TOPY was very important for the formation of what would later be called chaos magic, and to a large extent TOPY's work was based on the well-known chaotic technique of sigilization. In fact, in Orridge's magnum opus, best books, The Psychick Bible to anyone who deals with chaos magic, the occult in general, but also art or just has an interest in underground cultures, probably the best instructions for sigilization that can be found publicly are published.
TOPY examined the methods of both the left and right ways and let's say all the members collected their sexual fluids on the 23rd of the month and sent them in vials to the Orridges.
Also, they questioned the limits of their sexuality by putting all their sexual fantasies, including the most bizarre ones, on paper and sending them. When Orridge and his wife had to flee England at one point, due to the brutal invasion of Scotland Yard in their house due to a false report according to which a baby was allegedly ritually sacrificed in one of their video works, to assume that the police were quite surprised by all those vials and confessions about sexual fantasies.
grey and depressing British industrial city of Hull was the appropriate place for a nihilistic avant-garde collective that aggressively tackled every conceivable taboo between the years 1969 and 1976: sex, drugs, pornography, violence and self-mutilation.
But 'COUM Transmissions' was just the beginning.
Under the direction of artists Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti, COUM soon mutated into the visionary, transgressive and absolutely uncompromising industrial band 'Throbbing Gristle', who reinvented music by destroying it and have thus set an untouchable standard of radical otherness to this day.
England, 1970. In a run-down commune in the rough port city of Hull, a group of social outsiders - mainly working class and mostly self-taught - took on new identities and began to make simple street theatre under the name "COUM Transmissions". Surviving on the fringes of society with scant means, COUM's playful performances gradually gave way to a body of work that dealt openly with sex, obscenity and violence.
At the core of the group were the two artists Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti: Cosey took a unique position in relation to feminism of the 1970s, modelling for pornographic magazines as an exercise in conceptual art, while Genesis pushed to other extremes and explored the limits of the human body. In the mid-1970s, they were chased by the Hull police and branded as "destroyers of civilization" by a shocked politician in the British press.
'Psychic Television' and the Temple Ov Psychick Youth
From 50 Beck Road, in the London working-class borough of Hackney, Peter Christopherson and Genesis P-Orridge, together with guitarist Alex Fergusson (Alternative TV), founded the band 'Psychic TV', PTV for short, in the late autumn of 1981, which was to act as the public relations arm of the Temple Ov Psychic Youth.
The first album of the TG follow-up project 'Psychick Television' was released on 'Some Bizzare' Records and was titled 'Force the hand of chance' (1982). In 1983, PTV was signed by the mainstream label WEA-Musik and released the second album 'Dreams Less Sweet', the highest-pre-financed album since the Sex Pistols. Alex Fergusson and sound experiments, which were primarily developed by Christopherson and Geff Rushton alias John Balance - a harbinger of the pair's later work as a coil.
Marc Almond from Soft Cell also contributed vocals. With the advance of the record company, Gen and Sleazy, with their otherwise limited means as artists, created the basis for the "Temple Ov Psychick Youth" universe.
The different phases of Psychic TV can be summarized as follows: 1982 - 1987 Alex Fergusson Period, 1988 - 1992 Fred Gianelli Period, 1992 - 1993 Exile, 1993 - 1999 Larry Trasher Period, 2003 - 2020 (PTV3) Edley ODowd Period.
Psychic TV released more than 100 albums, including a series of 16 live albums in one year, earning them an entry in the Guinness Book of Records in 1986. Until G.P-Orridge's demise in 2021, the band was one of the main representatives of the post-industrial scene.
So GPO in the Opens external link in new window1986 BBC Studio interview, about his court case in 1976 - when the artist had sent a series of postcard collages with the Queen and pornographic content by post and was subsequently convicted and declared an 'unrepresentative person'. Scotland Yard officials warned P-Orridge that his passport could be confiscated if he continued to disregard the boundaries of art (and thus the law). Since then, it has been clear to the radical border crosser that the concentrated power of the system in England could rain down on him at any time.
And that's exactly what happened at the beginning of the nineties. The P-Orridges were in Kathmandu with their two daughters when they received the warning message that they would not be able to come home without putting themselves and their children in danger. With the programme 'Dispatches' on the national television of the BBC 4, a team of producers - who had already attracted attention with dishonest productions - had produced a report on the TOPY. This served the typical clichés around the topics of paganism and Satanism.
Accompanied by film sequences recorded in the studio of dry ice fog, frightened-crying toddlers and a false witness who reported that she had participated in satanic child sacrifices, which were said to have taken place in the basement of the P-Orridge apartment building. England was in shock! Scotland Yard officers broke into the house, ransacked and confiscated everything inside. However, the cellar in question was not found, as the row of houses on the outermost hill of the city, in Brighton's Crescent Hill, had no basement at all. Like the rest of the so-called "documentary", everything was fictitious, constructed and far-fetched. But all this was to become clear later.
For their own protection, the P-Orridges traveled to the United States, into exile. In sunny California, north of San Francisco, the psychedelic publicist Michael Horowitz, who decades earlier had already given shelter to the LSD Pope and Harvard professor Timothy Leary, helped them escape from US prison.
'Psychic Television' and the Temple Ov Psychick Youth
From 50 Beck Road, in the London working-class borough of Hackney, Peter Christopherson and Genesis P-Orridge, together with guitarist Alex Fergusson (Alternative TV), founded the band 'Psychic TV', PTV for short, in the late autumn of 1981, which was to act as the public relations arm of the Temple Ov Psychic Youth.
The first album of the TG follow-up project 'Psychick Television' was released on 'Some Bizzare' Records and was titled 'Force the hand of chance' (1982). In 1983, PTV was signed by the mainstream label WEA-Musik and released the second album 'Dreams Less Sweet', the highest-pre-financed album since the Sex Pistols.
Alex Fergusson and sound experiments, which were primarily developed by Christopherson and Geff Rushton alias John Balance - a harbinger of the pair's later work as a coil. Marc Almond from Soft Cell also contributed vocals. With the advance of the record company, Gen and Sleazy, with their otherwise limited means as artists, created the basis for the "Temple Ov Psychick Youth" universe.
For their own protection, the P-Orridges traveled to the United States, into exile. In sunny California, north of San Francisco, the psychedelic publicist Michael Horowitz, who decades earlier had already given shelter to the LSD Pope and Harvard professor Timothy Leary, helped them escape from US prison.
"Scotland Yard seized every single video, photo, slide and roll of film, based on fabricated allegations that would later prove to be unfounded. We had just started filming Brion Gysin in his tiny apartment in Paris in order to make a film about Gysin in the course of his participation in the Final Academy and for posterity.
Last year, the filmmakers who are currently shooting the documentary for TOPY contacted BORIS from PYROMANIA ARTS. It turned out that he had copied numerous videos of my archive, just in case my fears of suppression were justified and not paranoid, as some TOPY individuals claimed. BORIS, who was a TOPY NOMAD in the 80s and 90s, kindly copied what we were able to include in the 'Artchive Too'. We sincerely thank him for his foresight."
