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  My background meant I was more savvy at handling Hull hard cases than the others, who’d mainly had a sheltered middle-class upbringing. I was immediately confronted by one of the bikers’ girlfriends, a tough blonde girl they all called Glob. She was smaller than me and was surprised at my combative response to her threats. I blanked her and entered into a dialogue with a couple of the guys. Some of them came from Longhill Estate, near my family home. That commonality was our saving grace. We ended up having a half-civil conversation with them, vocally sparring until we arrived at an amicable kind of ‘understanding’, and they eventually left. The next day I went into the Gondola coffee bar, where they hung out. A few of them were there, including Glob. I walked over and handed her her purse, which she’d dropped at the Funhouse. She looked confused that it hadn’t been emptied.

  Back at the Funhouse, the other commune members had returned. Bronwyn was particularly pissed off as the bikers had sprayed BRONWYN PULLS A TRAIN in huge letters across the full length of the wall of her room. Being a term used by the Angels for women who had sex with one man after another to gain status, it wasn’t the nicest thing to come home to, nor the highest compliment.

  Contrary to what others may have said, the Hells Angels never had three-day parties at the Funhouse, they just popped round now and again. But their visits did upset our fellow housemates and some of the locals. The people at the corner cafe were disgusted at our ‘friends’ the Hells Angels wearing Nazi helmets and swastika armbands. A few days after the Angels’ rampage we went in the cafe for our occasional treat of egg and chips. As we opened the door, all eyes turned to us and we were confronted by the owner.

  ‘Didn’t you know the guy over the road was in a prisoner-of-war camp and it traumatised him to see Nazi helmets?’

  ‘No, sorry.’ I don’t know why I was apologising.

  ‘I’ve heard about you hippies – you have orgies on the stairs, don’t you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. But he didn’t believe me.

  After the Hells Angels episode the atmosphere towards the top-floor dwellers changed. That, and the fact that we didn’t know how long the Funhouse lease would last, made me and Gen set about the task of looking for a place of our own.

  We searched all over the Old Town for possible buildings to rent. The old abandoned bonded warehouses were spacious and lent themselves to our needs. The offices of one had oak-lined walls and were strewn with old invoices, rubber stamps and relics of a once-thriving business. I imagined how I’d convert it into a living space, keeping the beautiful features and feeding off the energies of past activities that had taken place there. But we couldn’t find anywhere that was up for rent – or the estate agents took one look at us and said, ‘It’s not available.’

  Then we had a stroke of luck on one of our usual trips to the stalls of our friend Lucy and her son, Sydney, in the local Holy Trinity marketplace. She had the most extraordinary assortment of clothes and antiques and would save me things she thought I should have. We bought silver vesta matchboxes (for Gen’s mum), jewellery, clothes, antique daggers (Gen had a collection) and, my favourite, a press-gang cosh used to forcibly enlist men on to ships. It was a beautiful object made from a single piece of rope that had been expertly crafted into a long 8×2-inch cylindrical shape, which narrowed to form a handle that was neatly finished off with a large, complicated knot to aid gripping. The whole cosh had been dipped in tar to make it hard and effective at knocking out the poor victims. As we were talking to Lucy a short, ragged-looking old man came over to chat to her and she introduced us. His name was Jim and he owned the old stable down Prince Street, which he rented as storage space to the market traders. He also owned a row of about four houses opposite the stable, of which two adjoining ones lay unused. Jim looked more like a tramp than a man of property. He wore a flat cap and a grimy coat. His face was dry as parchment, always with a few days’ grey stubble whiskers, and his false teeth moved up and down as he talked. Lucy told us that, back in the day when he had his own teeth, he used them to make money in the market square, biting off (docking) puppies’ tails. I don’t know what his life story was but he lived alone with his faithful dog, which he always called ‘Jack – you bastard’. He’d vacillate from laughing and whistling to cursing and shouting at all and sundry. He wasn’t an easy man to get along with but he took to me more than he did to Gen, so I spent a few weeks talking with him to persuade him to rent to us.

  And so 8–9 Prince Street, off Dagger Lane (now a Grade II-listed Georgian building), became the home of COUM and placed me in the Holy Trinity parish, where my maternal grandmother had spent her childhood. Prince Street is a small cobbled road that gently curves from Dagger Lane, through an archway that leads on to King Street, where stands the magnificent and imposing late-thirteenth-century Holy Trinity Church.

  Our buildings sat more or less midway in a row of Georgian houses and had been partly knocked into one. They were last occupied by the sauce and pickle manufacturer Priestman, Hartley & Co. Ltd., and prior to that had seen other uses, including as a toffee-apple factory. There were seventeen rooms in total, none of which had been touched in years. The top floor was unusable and unsound because of roosting pigeons and damp from a leaking roof. The ground-floor front room was taken over by Jim’s junk, so we cordoned it off and later designated it as ‘the cat room’. Debris and abandoned possessions of previous tenants were scattered about.

  Entering the houses for the first time fed my predilection for derelict buildings and I explored every nook and cranny. Halfway up one flight of the very rickety stairs was a sliding door. I unlatched it and, though it was stiff and creaky, I managed to open it enough to see inside and squeeze through the gap. I discovered a small windowless room with bare plaster walls. As I looked around I found, to my joy and fascination, the scribbled names of children on one of the walls and a very dusty, empty art deco chocolate box on the floor. What use the room had been put to was anyone’s guess but I imagined that it might have been a nursery in the days before the house was repurposed from domestic to business use. We found so many wonderful things: a large Victorian glass spoon and fork, old glass bottles used in the making of Prince sauce, along with a stack of labels and old Priestman & Hartley stationery, which we co-opted as COUM notepaper and for collage material.

  Our most useful discovery was a stash of stoneware – Pooh Bear-style honeypots that lined the floor of what had been the toffee-apple room, with more in some of the upstairs rooms. Our friend Alan Worsley ran a second-hand shop and we bartered the honeypots for an electric cooker and other essentials. Worsley was an amazing person. He’d been Bronwyn’s partner but they split up and he settled down with a lovely happy girl called Kate. I remember visiting their basement flat, which was ram-packed with curios and antiques, with dividing walls made from miscellaneous empty bottles. He was researching lucid dreaming, with Kate as his subject. I always thought that was just part of his eccentric personality, but last I heard he is a lucid-dream expert and continuing his experiments. He also made penis candles and gave me a magnificent large blood-red one, which still sits resplendent in my office.

  Only a handful of the seventeen rooms in the two houses were fit for use – one on the ground floor and three of the first-floor rooms, which were taken by me and Gen, then later by COUM members Spydeee (Ian Evetts) and briefly Haydn Robb, my friend Jeremy and Hells Angels Gypsy and Rick. We used the toffee-apple room as the ‘drum room’ and storeroom for COUM materials. It was in a dilapidated extension at the back of the house and came with a large hole in the middle of the floor, which we never repaired. We seemed to navigate around it without ever falling through, and it was useful for talking to anyone in the room below, which we made into a kitchen of sorts, primarily because it was the only source of water – a cold-water tap above an ancient stone sink. In the farthest corner of the kitchen was the only (disgusting) toilet – at least in this house it wasn’t four flights down.

  With no heating other than coa
l fires in the upper rooms, the house was so cold in winter that the kitchen floor would get covered in glistening frost and the water pipes and toilet cistern would freeze up completely. We didn’t have a bathroom but visited friends or the impressive Victorian red-brick Beverley Road Baths for a hot bath. The cubicles there lined either side of a high-walled, glossy-tiled and very long, cold, stone-floored corridor. It was like a trip back in time to when many houses didn’t have running hot water. The cubicles were basic, with white, cream and olive-green tiled walls, a stone floor, a big bath with a ledge for soap and cast-iron wall pegs for hanging up your clothes. The attendant was in charge of the hot water, which she controlled fastidiously from a tap on the corridor side of the cubicle wall. If you wanted a top-up you pushed a call button above the bath. She also had a key to open the door – either for safety or to oust you if you overstayed your allotted time. Although it was a no-frills service, the bath swung the deal. It was so deep and long you could lie at full stretch and submerge yourself completely.

  Me and Gen transported our belongings from the Funhouse to Prince Street in an old pram we’d bought, and worked hard cleaning and decorating the more decent rooms to make them habitable, acquiring free or heavily discounted cans of paint. The walls and ceilings were in a very poor state and we covered them and any crumbling plaster with sheets of reject polythene we got free from local factories. One particular carrier-bag factory provided us with a plentiful supply of rolls of polythene of varying colours and designs, which we also used later in COUM performances. Our trusty and invaluable staple gun made decorating pretty quick, and the transformation from dirty, dusty walls to something more clean and bright didn’t take too long. The house wasn’t just a living space; it was also a representation of COUM, with various art objects nailed to the walls and hung from the ceiling of the hallway and beyond, and Gen’s inscription of ‘Poetry is a dead letter’ painted on the risers of each step as you made your way upstairs.

  My and Gen’s room was at the front of the house and had a bay window and a beautiful large white marble fireplace. We discovered Georgian wall panel features that had been covered over with plaster, which we carefully restored; we painted the room white and the panels pale blue with gold edging. A while later we turned our attention to the outside of the building, painting a rainbow over the front door and pasting pertinent COUM signages and posters on the walls. It was a spooky place and at times I had the feeling we weren’t the only residents. If I was alone at night I never went downstairs and I tried my best to ignore any banging and creaking noises. I felt a presence and a chill up my spine whenever I got to the bottom step before entering the kitchen. I’d run, in fear that something would reach out and grab me.

  *

  Spydeee had joined me and Gen in Prince Street around mid-1970. He was handsome and slim, with chin-length dark curly locks and a cheeky glint in his eyes whenever he smiled. We’d all got on well from the beginning. I showed him the ropes for signing on, and we all split living costs, ate together, and also shared some very pleasurable intimate moments. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I had more in common with Spydeee than I realised. Like myself, he’d been given an ultimatum by his father – conform or get out – unlike Gen, whose parents who were more indulgent than ours. We rejected limitations. To us, the possibilities were endless, and in keeping with that mindset Spydeee had responded to his father’s ultimatum by leaving the family home and coming to live with us in Hull. He’d visited Gen there in the summer of 1969 as part of his hitch-hiking tour around England, and the Ho Ho Funhouse sounded like a suitable place for him to join Gen to continue their creative collaborations. By the time he got to Hull we’d left the Funhouse, but it hadn’t taken him long to find us.

  I wasn’t told much about Spydeee before his arrival, other than that he was a very close school friend of Gen’s from his days at Solihull School, and that they’d worked together on different creative projects. I later learned more from Spydeee, some of which contradicted the impressions Gen had given me. According to Spydeee, Gen was a fee-paying pupil, while Spydeee had won a scholarship, and it was Spydeee who was the main active misfit, getting into trouble and eventually getting expelled for editing and distributing the alternative school magazine Conscience, which he and a group of friends put together. He had even earned the disapproval of Gen’s mother, Mimi, who blamed him for leading Gen astray.

  Inspired by their interest in Eliphas Levi and Aleister Crowley, they made their ‘mark’ by chalking pentagrams and Latin graffiti on the park bandstand – reported in the local paper as BLACK MASS IN SOLIHULL PARK. Then their curiosity moved on to the Beat writers. Spydeee recently described to me his and Gen’s introduction to William Burroughs: ‘He wasn’t introduced to the work of Burroughs by a teacher, in fact there was a key book that introduced us. It was called THE NEW WRITING IN THE USA by Donald Allen & Robert Creeley, published by Penguin Books Ltd, 1967 … I found it while browsing and told him.’

  Music was a focal point for Gen – that’s how I’d met him – and he, Spydeee and their friends had experimented with music influenced not only by the more obvious underground bands like the Velvet Underground, the Fugs and Frank Zappa but also by some of Spydeee’s unconventional record collection, in particular AMM’s inspirational and obscure AMMMusic album from 1967, which Spydeee excitedly insisted on playing to Gen. The philosophical approach to music of Cornelius Cardew, Keith Rowe, Lawrence Sheaff, Lou Gare and Eddie Prévost proved to be very influential and reads rather like an early version of what was to become COUM’s approach to music: anti-harmony, no prerequisite for anyone to be able to play a given instrument, and the sound the ‘group’ generated was also regarded as a contributory member of the group itself. Gen and Spydeee recorded one album together, Early Worm, the precursor to later COUM works. All three of us often sang the jolly ditty from the track ‘The Balloon Burst’, which Spydeee told me was based on him thinking he’d got his girlfriend pregnant when the condom burst. We all shared similar interests in music and were familiar with surrealism and Dada, which became significant influences on us all (Gen’s penchant being for Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dalí). We’d also all read International Times and OZ magazine, with Spydeee having a letter printed in OZ ’ s 1970 ‘Schoolkids’ edition. All considered, it was a fortuitous convergence of three appropriately primed, like-minded people eager for adventurous experiences in our quest to find our places in the world.

  *

  It seemed par for the course that, as part of an alternative lifestyle, many people adopted different names to replace the boring ones given to us by our parents. We wanted names that were more reflective of who we were, as well as being a mark of rejecting social norms. The practice of renaming people is generally seen as an affectionate, personal way of affirming the bonds between each other – though some may see it, in certain cult-like circumstances, as a symbolic act of possession, a subtle way of isolating and laying claim to someone.

  I’d been given a new name by Gen – Cosmosis – which Gen explained to me as meaning the exchange of energy from one person to another. A kind of well-thought-out hybrid of ‘cosmos’ and ‘osmosis’. Still, I had no objection to my new name. I liked it – it seemed apt as I started the next phase of my life – and Cosmosis was soon shortened to Cosey. I’d only ever known and called Spydeee by his nickname, which came from his love of comics, specifically because of his empathy with the adolescent angst of Peter Parker (Spiderman). He later expanded his name, adding Gasmantell as a direct reference to the original old gas mantle on the wall of his room in Prince Street. Likewise I only knew Gen as Genesis but found out that he’d changed it from Neil Megson, despite Spydeee pointing out there was already a band called Genesis. With ‘genesis’ having a meaning like ‘the coming into being of something’, it now seems highly indicative of what was to transpire. The surname he had taken on, P-Orridge, came from people’s comments on his love of porridge, and Gen embraced it by changing his name legally by dee
d poll in 1971.

  Our self-identifiers extended to us also adopting our own ‘magickal’ numbers and colours based on personal reasons and our interest in the occult. I already had mine in mind, but numerology also played a part in affirming my chosen number: 4. It was the date of the day of my birth, and my full birthdate also resolved to 4. Applying the numerological method to my names – Carol, Cosmosis, Cosey – brought about the same result: 4. But the number 4 was more than that to me; it felt grounded and reliable, like the four points of the compass. My chosen colour, blue, had been forming years before I met Gen. Over time, its childhood negative ‘boy’ connotations had turned into a positive, simply by my seeing blue as a symbol representing what my dad expected of me and by the realisation that such pressure had instilled a sense of ‘difference’ in my psyche – which to me was most definitely a positive. Blue represented my free spirit, the infinity of the sky, the vast depths of the oceans in constant flux in response to the vagaries of nature. My number and colour together stood for a sense of core stability that gave me confidence as I forged ahead exploring – as well as coping with, utilising and learning from some volatile life experiences.

  Spydeee and Gen had their own reasons for their magickal number and colour choices. Gen’s love of the colour orange (preferably Day-Glo orange) was as much to do with psychedelia as it was to do with anything esoteric, and was also, as I later discovered, possibly influenced by his time in Transmedia Explorations. His choice of the number 3 was, like my choice, partly based on his birthday, the 22nd of the 2nd (three 2s, when added together and divided by 2, become 3). But Gen also drew on the religious and occult symbolism of the number 3. There’s meaning to be found in anything, if you want it bad enough. From good to evil – the Holy Trinity (3) to the number of the beast, 666 (the sum of three 6s divided by 6 = 3). Spydeee’s choices were pure and straightforward. He chose the number 7, which was both me and Gen (4 + 3) and his date of birth, with additional inspiration from the significance of the number 7 within various belief systems. And, as he said, ‘Usually seven signifies creation, the beginning of things.’ His colour was green, the colour of nature.