Art Sex Music Page 14

  In the meantime there were other priorities.

  10 July 1973

  Cosey hit the modelling scene with a bit of a thud yesterday. 5 bloody hours. Am I popular or am I being used? Geni, my lover, he misses me awfully and is getting very depressed. I only think of coming home to him.

  I hardly had time to catch my breath from the big move. I started my first nude modelling job within two days. Nanny had arranged it. She’d worked there before and said it would be a good introduction for me – that the modelling work would only get better from there on. In hindsight she was wrong: there would be worse to come.

  For this job I was to be the ‘glamour’ model for hourly hire to budding amateur photographers who came into the shop, Premier Cameras in Whitechapel Road. It was run by a middle-aged, smartly dressed man called Monty, who was polite enough towards me but worked me hard. It was a weird set-up. I had to sit behind the shop counter and be on show as he offered my nude modelling services to his customers. If they took him up on the deal I’d be sent upstairs to the small dingy studio above the shop. As soon as the first photographer stepped into the room I understood what Nanny had meant in one respect: it was a good introduction as far as managing uncomfortable situations was concerned.

  It was a seedy atmosphere and resembled the studio in the film Peeping Tom, all very 1950s with a gold-painted, wrought-iron, pink-velvet-covered bar chair and a grubby, well-used sheepskin rug for posing on. As requested, I’d taken some sexy lingerie with me to change into and there were awkward moments when the men obviously wanted me to strip off but couldn’t bring themselves to ask. After a few days I amused myself by toying with their discomfort, especially if they were just there to ogle. It annoyed me that they thought I was too dumb to notice they had no film in their cameras. I could easily tell, simply because they failed to wind on after each shot or change their film. As I moved from one pose to another they’d be transfixed, staring at my boobs, pussy and bum with wide-eyed lechy looks and a sweaty brow, clearing their throats and making shifty, furtive little body twitches. I worked there a week and there wasn’t much downtime other than tea and lunch breaks.

  Monty invited me back any time I wanted. As if. My spell at Monty’s didn’t provide any documentation for my project; I approached it as research and training. It was a good start for learning how to be comfortable with being naked in front of strangers, learning to pose for the camera – what looked good and what looked bad. It’s not easy being scrutinised and told you look odd or not quite right.

  23 July 1973

  I did a phoney lesbian polaroid session tonight. Enjoyed meeting Maggie, don’t like Christine or the set-up, very suspicious. NEVER again.

  From Monty’s to a dodgy Polaroid job a week later that turned out to be yet more ‘research’.

  I needed real magazine work so I could secure the images I wanted for my art. I looked up where the offices of Fiesta magazine were and went to enquire about doing a shoot for them. No luck. I think taking Gen with me was the wrong strategy.

  The journey turned out to be worth it, though. On my way back to the Tube a guy came running up to me in the street as I waited for Gen near Oxford Circus and asked if I wanted to work in his fashion showroom, modelling for his buyers. I didn’t take him seriously at first. He turned out to be genuine and I started at GM Fashions, Great Portland Street, two days later. Within just two weeks he’d brought a new girl into the office to model for him, all big hair and lashings of lip gloss. He could be a nasty bastard, and when I refused to tell what he called ‘a nuisance buyer’ to bugger off when she rang for the umpteenth time, he sacked me. I was glad to be out of there, even though the money had been useful.

  Gen had signed on the dole again, so at least the studio rent was secured, and quite by chance I managed to get some casual work through a friend who was working for a small animation company called Crunchy Frog. It wasn’t far from the studio, just down Kingsland Road. I had no idea whether I had the necessary skills to do the kind of work involved but tried my luck and was taken on, trained up and set to work painting animation cells. It was intricate work, getting the paint at the right consistency to flow seamlessly and accurately, but I loved it and got a real kick from seeing my handiwork on the TV ad for Fine Fare supermarket. I was also working whatever modelling jobs came my way and had been lucky in managing to fit them around work and our increasing number of COUM bookings, sometimes doing a photo session and then rushing back home to load up and travel to a COUM gig later the same day. Art is Life was tough going.

  *

  Gen had had an at times antagonistic and interesting exchange of letters with Ken Friedman, and COUM were invited by David Mayor to participate in a Fluxus event. David (with the support of the founders of Fluxus, George Maciunas and Ken Friedman) coordinated ‘Fluxshoe’, an Arts Council-funded UK touring exhibition that ran from October 1972 to October 1973. When we met him, he lived on a farm in Devon with the Mexican artist Felipe Ehrenberg in a kind of art colony set-up, working on the Fluxus exhibition together and starting Beau Geste Press. The ‘Fluxshoe’ project brought artists together not only in inspiring and influencing one another but in generating unexpected collaborations, like the COUM/Paul Woodrow (W.O.R.K.S.) piece ‘Marcel Duchamp’s Next Work’. Being part of ‘Fluxshoe’, I met old-guard Fluxus artist and Yoko Ono collaborator Takako Saito, who became David’s partner at that time, and through David’s philanthropic spirit I was introduced to many of the other artists and their work, including Helen Chadwick, Marc Chaimowicz, Henri Chopin and Carolee Schneemann.

  The second phase of COUM at ‘Fluxshoe’ was me and Gen as wayward funsters ‘The Terribull Tasteless Twins’, roaming around making small random interventions throughout the town centre dressed identically in black hot pants, pink, blue and silver cardigans and striped knee-high socks, with our hair in three pigtails.

  The ‘Fluxshoe’ exhibition was at Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, where we also took part in creating impromptu artworks and adding them to the exhibition. Gen drilled 4,000 holes in the Blackburn phone directory and mailed it to John Lennon, as a witty Fluxus reference to the lyrics of the Beatles song ‘A Day in the Life’. We mailed out a small edition of postcards we’d painted black, as a comment on the darkness and coal-mining history of Blackburn. David and Takako were two of the most self-possessed, kind people I’d met and we spent five days living with them in a council flat they’d leased for the two-week stint of ‘Fluxshoe’. After long days in the gallery or on the streets of Blackburn, our evenings were often spent on prolonged collage sessions, discussing ideas and talking into the small hours while playing games like Yahtzee and Mousie Mousie. We later used the slogan from one of the games, ‘A riot of laughter and excitement’, for a TG T-shirt.

  ‘Fluxshoe’ moved on to Hastings and so did we, this time performing at the Victor Musgrave Gallery with Foxtrot and our artist friends Malcolm and Peter Davey. The streets and the beach there were where the ‘Orange and Blue’-themed work of transformation was implemented for the first time – me dressed all in blue and Gen in orange setting off orange smoke bombs and putting orange and blue stickers on the pebbles: landscape ‘painting’ the beach.

  8 September 1973

  Yesterday I rang ‘Pussycat’ mag. Turned out to be a rubber fetish mag. R-U-B-B-E-R! Went along to Ragdoll and Eugene for test shots.

  I continued to solicit modelling work, and went to see Leslie B., who ran the rubber fetish magazine Pussycat. I had to go to his flat for an interview to see if I fitted his subscribers’ profile. They preferred something they could relate to – more readers’ wives style than straight glamour.

  He’d insisted I went along in the evening, which I really didn’t like. After about half an hour of awkward attempts at relaxing conversation, he got me to try on some outfits, having me talc my body up so I could slide more easily into the tight rubber pants. He was very polite and hospitable but I felt uneasy being alone with him in his flat, which he picked
up on, suggesting I come back another time when I felt more confident with him.

  Getting into strange situations like that made it all the more important that I join a model agency, to give me at least a chance of filtering out any possible weirdos. Nanny suggested her agency, Ragdolls. They interviewed me and set up a test-shot session with a photographer, to get some decent photos to start a portfolio. With a model portfolio and auditions, it was getting serious, like the real thing, though I still got messed around a lot. Photographers would offer to do test shots for me, then I’d realise they were using me to do free photos they could sell to a magazine. I didn’t complain because I got some prints for my portfolio and I’d more often than not get used by them for paid work later. I was role-playing, being a ‘model’, to secure the work. My personal style of dress was so far from what was expected, and each time I had to transform myself into a presentable and bookable glamour girl – doing my hair and make-up and dressing the part. I didn’t tell many of my friends about my nude work project, nor the modelling contacts about my art. I wanted to be treated like the other girls so I could get as close as possible to a genuine experience of what it was like to be a glamour and porn model.

  10 September 1973

  I was so busy today. I was all set to just see ‘Pussycat’ today. Then I ring Bill. He offers me a big job this Thursday. I couldn’t refuse. I bombed over for 1 o’clock. Then had to go see the editor of ‘Alpha’. Then rush home just to rush out again to East Putney to ‘Pussycat’.

  27 September 1973

  Well I finally did my job for Bill. Silly bastard. He tried to get off with me four bloody times. He won’t take no for an answer that bloke.

  I worked for Bill quite a lot. He was shorter than me and quite skinny so I could fend him off when he started with his wandering hands and crawling on top of me. That particular day he’d used the excuse of wanting a sympathy cuddle because he had a really painful tooth abscess. Oh yeah? I ended up punching him in the jaw. Surprise surprise, there was no excruciating scream as you’d expect from an abscessed tooth.

  I had no patience for opportunist groping; I was busy working towards my solo piece, ‘Blue Mover’, for the Reading University Art Exchange. I had posters put up around the university, inviting people to participate by coming along dressed only in blue. The title was obviously a pun on blue movies and my colour – me being the ‘blue’ mover working my way into those inner porn circles. But the physical and visual objective of the work was about creating a space that moved with flowing shades of blue driven by the interaction of the blue-clothed people. I wanted to give life to (my) colour. Had I had access to the technology of today, I could have realised my idea more fully – I was thinking along the lines of form that was experienced and viewed from within and outside but could also be moved through, akin to a virtual reality. That was even more the case later, with the development of the ‘Orange and Blue’ piece, which I envisaged ideally as a room divided equally into orange and blue, with me as blue (positive/female) and Gen as orange (negative/male), slowly shifting and transforming as orange and blue clothes, objects, floor, walls and ceiling were transferred from one colour section to the other – from positive to negative, female to male, male to female. Somewhere in that shifting exchange process lay the perfect balance.

  On a cold October night I found myself naked in a small room above Hangar Lane Tube station. I was doing a half-hour job for the Central Line Photographic Group. It was a stressless ‘Cos(e)y affair’, as London Transport News reported in their paper a few days later. Unlike Monty’s place, the photographers were very polite and serious about their work. When I first arrived, I stood outside contemplating whether to go in or turn around and go home. Everyone else was going about their business and here was I about to do something I might regret. I can’t believe I put myself into such risky and unpredictable set-ups. As it happened, everything was above board, and unlike at Premier Cameras I actually ended up getting published.

  Nothing had come of the Alpha test shots I’d done or of ones me and Nanny had done for Men Only. So much was going on with COUM that I was happy to plod on, hoping things would work out as I’d wanted. Also it was coming up to my birthday and the first of my Martello Street parties. Having sent invites out to friends in Hull and London, I was excited that everyone was coming along. It turned out to be a wonderful, very drunken, fun night full of unexpected sexual liaisons – and a blueprint for my future birthday parties in the bowels of the old trouser factory. Such happy, carefree times helped offset the prevailing concerns of everyday life.

  26 November 1973

  I reckon the end of the world is nigh. Also if I reckon that, what the fuck do I bother with a diary for? Or entering Miss Office World?

  The move to London was a few months after the four IRA car bombs in London; two were defused but two exploded, one at the Old Bailey and one near Scotland Yard. The trial on 14 November dominated the news. Up until this point there’d been few bombs in mainland Britain so I’d felt relatively distant from the Troubles. It was a harsh awakening, especially after the bombs at King’s Cross and Euston stations. I’d been walking up to King’s Cross station on my way home when the blast there happened. It was chaos, with everyone screaming in panic and running in all directions. I spotted a bus that was starting to pull away and jumped straight on it. I didn’t care where it was going.

  The early 1970s was a time of social, political and economic turmoil, as well as a very active period for violent militant groups like the IRA, the Angry Brigade and the Baader-Meinhof group. There were bomb warnings, some true, some hoaxes, which made everyone nervous about travelling around London.

  Still, we forged on with our COUM show for the week before Christmas – three performances at the Oval House Theatre as part of Ian Hinchcliffe’s Matchbox Purveyors’ ‘Hot Chips for Christmas’ programme. Ian was a performance artist we’d met through his mentor, Jeff Nuttall. Ian’s group consisted of either just himself or varying numbers of artists, poets and musicians, depending on how he felt at the time. He was incredibly talented but could be wild, dangerous and uncompromising. Our kind of person, really. The first two COUM shows were in the afternoon, which meant I couldn’t be there – I was stuck at work (as a secretary at a local dress factory). Joseph L. R. Rose from the Reading crowd and John Lacey (Bruce’s son, aka John Gunni Busck) had been working with us for quite a while and did the matinee shows with Gen.

  The big performance was on the Friday night. I’d been practising playing the tom-tom and snare drums in preparation for our musical ‘deCOUMposition’ and felt pretty good about my first public drum performance. Biggles turned up and our SPACE artist friend Ted brought along and played his Farfisa organ. It was a very Christmas-party atmosphere with so many friends coming along. As was becoming the norm, we went to Gen’s parents’ for Christmas, taking an arduous coach journey all the way to Shrewsbury and returning in time for New Year’s Eve.

  I loved working with John Lacey. He was full of ideas and made every aspect of the creative process fun and enjoyable. Any hitches that cropped up were never seen as a problem. He’d just smile and say, ‘We can make it happen’, and set about putting things right. John was also my entry into using electronics. Before him, COUM music had been mainly acoustic but John had interests and skills that helped steer COUM in a new direction. He and his friend Chris Cobb (who worked for the BBC) were building quadrophonic speakers and amps, which we brought to use in the studio and for COUM events. John lived in a semi-detached four-bedroomed house in Durnsford Road, North London, with his mother, Pat, his brother and four sisters. Each of the six siblings had their partners, friends and musicians coming and going and staying over, which made the house heave with chaotic creative energies.

  On one of my many visits to Durnsford Road, I met John’s friend Chris Carter, who was staying in John’s room until he found his own place. Chris had played bass guitar in a band called the Dragsters with his friend Chris Panniotou, unt
il they both started doing light shows for bands like Yes and Hawkwind and for the BBC. When Chris met John, he refocused on music, shifting from bass guitar to building his own synthesisers, and all three of them and other friends joined forces in various collaborative configurations to contribute to each other’s projects. It was hard to find a place to sit in John and Chris’s room; it was so full of equipment. There were near-complete and finished synthesisers, parts of gear awaiting their final purpose, boxes of electronic components, costumes, papier-mâché masks and props from John’s theatre works, Chris’s projectors and slides, reel-to-reel tape recorders and John’s Super 8mm film equipment.

  Considering how close John was to Chris, how often they worked together at Bruce’s Martello Street workshop at the same time as John was working with me and Gen in our studio, I don’t know how we’d not managed to run into Chris sooner. He had been just a figure fleeting across the landing or passing us on the stairs of the Lacey house until our first face-to-face meeting, when we visited John to find Chris and his girlfriend, Simone, talking to John about their forthcoming wedding. I was quite surprised that such unconventional people were contemplating marriage, but even more surprised when Simone invited me and Gen to their wedding, having only just met us. I declined the invitation: ‘I don’t go to weddings – I don’t agree with marriage,’ I said rather dismissively. Chris was very quiet – in fact, I don’t remember him saying anything. We didn’t fully connect with him again until some time later.