COUM Transmissions

COUM Transmissions was a performance art group interested in pushing boundaries, influenced by Dada and the Merry Pranksters.

CT was a whimsical, eccentric as well as confrontational band and performance art group, from Hull, Yorkshire – a collective the constants of which were its founder, Genesis P-Orridge, and Cosey Fanni Tutti, who joined in early 1970. It had a rotating membership, not atypical of the 1960s, and included both intellectual and criminal elements and existed formally from 1969 until 1976. In that year, they exhibited at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts in a show called Prostitution, which consisted of explicit photographs of lesbians, assemblages of rusty knives, syringes, bloodied hair, used sanitary towels, press clippings and photo documentation of COUM performances in Milan and Paris. There was a lot of outrage expressed by London newspapers and UK politicians, including Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn, who referred to COUM as the "wreckers of Western civilization". However, memberships to the ICA increased sharply as a result of the COUM show.

The last official COUM performances and art shows took place in 1976. At or around that time, Genesis proclaimed he was through with performance art. Cosey, on the other hand, felt she had only just begun. Though she feels the name COUM to be "tainted" now and unusable, she has been known to say her individual projects are still a part of the COUM family of work^{[citation needed]}. In fact she now has a website called Coum

During its final performance, in '76, the occasion was also the birth of the four-member Throbbing Gristle, which is a slang term, from Hull, meaning erection.

Members of CT over its existence included Foxtrot Echo (aka Echo Foxxtrot), Fizzey Paet, Ray Harvey and "Spydee Garmantel". Although Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson and Chris Carter were acquaintances of the collective they did not technically join up until COUM had morphed into Throbbing Gristle.

The collective, as a band, opened for Hawkwind, got interest from John Peel and were played on his radio show.

COUM's work took on different directions and lives of its own. Examples include Cosey's pornographic modelling career and, most notably, the industrial music group Throbbing Gristle.

TG dissolved and the parts went on to form their own projects and projections. As Psychic TV, Chris And Cosey, Coil, Thee Majesty, Genesis, Cosey, Chris and Sleazy continue to elaborate and expand upon what they originally discovered back in the late sixties/early seventies together.

A definitive documentary work on COUM Transmissions is the book Wreckers of Civilisation, by Simon Ford, a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Black Dog Publishing Company, July 2000.

Discography

In July 2009, American record label Dais Records released the COUM Transmissions LP The Sound Of Porridge Bubbling in a limited edition of 500 copies, as was the case with Early Worm (Genesis P-Orridge and friends, 1968) in 2008. When announcing the release of the album, Dais stated that it is to be "the first in a planned continuing series of lost recordings by COUM Transmissions".

The COUM LP was recorded in 1971 and then shelved due to the fluid nature of COUM's membership and interests. What musical content the LP features is improvisational and avant-garde in nature, and for the most part the album's tracks consist of spoken word material and sound experiments, at times reminiscent of the audio material that William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin had been experimenting with in the 1960s.

Track listing

Side A

1. "Welcome To The Alien Camp" - 1:57
2. "Real Sure Alien Brain" - 2:51
3. "On The Count Of Three" - 1:57
4. "Dogs Are Funny People" - 1:24
5. "It's Easy With Kesey" - 1:32
6. "73 Vibrant" - 2:56
7. "Magazine Illustration" - 0:48

Side B

1. "Magickal Variants" - 5:16
2. "Nude Supper" - 9:46
3. "The Sound Of Porridge Bubbling" - 1:56