ONE way of starting a book is to begin at the back and check out the references. These give you a good idea if you should buy and return to the front.
One way of starting a book review is to begin with the titles of some of these references.
In Cosey Fanni Tutti’s marvellous, Re-Sisters you’ll find in the sources a Master’s thesis called The Topography Of Illicit Sex In Later Medieval English Provincial Towns. Oh, and there’s this too (from Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal): “Be More Strange and Bold”: Kissing Lepers And Female Same-Sex Desire In The Book of Margery Kempe. That grabs your attention…
Cosey is no stranger to controversy. The former Solicitor General for Scotland, the tartan-troosered Nicholas Fairbairn, famously called her one of the “wreckers of civilization”. As if auld Nick were some paragon of virtue.
My first exposure to Cosey’s pictorial pieces as a late teenager was via some found reading material on a country walk but we won’t go into that. Many years later, I learned that she had reframed these activities as art. These works are somewhat in the manner of the 1960s Viennese Actionists, those Austrian provocateurs fond of holding their fellow countrymen to account for their recent history of atrocity.
Cosey then formed Throbbing Gristle with the ludicrously named Genesis P-Orridge, a persistently influential band with a taste for shock and awe.
This book follows on from her highly successful memoir – Art Sex Music – and interdigitates her own life stories with those of the electronic composer Delia Derbyshire and a 15th-century mystic, the aforementioned Margery Kempe.
You might imagine all three as female acolytes of St Augustine, intent on reform, each whispering “grant me chastity and continence, but not yet”. All three are up against it, “it” being the blob that is male patriarchy. All three, in Cosey’s words, delight in infiltrating and subverting institutions. Three lives then, separate in time but with much in common: resistance to male rules, a need to flee from the nets of male constraint.
Derbyshire was born in Coventry in 1937 and worked for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The Doctor Who theme is her most famed composition; she was a pioneer of electronic music. You can hear her influence on The Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows (she met Paul McCartney) through to the work of Pink Floyd, Throbbing Gristle themselves, and on to the banging German techno of today.
Derbyshire’s ideas were, in Robert Wyatt’s words, “simply way ahead of the curve”. Her work was exploited, appropriated, unacknowledged. You feel Cosey’s anger as she outlines Derbyshire’s experience of male bullying, explicitly linking it to her own history of abuse at the hands of P-Orridge.
Kempe was born in King’s Lynn in 1373 and wrote what might be the first autobiography in English literature. The book was found in 1934 and bought by the British library as recently as 1980. Kempe had “an adventurous life, to say the least”, and Cosey’s telling of her story is fantastically entertaining, involving, as it does, seven trials for heresy, pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Aachen and Santiago de Compostela, trips to Gdansk and 13 pregnancies. Unsurprisingly, Kempe became what we might call a veecel: a voluntary celibate.
Cosey has an affinity with both women, with their resilience in the face of relentless misogyny, their “intolerance of inaccuracy” and their independence of thought.
All three are indomitable: subjugation is not an option.
Cosey tells a truly appalling story of her life with P-Orridge that demands attention must be paid; her resolve to channel her anger creatively and win is entirely admirable.
Cosey’s verdict on the swinging 60s libertinism is damning: “I know from personal experience that there’s no such thing as ‘free love’; there’s always a price to be paid, someone who gets hurt.”
Cosey says critics thought she “didn’t know (her) place”. Succinctly she responds: “I definitely do. My place is where I decide it is.”
More than once I heard the echo of Muriel Spark’s voice here. Her book is well researched and there’s a beautiful description of the John Rylands Library in Manchester where she listened to many of Derbyshire’s recordings held in their collection.
And there’s a happy ending too!
