I saw Mum, her eyes red from crying. She held me tight. I asked her how she knew I was there. The police had rung Dad and said: “We have your daughter. She’s been sleeping rough with two young men.”
Dad was appalled. She’d begged him to drive her to the police station, but he wouldn’t come inside. I assured her I was fine, that I wasn’t sleeping rough, or with two men. She left feeling relatively comforted. I went back to my cell and the next morning me, Gen and John were found guilty, fined £10 each (despite pleading poverty), and set free. The air had never smelled so good.
One night at the Funhouse, we were enjoying having the building to ourselves, when we heard the roar of motorbikes, followed swiftly by a smashing sound as the Hells Angels broke in through our front door and tore through the house, spraypainting the walls and ransacking the place. For some reason, they didn’t make it as far as us on the top floor. When the noise subsided, we quietly made our way downstairs to find they’d congregated in the communal room and were giving one of their “prospects” a mouth-scrubbing with Ajax toilet cleaner.
My background meant I was more savvy at handling Hull hardcases than the others. I was confronted by one of the bikers’ girlfriends, a tough blonde girl they all called Glob. She was surprised at my combative response to her threats. I entered into a dialogue with a couple of the guys. Some of them came from Longhill Estate, near my family home. That was our saving grace. We ended up having a half-civil conversation, sparring until we arrived at an amicable kind of “understanding”, and they left.
When the other commune members returned, Bronwyn was particularly pissed off as the bikers had sprayed “Bronwyn pulls a train” in huge letters across her room. This is a term used by the Angels for women who had sex with one man after another to gain status. It wasn’t the nicest thing to come home to.
In the mid-1970s, the COUM team took a show to Amsterdam. Being a sexually liberated place, Amsterdam seemed an opportunity to indulge ourselves, and we took the brakes off. To start, Foxtrot walked on looking menacing in his SS leather coat and hat, his riding boots and sunglasses, and wielding a blowtorch, which he used to light the torches on the stage. He and I had a scene together, both dressed as homosexual soldiers, kissing and groping.
Gen had wanted me to give Foxtrot a blowjob, but I refused. Biggles was on a table being massaged by Fizzy in his “Shirley Shassey” dress and he offered Biggles the “extra” service, then turned to the audience, smiling, and proceeded to oil Biggles’ bits – rather too vigorously for comfort, judging by Biggles’ face.
Sleazy was positioned to one side of the stage, fully dressed, seated alone on a chair, softly lit, reading aloud his public-schoolboy sexual fantasies from handwritten notes. I had a much more full-on time. I strode on stage, dominatrix-style, in high heels but otherwise naked save for a strap costume that didn’t cover much. I’d made it from strips of black PVC and gold buckles I’d found in a bin.
I stood watching a naked Gen being chained to a cross. I daubed him in flour paste and chicken’s feet and whipped him hard. Gen had told me to whip him properly – it had to be real. I don’t think he’d really thought about what being whipped meant in terms of pain, or that I’d actually do it, but I really got into it, and Fizzy was itching to have a go, too. I had to hold back a bit the second night because of the welts that I’d inflicted.
We’d performed to 1,500 people each night. We’d had little sleep but felt elated at what we’d done. Whipping Gen crucified on the cross worked so well that we restaged it back in Britain for a new COUM poster image. Sleazy did some photographs with Gen drunk, cuffed and chained to the cross, and me in the foreground in my strap costume clutching the whip. Me and Sleazy loved it, but Gen wasn’t too keen. I thought it reflected a shift in the dynamics of my and Gen’s personal and working relationship. For the first time I was in the dominant position.
I was constantly having to second-guess Gen’s mood swings. Nothing I did was enough. He showed no empathy towards me – it was always about him. If I had an early start for a photo or film shoot, he’d keep me up late, talking about himself, saying he was depressed and needing reassurance. He fed off me like a parasite. I knew my life with Gen couldn’t continue.
On 1 August 1978, as we lay in bed, I told Gen I thought that we should separate. First there were tears, from us both. I held him close. I hated making him so sad. When he realised he couldn’t talk me round, the reality hit home. “But you’re my battery – I feed off you,” he said. No mention of love. “That’s why I have to leave,” I said. “I feel like I’m being eaten away.”
He leapt on top of me and started strangling me. “If I can’t have you, nobody can!” I was strong enough to get him off me and hold him down until his temper subsided a bit. He was wild-eyed, and I suspected that as soon as I let go of him, he’d flip again. I jumped up, ran through to the front bedroom, dressed as quickly as I could, and grabbed the bag of essentials that I’d thankfully packed ages ago. I heard Gen get out of bed and turned as he came running after me. He was so fast. “All because of THAT!” he screamed at me as he kicked me so hard in my crotch that it almost lifted me off the ground. I was doubled over in pain, holding myself. I couldn’t move. Then he unleashed a torrent of punches and kicks and delivered a verbal blow that hurt me more: “I’d never have let you kill my baby if I’d known you’d leave me.” I was stunned to hear him use the termination I’d had in this way. “My baby”? Not “our baby”? How cruel to use the child I’d mourned against me.
Me and Gen living apart didn’t seem to adversely affect Throbbing Gristle, the band that evolved from COUM. We were on fire with ideas. The band took a trip to visit our friend Monte, who was now living in San Francisco. We all slept on the floor of his living room, which was difficult as Gen kept wanting to sleep with me.
I took the opportunity to get an all-over tan. I hated bikini marks – they didn’t look good when I was stripping. I was on my own in the garden, lying on my front in a red G-string, half-asleep. Suddenly there was a great thud. I sprang up to see that a large cement block had landed about six inches from my head. Gen had thrown it from Monte’s balcony and was standing there staring down in silence.
He could have killed me. I shouted at him and Monte came out to see what was going on. He was horrified, but Gen carried on like nothing had happened. With hindsight, it’s unbelievable that Gen wasn’t brought to account. Maybe Monte made him realise what a narrow escape he – and I – had had. That put a halt to any more sunbathing for me when Gen was around.