Early on, Chris & Cosey took a pop-tinged approach with seemingly accessible tracks like October Love Song and Exotika. Of late, echoes of ethereality from the TG, Cosey-penned track Hometime, can be heard on Carter Tutti’s newest LP Feral Vapours of the Silver Ether.
The stuff we do separate to TG is more structured because we like the challenge. We disguise our tracks in a very accessible way but when you listen, you think, “what's that doing there? What does she mean by that?” [The lyrics] deal with quite difficult subjects in a way that you can dance to.
Feral Vapours was about that intangible space between your internal feelings and the world around you. That space you inhabit where you feel vulnerable and sad or joyous, coping with situations that are overwhelming. We had a really tough couple of years before we recorded that—emotionally, not between us—things that had happened in the family. Feral Vapours came out of that so it was quite a strong album for us.
Though Mute currently manages the TG back catalogue, Cosey and Chris issue recordings on their own CTI label and Throbbing Gristle have resurrected Industrial Records for their current and future releases.
We do small runs of a few thousand and then downloads because the distribution and sale of CDs has declined so much it’s not cost effective if you're independent. We did just 3000 Third Mind Movements CDs, other than that you can get it as a download.
This is our life, this is what we do; it has to fund the next project so we have to be careful. Give it to another label, you get next to nothing – you don’t know how many have been pressed, how many are going anywhere. You don’t have control over the quality and they interfere with the cover and everything else. We make sure everything is done by us.
We were going to do downloads of all the gigs when we got back [from America] but so many bootlegs got out that we’re re-thinking it. It’s unavoidable but it doesn’t make it right. If you want music to be out there, someone has to pay for it to continue and I do wish people would suddenly have that revelation. We’re not asking people to pay a fortune because they are done at a budget price – we’ve always done that.
It is a horrible feeling that suddenly your work is worthless. You think “I spent a year making this and it’s worth nothing.” That's my heart and soul, not something I’ve just knocked together in the shed.
That’s the worst thing about TG, all the bootlegs. People say “oh you said make a tape and spread it around.” Yeah, we said that. We didn’t say press up 3,000 and make a profit and rubbish the name of TG by bad quality. That’s why we’ve restarted Industrial Records.
Cosey continues to exhibit internationally. In 2004 she performed Selflessness, a series of art actions which brought her to four significant locations, including the notorious suicide spot Beachy Head featured on the cover of Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats.
There were four different actions [to Selflessness], each with complex elements that dealt with significant events in my life. One took place at Disneyland, one at Beachy Head, one at the Queen’s Sandringham estate and the other at my mother’s grave. The whole work was about connecting with and having a dialogue with the ‘self’ in response to my concern over the increasing lack of ‘self’ and increase in superficiality.
I was really concerned the generations coming up were not in touch with themselves. They’re being more or less programmed into what to do with life; they don’t have the skills to deal with the terrible things that happen to them, or to interact with other human beings.
I think it’s beginning to turn now, I really do. The younger people I’ve met on the TG tour in America—you’d look there first for any kind of turning—are beginning to see real lights of hope.
Only a small percentage of society has to be awakened for it to have a butterfly effect. If you think back to the 50s and 60s there weren’t millions of hippies, it wasn’t like the Catholic Church or whatever but it had an immense effect. You don’t need to bang it out to 80% of the world’s population.
I can’t get through enough to people, just open yourself to experience, don’t just be channelled down a road by other people’s experiences or business ideas, because that’s usually what it boils down to, commerce.
This autumn Cosey will be included in the Tate Modern’s exhibition Poplife: Art in the Material World alongside Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. She is also planning a solo show of a more personal nature.
One piece I’m going to put in [Poplife] is a sex magazine from 1977 where they had me and another girl as painters and decorators. One of us had red paint, one had blue and it turns into an action of us painting each other's nude bodies. There’s text along the top that says “we should keep it and maybe even sell it to the Tate.” It seems apt to put that in there; the interaction between the material world and the art world is in that one piece.
I’m working on a new [solo show] as well called Szabo Sessions. I worked with [the photograher Szabo] at the time of those magazines and I got on really well with him, he was more on my wavelength. He got into glamour photography out of interest, like me wanting to be a glamour model.
He took some of the best photographs of me ever and when he died he left me about 300 colour transparencies. I’m doing a whole new art piece based on his vision of me. That’s nice to do actually, work with him again.
On 21 June Throbbing Gristle will play at London’s Heaven for the first time since their gig there in 1980, two days before Christmas.
We’re coming home. I think it will be weird to see what it looks like
now, there’s been a lot of traffic since then. 
Cosey
Throbbing Gristle, plus info on Industrial Records
Chris & Cosey/Carter Tutti
Recommended reading:
Wreckers of Civilization: The Story of Coum Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle, by Simon Freud.
Interview © 2009 Wheel Me Out. No part can be used for any purpose without prior consent. Please contact editorial@wheelmeout.com
