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. Members 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.

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

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.

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. In fact she now has a website called Coum

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.

In the spirit of Debordian détournement, artist/novelist Stewart Home has incorporated elements of COUM's output in some of his exhibition work, in particular, the pornographic pictures of Cosi Fanni Tutti