COUM Transmissions

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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 Cosey Fanni Tutti and Genesis P-Orridge. 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 (or Echo Foxxtrot), Fizzey Peet, Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson and Chris Carter.

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.

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.