Art Sex Music Read online

  Art Sex Music

  Cosey Fanni Tutti

  Dedicated to Chris – my heartbeat

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations

  Author’s Note

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  Photographs

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  List of Illustrations

  Me and Dad, 1952

  Me, my sister Pam, Dad and Mum: a happy family day at the beach

  Me, aged fourteen to seventeen, with friends Jo, Shirley and Jean: from school to disco to dropping out

  Me and Gen, 1969

  Me with Spydeee on Hull pier waste ground, 1971

  Me on Prince Street with Les’s Bible stand, 1971

  COUM outside Ferens Art Gallery, 1971

  Creating a page in my diary, 25 February 1973, at Prince Street

  Reunited with Les, Beck Road, 1974

  Party at Martello Street, 1975

  The ICA ‘Prostitution’ exhibition poster, 1976

  TG launch gig at the ‘Prostitution’ show

  Out and about in LA with Kitten, Eric and Skot, 1976

  First official TG promo photo, 1976

  Diary entry, 26 March 1977

  One of the many photos taken by Szabo, July 1979

  Modelling/stripping at the Ship, Brighton, for the Evening Argus Pub of the Year Award, 1978

  Stripping at the Westminster Arms, London, 1979

  20 Jazz Funk Greats recording session, Martello Street, 1979

  Recording ‘A Journey Through the Body’ at RAI Studios, Rome

  Penultimate TG gig, Los Angeles, 1981

  With Skot at the TG motel, Los Angeles, 1981

  TG promo shoot with Jon Savage, Victoria Park, London, 1981

  Chris and Nick, 1982

  Me and Nick: family holiday in Spain, 1983

  CTI, 1984: Chris, me and John

  Chris & Cosey USA tour, 1989

  ‘Studio of Lust’ art action, Nuffield Gallery, Southampton, 1975

  ‘Ritual Awakening Part 2’ art action, Bar Europa Festival, Amsterdam, 1987

  Me and Monte, Los Angeles, 2002

  Me and Sleazy, Berlin, New Year’s Eve 2006

  TG regrouping session at Mute Records Studio, Harrow Road, London, 2009

  Chris, Nick and me, Rough Trade East, London, 2011

  The last ‘Carter Tutti plays Chris & Cosey’ gig at Heaven, London, 2016

  Author’s Note

  As I was researching for an exhibition, going through some of my old diaries to fact-check, I got totally distracted and drawn into my past and ended up reading for hours. I finally closed the diaries and put them back in the cupboard, all chronologically lined up, like my story in waiting. I knew at that moment what form my book would take. If I was going to enter the lion’s den of my past, it would be by using my diaries as my primary source. They offered an unblinkered view into my mindset of that time, and I could avoid the misty goggles of retrospection. The diaries evoked strong feelings of extreme happiness, my spirited passionate self, and the not-so-good feelings of dark sadness and pain. It was a revelatory process and they provided exactly what I needed – albeit a harsh and definitely not rose-tinted view of my past.

  1

  ‘Yours was a difficult birth,’ my mother told me. I was born with my left elbow bent and my fist firmly wedged against my chin like Rodin’s The Thinker. Then she added, with a smile, ‘You’ve been difficult ever since.’

  The name chosen was Christopher; it was expected I would be a boy – but I wasn’t. The name was then changed to Christine and a middle name, Carol, added, which became my given name … alongside nicknames Tuppence, Sputnik, Caz, and later names of Cosmosis, Scarlet and Cosey. So many names – but only one ‘me’.

  Just before the stroke of midnight on 4 November 1951, Hedon Road Maternity Hospital, sandwiched between a cemetery on one side and Hull Prison on the other. So began the first twenty-one years of my life living in the port of Kingston upon Hull – then the most violent city in England. It was buzzing with energy and an expectancy of a better life after the devastation wreaked upon it, and its people, by World War II. The fishing and manufacturing industries were thriving, employment was at a healthy level, and the slum clearance and building of new homes fostered a spirit of positive change.

  With such high hopes of prosperity while surrounded by post-war dereliction, a pervading sense of self-survival, and a confrontational and uncompromising attitude, it’s no wonder people were often at loggerheads for one reason or another. But the serious violence centred around drunkenness and conflict between the trawlermen, sailors, Teddy boys, mods, skinheads and Hells Angels. Everyone gave a wide berth to the trawlermen, who we called Fisher Kids. When they came back from a fishing trip laden with a fat wage packet, they’d drop off some cash to their families, don their pale-blue, double-vented ‘Fisher Kid’ suits and head straight for the pubs to get legless and fight. They were hard drinkers, like the dockers and sailors, but their distinctive suits made them stand out a mile. We’d avoid them, not just crossing the road but dodging out of sight completely. That was my environment and I loved it.

  *

  I was about three years old, sitting in my pushchair with Mum pushing me, my Grandma Rarity at her side and my sister, Pam, holding on to the pram. The sun was shining. I was in a cotton summer dress and overwhelmed by a profound feeling of happiness, warmth and love, smiling as I looked up at the beaming faces all gazing down at me. That first experience of loving oneness proved key to my knowing what love should feel like. That fundamental emotional benchmark, set at such an early age, meant that I also recognised when things didn’t feel right or measure up.

  Significantly, I was not in the company of any of my dad’s family at such a joyous moment. Grandma Rarity was the mother of my mum’s first husband, Donald, an RAF pilot. They had married in 1941, during World War II, but he went missing in action the very next year. Mum was heartbroken and Grandma devastated, as Donald was her only child and she’d already lost her husband after just seven years of marriage. Mum was like a daughter to her, and Grandma like a surrogate mother to Mum (who had lost her own mother in 1939). Me and my sister became the much-loved grandchildren Grandma never had, visiting her in Nuneaton for weeks at a time. My dad seemed resentful of the closeness we shared. He never came with us and kept Grandma at a distance.

  Pam had arrived first, in 1950, which is why expectations were high that I would be a boy. Consequently we were both a disappointment to my dad from the start. He’d decorated the children’s room with toy-soldier wallpaper in preparation for his son’s arrival. We often wondered why our bedroom had boys’ wallpaper, but just accepted it. He finally repapered our room when we were about ten years old, and the soldiers were replaced by red roses. I wasn’t impressed, and kind of missed (and preferred) the soldiers.

  So there I was, Christine, not Christopher, but Dad always called me by my second name, Carol, or my nicknames Tuppence or Sputnik. If I was in trouble, or to show his contempt for me, he’d call me Christine, almost spitting the word at me. All the various names he had for me – my sister was only ever called versions of Pamela – were like code names for his moods, and I soon realised this and responded according to the one he used.

  My mum always called me Carol, loved me no matter what I did (I was a bit of a hellion), smiled and laughed so much with us when Dad wasn’t around, and sang as she went about the house. Her warmth and loving tenderness were in direct contrast to Dad’s cold detachment. When he worked night shifts, I’d cuddle
up with Mum in their big bed and drift off to sleep. I’d sit at her feet by the fire, watching TV, and she’d stroke my hair for hours – unless my dad was around.

  Those affectionate moments between me and Mum were often spoiled by Dad walking into the room and fracturing the calm atmosphere with a brusque ‘Get up off the floor’ – as if speaking to a dog. I only recall one time that he held me in his arms, when I was about six years old. I’d had some teeth out and was still groggy from the gas so he had to carry me into the house. It wasn’t a gesture of affection, but I convinced myself that he loved me nevertheless because he held me safe in his arms, and because he bought me a bar of chocolate. Not totally appropriate when I had a mouth full of bleeding gums and couldn’t eat anything.

  Mum married Dad in 1948; she was his elder by six years. They lived with Mum’s father in Wadham Grove, Hull, until they were rehoused to Staveley Road, on the spanking-new Bilton Grange council estate, about five miles from the town centre. My parents’ jobs meant we were one of just a few professional families amongst the coal men, factory workers and dockers in our road. The Scott family lived next door to us. Mr Scott, a burly but gentle docker, would painlessly pull my loose baby teeth out for me and give me a penny. The Scott family weren’t there long and the Smith family, with their eight children, moved in. That brought a batch of new friends to play with – and Mrs Smith’s freshly baked bread. The smell from the oven was amazing and she’d invite me in and give me a hot bread roll dripping with melted butter. Our neighbours on the other side, the Goodriches, were different. They were more middle-class and had an immaculate house and garden and a shiny car. Owning a car was rare. I can only recall four cars ever being parked in our road. Elaine Goodrich became one of my best friends. We slept in adjacent bedrooms and would knock on the wall to signal to each other to lean out and talk through our open windows, exchanging comics swung across on lengths of string or wool.

  The Bilton Grange Estate was built as part of the post-war house-building programme. Being the third-biggest port in the UK, Hull was the second-most-bombed city, so a massive rebuild was essential to replace the homes damaged or destroyed. The new estate I lived on had a shopping parade, a library, a park and even a cinema, the Berkeley. That arrived just in time for me to go to children’s Saturday cinema and watch classics such as Flash Gordon, The Lone Ranger and The Three Stooges and to take part in yo-yo competitions. But me and my best friend, Les Maull, mainly got up to no good as soon as the lights went out. We’d throw our lolly sticks and rolled-up sweet wrappers at the screen, then crawl along the wooden floor sticky with melted ice cream, ice lollies and abandoned grungy sweets, making our way between the rows of seats, shouting and laughing, to create a game of Chase with the ushers until we burst out of the fire exit or got thrown out.

  Even with a purpose-built park, me and my friends preferred to play where our parents told us not to, on a place called ‘the Dump’. I’d often go there, find an isolated spot at the back of the hills and hide in the long grass and bushes and sit alone daydreaming. I loved the smells and the tranquillity. I owned that place; time and thoughts could venture anywhere without interruption or judgement. I was (and still am) prone to wandering off into my own thoughts. My father would yell, ‘Wake up, Dolly Daydream!’ I hated that abrupt awakening. But there, on the Dump, nestled safely in nature, I was happy. I could let my imagination roam free and it was all the more potent because it was a place I shouldn’t be. My chosen idyll for tranquil moments, where I felt safe and at peace, was in fact a blanket of weeds and wild flowers that camouflaged the remnants of lost lives and destroyed hopes and dreams. I didn’t know it was an old rubbish dump full of debris from the war, heaps of gravestones, bricks and glass from bombed buildings. To us, the Dump was just a place that had great hills to slide down on sheets of cardboard gathered from the back of the shops en route. The hills we loved so much had been formed from the mass of post-war rubble being cleared in the centre to create a running track and cinder cycle track – everything scooped to the edges like a huge ring donut and covered in mud and grass. We didn’t use the running tracks; we preferred to climb the mounds of rubble, playing Hide and Seek or Cowboys and Indians with pretend horses galloping up and down the undulating humps and bumps of buried detritus. I always insisted on being an Indian squaw because, from what I saw in films, they were feisty fighters who rode their horses like men did, and I wanted to be in the thick of the action.

  It was to the Dump that we all went when I ‘found’ a five-pound note in the house. My dad used to lose change from his pockets down the side of our old sofa and chairs, and I’d go round tapping the underneath to see if I could hear any money rattling. My little hands could get right down under the lining. When I found the five-pound note tucked away, I was beyond excited. I had a momentary waver of ‘Should I …?’, then I took it to Les and his sisters and we all made a unanimous and very wise decision to spend it all on cakes and sweets. We sat and ate our hoard, hidden from view in the long grass of the Dump.

  The sheer destruction caused by the bombing of Hull meant that bombed-out buildings were everywhere me and my friends wandered as children. Those bomb sites, which held such fascination for me, were our playgrounds and we’d fantasise about the people who had once lived there. Toys, pianos, kitchens left almost intact, the tattered wallpaper on one remaining wall of a house complete with fireplace, half a staircase, or a small piece of bedroom floor hanging precariously … I don’t know how any of us escaped injury clambering up rickety steps and across broken floorboards.

  There was a lot of fighting on our estate, and in his own way Dad may have wanted to toughen me up. He succeeded because, by the age of ten, I was proud that I could defend myself against anyone in my class, boy or girl, and more on the estate. You had to be able to stand your ground or you’d get hurt. As word got around, people kept their distance and I didn’t often get any bother. Disagreements were dealt with there and then and you moved on, often remaining friends. When an older girl beat me, my dad sent me round to her house armed with a pair of garden shears. She was twice my age and size. Crazy. Nevertheless, I had no option but to go round under orders from Dad. He stood at the end of our path and watched to make sure I did as I was told. I knocked on the door, surprise-punched her when she answered, and screamed at her that if she ever touched me again I’d be back and have her with the garden shears. That’s Hull for you.

  Being a post-war baby also meant that my formative years involved a tacit acceptance (and dread) of death from incurable illnesses. The NHS had only just come into being, in 1948. Scarlet fever, measles, German measles, mumps and whooping cough were all commonplace and had their fatalities. Both me and my sister succumbed to all of them. But Pam tended to be more sickly than me and also contracted glandular fever and pneumonia. I was protective towards her because she seemed so vulnerable, shy, and not as full-on as me, so I’d often fight for her even though she was fifteen months older. Tonsillitis was so common that tonsillectomy was recommended for those who had repeat attacks. We were keen to undergo it after finding out that part of the recovery was eating jelly and ice cream. We weren’t so eager after we heard a few children had died during the surgery.

  But it was the word ‘cancer’ that everyone feared the most. A girl at my infant school died of cancer. She was called Elizabeth and played Mary in the nativity play one Christmas, then never came back to school. We all knew she was dying – we were told in assembly – and we’d walk past her house every day, to and from school, feeling sad for her but being too young to fully understand what dying really meant. Mainly because we were told in assembly that she’d go to ‘heaven’ and would be happy.

  I was about ten years old when my mother got breast cancer. She and the family assumed that, like her mother, she would probably die from it, the general consensus being that cancer killed you slowly and painfully. So when I heard the news, Grandma and Elizabeth immediately came to mind, and dark thoughts that I was going to
lose my mother. Mum had what they’d now call a lumpectomy and I remember her lying in bed crying because she thought the lump had come back, and Dad trying to console and reassure her that everything would be all right. Thankfully she made a full recovery.

  My paternal grandfather was not so blessed. He died of bone cancer just a few years later. I remember being taken to see him in hospital, not realising that my ‘outing’ was a last goodbye. It was a bright sunny day, I was all dressed up and, as instructed, standing outside awaiting permission to enter. The hospital was Victorian, old red brick, with tall windows, austere. The cancer ward Granddad was in smelled of what I imagined decaying bodies must smell like. It made me nauseous. Then I saw my granddad, who was now yellow, lying in what looked like a huge bed of white linen, all tucked in nice and tidy. But the bed wasn’t huge: it was him who was so small. He’d wasted away to a skeleton of his former self. He was such a kind-hearted, quiet man, and as I looked at him and we exchanged smiles, I was struggling to make sense of how something invisible could have such dreadful effects. It was around this time that my dad gave up smoking. Everyone we knew who had cancer was a smoker. People knew smoking was bad for you. Cigarettes were called ‘coffin nails’, and when referring to smokers’ cough people would often light-heartedly say, ‘It’s not the coughing that buries you: it’s the coffin they carry you off in.’

  My first day at Bilton Grange Infant School is still vivid in my memory. The huge hall smelled of polish and disinfectant and was full of silent children all sat cross-legged on the wooden floor, with brown-card name tags hung round our necks on bits of string. I wasn’t nervous about going to school because Pam was already there and me and Les started school together. We had curious childhood habits. We’d eat mud, coal, flowers and clover leaves, and now we proceeded to eat the wax crayons we were given at school. The purple crayons seemed the most tasty and we’d have to ask for replacements suspiciously often. It was just a short walk to school from our house and I’d meet friends along the way, droves of us chattering away as we crossed the road under the supervision of the crossing warden, our happy ‘lollipop lady’, Mrs Stephenson.