5

A scorching summer in 1981 befitted the mood me and Chris were in as we started our life together. Free at last, everything seemed brighter than bright – blazing sunshine, laughter and positivity. First stop after our return from America was to visit Pam and Les to tell them about the baby. We went to the seaside at Scarborough. A carefree break prior to tackling the TG fallout and our future plans.

There was so much to do. For one thing, I couldn’t continue stripping once my baby bump began to show. That came sooner than I expected. The landlord at the Old Red Lion commented on my boobs looking great ‘that size’. He thought I’d had breast implants. Although I was only fourteen weeks pregnant, I told my agency I was leaving. I fulfilled one last job, performing a striptease to Bowie’s ‘Fashion’ for a new format, the LaserDisc. It ended up coming out on video, with me being introduced by the actor Keith Allen.

With our new era came the task of dealing with residual TG matters. We all agreed to complete any outstanding projects and announced the official end of TG with a funeral card that simply stated ‘The Mission Is Terminated’, dated 23 June 1981. Me and Chris visited Beck Road at appointed times. Gen insisted I take everything that he deemed to be my belongings, as Paula was moving in: all my ICA framed magazines, my darkroom equipment – Gen didn’t want it, he didn’t know how to use it, and in any case he had Sleazy to do all that for him. I also took some of my negatives and asked Gen for copies of photos of our time together. He put some in an envelope and gave it to me. I thought that was amiable of him. But when I got home and opened it, he’d cut himself out of every one of the photos. It struck me as strange and childish to go to the trouble of making a symbolic gesture of cutting himself out of my life. I took that and his reaction to my pregnancy as a sign writ large that he was ready to let go at last. It was a relief.

There was more purging to follow. I was told by Gen that Paula was allergic to cats, so they had to go too. I couldn’t let them be sent away to strangers or be put to sleep so I said I’d take them. However, I was only allowed to take Hermes and Razart; Gen wouldn’t let me have Moonshine. Paula’s allergy aside, he regarded Moonshine as his cat. By the beginning of July, the era of me and Gen was over. The saddest final part was dear Tremble passing away on 5 July. She was buried in Chris’s parents’ garden, her grave marked by the twelve red roses I’d been given on my final stripping booking just two days earlier.

*

Before the TG split, Geoff Travis of Rough Trade had asked Chris to play him some of his solo tapes and offered him a solo album deal. Me and Chris went for a meeting with him at their Blenheim Crescent offices in Notting Hill after the TG USA trip. It was an incredibly hot and sunny day. Everything seemed to be in slow motion as we walked hand-in-hand down the street lined with cherry blossom trees, being gently showered by the falling pale-pink blossoms and treading softly through the drifts of flowers that had collected underfoot.

The meeting was just as uplifting. Rough Trade were very supportive and offered to front the cost of manufacturing and handle distribution, and Geoff also extended Chris’s solo album offer to include the release of the first Chris & Cosey album. We’d started compiling ideas and sounds while in LA and soon after we got back we began recording in the small studio Chris had set up in one of our old bedsit rooms after we’d moved into a larger flat downstairs. We used a TEAC four-track, then took the tape to Meridian Studios, under the Southern Music offices down Denmark Street (just next door to Hipgnosis). Mick Garoghan was the resident engineer and worked with us over the two weeks, with Alex (Fergusson) helping out on guitar and vocals. It was a fun few weeks working with them both. Alex was amazing to work with, always happy and game for trying out ideas. We were cutting the album with Steve Angel at Utopia by the end of August, then completed the artwork and delivered everything to Rough Trade on 7 September.

The album as a whole was peppered with references to the huge transitional period in our lives. Not just the music, which was a crossover between TG and what was to come, but also the artwork. The front cover was an image of the first scan of our child, the title, Heartbeat, a reference to our new ‘life’. We recorded the baby’s heartbeat and used it on the title track and dedicated the album to Tremble.

During the recording of Heartbeat me and Chris had resumed our search for a cheap property to buy. I asked a local estate agent if they had any run-down properties and they showed us one that they’d just taken on, a very cheap ‘doer-upper’, a three-bedroom terraced house in Tottenham, North London. The last owner was a Mrs D’Eath, which didn’t sit well until Chris’s mum dismissed it outright: ‘Oh, there were a lot of people with that name when I was young.’

That intense Inland Revenue meeting had paid off, as the self-employed accounts I’d had to supply also qualified me for a mortgage. The house needed a lot doing to it to make it habitable, and we continued living in a rented flat in Crouch End while it was renovated. We were overseeing the builders while also working on and promoting the new album, and meanwhile I was learning to cope with the increasing size of my baby bump. Claude Bessy, who we met in Los Angeles when he worked for Slash music magazine, was now living in the UK and working as press officer for Rough Trade, so we saw a lot of him and his wife, Philomena (Pinglewad’s sister), during the run-up to (and beyond) the release of Heartbeat.

In October we were asked to support Grace Jones on her ‘One Man Show’ tour but had to decline as I was seven months pregnant and airline restrictions didn’t allow flying at that stage. I think we had enough on our plate already anyway, as TG business was still being wound down. Fetish were releasing a five-album TG box set, with Neville Brody on board doing design. The box included a badge, booklet, liner notes by Jon Savage, the four official TG albums and the very last TG gig in San Francisco, entitled Mission of Dead Souls. Rough Trade were also releasing TG live in Heaven on cassette, under the title Beyond Jazz Funk, and Chris supervised the mastering for them. He’d also had an offer from Southern Publishing to do an album of incidental music for their BBC library series. So much was happening, and so quickly.

30 December 1981

‘Heartbeat’ was released and sold the first 5000 in a week. Re-pressing another 2000 now. Cassettes selling well too … We sorted out Industrial Records and shared out the equipment.

We’d spent a fantastic, boisterous family Christmas at Chris’s parents’, fourteen of us and the boxing promoter Frank Warren and his wife Sue, close friends of the family, all tucking into a festive feast while being entertained by crazy mad stories of past pranks and near misses. I laughed so much I thought I was going to go into labour.

Heartbeat had sold well, was licensed to France and Italy, and Rough Trade suggested we do another album and a single for the following year. That was a great counterbalance to the sombre task of the dispersing of TG and IR assets. We shared out TG equipment – well, I say share: there didn’t seem much left in the studio when me and Chris got there. We weren’t interested in the fight over the TG/IR spoils. For one thing, it was New Year’s Eve when Gen told us to collect everything, and I was due to give birth in just two weeks’ time, so I wasn’t best pleased about the timing of it all. We left a lot behind.

*

At 3.30 p.m. on 12 January 1982, TG gathered at the offices of Peer Music on Denmark Street to sign off from our contracts with them. It was the end of TG and the beginning of a new life for me and Chris.

I thought I had the usual backache, but I’d actually gone into labour during the meeting. By the time we got home to Crouch End at about six thirty, I was under no illusion that this was labour for sure – the pains were coming every four minutes. I had to abandon my cake and cup of tea and we set off in my blue Mini to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead. The sudden panic of imminent birth had Chris driving in the wrong direction at first, like some comedy sketch. We were laughing, which only made the pains worse.

Just before 11 p.m. that evening, and on my mother’s birthday, our son, Nick, was born after a short but intensely painful four-hour labour. I’d requested no epidural or pain relief. I had the natural birth I wanted.

I wrote a letter to Monte about the intensity of the pain, how I seemed to transcend my body when it reached a critical level. I was euphoric, if exhausted. I’d had one of the most momentous experiences of my life but didn’t talk about it at postnatal classes. I was silenced by my respect for the other women’s pain. Everyone else in the class had tales of postnatal depression, unsupportive partners, agonising births, and one woman had walked across the ward leaving a trail of blood as she went. I was also lucky with my postnatal hormonal plunge into ‘baby blues’. It was brief and shared with a woman in the next bed to me during my week-long stay in hospital. We’d both been given strong painkillers and were a bit out of it for a couple of days, laughing and clowning around as best we could with stitches and the agony of humongous boobs as our milk came in.

Giving birth and the physical aftermath it wreaks on women’s bodies doesn’t tally with the idyllic picture of motherhood. A week before me, Chris’s sister Vicki had her son, Peter, who was renamed Nicholas after our Nick was born. Two babies born within a week of each other in the same family meant that there was a lot of love and support. I couldn’t have managed half as well without Rose and her sister, Pat. Nick was adorable and adored by the family and fitted into our lives seamlessly. I settled into motherhood without any angst or hang-ups. Nick was my child, he was dependent on me and Chris, and like most new parents we revelled in the marvel of the precious new life we’d created.

*

Just six days before Nick arrived, we’d mastered our second album, Trance, an instrumental in a more minimal style, still under the name Chris & Cosey but adding ‘The Creative Technology Institute’ (CTI), which stood for both our own label and the collective name for any forthcoming collaborations and Chris & Cosey side projects that also went under the moniker of Conspiracy International. Although we released our work on Rough Trade, we continued the independent DIY approach we’d practised as IR and TG with our own CTI label, including distributing newsletters and operating a mail-order service to our own mailing list. Such a short time after the demise of TG we were fully up and running with unprecedented fervour, a sense of freedom and an expanding fanbase.

Recording Trance had been a new experience. There was no lingering trace of TG, and the tracks came together so easily and quickly that we thought of it as more of a stopgap between C&C albums and proposed that it be sold at a budget price. It was to wholesalers, but generally shops sold it on at full price. That was a lesson learned. Trance marked a distinct shift in our musical style as we were now using a Roland TR-808 drum machine and TB-303 bassline. We had no idea it would gain status years later as one of our most successful and influential albums.

The cover artwork was as easy-going as the music. As part of my postnatal fitness plan, we took regular walks with Nick through Crouch End and up Highgate Hill to Highgate Cemetery, where we’d walk around, then have tea and cake at a cafe. On one of our walks we set up my Nikon and took the photos for the cover of Trance in front of the entrance gates to a tomb not far from the Karl Marx monument, with Nick in his pram just out of shot next to the camera tripod. Back then the cemetery was quite run-down and access to the catacombs wasn’t difficult. Many a horror film was shot there.

As news got round that me and Chris were no longer involved with Gen, a lot of friends reconnected with us. John Lacey had kept in touch and called round to our flat late one night to tell us that he’d bought a house and was now living in Todmorden, West Yorkshire. After we’d moved to Tottenham, we called John and invited him to stay. That visit rekindled our creative working relationship. Me and Chris had started recording music for Elemental 7 and John joined us in collaboration. We decided to make a video of the whole album.

I’d been invited to give a lecture on my work at Leeds College of Art. I put together some slides to base my talk around and we drove up there, with baby and all the video and lighting equipment we’d need to do some filming. We were making use of the trip to visit Hull, then go on to John’s place in Todmorden for more filming for Elemental 7. The Leeds lecture went very well, with me feeding Nick in a small room just before, leaving Chris to rock him to sleep. The talk was taped and transcribed to form the basis of ‘Time to Tell’, a special edition of Ian Dobson’s fanzine, Flowmotion. The issue covered the past ten years of my work as a musician, artist, model and striptease dancer, and included a cassette of a solo music recording I’d made in our small studio in Crouch End.

John’s house in Todmorden stood on a hill in a row of stone Victorian terraced houses. Just up the road was Robinwood Mill, a huge disused Victorian cotton mill. We did a recce of the place as a potential site for filming. The main part of the mill was five storeys high and we used the old rickety goods lift that was just about operational as we explored each of the floors. Emptied of their machinery they looked vast. The dusty, worn, wooden floorboards were solid underfoot and light streamed in from the windows that lined the walls. There was an underlying feeling of some lurking presence, giving it a creepy atmosphere that was magnified tenfold when we returned to film there in the evening.

There wasn’t much lighting and we needed torches and the video lights to help us find our way. The lift had iron concertina doors that had to be latched into place for the thing to operate. They didn’t always latch properly or would spring open with the jolts and jerks – and the lift would sometimes stop between floors, stranding us until we got the thing going again. That and unexpected and unaccountable moving shadows and noises amplified by the echoing vastness gave us a feeling that we were not alone, intruders at the mercy of the building and whatever lingering forces were at play. But we were determined to get some video footage. As we played the album track off a cassette machine, Chris filmed me and John as we danced, leaped and ran across the wooden floor. When we finished, the atmosphere had changed. It felt as if our actions had disturbed the equilibrium of whatever energies were present – that we were not welcome. Behind the lights was a blanket of blackness that none of us wanted to look into. The hairs stood up on the backs of our necks and it was fast approaching midnight. We didn’t care how irrational our reactions seemed as we scrambled to pack the equipment up and get out as fast as we could, praying the lift didn’t come to a grinding halt and leave us stuck in the mill overnight. We were delivered to the ground floor, slung the lift gate aside and rushed out the main entrance and up the road to the safety of John’s house. We called the track ‘Dancing Ghosts’.

*

I returned to stripping when Nick was five months old. I’ve barely touched on my stripping yet so I’ll start at the beginning, even though by now my involvement was nearing its end.

My first introduction to stripping was while modelling for magazines. I worked with two girls, Janet and Lynn, who were also striptease artistes. Despite their encouragement, I didn’t start until late 1977. My stripping work ran parallel to my music and art activities and any modelling jobs that cropped up. There were still a few photographers who hadn’t blacklisted me after the ICA exhibition.

I was lucky that both my model and dancing agencies knew and understood that I had other priorities, so I could fit their bookings in around TG and other projects. But it was physically exhausting dancing up to four hours a day, going to our Martello Street studio at night and weekends, doing TG gigs, recordings and art projects. When I look back at my diaries, I’m amazed that I also had such a full-on social life, considering how much else was happening. But stripping did have some unexpected advantages at times. I acquired some steel surgical instruments from a pub, including a rib-spreader and a speculum. I have no idea what they were doing there, discarded in an old cardboard box in the storeroom that doubled as my dressing room. But they were most welcome and fitted in very readily with our other interesting activities of the time.

I auditioned for the Gemini stripping agency at the infamous Chelsea Drugstore in the King’s Road. It had been an old haunt of Chris’s and he’d also worked there on the set of A Clockwork Orange. Those connections made me feel more at home. But I was nervous as I knew that it was a one-dance chance and I had no idea if I’d fit the bill. I go-go danced in my silver sequinned bikini, behind the bar on a small ledge they called a stage, and I could see my potential agent, Bob, and his wife stood across the room watching intently as they assessed me. When my music finished Bob beckoned me over … I got the job. I was surprised but elated.

Leading up to the audition I’d spent months doing research, mainly going to the Arabian Arms in Cambridge Heath Road, Hackney, which was not far from where I lived in Beck Road. I’d watch the different dancers, noting how they moved, what music they used, their costumes and how the customers responded. As I came to understand how it all worked and how it could work for me, I decided I’d use the name ‘Scarlet’, with all its connotations of the ‘Scarlet Woman’. It suited both stripping and my interest in magick. I made my costumes and compiled my music.

Selecting the right music was one of the most difficult tasks. Back then, in the 1970s, everything was on vinyl, and singles were either 7" or 12", so it was important to keep them to a minimum if only to limit the weight of your dance-kit bag. Also there was no room for duplication: the dancers had to use music the DJs didn’t play and also select different songs to one another. The choices were limited but inevitably some great songs lent themselves so readily to stripping – in mood, rhythm and lyrics – that girls duplicated, but usually never when they worked together.

Money and ego were the two sources of competition between the girls. The issue of who was better than who often raised its ugly head. We all cultivated a ‘look’ and persona, and our costumes reflected that, so it was irritating when these got copied. It was also unacceptable to have two girls dance with the same outfit – it made for unwelcome comparisons. I made my own costumes so I was lucky that none of the girls could copy them, but there were arguments about who danced to any one particular record. Fortunately it only happened to me once, at a pub in the King’s Road. It had a large wooden dance floor and good sound system, so whenever I was sent there I took the opportunity to really dance away to Candi Staton’s ‘Nights on Broadway’. The girl I was with was up next and used the same song, saying, as she passed me, ‘That’s my track.’ She was reprimanded by the DJ.

Stag (bachelor) parties were different from pub work because there were no single dances, only stripteases, and these were performed to two or three tracks, so girls compiled the music for their stag acts on to cassette tape. One tape for each act, so the tape could be quickly rewound – but not on a machine. We couldn’t cart that around with us as well as make-up, vinyl, up to ten costumes and everything else, so we had to rewind manually: pencil or Biro through the sprocket hole and spin. It was a common sight in dressing rooms to see girls sat talking while nonchalantly rewinding their cassette tapes in readiness for their next show.

It quickly became apparent to me that the striptease scene was a world apart from my art, music and modelling. Up to this point, everything had connected well, each informing the other in the most rewarding ways. But this new venture was uncompromisingly social in context, with me as the focal point to ensure that the few hours I was there were exciting, fun and erotic. This was entertainment and, unlike modelling, I had the lion’s share of control. After all that time since my teens, I got to dance, dress up and more or less have a party every day. Of course, that’s a simplistic view and paints a far better picture than the realities I faced, but nevertheless I recognised the opportunity it gave me to express myself within an unfamiliar environment.

Working in live and volatile situations twice a day called for a quite different means of coping, and I faced a steep learning curve. What I’d experienced in the world of pornography had been tough in other ways. I was never followed home from modelling jobs, whereas leaving pubs on my own either in the afternoon or evening left me vulnerable to being stalked and possibly attacked. That’s when my faithful ‘fans’ helped, as they’d often see me safely to my car.

But they weren’t around when I worked in Dagenham one day. It was a good money-spinner, with all the Ford workers drinking there at lunchtimes. When I left I noticed a guy in a car following me. I thought nothing of it at first but no matter which way I turned to test him out, he followed me and continued on my tail all the way to Bethnal Green. I could see the guy’s face in my rear-view mirror and I began to panic. As I stopped at the traffic lights at the junction of Cambridge Heath Road, a motorcycle cop pulled up alongside me. I quickly wound my window down and shouted, ‘What do I do about a guy who’s been following me from Dagenham?’

‘Any reason why he should be following you?’ he asked.

‘No, I don’t know him.’

The cop looked behind at the car I’d pointed out and said, ‘When the lights change to green, drive off and I’ll keep him here.’ He positioned his bike in front of the stalker’s car and I drove off. I thought I’d shaken him but as I reached Crouch End I saw him again. I drove past our flat and straight to the nearby police station and parked, and he pulled up a short distance away. I pointed to the neon POLICE STATION sign and shouted at him, ‘I’m going in there to report you and give them your registration number. I suggest you FUCK OFF!’, and I walked into the station. I stood in the lobby for a few minutes, then peeked tentatively through the window – he’d gone.

When I first started with Gemini in 1977, the scene was still quite tame and focused on go-go dancing. It was changing fast, though, and topless dancing was no longer enough. But the landlords wouldn’t pay the girls extra for stripping, so in answer to the customers’ demands, and with the permission of the landlords and my agency, a few of the girls began to collect money from the customers by taking a pint glass around. The tamer girls didn’t want to reveal all and gradually disappeared from the circuit. The costumes reflected the more dance-orientated girls, all tassels, sequins and rhinestones. It was only when stripping took over as the expected norm that the costumes and music changed. Striptease required a very different style of ‘dance’ movement, pace and mood. I had to deliver a fantasy for the customers. Just dancing to your favourite records didn’t work. The package was all-important.

I did break out now and again and dance to personal favourites. I danced to ATV’s ‘Love Lies Limp’, firstly just as an ironic comment I felt I needed to make. But, quite unexpectedly, it was rather popular, so I’d dig it out now and again. Captain Beefheart’s ‘Hard Workin’ Man’ was a keeper. It was raunchy and gave a no-nonsense thumping message as I entered the stage for the first part of one of my strip routines. My choice of music was diverse, driven in the main by the need for the audience to relate in some way, especially at Christmas time when all the party bookings came in.

I was always on the lookout for new costumes. When TG had played in LA in 1981, I’d visited the Frederick’s of Hollywood lingerie store on Sunset Boulevard and picked up a stunning gold basque with matching gold garters complete with Christmas bells and a tiny gold whistle. Alongside diamante accessories, that became my Christmas stripping outfit for the classier stag nights and office parties.

If I wanted to exorcise some restless energies, I’d dance my heart out to Patti Smith’s ‘Because the Night’. I didn’t give a shit at moments like that. For that one dance it was about me. I worked at so many pubs around London, Brighton and the South-East, and wherever my agency sent me. One of my regular London pubs was the Wellington at Shepherd’s Bush. When David Thomas was in town with Pere Ubu, he and Gen came along with me one Friday afternoon. I’d been using Pere Ubu’s ‘Heaven’ in my strip routine. It had all the elements I needed: a great melody, so danceable, and the lyrics were suggestive enough for me to use for such an erotically charged setting. When I finished, I joined David and Gen at the side of the dance floor. I got the sense that David didn’t quite approve of my using his song. Someone suggested it might be because he was a Jehovah’s Witness.

I’d be booked for the ‘liquid lunch hour’ break, from 1 till 3 p.m., Monday to Friday, and then in the evenings from 8 till 11 p.m., and be paid only as a dancer. The job was more than just throwing on some sexy underwear, then taking it off to music. There was a standard to maintain or you got sacked. Gemini kept a check on us to see if we’d put on weight and whether our costumes and dancing were up to scratch. If for any reason the agency had doubts, we were suspended until we hit the benchmark again. Over time I gained a certain popularity, which meant I got requests for regular spots. One was the Queen Anne pub at Vauxhall. It was a small pub but its location amid many white-collar office blocks meant the customers had well-paid jobs, so the jug money was very, very good.

Gemini acted as a safety net and filter to fend off any seedy or risky bookings and made sure, as much as possible, that us girls were not put in bad situations. But the business being what it is, you can’t always predict what happens. When you’re booked, the situation can turn out to be something quite different from what was arranged and agreed. Or, in other instances, the charged atmosphere mixed with alcohol-fuelled bravado could spark off terrible verbal and sometimes physical abuse for the girls. One of my friends had her nipple half bitten off by a guy who leaped on the stage as she lay on the floor during her act. Such places were put on a blacklist, but I don’t recall the police ever getting involved. One of the girls had sussed out how to keep safe. She took her two huge German shepherd dogs with her to every booking and had them sit on guard at each side of the stage. If anyone came near her, you’d hear them growl, waiting for her command to attack. That was enough to deter any trouble on the stage or when she left to go to her car in the dark.

Like all the girls at the agency, I had my favourite pubs to work in and my faithful ‘fans’ too. So when I checked in for my next week’s bookings, I always tried to secure some I knew would be easy and lucrative. More often than not I had to settle for some rough with the smooth. And there were some very rough pubs frequented by some equally rough customers.

One time I took an evening job at a club above a shop in Tottenham, not far from where I was living. As soon as I stepped off the street I felt uneasy. When I walked into the club it was clear by the comments made to me that I was the only white person in there. But I asked where the dressing room was and who to speak to about my music and time slot. I’d been booked along with a black girl from another agency, who I didn’t know, and who made it crystal-clear that she didn’t like me. She took to the stage first and immediately proceeded to fuck herself with a beer bottle offered to her by a guy in the audience. That wasn’t a good start to the evening. Usually the first act from each girl was delivered clean. After that, depending on negotiations, it hotted up. I had to follow a full-on bottle-fucking floor show with my straight topless dance. It didn’t go down well. In situations like that, I went even straighter than normal, as if to hammer home the point that I wasn’t on offer. The atmosphere was so charged I kept my bag packed and ready to go if I needed to make a run for it. As I sat at the side of the dance area, the room erupted into laughter and the sound of backslapping. A calm-looking white guy was led to one of the front tables. I could feel him glaring at me. I didn’t make eye contact. I was asked, or rather ordered, to join him. His name was Angel and he’d just come out of prison. I was told ‘Be nice to him’ by the club manager. The situation was getting really edgy and dark and I wanted to leave, but it also became obvious that I’d need to work my way out of there. I was at the farthest part of the club from the entrance, and one floor up behind two locked doors. I sat at Angel’s table as instructed. He looked angelic, so I could see where his name came from, but assumed it was ironic, judging by his time inside for GBH and his obvious high status among his peers. He was a gentleman in the way ‘connected’ villains are, but had a shadow of sadness about him. We had a polite to-and-fro conversation, a preamble to the inevitable request for sex, which he’d clearly been told to expect. I’d been brought in for him under the pretext of ‘dancer’ as a gift to celebrate his release. White girl for white man. I knew I had to read this guy fast, try and figure out where his sadness lay. Lucky for me, I was somewhat familiar with guys like him, as well as precarious situations. I steered the conversation round to relationships and he expressed the importance of loyalty. Phew! That was my in to get out. No hesitation, I told him I didn’t sell sex, that I had a long-term partner I was faithful to, and that we had a young son. Oddly, but thankfully for me, his body language changed, he became relaxed, his face softened and he said quietly how wonderful that was to hear. We talked a little more, nothing heavy, and I kind of liked him. Then he leaned over, gave me £50 and said he would see me to the door and safely off the premises – before it got really heavy.

Stag parties were always a bit risky. They varied from social-club strip nights disguised as stag parties to a group of guys in a flat above a shop (very dodgy). It was at such a ‘party’ that I first met Brigitte. There were four of us girls, me, Joanne, Jane and Brigitte. As soon as we got there the men were pushing us all to do sex for money. Joanne and Jane were happy to oblige and as soon as I told them I wouldn’t they badgered Brigitte to join them. Brigitte was visibly stressed over the pressure to oblige. She sat on the edge of the bed, wringing her hands and shaking her head. I bent down in front of her, took her hands in mine and said to her that the answer is simple and short: ‘No.’ She didn’t do it. From that night we became friends and allies and often worked together.

One Friday night in 1982 (the year Nick was born), Brigitte and I worked together on a typical stag night. It all started with the usual bookings process. I rang the agency: ‘Hello. Is Bob there?’ Mandy had answered the phone. She wasn’t the ideal person to deal with. She’d been a stripper herself and enjoyed doing the girls no favours at all. Her privileged position gave her a vantage point she revelled in.

‘Is that Scarlet?’ (She always called me by my stage name.)

‘Yeah.’

‘You’ll have to call back,’ she said dismissively.

That ritual happened with irritating regularity every Friday afternoon. Getting in quick for bookings meant you could get the best-paid pubs and stag nights and not be stuck with the nasty leftovers. To some extent I could call on my expertise and popularity to secure half-decent dates, as long as I could get Bob in a good mood. It worked more times than not, mainly because I’d entered Bob’s world as someone different to the usual ‘dogs’ he took on (his endearing terminology). He regarded me as intelligent: I knew where I was going and striptease to me wasn’t just about an easy-money game. He liked that, even though we fought for the upper hand now and again.

I had a love–hate relationship with stripping. I loved the dancing, the exhibitionism, the wanting looks, knowing they couldn’t have me. A kind of power trip that made me feel good at times and helped me get through the down times. But sometimes it made me feel bad and I’d hate everyone and everything the situation stood for – putting myself in the position of a target for drunken lechery and insults, and having to be constantly on guard against possible trouble and unwelcome propositions for sex.

To fill in the time before calling Bob back, I rummaged through my bag of tricks in readiness. A treasure trove for every sexual fantasy. I selected the red-satin and silver outfit and the powerful, dominant, black ciré costume with zips. I never used accessories like whips (at least not for stripping) – they were too passé. Certain sex toys were for my pleasure and had to remain untainted. Besides all that, some of the rougher guys had been known to use the whips on the girls. Ugly scenes would develop if the DJ didn’t keep the guys in check. It was always a fine line between teasing for pleasure and teasing to belittle and insult the guys. Some girls got off on that – those who had been totally fucked up about sex for one of a hundred reasons and used striptease as a way of exorcising some of the pain. For some it worked, to a degree. There was a lot of self-hate, come to think of it. That saddened me.

As I was getting ready to go to my stag booking, Chris took our baby son for his evening bath. I put my bag down and went through to the bathroom to join them. This was my world and the time of day I set aside for myself and my dearests. Nick was splashing happily, making those baby sounds everyone goes gooey over, and Chris’s face was lit up with a smile of devotion. Nick was cocooned in love. The warm feelings of self overwhelmed me and I left Scarlet behind.

But not for long – the phone rang. Bob had called back, mainly because he wanted me to do one of his special jobs. Favour time, so he was extra-nice. I did most of his more respectable bookings. Since I had made the cover of the Sunday Times colour supplement as a desirable, presentable stripper for hire, a lot of work had come my way, which Bob had benefited from. People asked for me, ‘Scarlet’, specifically. I got to jump out of cakes and lie across cars, which made a welcome change from the smoky, dank pubs that were my regular haunts. Seeing as Bob wanted a favour, I took advantage and in fair exchange got some good bookings for the following week. Plus he’d obviously been for a drink at lunchtime and was in a happy, cheeky-geezer mood. He wouldn’t have been out of place selling second-hand cars. Bob treated the girls like cheap bargains at times and he’d bad-mouth them to me. That and his attitude sat unhappily with me, not only because I had to work alongside these girls but also because I liked them and so did the guys.

I took the necessary details for the stag from Bob, quickly rang Brigitte to check she was on board, and returned to the bathroom. Chris had scooped Nick out of the bath and wrapped him in a huge, soft, warm towel. His hair was all wet and little drops of water tickled him as they trickled down his cheeks. His laughter was infectious and his face a picture of sublime happiness. Chris passed him to me and I hugged him close, nuzzling his neck and breathing in that amazing baby smell. I took him upstairs to put him to bed, lay him in his cot and gently stroked behind his ear to soothe him to sleep. I crept downstairs so as not to wake him, grabbed a quick snack, kissed my darling Chris, picked up my bag and left my boys at home.

It was already pitch-black when I set off. The roads were wet and shiny and that wonderful damp smell rose up to make everything feel very close. I was lost in thoughts when I suddenly realised I must be very near Brigitte’s flat. Sometimes I got really pissed off when I had to act as a taxi service. But Brigitte was an exception – we just clicked. There was something about her that set her apart from the other girls. She’d worked in the Middle East and her passion was writing and playing her own music. A lot of the girls didn’t like her, but she was just different. It seemed to me that she hadn’t been successful in masking herself and that’s what made the girls and men nervous of her. She did an act using lit candles, which she would squat over and then produce a knife that glittered in the stage lights. It was all a bit too ritualistic and symbolic, and, for the ordinary working man, ‘fucking weird’ – and too much.

I pulled up outside Brigitte’s, left the car running and ran to the front door. I had to give three rings of her doorbell, wait, then ring twice more. Brigitte’s little safety code. She shouted down from her first-floor window, ‘Hello! I’ll be right down, Scarlet.’

I waited in the car and unlocked the passenger door to her little taps on the window. She kissed my cheek. ‘Hello, my darling.’

‘We’re at a restaurant in the West End – God knows where I’ll park. Some office Christmas party. Jackie and Marianne are with us, so we’ll have to pair off.’

Brigitte laughed and her eyes glinted with mischief. ‘I’ll make mad, passionate love to you and I’ll scream as I have my orgasm.’

That’s what I loved about her: she could laugh at the odd situations we got tangled up in. The lesbian act we’d perfected was a sham, but the guys never knew. They were so locked into the moment. We held genuine affection for each other as women surviving in a very real world, both playing roles within roles.

We reached the restaurant. There was always a feeling of trepidation walking into a place, with thoughts scattered in every direction, mentally marking the exits, making sure the dressing room (or what passed for one) had a functional lock on it, how to be approachable, sussing out the guys as you go, making sure they kept a safe distance. Many of the girls sold sex at the end of the shows. I’d never done that. Sometimes, out of safety for myself and the other girl, I’d step in if a girl was having a hard time getting a guy to come. I hated doing that – the guy would always insist I tried it. No way – they had to be content with my physical presence in the room. Sex was, in part, a profession to me, but I’d managed to keep all this side of it from crossing over and intruding into my own sex life. Sex with Chris was precious.

All four of us girls were chatting away when there was a knock on the door. ‘Girls, can I come in?’ a pathetic voice pleaded.

‘Who is it?’ Marianne shouted.

‘It’s me, Tom.’ He was the organiser for the evening. He was allowed into the inner sanctum of the ladies’ loo (our luxurious dressing room). He had a large plastic carrier bag in his hand and a sweaty face.

‘What’s in your bag, Tom?’ Marianne asked with irritated sarcasm.

He was obviously embarrassed and in difficulty. ‘Well, erm, you see, well, we thought … Would you girls mind, err, using some of these in your act. I mean, if you don’t mind.’

Ever so business-like, Marianne tipped the contents unceremoniously on to the small table. As if we all hadn’t guessed already. Dildos, vibrators, a whip and a very nice school cane. I quickly snatched up the cane to take home.

‘You’ll have to pay us extra, and Scarlet doesn’t do blue, by the way,’ Marianne proclaimed.

‘Oh, we, err, were, err, hoping all four of you would, err, do something,’ Tom stammered.

They always tried to persuade me. A little extra money. They really didn’t get it. I never wavered.

I sat quietly while the girls sorted out their extracurricular fees, then announced to Tom that Brigitte and I would be happy to do a lesbian act, and that we wouldn’t be needing the dildos or vibrator, but the whip would do nicely. Brigitte liked whips.

Tom’s eyes went from disappointment to boyish anticipation.

‘Come on, Brigitte, let’s eat each other, with a little discipline for the men. And don’t go mad this time!’ I said with a grin as I took Brigitte’s hand and we both walked out into the restaurant to the sounds of the Troggs’ ‘Wild Thing’. Brigitte took one side of the room and me the other.

I targeted a small, quiet man who wasn’t drunk but faking disinterest. This was quite common and always a challenge to me. I walked around the back of his chair and firmly nudged the side of his face with my hips. My red satin miniskirt parted down the side and I let it slide down his cheek on to his lap. A smile crept across his face and his hands twitched restlessly. As expected, he was reluctant to show interest or make contact. I had no intention of allowing him to. I bent forward, my tiny half-cup bra bursting with my peachy breasts. They were an inch from his nose. My G-string teasingly covered everything he and the rest wanted to see as I leaned forward, moving my hips in time with the music. I whispered in his ear that he must be good and not move. I sat astride his knees, my back arched and arms wrapped around his neck, all the while my hips still moving with the music, sensuously, rhythmically. He was safe. His face was flushed with pleasure, not embarrassment, and I left his lap knowing he was hard.

Brigitte had been stern with some of the men. She strode over to me, whip in hand, traced the curves of my body with it, stroked my breasts, unfastened my bra and dropped it to the floor. She cracked the whip and clawed at her clothes, rubbing herself against me, pleading for me to be naked too. Flesh on flesh. We rolled on the floor, caressing, kissing. My tongue savoured its way down Brigitte’s neck, around her small, hard nipples and over her firm stomach. We were lost in each other, Brigitte writhing and uttering sounds of ecstasy. A strange, wet silence hung over the whole scene. The music had ended; the men were mesmerised. Brigitte winked at me. We exchanged a knowing look of triumph. Applause and cheers accompanied us to the dressing room.

I dropped Brigitte off and got home around 1 a.m. I slipped into bed next to Chris, only too aware, as usual, that my hair stank of cigarettes. I hated that and knew Chris did too, but he never mentioned it, just always asked if I was OK. Always so thoughtful and caring. He knew some nights it was difficult for me and talking about it helped me make sense of the whole evening. My head spun, my body buzzed, but I was home, safe in Chris’s arms. I fell into a deep sleep.

Not all the girls got on with each other and there was a lot of competition between us. Some could earn good money and others very little. But there was some camaraderie amongst us. When there was any trouble, we’d stick together and protect one another as we all recognised that it was a case of ‘us against them’. That’s not to say I didn’t like the men I came across, just that it would be fair to say the nice and good men were outnumbered by some real arseholes. The agency had a variety of girls rated in terms of how they looked, what they’d do, how they performed and their personalities. But all of them had one necessary trait: they were all strong women, and I defend and respect them and their choice to do what they wanted with their bodies. Inevitably, like it or not, the girls fell into categories depending on the jobs that came in and their suitability. It was the same for me. I didn’t always fit the job. I suspect the competition between the girls was fed as much by the agency, to keep them on their toes, as it was by the girls themselves. The ‘blue’ girls, who offered sex extras, earned the most and between them they competed to be the top earner, as much a mark of their sexual expertise as their desire to make as much money as they could.

A lot of the pubs I worked at have either closed down or been turned into shops, or, like the Arabian Arms and Browns, become ‘gentlemen’s clubs’. I’ve not been inside a strip club for over thirty years. I think my eight-year stint is enough for a lifetime. I don’t know how ‘gentlemanly’ these clubs are, but in the early 1980s I did work a few times at one gentlemen’s club near the Mall. It was tucked away and frequented by suited gents on their extended lunch breaks. The layout was very different from the pub circuit. Tables with crisp, white linen cloths were arranged around a catwalk. Backstage we had a proper theatre-like dressing room and would be notified politely when we were requested on stage. We were only booked to do a couple of strips each and were instructed to keep them ‘respectable’. It was like going back in time to the 1960s, and brought to mind Christine Keeler or Mandy Rice-Davies. A thoroughly enjoyable timewarp, and a welcome relief from the smelly, noisy pubs.

Dancing and stripping meant I had to keep in shape. The dancing itself more or less did that for me, but the body being the focal point also meant you had to keep free of bruises and unappealing marks. I woke up one morning and went to scratch my head. ‘My head feels weird,’ I said to Chris.

He turned and looked at me with horror. ‘Bloody hell!’

‘What?’

He jumped out of bed. ‘You need to look in the mirror.’

My head, eyes and mouth were swollen – I looked like I’d done ten rounds with Mike Tyson. Then I looked down and all of my torso was covered in huge, red, swollen, itchy blotches. I rang my agency straight away and cancelled my bookings. I said I’d get back to them after seeing my doctor. But it was more serious than I thought. I’d had a severe allergic reaction to aspirin and was put on steroids straight away. It was a strange feeling, watching as the swelling shifted from one area to another, all the time hoping that my throat didn’t close up as the doctor had mentioned it could had I not gone to her so soon. I couldn’t dance for a week. I’d been lucky it hadn’t happened during my work for Steve Dwoskin on his Shadows from Light documentary film on Bill Brandt.

But a week off did give me time to focus on an art action I was going to do at an arts venue near St Paul’s Cathedral. I had Chris video me as I worked and send the live feed to a monitor placed in front of me, giving me immediate visual feedback that I used to create a loop of action and response. The space was small but full of people, and as I was clearing away afterwards Stevo from Some Bizarre Records came up and started excitedly shouting at me and Chris about how he wanted to sign us to his label. It wasn’t the best time to approach us and we told him we weren’t the least bit interested, but thanks anyway. As the place emptied we got talking to a guy called Dooby who worked at London Video Arts (LVA), an organisation that provided support and free access to facilities for video artists. He invited us to their place in Soho to see if we’d like to use it.

The use of LVA’s resources came at just the right time, not only for my art video works but because we’d just finished filming Elemental 7 and needed affordable access for editing and post-production. We booked time in LVA’s editing suite and mastered both Elemental 7 and, later, European Rendezvous. There were fractious moments as everything was done in real time with no back-ups. With the video completed and put to one side, we prepared to do our first gigs since TG – as CTI. Rough Trade bookings organised the shows for us and we, along with John, went on a European tour.

Although we’d released our first album as Chris & Cosey, our work since then had mainly been collaborative and under the banner of CTI. The months leading up to our first gigs had been taken up with recording with different people. Glenn Wallis, one of the first TG fans and roadie, formed a band called Konstruktivits and we worked together on a CTI 12" single.

While recording the tracks, me and Chris had been taking regular morning and afternoon trips to the Muswell Hill day nursery to drop off and pick up Nick. We’d pass 23 Cranley Gardens every day and didn’t give it a second thought until news broke of the arrest of a serial killer and necrophiliac who’d lived there and carried out multiple murders in the house. His name was Dennis Nilsen. He was put on trial and convicted of murdering gay and homeless young men in his flat, hiding the corpses under floorboards or dismembering them and stuffing body parts down the drains of the property. Passing the house on the way to the nursery was never the same again. We took a photo of it and used it for the front cover of the 12" and called the title track ‘Hammer House’ – the house of horror.

Our 12" single ‘Thy Gift of Tongues’, made with Brian Williams (aka Lustmord), had a similar dark theme, but based on myth: Asmodeus, Prince of Hell, the demon of wrath and lust. For Brian I suspect it was about the power of wrath, and for me, the power of primal lust. Brian had first got in touch through writing to TG, and then met us at a record-store signing. He’d started doing his own music and I suggested he contact SPK (Surgical Penis Klinik), who were among many musicians and artists squatting in one of the houses in Bonnington Square, Vauxhall. We knew SPK through the musician Graeme Revell, who had written to TG; back in 1980, Industrial Records had released the first SPK record, the single ‘Slogun’. Graeme was intense and ambitious and would often ring or call round, blatantly asking Chris to give him the inside information on how we did things on certain tracks, to use in his own music. We never collaborated with him – it was too much of a one-way street. Brian ended up joining SPK and would stay with them off and on during his trips from his home in Wales. We became close friends, visiting him and his partner, Tracey, after they moved to London into a squat overlooking the Oval cricket ground. Tracey worked for a video-editing and duplication company in Soho and helped us out with mastering and duping our gig videos.

*

Nick’s few hours a day at the local nursery gave us the opportunity to record. Chris had put together some sequences using our new Roland MC-8 sequencer and tentative rhythms for a track, and asked me to try out some vocals to it. I lay on our bed as he spoke to me through my headphones. ‘Just try anything,’ he said.

He felt so close, and his voice so soft and sensual, that it put me in mind of when we’d phone each other during the tough times while we were apart. I started talking to him about our struggle as lovers, being impeded by other commitments, how he made me feel and the joy of being together. I started with when we initiated our love affair – on the Charing Cross Tube escalator on our way to the ICA in 1976. ‘You took my hand on the stair. You said we could be lovers – I just had to say the word.’ I hadn’t meant it to be the actual lyrics; I just wanted to tell him what he meant to me. He came into the room. ‘What?’ I asked.

‘I love it. Let’s take the song in that direction and sing a chorus and a melody.’

The track was completed that afternoon, other than tweaking and the final mix. ‘October (Love Song)’ came from such an intimately personal few minutes and became a signature Chris & Cosey track. It was a total departure for us, unlike anything we’d recorded before – romantic but so uplifting. It was fun running with the love-song theme and making an accompanying kitsch video using LVA’s facilities, with the assistance of David Dawson, and photographer Steve Pyke taking stills from the video and promo photographs – one of which we used for the cover of our next 12" single collaboration project, ‘Sweet Surprise’ with the Eurythmics.

*

It hadn’t taken long for TG bootleg albums to start appearing. There’d been a few while TG were still together but it accelerated to a ridiculous level after we split. We weren’t informed or consulted about such releases and were referred to in a letter from Gen to Geff Rushton, dated 1 March 1982, as ‘Thee Negatives (Chris & Cosey)’, with Gen giving his (and Sleazy’s) permission for Geff to release TG work: ‘E hereby give mine & Sleazy’s blessing to your TG best of boxed set project, ASSUME POWER FOCUS … DON’T tell Thee Negs … They are best ignored on these kind of projects …’

When we discovered Assume Power Focus was by Geff, we rang Sleazy, who apologised and sent us a cheque for a couple of hundred pounds. By that time, he and Geff were working together as Coil, having distanced themselves from Gen. Over the years, as more bootlegs of live TG recordings appeared, I was sent information by concerned fans (the quality was bad). The main source was revealed with proof supplied to me by different labels and people involved, including licence agreements signed by ‘Genesis P-Orridge’. Despite the paper trail of evidence, there was no offer of apology or accountability: our approaches were just met with indifference. I’d get irate phone calls from Geff on our and Sleazy’s behalf, urging me to bring Gen to book. I managed to retrospectively get some of the bootlegs converted into legitimate releases and the label to pay me, Chris and Sleazy our due royalties. It was tough, as the label had already paid a large up-front payment to the seller of the tapes.

Keeping track of unofficial TG releases that were subsequently licensed on to more labels over the years wasn’t something I wanted to waste precious energy on. IR and TG signed a licence agreement with Mute Records in May 1983 but that only covered the main catalogue and the Fetish Records releases. And Fetish turned out to be a bad experience, considering TG’s generosity towards the label. Rod Pearce (who owned Fetish) insisted on 50 per cent of TG’s advance and royalties from the Mute deal. I felt like we were being well and truly shafted from every direction.

Daniel (Miller) and Mute were the only ones who held true to the original spirit of the ethos of independent music, and I felt the official TG legacy was respected and safe in their hands. We’d known Daniel since the mid-1970s, when he’d released ‘TVOD’ and ‘Warm Leatherette’ through Rough Trade when he started Mute Records. We had mutual interests and principles, and he and Chris shared a passion for electronics, conferring and meeting up to exchange information on new sound technology. I looked upon the TG/Mute relationship as ‘family’.

I was shocked and sad to hear that Rod met with an untimely and brutal end after he’d finished Fetish Records and moved to Mexico. In 1997 his body was found on a beach, almost decapitated, reportedly hacked to death with a machete.

28 May 1984

For many years I dreamt of a life in the country with land and hope of all hopes an old school or church as my home. We have it!!!!

Living in London had become difficult, both financially and in terms of our lifestyle. I felt like I was running to stand still to pay bills, and every time I stepped outside our front door I was sucked into a vortex of uncompromising negativity and subjected to a pace of life that was not conducive to my creative sensibilities. We spotted a church for sale in East Heckington, Lincolnshire, and made an appointment to view it. The place was easily convertible but too small and isolated for Nick’s needs.

We drove home via King’s Lynn and picked up the local paper. When we got home we looked through it and saw a small village school was up for auction on the following Tuesday … in just three days’ time. Chris called his dad, Albert, who had experience with buying property, and asked if he’d come with us to view the school. We arranged to collect the key the next day and Albert came with us. He gave the building the thumbs-up. ‘It’s rock-solid,’ he said. A beautiful, red-brick Victorian primary school within reach of all amenities. It had two large classrooms, cloakrooms and a kitchen annexe with a row of outside red-brick toilets. It was just the right size and stood on a third-of-an-acre plot that was paved over as the school playground, with a jetty on the riverbank for fishing. Me and Chris were so excited – it already felt like ours but we didn’t dare let ourselves think that yet. We travelled back to Norfolk for the auction on the Tuesday. The bidding started, and there were only three people interested in it. Our bid got the school for an affordable price. It felt like a dream. We’d just bought our new home. We sold our house in London in a matter of days and moved in as soon as the major structural works were complete.

I continued to do some striptease work, travelling to London for just two days a week and staying at Chris’s mum and dad’s Totteridge house to earn enough money to have the playground dug up to make us a garden. Settling into the house was the first real break we’d had in years and we relished every moment of it. Life was suddenly so simple. Working with nature, planting apple and pear trees and flowers, watching Nick running round playing in the sun, and the cats tasting true freedom for the first time in their lives.

We lived in the house as the final work was completed, making special allowances for Phil the plasterer. He was the best for the job but also a cokehead, and would disappear on benders when he got paid. One of the builders would go in search to local pubs to pick him up while he was still under the influence, because once on the job he’d do fantastic plastering at breakneck speed. Other than the dramas surrounding Phil’s availability, it all seemed very idyllic, until a month later, when there was a full-on shotgun shootout between feuding Essex and Norfolk travellers who lived on their own land at the end of the village. Country life was not quite the quiet idyll we’d imagined it to be.

We’d entered a very close-knit community, many of whom had been born in the village, grown up together and gone to the (our) school … including two of the builders. Eighty-nine-year-old Joe who lived next door had worked on the local farm all his life and had never left the village. ‘He had no need to,’ his daughter told us.

At the same time as we moved into the village, a family called Newby moved out. I found out later that the Newbys had owned and farmed land in and around the village, and that our neighbour had worked for them – and the local churchyard had Newbys and Carters buried there. It was uncanny when I found out that Les’s family had originally hailed from King’s Lynn, then moved to Hull. How had I unwittingly ended up in a place with so many connections to my family and closest friend?

I took Nick to the small toddler group in the village hall so he could make friends. I didn’t have a lot in common with the other mothers and felt a bit guilty that I’d bought the school their children would have gone to (had there been more of them to keep it viable). I was there for Nick, who was happily playing with the other children. We wanted to establish a secure, happy base for him and ourselves. I gave up striptease work, which meant there was no regular income except for £18 a month child allowance. It was a struggle financially, living off credit cards and an overdraft, waiting for royalty cheques to come through so we could pay off enough to stop the bank coming down on us. It was the poorest period of our lives, and yet the happiest and most complete we’d felt. Away from the studio or gigs we found joy in the simple things, like family get-togethers, days out with Nick and his friends, and Nick’s large birthday parties.

We didn’t do any gigs the year we moved. We concentrated on finishing as much of the house as possible, getting the studio up and running first, keeping the school blackboard that ran the length of one wall to use for studio notes. The old school kitchen had a huge porcelain basin, ideal for developing and printing, and it became our new darkroom. The walls of the two cloakrooms were in a bad way so we covered them in old TG Heathen Earth posters. We had a ritual burning of some of the TG vinyl we had left over from our share of IR stock – including rare blue-vinyl copies of Heathen Earth. They represented the crap we’d left behind and it felt good watching it all go up in flames.

Our music had moved on to what would become known as the distinctive sound of Chris & Cosey – such tracks as ‘Driving Blind’, ‘Love Cuts’ and ‘Walking Through Heaven’ on the Songs of Love and Lust album we’d recorded in our studio in 1983, well before we left London. The front cover was a painting by Skot of a couple embracing, inspired by the James Bond film You Only Live Twice. The album was released on Rough Trade in January 1984. That, and the releases of Elemental 7 and the 12" singles, gave us some breathing space to make the school a home.

Once the builders had gone, we continued recording Techno Primitiv. I’d take Nick out to the park, the beach or to Thetford Forest to give Chris a good few hours of peace and quiet to finish mastering. Techno Primitiv and Chris’s solo album, Mondo Beat, were our final albums released on Rough Trade. Geoff didn’t feel an affinity with our sound or image any more and we weren’t going to change, but the parting of ways was amicable.

Alongside our music, I was still engaging with my art actions. Paul Buck invited me to perform as part of his five-day event, ‘Violent Silence Festival – Acts of Transgression’, a celebration of Georges Bataille. He and Roger Ely were coordinating the festival, which would take place at the Bloomsbury Theatre, London. It would include the staging of Georges Bataille’s My Mother, the first full production in English, adapted by Pierre Bourgeade and translated by Paul. The programme included works inspired by and in homage to Bataille – music by Marc Almond and Last Few Days, dance, films by Derek Jarman, Paul Buck, John Maybury, Cerith Wyn Evans, Steve Dwoskin, performances by myself (‘Such Is Life’) and readings by Roger Ely, Paul and Terence Sellers. My previous work with Steve Dwoskin derived from Bataille’s My Mother was my (and Steve’s) direct connection to the festival.

It was only a month after we’d moved. Me and Chris worked on music specifically written for the piece, but he stayed in Norfolk with Nick. I travelled to London and met up with John Lacey, who worked with me projecting slides we’d prepared especially for the piece. I was dressed in white and the slides were projected on to my body, following my every movement and simultaneously appearing on pieces of diaphanous white muslin I used in my ritual action. The performance was quiet and peaceful, the audience attentive and appreciative – including, to my surprise, two of my striptease fans.

Preparing for the performance had been interesting. Me and John arrived at the theatre to begin setting up and getting a feel for the place. We were escorted to the dressing rooms behind the stage, making our way from the back of the auditorium as quietly as possible as there was a woman with a head full of hair curlers stood soundchecking at the microphone. ‘That’s Terence Sellers,’ I was told. I knew of her but hadn’t met her before. She was acquainted with Gen so I wasn’t sure whether to say anything as I’d been reliably informed that my name was banned from being spoken in his presence. As I got to the stage, I said hello to her. She looked over to me and blanked me. OK, I thought, I know where I stand.

Part of my contribution included the screening of the COUM film After Cease to Exist – which nearly didn’t happen. During setting up in the afternoon, I was informed by one of the theatre hands that the senior theatre technician refused to show the film. She objected to the castration scene.

‘On what grounds?’ I asked.

‘You’ll have to speak to her yourself. She’s up there’, and he pointed to the upper circle seats near the projection booth, where a rather stern-faced, tough-looking, androgynous woman sat with her feet up on the seats in front.

I made my way to her, introduced myself and asked what her objections were. She explained that she didn’t think it appropriate to show a film of a man being castrated. I suggested that I explain the film to her and we could then have an informed discussion about it. We spent about an hour together, analysing and debating the film, sexuality and more besides, and she agreed to it being shown.

‘Ritual Awakening’ at the Zap club in Brighton was my penultimate live art action. It was part of the Taboo Festival of Eroticism run by Roger Ely. Nick was at his gran’s, and me, Chris, Brian and Tracey travelled to Brighton together and stayed in a quaint bed and breakfast that owed a lot to Fawlty Towers. The venue was a small club in King’s Road Arches, and full. My action was on the stage at the back of the room. Chris, Brian and Tracey helped me set things up, Chris did a live mix of the audio I’d prepared and we recorded the whole thing on to video. My art film, Pussy Got the Cream, was shown separately at the festival.

A year later I performed an extended version at the Bar Europa Festival in Amsterdam. ‘Ritual Awakening Part 2’ was my final live art action. I met up with Michael Moynihan (aka Coup de Grâce), who was also presenting his own performance involving cutting himself. It was intense and personal. I felt some affinity with him and his work … but we lost touch after he joined Boyd Rice’s band, NON, and became a member of the Church of Satan. After Michael, Johanna Went was on stage, just before me. Her performance was loud (screaming) and chaotic, with the stage cluttered with large props that she hurled about and then she threw liquid around the stage. I didn’t ‘get it’ – much like some people probably didn’t get early COUM. The stage was a mess and me and the theatre crew had to clean up before I could begin my piece. It was also quite late and the bar had been busy. I was made aware that my controversial history had preceded me. The audience were rowdy and drunk and making it clear that they wanted nudity, cutting and more. They got none of that. My last action was a ritual exorcism of everything that represented the spectacle people had come to expect from me. A disconnect from the tainted past. I couldn’t have had better reinforcement of my decision to make this the last art action than that entire trip to Amsterdam.

*

It’s never good when you get a call at 7.30 in the morning. It was ten days after I’d got back from Amsterdam. Chris answered and I could tell by the tone of his voice it was bad news.

‘Who is it, Mum or Dad?’ I asked him.

‘Your mum,’ he said.

My whole body went numb, then came a shockwave of rage. ‘Why couldn’t it be him? It’s not fair!’

Les had made the call on behalf of Pam, who’d been told not to tell me until after Mum’s funeral. I was stunned – I couldn’t quite process what I’d just heard. After all this time, I was even kept from saying a final goodbye to Mum. I didn’t blame Pam – she was in a difficult position and Dad was still very much a part of her and her children’s lives. Chris received a long letter from Pam explaining everything and hoping that I’d forgive her for not letting me know in time for the funeral. Mum had had a stroke and been admitted to hospital. She’d asked Pam not to tell me in case I visited her. She was worried it could stress out Dad and give him a heart attack, as he was due to undergo heart surgery. So I wasn’t told Mum was ill. Days later she had another stroke and a heart attack, and died. She was only sixty-six years old. All my hopes of being reunited with her were gone forever. She’d never see her grandson, Nick, or meet Chris, we’d never hold each other or laugh together again – my thoughts were all about the many associated losses signalled by her dying before Dad. I blamed him for them all. The only consolation I had was that he would be miserable without Mum.

Me, Chris and Nick went to Hull and Pam took me to the cemetery to show me Mum’s plaque and her name listed on a page in the book of remembrance. It wasn’t enough. I couldn’t relate these markers of her life to what Mum meant to me. Pam and I laid flowers together and wept. I saw all three of us as having each suffered in our own way, all to suit the needs of my domineering dad. I made a visit to the Hull Daily Mail offices to place a dedication to Mum. The day after we returned home I got a phone call. A man’s voice said, ‘Excuse me for disturbing you. I’m from the Hull Daily Mail. We’ve been asked by a Mr Dennis Newby not to print your dedication to your mother.’ Silence. He continued, ‘I don’t know why someone would make such a request, but as far as I’m concerned, if you say to me now that you still want me to print it, I would be very, very happy to do so for you.’ He was so kind and outraged on my behalf.

‘Yes, please print it for me,’ I said.

*

Lost in our world of music and video, we were fully focused on releasing our work on our own label, CTI. It hadn’t occurred to us to do it any other way. Then we were approached by the Nettwerk Productions record label in Canada, and shortly afterwards Kenny Gates of Play It Again Sam Records got in touch. After many talks regarding us retaining the artistic freedom we’d always had, we signed to both labels … and also later to Wax Trax! Records in Chicago. That gave us worldwide distribution and sparked what became the beginning of C&C’s world-touring electronica success.

Having done gigs in Holland with our friends Hay Schoolmeesters and Brecht from NL Centrum, we had them book and tour-manage us for Europe. We all got on so well, Hay with his wide smile, and tall, slim, leather-clad Brecht looking like Emma Peel, both speaking with the most wonderful strong Dutch accents. They were kindred spirits and unorthodox as far as booking agents or tour managers were concerned. They ran their own alternative art and music events and shared our DIY ethos. Sometimes Hay’s cousin Frank came along. He drove like a lunatic, always too fast and way too close to the vehicle in front. Me and Chris would close our eyes as we sat in the back of the car, pretending we weren’t there, our fingers crossed for a safe arrival to our next destination as we drove from gig to gig.

Hay had a dry wit. As we entered one strange venue he said, with a lopsided smile, ‘I think this is a beatnik club’, which I used later for lyrics. But neither he nor Brecht suffered fools gladly. A promoter didn’t pay up after one of the shows. As we set off to the next gig the following morning, Hay took a detour to the promoter’s flat, telling us to wait in the car while he and Frank paid the guy a visit. They came rushing back to the car ten minutes later with our money, saying we had to make a dash across the border because the guy was calling the police … and Hay and Frank were supposedly on a ‘suspects’ list due to their past anarchist activities.

As NL Centrum expanded, a lovely guy called John Jacobs took over most of our European tour-managing and we always took along ‘Jan the video beamer man’. Our touring was like being away with ‘family’. Everyone was so kind, relaxed and happy in each other’s company.

We hardly ever played in the UK – there wasn’t the demand. Our main audience was in Europe and America but we made an exception for UK Electronica, which was a small festival with some live performances, talks and stands to sell records and related ephemera. Manning our stand led to some good new contacts and we met and talked to a lot of fans, including our good friend Joe Ahmed.

During our performance we projected one of our gig videos, which was full of cut-up images, including clips from blue films. Someone brought their ten-year-old son to see us play even though it was an over-eighteens show, and made an official complaint about the video content. Three days later we got a visit from the local police. Two squad cars pulled up in the drive with three uniformed officers and two detectives presenting us with a warrant to search our property. A friend had phoned to say that our names and address had been given to the police by one of the festival organisers, but we never expected to be the subjects of an investigation. We were kept in our living room while the police went around the house, searching everywhere and pulling out ‘evidence’ to take away with them.

‘What exactly are you looking for?’ I asked.

‘Anything that shows you naked,’ was the reply.

‘Come with me,’ I said, and gave them a pile of photos of myself semi- and fully nude, dancing, on holiday, etc. They thought (or had been informed) that we were making and selling pornographic videos. After hours of delving and questioning, they realised the accusation was possibly bogus, but still took boxes of videos, photos and paperwork away with them to look through, saying they’d be in touch. Three months later, on my birthday, me and Chris were walking around town when we saw one of the detectives. He nodded, smiled, then came over to us to say that we could collect our belongings whenever we wanted. They were satisfied that there was no charge to answer.

Nettwerk, then PIAS, released the C&C ‘taster’ 12" EP, Take Five, and we embarked on our first C&C tour of the USA. Steve Montgomery, the manager at the Rough Trade Notting Hill shop, organised the bookings and tour-managed us. The tour was a great success; we were excited about future possibilities from all the contacts we’d made and it gave us enough money to fix our leaking roof and invest in some new equipment – an AKAI S900 sampler, an MC-500 MIDI sequencer, a Roland Octapad and a Fostex sixteen-track tape recorder.

The injection of new gear changed our sound and the way we worked. We sampled like crazy, anything and everything, and started recording our next album, Exotika. We recorded the title track as our homage to Martin Denny, which was released as a single and was a big hit in clubs on the West Coast of America and in Goa, India, at the trance dance parties.

When so much is happening, and so fast, you just go with the flow, not realising until much later just how monumental those events turned out to be. 1987 was like that for us. Our output was prolific. We’d released the single ‘Obsession’ and began a Conspiracy International collaboration album called Core with our friends Monte Cazazza, Brian Williams, Boyd Rice, Robert Wyatt, John Duncan, Joe Potts and Coil.

I was in touch with Geff regularly. He’d call me, more often than not when he was three sheets to the wind, talking about the nuances of sex, putting the world to rights between us, him saying how, since me and Chris had been doing electronica for years, we could make a fortune now that it had taken off. We weren’t interested in the mainstream or banging out music just to make money. That attitude probably contributed to our money struggles. What excited us was collaborating on an album track with everyone. It was the first time we’d worked with Sleazy since TG split and I always think of Core as having brought us back together. Having him in our lives again felt right: even though we’d travelled very different paths in the interim, that deep connection between us was still there.

And the album itself was a work involving people we felt a special connection to. John Duncan and Joe, along with Rick Potts, Tom Recchion and the artist Paul McCarthy, were part of a radical art/music collective called LAFMS (Los Angeles Free Music Society). I’d hung out with them in LA during TG’s last gigs and John had celebrated Nick’s birth by releasing a 7" single called ‘NICKI’. The common factor among us all was that our work and lives were unorthodox in our own unique ways, and bringing us together would make for some very potent music.

Brian was the only one who recorded with us at our studio. All the other tracks were done by exchanging tapes through the mail – we had no email then. Working on the track ‘Unmasked’ with Robert (Wyatt) was very special. We held an unspoken trust in each other that made possible the effortless close melding of our sensitive music and sense of self. We exchanged tapes of his musical and vocal ideas and he sent me wonderful letters full of lyrics for me to select from. I compiled what I felt was the essence of an underlying storyline and we recorded them alongside a melody made from samples of his voice. Even though he wasn’t there physically, his calls and letters were so charged with his creative energy, making it an incredibly intimate collaborative experience. He loved the track and did his own cover version some years later.

The mid-morning mail arrived. A package from Wax Trax! Records in Chicago containing animal rights literature with graphic descriptions and photographs of animal cruelty, including the horrific suffering of animals in slaughterhouses. I read it once and never looked at it again – it was too distressing. Wax Trax! were releasing an album, Animal Liberation, which Dan Mathews of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) was putting together. Jim at Wax Trax! had assumed me and Chris were vegetarian and asked us to contribute a track. We weren’t vegetarian until that envelope arrived, but we have been ever since.

I sat and wrote the lyrics and we recorded the song ‘Silent Cry’ in about four hours. It had been sparked off by a chance meeting with Dan the previous year at our friend Lene Lovich’s house. Now the album was being released, Dan was in the UK to promote it and we met up again to discuss a live performance of our song at an animal rights party he’d organised at the Limelight in London. Lene and Nina Hagen had also done a track together for the album and we were all backstage. I felt decidedly underdressed and rather demure next to them both, with their big hair and outrageous, eccentric theatrical clothes and make-up. Performing our gentle, sad song was quite emotional but I held it together. Lene and Nina blasted out their song with full-on energy and gusto and we all decamped to a local Indian restaurant. The owner looked at Lene and Nina with incredulity and was trying desperately to usher us all out. But Nina was an unstoppable force, talking ten to the dozen at him about astrology and the meaning of life, turning his shock into fascination until he smiled and seated us all with his blessing.

I took that memorable demonstration of Nina in action as inspiration for when I had to play her in the PETA promo video. Nina wasn’t available so I was enlisted to play her part, donning a wig that resembled her hair, with clothes to match and high heels. The location was a fenced-off rubbish tip near Lene’s, the nearest we could get to what looked like the entrance to a securely locked animal-experimentation facility. We feigned breaking the locks and climbing over the fence to free the animals – me in my patent stiletto heels and a very short skirt scaling the fence, determined to complete my mission. I think it was pretty convincing.

Unbeknownst to us, Daniel Miller was interested in signing us to Mute Records, but Kenny Gates of Play It Again Sam had got to us first. Being officially signed to record labels in Europe and Canada, we encountered our first taste of standard record-business practice. Exotika was released and we were asked to go on tour to promote it. Naive as it may sound, we’d never thought of our live work as promotion before. Performing was just part of what we did: we presented our music and video work to people, shared that special time together, and hopefully made some money to enable us to carry on making music and art. There hadn’t been a calculated commercial agenda attached to playing live – until now. The notion of recording an album, then performing it live on tour to ‘sell’ it, was a new thing for us.

And so was going on tour with a support band … SPK. Their line-up was now Graeme, his wife, Sinan, and Karina Hayes on additional vocals and dance. They had more gear than us, what with all their props and an angle grinder, which caused no end of hold-ups and problems at the airports. Equipment Carnets (a temporary export–import document) were mandatory when touring abroad and they were a nightmare. Every item of equipment had to be listed and accounted for as you passed through customs – every lead, jack plug, power supply. If something went missing, you could face a very hefty fine. It loaded extra stress on to our tight airport connections, without the added dramas created by Graeme’s unusual luggage.

The first thing that triggered an underlying discontentment in Graeme was when we went through US Immigration and he, Sinan and Karina got stopped and taken for questioning. They weren’t going to be allowed in until me and Chris offered to vouch for them as our legitimate support act. That worked, but also publicly showed Graeme as subordinate to us, and that wasn’t taken well, especially when the immigration officer smiled at me and Chris and said, ‘I’ve got tickets to your show tonight – I love your music.’ We gave him some C&C badges, chatted a little, then went on our way. Graeme’s sense of being treated as secondary to us grew as we headlined the shows, and the number of radio and press interviews was much higher for us than him. Who played in the so-called headline spot was irrelevant and meant little to me but more to Graeme. Things started getting very strained and his persistent moaning and harassment of Dan put a real dampener on things. Dan took the brunt of it all, but no matter what he tried to do to appease Graeme, it wasn’t enough. He kept the tour on track by clearing up any complaints and monetary settlements for damage SPK caused during their performances thanks to Graeme’s metal chain swinging above the audience’s head, his twirling and breaking of some of the house microphones and the sparking from the angle grinder as he used it on available objects and pillars at the venues. A girl in the audience at one show had her head cut open by a forceful swing from the heavy chain and she threatened to sue, but Dan managed to talk her out of it.

Fraught with Graeme’s discontent, things came to a head mid-tour. As we were walking along the street after yet another confrontational episode with Graeme, Dan suddenly stopped dead in his tracks and hurled his tour briefcase down the street, screaming, ‘I’ve had ENOUGH! I’m leaving!’

Nick was scared, and we didn’t know what would happen with the tour. I went and retrieved the case and between me and Chris we managed to persuade Dan to stay on until we could get someone to replace him. He stayed away from Graeme, then we had an emotional farewell with him when he left and Steve (Montgomery) joined us to take over tour manager duties and to try and keep things on an even keel with Graeme. As soon as we hit the West Coast, me and Chris took Nick to visit friends. It was good to get away from the tense atmosphere.

The SPK damage costs had mounted as the tour progressed and by the end had eaten substantially into the tour income. Payment was to be settled at the airport when Steve took us all to catch our flights home. When Graeme was told about the money situation he went crazy. ‘I’ve got a wife and two kids to support and a mortgage to pay!’ he yelled.

Chris tried to calm things down and reason with him but, contrary to what his contract with Steve supposedly said, Graeme demanded money. That money would have to come out of our and Steve’s earnings. Steve went to the men’s room and Graeme followed him. When they emerged, Steve looked decidedly shaken and Graeme rushed off without saying a word to us. I was sat with Nick, trying to keep him from noticing anything bad was going on. ‘What happened?’ I asked Steve.

‘He blindsided me. I didn’t expect him to switch from verbal to physical.’

Apparently some guy had witnessed the altercation and called the LAPD, who appeared and told Steve that, as the booking agent, he was responsible for Graeme’s welfare and safe return to Australia and that Steve had to pay Graeme or we’d all be taken to the precinct. Steve lost his commission and we were left with just a few hundred dollars from our own tour. We felt robbed. I heard that SPK disbanded after that, and Graeme moved to LA and went on to do film work for Hollywood movies.

25 June 1989

Chris took me to the hospital at about 7 o’clock and I was put on a drip … my emotions are in turmoil.

A visit to my GP confirmed that I was pregnant. It was a shock as I had had a coil fitted. I was worried whether the pregnancy could be viable with a coil in place or if it would damage the baby. I was sent to the local hospital, where a doctor gave me an internal examination, which even I knew wasn’t the preferred procedure at such an early stage in a pregnancy. I remember him looking me straight in the eyes as he stuck his fingers inside me. It was such a creepy feeling. He was brutal and I yelped as he probed about. I looked to the nurse for help, for her to say something to this guy, that what he was doing was all wrong. She was visibly shocked and concerned about what she’d witnessed. Nothing was said but I knew he had assaulted me and I’d be lucky to keep the baby. I was sent home feeling violated and in pain.

The next day we went to a village fete and I started cramping and bleeding heavily. By the time we got home, I knew I was miscarrying. Chris rang the hospital and was advised to collect whatever came out into a jar to take to the hospital, for them to confirm that I’d miscarried successfully. To see that tiny little foetus, the potential life we’d lost, was too much for me. Just eight weeks old and the size of a fifty-pence piece. How brutal and cruel the procedure was. Our child was reduced to ‘evidence’ of loss in a jar.

I was admitted to hospital to have the coil removed and a D&C to remove any remaining parts of the baby. I was taken to theatre and given an anaesthetic. The last thing I remember as I went under was a huge crushing sensation on my chest, like the ceiling had fallen on top of me. Then, from far away, I heard a woman’s anxious voice say, ‘Her blood pressure’s dropped … Christine! Christine!’

I slowly realised they were calling me by my first christened name, not Cosey. I opened my eyes. They checked me over, then took me to the ward to recover.

Just three weeks later we embarked on an eight-date European tour, immediately followed by a fifteen-date C&C tour of the USA to promote our new album, Trust. That wasn’t the best thing for me to have done. My health was never the same again.

*

1991 was an odd year. It seemed like business as usual but there were big changes taking place that we weren’t fully aware of at the time. On a personal level, me and Chris were as one, unified in love and in our creative pursuits. That is as true today as it was then – the vital force that drives us forward and maintains the continuum of our togetherness. We were an idyllically happy family with Nick, taking regular trips to relatives, them visiting us, raucous fun parties and Christmas gatherings. Before (and after) Mum died, the only absentees from the happy group get-togethers were my mum and dad. I’d felt sad for Mum and Nick but I couldn’t have done anything about it. I’d thought of just turning up and knocking on their door with Nick and Chris, but decided against subjecting them to what I anticipated would be a cold-hearted response from Dad. I was resigned to not having them in my life and I was so happy being a part of Chris’s family.

Being signed to three record labels proved to be good for everyone. Our back catalogue got a new airing as each label re-released the early C&C albums and compilations. We were fortunate to work with such good people and have their enthusiastic support. Visiting Wax Trax! in Chicago to see the owners, Jim and Dannie, was always a treat, just in terms of them being such great, fun people. Just as we were riding high and for the first time feeling a hint of financial security, some labels started running into trouble. First Rough Trade Distribution folded, then the whole of the Rough Trade Group went into voluntary liquidation in 1991, owing us money (which was settled years later). Some of our publishing was with Rough Trade and after their collapse had been put in the hands of another publishing company. Things got more complicated when Wax Trax! went under, but PIAS were stable and Kenny and Michel kept our spirits up.

The demise of Wax Trax! had scuppered the release of my solo project, Time to Tell. Chris Connelly first proposed its release to me. We’d met him years earlier when he visited Beck Road as a very young TG fan. After his band, Finitribe, split, he’d moved to Chicago and joined Revolting Cocks and Ministry, who were also signed to Wax Trax! – that’s where we met up again. He was coordinating the Time to Tell release with me and thoughtfully arranged for the artworks to be returned. It’s never good when a label collapses – there’s so much fallout and recrimination, but I never felt any malice to Jim and Dannie. I co-opted the help of Joe Banks to work on the artwork for a special version of Time to Tell on CD, in a deluxe package dedicated to Szabo, who had died in November 1982. The audio was extended and remastered, and the booklet updated and revised with additional material and twenty-six black-and-white cards of related art and modelling images. There was a hitch, though: the factory that packaged the inserts refused the job on religious and moral grounds … My nude image on the cards being the reason. A replacement and more amenable factory was found and production went ahead with no more trouble. I’d also produced a very limited signed edition, which included one of my original encaustic paintings in a handmade box.

At this point, Sleazy, me and Chris weren’t on speaking terms with Gen, who was now living in the USA. Mute had the TG catalogue and acted as mediators. We’d all re-signed to them for a Mute Grey Area release with the addition of live tracks, TG LIVE. Me, Chris and Sleazy had gone to Mute meetings together but Sleazy didn’t want anything to do with the TG artworks, editing or mastering, and, as far as any of us knew, Gen didn’t either. That job fell to me and Chris, with the assistance of Brian and Joe Banks. Brian waded through the TG live tapes, selecting the best for quality and possible bonus tracks. That was a job neither me nor Chris could face at the time. It was enough that Chris then had to master them all. Joe was a graphic designer who’d worked with Brian and he did the artworks for us, and I designed and drew the camouflage box set sleeve based on our TG uniforms.

Mute had been a positive constant in our lives and we had good friends there, like John McGrath, John McRobbie and Daniel. Our working relationship with Mute expanded to include Chris’s solo album, The Space Between, and an Erasure remix, with Daniel having done the first ever remix of any of our music, for our C&C 12" single ‘Synaesthesia’.

Me and Chris were nearing the end of our contract with PIAS and recording Musik Fantastique! The samples were stored for playback on SyQuest hard disk cartridges. We thought we were being cutting-edge: we could store the whole album on one big disk. Three months into the album, the SyQuest drives started failing and corrupting the samples. The majority of the album was lost. What saved us was that we’d recorded the vocals, guitar and cornet on to tape, so at least we had that. After a week moping around depressed, we swapped back to slow but reliable floppy disks and re-recorded the album. It probably came out the better for the ‘disaster’.

After that we went over to a super-reliable optical drive and disks as soon as they became available. Musik Fantastique! was our last album on PIAS. We moved back to releasing material on our own CTI label through World Serpent. Sleazy had recommended them to us and introduced us to the owners, Alison, Gibby and Alan. We were completely independent again and marked the return with the 7" single ‘Passion’, cut at Porky’s studio in London, which I etched with auspicious runic symbols.

The oddest of situations can bring inspiration. Driving seems to be when me and Chris have time free from other distractions to talk through and brainstorm ideas, usually on long journeys. But the ‘Library of Sound’ series of albums came about during a twenty-minute drive to do the weekly shop. We wanted to do more introspective, instrumental, ambient music, to venture into different territory and away from the Chris & Cosey sound. It suited my health situation and where my head was at too. My dance groove was temporarily suspended. Metaphysical and Chronomanic came together quickly, followed by In Continuum.

The now-huge music and multimedia arts festival Sonar started in 1994 and we were asked to play. Thrilled as we were, we had to refuse due to my health, so we made a video, ‘Select Reflections 2’, to be screened as our contribution. We were asked to perform again the following year but I was no better and the accompanying video to Chronomanic was shown instead.

Just as we were having a break from Chris & Cosey, JD Twitch (aka Keith McIvor, who went on to run Optimo club in Glasgow with JG Wilkes) appeared on our horizon. We knew his friend, the effervescent Jill Mingo, who had done some promo for us. Keith had been following and DJing TG and C&C music, and proposed a remix album of C&C tracks for his T&B label. Me and Chris, being in our ‘bubble’, had no idea just what an impact our music had once we relinquished it to the world. We never expected a ‘return’, simply being pleased that we were able to get our work out there and hoping others shared in the pleasure we got from making it. We didn’t know then but Keith’s release Twist, an album of C&C remixes by Carl Craig, Mike Paradinas, Mark Gage, Fred Giannelli, Coil and Cosmic Connection, was a key factor in the resurgence of interest in our C&C music and he brought us into contact with some great people.

The remix by Coil (Sleazy and Drew McDowall) kept an ongoing connection with Sleazy. But our lifestyles were poles apart, me trying to keep as calm as possible and Sleazy trying to get as high and ‘up’ as possible. He was heavily into his recreational drug phase … as Chris witnessed at a KAI Power Tools visual software seminar in London. As the announcement of a specific tool within the programme was announced to the seated attentive audience, a very loud ‘YESSSSS! WHOOOOOP!’ broke the silence. Everyone turned round to see someone stood with their arms in the air in triumphant appreciation of a new weapon for video effects – it was Sleazy. He was dressed in a thick, black puffa jacket, sweating, eyes popping, but with a massive grin on his face. He’d obviously been waiting for technology to catch up with whatever ideas he had in mind.

*

The start of my heart problem seemed to stem from the operation after my miscarriage. I began having trouble breathing, then palpitations, almost blacking out. I could see my heart thumping in my chest as it kicked in again after missed beats. The episodes could last for hours at a time and were unpredictable, exhausting and frightening. My (male) GP put it down to me being a neurotic, pre-menopausal woman.

I struggled on until I finally asked to see another doctor, who was more enlightened and concerned. He sent me for a 24-hour heart monitor test. I dropped the ECG recording off as instructed, and two hours later I got a phone call from the hospital to be told that the recording revealed a possible serious abnormality, that I mustn’t do anything strenuous, and that I had to go back to the hospital first thing the next day. My relief at the proof that my palpitations existed turned to dread as I began to think the worse.

When I reported to the cardiac department I was given a treadmill test – I lasted less than a minute before they stopped it and lay me down. My heart rate had soared to over 260 b.p.m. The young cardiologist was shocked – he’d never seen that before. He admitted me for further tests. Chris was in as much shock as I was and rang and faxed everyone to let them know. I received a flurry of beautiful bouquets from Mute, PIAS, family and friends to cheer me in my hospital bed. That took me by surprise. Was I that ill? I was in denial about my heart problem. Because it was sporadic, I took to thinking that, when it worked normally, it had righted itself and I was OK. I was put on beta-blockers, then another cardiac drug to slow me down. It did just that. I’d gone from a five-day-a-week gym-and-swim routine, with bike rides with Nick, to sitting inert and zombified by the medication to try and control my heart arrhythmia. When I was told to avoid stress and excitable situations the first thing I asked was, ‘What about orgasms?’ I was more worried about being denied that physical pleasure than ‘work’. I had my priorities.

Live music performances ended. I concentrated on working in the studio. That was the only way I could safely work around my physical limitations. I was keeping a log of the palpitations, chest pains and breathlessness, and sleeping at least two hours during the day. Feeling so restricted was depressing. As I sat in the garden resting, I wondered how many more summers I’d see, what a burden I must be to Chris, how I was holding him back and what Nick was losing out on because of my inability to join in the fun things in life. Sometimes the exhaustion was so acute it was an effort to even laugh. All I could think about was getting horizontal, lying down. I tried my best to do as much as possible, to try and make things as near as possible to normal. I couldn’t find it in me to totally surrender to the condition. Chris was amazing at coping with the worry and helping me continue to be ‘me’, making sure the studio sessions were always available at the time slots my heart allowed me to work.

Then he gave me a huge boost of confidence. We were watching a documentary programme that turned out to be part of an Open University course. ‘You should do that,’ he said.

Doing an academic degree at that time in my life worked out to be better for me. I had the advantage of having acquired my own skills and understanding of the art world through personal experience and was interested to discover that I shared views with some great minds.

*

Other than the Time to Tell release and my OU studies, I was happy to concentrate on my work with Chris. I’ve always thought of my work as art, whether it manifests as music, visuals or actions, but had no interest in direct contact with the art world. I’d mainly been focusing on sound and video presented as audiovisual gig-style performances and sometimes as screenings and installations. Our video work for the Cabinet Gallery group show ‘Popocultural’ at the South London Gallery was a case in point. Our inclusion alongside Chris Ofili, Jeremy Deller, Paul McCarthy and others came about from an invitation by Andrew Wheatley and Martin McGeown of Cabinet Gallery, who knew of my work and about TG. We were introduced by Simon Ford when he was writing his book Wreckers of Civilisation about COUM and TG.

The introduction to Andrew and Martin was one of the best things that came out of the book. I met two incredible people, both committed, generous and driven by an uncompromising love and respect for the creative spirit and powerful art. I’d never encountered anyone like them before.

21 September 1997

Spoke to Sleazy tonight about Simon’s book and how to redress the balance and correct Gen’s fantasies and inaccuracies. He said to get together next week.

Simon’s book actually started as a thesis on COUM and Throbbing Gristle and he visited me to go through and borrow archive material (most of which was never returned), with me reading through drafts as he progressed. It seemed an impossible task to me and I was happy for Simon to take it on, never expecting that it would turn into a book. My friend Grae Watson had started a similar book back in 1983, but rang me one day to tell me he’d abandoned it after allegedly having a tough time with Gen, who was insisting on controlling the content to the point that the book would have been an unbalanced, inaccurate account. Wreckers suffered from a similar problem but was tempered to a degree. It has its inaccuracies but stands as a good entry point for reference and analysis, and even before the book was published it brought about some significant introductions in the art world.

20 January 1997

Sleazy rang, nice to hear from him. Talked about COUM at M.O.C.A., he said to be careful Gen doesn’t just put himself & text. Maybe I’m still naive. Weird compiling all the COUM stuff, history, my past, the beginnings of me and Chris … It seems Art history surfaces and I am an official part of it.

The resurgence of interest in my past artwork continued and Paul Schimmel from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles contacted me about discussing the inclusion of COUM in a group show on performance art. Me and Chris travelled to London for a meeting at his hotel. We were shown into the drawing room to wait for him. We waited and waited but he never appeared. We left feeling really angry at being stood up and the waste of what little money we had on the train fares. But Paul was feeling equally annoyed. Through a series of phone calls, the ridiculous reason for the saga was revealed. The receptionist never called his room to tell him we had arrived. So we were downstairs, he was upstairs, waiting for the call that never came. He even went to the reception desk to ask after us, only to be told ‘No’ by the relief receptionist while we sat just feet away.

After that fiasco, I thought it would all come to nothing but Paul really wanted COUM represented in the exhibition, and by definitive performance photos. I could provide that for him and sent him a display book of works but suggested he also speak to Gen about any other material. The exhibition instigated my maxing out our credit card to buy an A3 printer and scanner (it cost less than outsourcing the work). I reconnected with my magazine actions from a very different viewpoint. My memory has always served me well but I’d already consulted my diaries for Simon’s book just to verify or correct Gen’s version of events. It was strange revisiting my past. But at least, after twenty years, some of my magazine works were finally going to be shown on a gallery wall for the very first time, and in the company of works including those by Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys, Gilbert & George, Marina Abramović, John Cage and my friend John Duncan.

More interest in my past activities surfaced. Out of the blue, Tuppy Owens got in touch. How she got my phone number, I’ll never know, but it was good to hear from her after so long. She was organising a festival called Smut Fest and I was invited to take part in a discussion at the Confessions Gallery in Islington, London, on the resurgence of political pornography. Others on the panel were Del LaGrace (photographer), Lindsey Frew from Hustler, Tuppy, Bill Owens from Suck, Hugh Scandell of Skin Two and an old friend, Ted Polhemus. It was an odd context for discussing my work in pornography. Most of the others were still very much a part of that lifestyle, and porn as ‘business’, and I couldn’t relate on their level. The thing that stood out most was them complaining about the laws that restricted their freedom to produce and distribute porn. That irritated me as I’d faced worse conditions and tighter controls but managed to work around and against them to achieve the freedom to express myself (sexually or otherwise). The only thing I had in common with them was that I’d once been part of the porn business. Where was the discussion of the ‘political’ aspect of porn? I was up for that. But the evening overall hadn’t been a pleasant reconnection with the sex industry, especially when one hard-core porn-video producer took to the floor with vivid descriptions of his seedy working practices. I was glad to leave.

3 April 1997

I am wondering how we will survive in the future. Is there a market left for our music? I am poor but in love and happy. I love Chris and Nick. I love life. That’s good, money makes life easier but love makes it happy and hard times bearable.

How you can be in such demand yet be on the breadline continues to baffle me and probably others in the same position. We were selling equipment to upgrade and just keep our heads above water, to maintain our creative lifestyle and meet the needs of teenage Nick and six cats. My illness meant I couldn’t do a day job even if I wanted to, but we were fortunate that Chris’s expertise and knowledge of equipment brought him paid commissioned articles and reviews for Sound on Sound magazine. As well as the review gear being useful in our studio, the fees kept us going for years, as did TG royalties from Mute. Chris’s dad had offered for him to join and take over the family business, Carter’s Glass in Crouch End, but Chris turned it down. It would have meant we’d have had a good steady income but we’d have had to give up music and move back to London. It was sad to have to refuse his dad’s generosity.

After our Rough Trade and Wax Trax! experiences, we hadn’t expected World Serpent to run into trouble. We were told that Tower Records hadn’t paid them for our CDs. We were thousands of pounds down but luckily we still got paid by some of their other retailers. It didn’t bode well. On top of that we received a package from Allan at Peer Music. Two more TG bootlegs had surfaced, then another, and Peer did their best to track down who was responsible. However, we all suspected we knew who it was.

Knowing someone was taking money from us when we had so little could have cast a dark shadow of resentment, but it didn’t. My life was so full of positive things and good people that I put the rip-offs to one side and dealt with them as best I could, with the help of some great friends. Geff’s calls cheered me up. He rang one day, all happy and affectionate, to tell me him and Sleazy would be coming to record with us in the summer. Then he told me all about Kenneth Anger having stayed with them for five days and how he’d slept for stretches of twenty-four hours, making them worried if he was OK. He’d emerge with press clippings of pirates, then go back to bed. Geff usually called when Sleazy was away filming music videos and ads. That work made it possible for them to eventually move out of London. Sleazy thought it may help Geff’s alcohol addiction, having already tried different treatments. Even the implants that triggered a severe reaction if he drank alcohol didn’t work. Nor did the twelve-step programme, or checking into clinics. Sleazy put his Chiswick house on the market and started the search for a new home for him and Geff. My financial struggles paled into insignificance compared to the havoc and pain caused by Geff’s addiction.

24 April 1998

Everyone really pulled together for us on this Industrial mess. Monte’s pissed off and thinks it’s a prank, we’re not sure … Sleazy had got on the case too which is highly unusual but welcome.

We connected to the World Wide Web in 1998, which massively improved communication and brought an end to our hard-copy CTI bulletins and the cost of printing and mailing. But it also speeded everything up, which was both a good and a bad thing. We’d always written personal replies to all our fans, at one time incurring the wrath of the mother of one of them who read one of my replies and called me ‘the devil’s filth witch’ … which appealed to my perverse sense of humour. Me and Chris used it as my nickname over the years. The pace of the postal system afforded us some respite, but emails were a near-instant-response form of communication. Chris designed our websites and put together an online mail-order service. That was a lifeline.

Then one day we got a flurry of emails informing us about Industrial Records being relaunched by someone in San Francisco, and claiming that Gen was behind it all. Daniel, Sleazy and Monte responded straight away. Things went crazy as everyone tried to get to the bottom of it all. It wasn’t a prank but was stopped after interventions by a number of concerned and pissed-off people. The internet has its upsides.

With emails making contact so much easier, past friends like Tim Poston, Foxtrot and Ann Fulam got in touch, and I also started to receive enquiries about my art, with requests to do lectures and interviews for academic publications.

23 Sept 1998

SO SO SO HAPPY!!!! the doctor at Papworth said he’s sure he can cure my Tachycardia. I’m ecstatic and so is Chris, Nick, Rose and all. Now I can feel motivation returning. I can see the reason behind ‘doing’ again … Four scenarios: 1. I die (please NO), 2. It doesn’t work (NO), 3. I need two ops, 4. IT WORKS. I have to be positive but I’m very frightened … Will I regret this assertive step? I hope not, I hope I will get my life back again.

Since 1993 I’d been under the care of an eminent cardiologist and whenever I went for check-ups I told him of the exhaustion affecting my quality of life and ability to work. I had an energy window of about three hours a day and struggled especially with anything that involved using the upper body, stupid mundane actions like hanging out washing or grating cheese. Also, that energy window meant me having to sleep in the car on some journeys or after our leisurely walks in the Sandringham woods. I explained all this and was told to ‘be a lady of leisure’. I was furious at his condescending, dismissive attitude. He held my future in his hands and any opportunity for me to live a nearer-normal life, but he didn’t see why I would want to do anything other than laze about and be waited on. I thank whatever forces that he was on holiday for my annual scheduled appointment with him in July 1998, when instead I saw a young cardiologist who referred me to an expert on electrical heart conditions at Papworth Hospital. I was given a diagnosis. It was an electrical rhythm problem! Now, isn’t that irony for you. I was informed by the doctor that he’d only come across two people with the same rare condition as me, the other being a trumpet player … More irony. I didn’t want to have a ‘special’ heart condition – I wanted a bog-standard one that was treatable, with proven surgical success. Then the news came that there was the option for treatment and he felt that it would be successful. I opted in. I wanted to be fixed.

10 February 1999

Daniel rang. Chris talked to him for ages and told him about our TG24 hours idea. He was ecstatic about it.

Me and Chris had thought that an official, updated, limited-edition release of all the live TG gigs based on the original TG 24-hour cassette box could offer a sensible solution to the ongoing problem of the bad TG bootlegs, and we asked Daniel if he’d be interested in putting it out on Mute Records. Daniel was very keen so we emailed Sleazy about it. He rang to say he was up for the idea, especially as Simon’s book seemed to have rekindled interest in TG … even though we were all yet to receive a copy. It was strange how much interest there was in our work from so long ago.

I’d prepared a slide show of images from the ‘Prostitution’ show for an event at the ICA to publicise Simon’s book. I was fine with that but Nick and his mate Greg had come along with us and I didn’t know how Nick would handle seeing his mum in all her naked glory – or how to explain a film in which I castrated his dad. I needn’t have worried. He took it in his stride and I gave him the nod when the sensitive images were to be shown so he could choose to avert his gaze.

By the time a feature in Bizarre magazine came out featuring similar images to illustrate an article on artists who push the boundaries of art and society by using their bodies, Nick was as comfortable as he could be about my magazine and art actions. His friends at college bought Bizarre magazine regularly – as I found out one day while at the checkout in Sainsbury’s. I saw Nick and two of his mates, who were grinning and looking at me and Chris. We nodded at them and said, ‘Hi.’

They came over carrying a copy of the magazine. ‘Did you really do all that in the Bizarre article?’ one of them asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Cool’ was his reply, and all three smiled and toddled off, waving to us as they went on their way.

20 March 1999

I’m determined to get a book out that puts the record straight.

Well, you’re reading that book now.

Simon’s Wreckers book prompted the diary entry, and the desire to put the record straight was further reinforced by press interviews with Gen and the book reviews, which seemed largely centred around him being the innovator and leader of TG. That misconception of TG and bias towards Gen, who was portrayed as a betrayed victim, angered me, Chris and Sleazy. We’d expected more from Simon – at least impartiality, having given him so much information to work with. Foxtrot had expected more too; he wasn’t best pleased at not being mentioned much in the COUM section, commenting on Gen in an interview, ‘He likes to have this mythic status, you see. He’s definitely got his own view of how it should be perceived. I mean, he is a great manipulator and he likes to retrospectively re-write history. I mean, I wasn’t mentioned much in the book, not that I’m an egomaniac but …’

Me, Chris and Sleazy didn’t attend the official book launch. Two days later, Simon emailed me an apology. I can’t recall whether it was for the book or the meagre twenty-five copies each we were to receive as ‘payment’ – and to be charged the postage.

25 April 1999

I’m fed up with being fed up now. It’s got my heart doing its palpitations again. If only I had the energy to scream and run round I’m sure I’d feel better. Exorcise the frustration a bit. I feel so sorry for Chris, he’s had to put up with so much because of my heart and now something else. It’s potentially so depressing but I mustn’t let it be. I’ll treat it as another chapter in my life, a project to fulfil and put behind me in my archive of life experiences.

My heart problem affected the dynamics of my relationship with Chris. He missed what he called my ‘mad half hours’ and my singing around the house. I didn’t feel myself either. I was used to rushing around everywhere, being so physically active and full of energy, and I worried that Chris wouldn’t love the slow, lifeless Cosey I’d become.

On top of that I’d been recalled after a routine mammogram to investigate a suspicious ‘mass’. By the time I went to the hospital one of the lumps was the size of an egg. They turned out to be cysts. ‘We’ll aspirate them for you,’ the consultant said. It all sounded so routine and harmless but turned out to involve inserting a long needle into the breast to withdraw fluid from the cysts. I felt like asking if they had a piece of wood for me to bite down on to.

I was relieved when it was all over but I was back at the clinic three months later, having found another lump the size of my thumb. Thinking it was just another cyst, I went into the consulting room on my own while Chris waited outside. I was taken from there to have an ultrasound scan. It wasn’t a cyst and they carried out a biopsy, telling me to return next week for the results. I couldn’t contemplate surgery after my last experience of a general anaesthetic. The stress set off my palpitations.

I had a close female support network, especially with Chris’s mum, Rose, his aunt Pat, my sister, Pam, and a wonderful group of caring friends who all talked me into thinking positively. Foxtrot being Foxtrot sent me a large Perspex vital progress hospital sign. I saw the consultant and got the biopsy result – the lump was fibrous and benign. I felt like I had permission to live again.

*

Chris had done some solo shows for Paul Smith’s ‘Disobey’ tour and Paul offered us C&C gigs for the summer, but I couldn’t do them. As everything seemed to be propelling us forward, I felt my health was holding us back. I called Papworth to try and get an idea of when my operation was so we could plan ahead. I was given a date, 19 May. Now I had something we could schedule offers and projects around.

20 May 1999

Oh what a traumatic day yesterday. All so unexpected and even now as I lay here at home I feel traumatised still.

Expectations were high that the cardiac ablation procedure would work and that I’d be free of medication and back to full health with energy to spare. Yeah! Chris stayed at a local hotel, as did his mum and aunt Pat to support me and Chris. They brought love and some light relief to the whole situation, and even a lovely curry for me from a nearby restaurant. I decided on a local anaesthetic, which enabled me to watch the procedure on the monitor above the operating table. The catheters were fed through an artery in my groin and into my heart, then different drugs were injected to try and induce the arrhythmia … to no avail. I was in theatre for over two hours and the ablation was abandoned, catheters removed and the nurse pressed down hard on the incision.

I was taken back to my hospital bed, where the incision opened up, spilling blood on the bed as I shuffled across from the trolley – more painful pressing down. I was exhausted, so even though I was by now laid in a pool of blood I was happy to comply with the order to lie flat for an hour, then two hours to be safe. I eventually slowly sat up but felt faint, then very weird. ‘Get the nurse,’ I said to Chris …

I don’t remember anything of the following ten minutes but it’s burned in Chris’s memory. He hit the panic button, alarms sounded, and the crash team were there in seconds. Apparently I’d gone deathly white, then red, then white, my eyes rolled back, then I had two convulsions and my heart stopped. Chris was stood on the chair in the corner of the room looking down and watching as the team worked on me to restart my heart. I woke up with an oxygen mask on, a drip in my arm and hooked up to a heart monitor, with Chris holding my hand. ‘What happened?’

He just said, ‘You fainted, that’s all.’

I was told that a number of factors could have been the cause of the crash – post-operative shock, or an adverse reaction to iodine, calcium, adrenaline or temazepam. Whatever it was, the doctors and nurses were fantastic. But my poor body had been through a lot. I felt like I’d been in an accident. The bruising on my groin extended down my thigh and I had bad chest pains, which freaked me out until Chris told me about the electric shocks to my heart. Then it made sense. He was emotionally drained. He’d thought I was dying when I had my collapse. I suppose I was dead for the minutes it took them to bring me back.

I’d considered myself to be a spiritual person and the whole incident changed my thinking, especially on reincarnation – I wasn’t going on to another life, I’d just gone. Not that I expected to, but I didn’t see any of those tunnels of white light or have any kind of out-of-body experience. I find it difficult to describe the finality of your own life force other than likening it to turning off a power switch. In some ways, it’s comforting to know it just ends – I felt nothing.

We’d had no reason to think there’d be any problem with the procedure – the family were excited that I’d be cured and it was just an overnight stay, so we told Nick he needn’t come along. We thought we’d save him the worry and he went to stay with his girlfriend. He was really upset when we told him what had happened, and I regret excluding him. Like he said, ‘What if you’d never come back?’

I did get some good news from the hospital. My heart muscle was healthy – it’s just those damned electrical impulses that were misfiring. I was off medication and told to adopt a sensible approach to avoiding getting stressed or overtired. That’s a tough balancing act at times, especially for gigs, and ours was now just eleven days after the operation. Les thought it was too soon but I’d checked with my doctor that it would be OK and we’d accepted Paul Smith’s offer to perform as part of Labradford’s Festival of Drifting, curated by Carter Burwell at the Union Chapel in London. Consequently my recovery period was a mix of keeping abreast of the gig preps, resting, and appreciating the kindness and affection of the many flowers and ‘Get Well’ cards.

Chris had so much to do: he was writing another Sound on Sound review as well as fielding calls and emails, looking after me and sorting everything for the gig. I did what I could, going through and selecting video footage. We’d reconfigured our set-up for a new approach to playing live and took a lot more gear than before, including our two AKAI samplers and running the sequencers and rhythms off our laptops. Nick and his friend Greg were our roadies and John Lacey came along with his four projectors to do slides again for us to augment our video.

The walls of the chapel were transformed by our visual projections and the space felt ‘ours’. It was an all-encompassing, all-consuming C&C audiovisual experience. We hadn’t played live for seven years and the festival gave us the opportunity to return to performing as what we thought of as a more incidental part of the evening. We were taken aback by the response to our show. It was a full house, with people coming from America and Europe, so many friends, family and familiar faces. Even Fizzy and Foxtrot turned up. Fizzy was now a psychiatric nurse, built and looking like a berserker, with no front teeth and dressed up for the occasion in a leopardskin Lycra jumpsuit. His appearance was at odds with his gentle, sweet, fun self, but perfectly reflected his eccentric style. With John there as well, doing a performance piece that he got Fizzy to join in with, it was like a COUM reunion.

Backstage was crammed and buzzing with so many people, big love and beaming smiles. I was hugging and kissing my close friend Andria, who I’d met through John McRobbie and her work at Mute. I showed her my beautiful bruise from the operation, which was like a painting in constant flux, all shades of blue, purple and yellow, extending across my groin and down almost to my knee. We were in the ladies’ toilet, where we’d retreated for privacy and to count the merchandise takings, having been harassed by a very persistent guy from the Union Chapel production team, who wanted their cut, and was insisting on watching me count the money. I wasn’t having any of that. Maybe he’d been ripped off before, but I’d just finished performing and was knackered as well as annoyed at him following me around. He waited outside the toilets the whole time we were in there, like a sentry on guard duty. As soon as I came out I handed over his cut and went back to join everyone.

Daniel Miller came over to chat and asked me and Chris about the possibility of TG re-forming. That took us by surprise. We didn’t ever expect TG to re-form. Why would anyone? Then he told us that the TG24 release couldn’t happen yet as production costs were too high.

We walked out of the venue to a wonderful sight: an all-laughing, dancing sea of ‘Prostitution’ T-shirts. All those that had bought one at the gig had put them on over their clothes and were heading off into the night for more fun. When we went to load up the car it was covered in notes thanking us for a wonderful show. What an amazing night.

Then the adrenaline high was gone and I slumped in the car for the drive back to Norfolk, exhausted and feeling very ill by the time we got home at 4 a.m.

I’d overdone it and didn’t feel good for months leading up to my post-op consultation. I thought I’d be put back on heart drugs but I was told to continue without medication and see how I got on. But the palpitations came back with a vengeance and I ended up back at Papworth. My case was apparently ‘astonishing’. It was bloody annoying to me but I appreciated the interest in my extraordinary condition. I was told that the options for surgical intervention were limited and not yet developed enough to guarantee a positive outcome. I opted to continue taking medication. I’d previously spent a week in hospital trying different drugs with varying efficacy, but I was put on a different one that I’d never tried before. Those little white tablets transformed my life. My energy window expanded – as long as I respected my limitations.

2 September 2000

So as from today I am represented by Cabinet Gallery. Whoopee!

I approached the year 2000 with renewed vigour and an improved sense of well-being that held me in good stead for the emerging shifts in focus, both personal and creative. I’d worked with Andrew and Martin for four years before we made our working relationship ‘official’. It all took place over lunch in a pub in London, with the details of the arrangement restated and confirmed as we crossed the busy road together on my way back to catch the train home with Chris. I hadn’t been represented by anyone before so was reluctant to commit myself, but they had belief in me and my work. I trusted Andrew and Martin as friends, and admired their unique approach to art and how they operated very much on their own terms within the art world. Working with them and under their guidance has been key to my reinvigorated enthusiasm for and approach to art.

During visits to discuss works for exhibit I was rather amused (but pleased) to see my work being handled with white cotton gloves. I hadn’t been afforded such respect before. It made me smile. Things were falling into place at a good time for me, having sat my last OU exam. I could return to being Cosey again full-time, with space for self-indulgence and reading non-academic material.

Studies and personal problems aside, interest in my art stepped up and I was taking part in panel discussions and doing talks, including at the Courtauld Institute with my artist friend André Stitt, at the Royal College of Art, and at other colleges and institutions. Music and art were overlapping with my and Chris’s ambient albums, E.A.R. One and E.A.R. Two, both being included in the ‘Volume’ exhibition at PS1 in New York.

Then the music took a backseat as I concentrated on my artwork, which was included in group exhibitions at galleries and museums around the world. It was refreshing to meet a whole set of new and interesting people, especially my fellow Cabinet artists Lucy McKenzie and Mark Leckey. I’d returned to the art world at the right moment. My work had had time to find its place and was now recognised as important in the historical timeline of 1970s radical influential art.

The long gap between being trashed by press, Parliament and some fellow artists and the establishment embracing my art had also given me the chance to re-view my past work. I was in a different place now and could look at it from another perspective. I was outside looking in, with the advantage of time having allowed the assimilation of the residual ‘aftertastes’ and intimacies involved, as well as the dreadful experience and familial damage resulting from the ‘Prostitution’ furore. Back in the early 1980s I’d wanted to burn all my magazine works but Chris was horrified at the thought, saying how important they were and he wouldn’t let me do it. It’s not that I was ashamed of them, I just didn’t see a good reason for keeping them. They were taken out of their frames, put into storage and tucked away for years. Retrieving my COUM and magazine works from the boxes in the archive room was like delving into a past that I’d been very happy to leave behind. Considering what it represented, revisiting wasn’t traumatic so much as intriguing. Seeing my magazine works like that, me as I was from the position of who I had become, was an awakening for me. I still recognised and connected with my past self in the photographs and remembered everything – the smells of aftershave and the locations, the feel of the bed sheets, the reasons behind a certain positioning of my body or the look in my eyes, and the happy, heavy or unfriendly atmospheres. Sometimes I’d smile, sometimes I’d cringe.

Flicking through the pages of the magazines triggered a myriad of emotions and memories, and seeing my model friends again brought back the events hidden behind the procuring of that final printed image. But the shock wasn’t that, nor the graphic detail of crotch shots, but just how much these magazines were a rich visual time capsule of the blatant 1970s sexism that I’d lived through, coped with, and which now looked ridiculous, sometimes shocking and crass. When you’re living in that world you cope, steer your way through, challenging and countering when and wherever you can. Those works have since been presented within a ‘feminist’ context and I can now appreciate why, but for me at the time (and always) it was about my freedom to be me, not about ‘feminism’ per se.

9 November 2000

It all seems to be happening this year. New Millennium (if you go by our calendar) and great shifts in our lives.

Skot had forwarded me an email from Gen (at Gen’s request), informing me that Gen’s mum had had a triple bypass at eighty-three. I didn’t know why he was emailing me after so many years. I’d also been told the week before that Gen wasn’t well, with talk of him allegedly having had a breakdown after taking ketamine and ending up in hospital. If that was true, maybe it had something to do with Gen’s change in attitude towards me, as well as the request from a guy who did his website asking to link it to ours as a gesture towards maybe ‘building bridges’.

Then a letter arrived from Gen, with two Polaroids of his dog, Tanith, in her grave. The letter was so nice and ‘normal’; the sentiment seemed sincere and friendly, wishing me health and happiness. But I couldn’t believe in his words and that was sad. I burst into tears at the sight of Tanith lying dead. The letter was significantly dated 4 November, my birthday – it was a loaded missive.

We were in distant touch with Gen again about Cherry Red releasing a TG DVD. The decision to accept the offer was delayed as Sleazy’s father had died, but when Sleazy got back in touch he refused the deal outright, saying we could get a better deal somewhere else.

He later called me one evening sounding fed up, which wasn’t like him. He’d just got back from a Coil gig at Sonar: Geff had started drinking again and he’d had a nightmare journey back home with him. I had some understanding of the problems he faced with Geff from when they played as part of Julian Cope’s two-day festival at the Royal Festival Hall. The gig had technical problems and Geff was drunk, so we decided not to go backstage after the show. Sleazy had enough on his plate. His video promo work had dried up. ‘The music industry has completely collapsed,’ he said, and announced that he was going into fine art, starting with a show at Whitechapel Gallery that Paul Smith was involved with. I gave him Matthew Higgs’ contact details, who I’d met when I was in his and Paul Noble’s ‘Protest and Survive’ Whitechapel show, as Matthew had shown interest in Sleazy’s Sex Pistols photographs.

I was busy forming ideas for a new art action series on the theme of identity, entitled ‘Self lessness’ … as in the lack of a sense of self. Jack Sargeant introduced me to a guy from the Arts Council, and Andrew and Paul Buck were helpfully encouraging in my applying for funding from them. I’d been there before and didn’t want to be answerable to them after my past experience with arts funding in the 1970s. I found the process of application complicated, too restrictive. How could I describe an action that had yet to take place or evaluate (and justify) how it would be of benefit to the community? Also, the actions and the elements within them could easily cause offence and rejection. I wasn’t going to compromise or inhibit my work to fit funding criteria, so I funded myself.

But first I had to prepare and install a solo show of my work at Galerie Station in Frankfurt, Germany. I scanned, outputted and framed one entire magazine action as well as three A0 diptychs from another, and compiled a video entitled Fall Out. The installation took me and Chris two days to complete, and it looked great. When we got home, I got a call from Alex Fergusson (who was by then living in Germany) to say he’d seen the exhibition and loved it, and would be coming to see us. He stayed for a few days and came with us to recce Ely before my degree graduation ceremony there. We checked out a restaurant by the river and had a meal together before roaming around the antique shops. He was still the same Alex: fun, talking ten to the dozen and squeezing my bum when Chris wasn’t looking.

*

For the previous six years, and in between the many other activities, I had studied hard, written many assignments, sat nerve-racking exams, and now I was finally being awarded a first-class honours degree. I was stunned and felt like it wasn’t really me that had done it all. Even the graduation ceremony at Ely Cathedral seemed otherworldly. The building dates back to the eleventh century and is an incredibly spectacular and evocative space. That day it was filled with graduates and guests as Bach organ music accompanied the gowned procession of dignitaries making their way to take their places for the conferment procedure. I was all dressed up in a graduation gown and mortarboard, with everyone staring at me. The one thing that made it seem more real for me was John Peel receiving his honorary degree at the same ceremony. For a brief time all the worries of debt and TG matters had been forgotten.

7 July 2001

All this TG bootleg business has really escalated. Gen is quite excited by us all ‘talking’ again … it’s business. It’s rather taken over all my time.

27 September 2001

We went to our 24hr TG meeting at Mute. If I hadn’t got the bootleg sorted and made contact with Gen again none of this would have happened. Chris and I have totally been instrumental in all this falling into place.

One of the consequences of the first bootlegging of TG material was that the unofficial licences were then re-licensed for more bootlegging. I once again took on the task of tracking some down and started negotiating more contracts to make the bootlegs retrospectively ‘official’, securing our copyright and royalties. It hadn’t been easy and it was extremely time-consuming, but it also reconnected us all with Gen, which in turn led to us discussing the TG24 project.

After many emails and phone calls about TG24, me, Chris and Sleazy went for a meeting at Mute (Gen was unavailable). It was the first time I’d seen Sleazy in years and he looked very different. Gone was the lithe, youthful body and much of his hair – except for a little goatee beard – and he had an assertive business air about him. An open office environment where you could be easily overheard wasn’t the best place to meet up again after so long, and Sleazy was a little guarded until we moved to somewhere more private. His mood had a lot to do with him recently retiring from doing promotional videos. He was very jaded about the music business and ranted about how ruthless it was, having recently been on the receiving end of some bad experiences.

The deal was done for the TG box set, and Mute were liaising with Gen. Daniel was excited and fired up about the release, talking about setting up interviews to promote it and then (again) asking if we thought TG would be up for playing live together.

‘When hell freezes over!’ Sleazy replied, adding scathing comments about Gen.

I just said, ‘No’, and Chris remained silent.

We’d worked together and Sleazy had even asked Chris to join Coil on tour as their ‘analogue synth man’. Chris assessed the reality of the offer – when, where, rehearsals in Weston-super-Mare, Geff’s three-day drunken comas. He’d also just sold his ailing analogue modular system to buy a Mac G4 and laptop. He said no to the Coil offer.

Me, Chris and Sleazy working together was no problem – working as TG was a whole other thing. It was the third time we’d been asked to re-form TG. A year or so earlier, a multinational corporation got in touch to ask if TG would play a one-off concert for a birthday party for one of their directors, who apparently was a huge TG fan. As we had no interest in playing live together we told them the fee would be a million dollars, knowing it would cut the offer off at the knees. It did.

After the Mute meeting we walked to the Tube together. It was a warm, sunny day and we laughed and talked about old times, in between times, and the present-day grim realities of Sleazy’s ongoing difficulties with Geff’s alcoholism. He painted a dark picture of his day-to-day struggle of coping with Geff and the recent trip to A&E when Geff had a suspected heart attack while trying to ‘dry out’. We lightened the mood before we went our separate ways – us to Norfolk and him back to Weston.

20 October 2001

Now we’ll have to go and bring baby home. It’s more upsetting than I thought it would be. Where do I put her/him? It’s all very formal and I’m scared of how I’ll feel when we actually hold it in our hands.

A few months after the Alder Hey Children’s Hospital babies’ organ scandal, I happened to pick up the local paper, which had a front-page story on a woman whose miscarried foetus had been stored in a jar at the local hospital without her knowledge. Then I saw the date of the woman’s miscarriage was the same year as mine.

I called the hospital helpline and later received a letter informing me that they would investigate and get back to me. My mind went into overdrive – what would I do if they had our foetus? I’d have to bring it home. I couldn’t leave it there. So many thoughts, trying to work out how to face and deal with the loss all over again.

Then the phone rang. It was Pam, calling to tell me Dad’s Parkinson’s was so bad he was now in a wheelchair and his short-term memory had gone. He was being put in a respite home for six weeks. I felt for her. She’d been looking after him for so long and he’d not treated her well. I just thought him being in a respite home would give her a rest.

A week after my call to the hospital, I received a letter from them telling me that they had our foetus in the form of a wax block and slides. I got a call from the hospital chaplain, who told me of the formal procedure that I had to go through. It was his job to consult with us on what would happen next. He was such a kind man but I was angry that after all this time the hospital still dictated what we could do with our foetus. And it had to be done through the church. I’m an atheist. Having to find a way of getting my hands on what was a part of me and Chris was a miserable situation to be in. In the end the chaplain ‘released’ our foetus to us, and with great sensitivity placed it in a small wooden casket that he’d bought himself. We took baby home. Both of us felt that was the right thing to do.

*

The month before our meeting with the chaplain I’d fallen over in the garden and broken my ankle, so I had a plaster cast on for my fiftieth birthday. Celebrations lasted for five days, with various parties, fireworks and visits. It was a fantastic happiness boost after an often tough year. Chris bought me a beautiful ‘koru’ pendant, a symbol of new life and purity.

I had no clue what news was waiting in the wings to bring me back down to earth. Pam rang on the morning of 6 December to tell me Dad had died early that day. She broke down, and it upset me so much to hear her cry that I started to cry too. As is the way with grief, the tears are irrepressible, then logic kicks in. She spoke quite remotely, giving me an account of how Dad had died. It was a horrible death, suffice to say: he’d had a fatal heart attack following complications from acute peritonitis. Pam organised everything with some help from my dad’s partner, Marian. She wouldn’t hear of me going there – she had her children, Debbie and Danny, with her. I knew she was finding it hard enough to cope without me, the outcast daughter, turning up and causing upset on upset.

My uncle Mike called me in the evening to ask how I felt. I said I really didn’t know. ‘Likewise,’ he said. He was confused because he’d just lost his brother and didn’t feel sad. So many feelings came surging over me – anger, regret for what could have been had Dad not been such a stubborn, hurtful bastard, sadness for Pam and even more so for Mum.

Les rang and was predictably caustic about Dad after he’d tested how I felt. He really let rip, saying Dad was evil, never a father at all, and more of the same. But Pam surprised me by her revelations about her feelings towards Dad – how I was his and she was Mum’s … Dad had said so, and she knew she could never be the daughter he wanted. She’d felt in my shadow all the time, unloved. That upset me. Apparently Marian had been on at Dad to reconcile his differences with me, but he wouldn’t have any of it. He’d lose face. What a price to pay for pride.

I told Nick his grandfather had died. He was shocked and said he’d hoped and fully intended to see him at least once. I said maybe it was better he hadn’t, in case he got a rejection full in the face. That was odds-on.

It’s perverse that I had input into Dad’s funeral and would attend when I was excluded from Mum’s, who I loved so dearly. Pam talked through the choice of wreaths with me – one from the grandchildren, Debbie, Danny and Nick. It meant a lot to me that Nick was included. The funeral was a week later. Me, Chris and Nick drove to Hull. When Pam answered her door and our eyes met, we wept in each other’s arms. It was too much.

My auntie Irene came to the funeral. I was glad she was there. I discovered she’d gone to school with Dad and they’d got their first jobs together in a shoe factory. After fifty years I finally understood why Mum and Dad chose her as our latchkey carer, and why she was our loving auntie.

We got ready to set off to Dad and Marian’s house to be picked up by the funeral hearse. It was weird being in Dad’s house. There weren’t any pictures of him anywhere, just a photo of Marian and her kids. Marian was nervous to see me, but welcoming. I sat in the only empty armchair. The room went quiet. Everyone looked at me. I thought it was because I was the estranged black sheep returning for the funeral, but it wasn’t that at all. Completely by chance I’d sat in ‘Dad’s chair’. That seemed just right to me.