Cosey Fanni Tutti and Chris Carter: Interview

Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti are vitally important figures in British electronic music. They’ve made significant records for decades as Chris and Cosey and Carter Tutti and, before that, as members of industrial originators Throbbing Gristle. Tutti’s hard-hitting autobiography Art Sex Music, which explored her career in provocative art and experimental music-making, also had a major impact on electronic music’s discourse.

In this interview, Tutti and Carter talk about the importance of the hippie movement, mind-expanding drugs, DIY music-making, Throbbing Gristle’s challenging approach to sound and performance, and how they came to love disco.

You were both involved in the alternative culture of the 1960s and early 1970s. How much do you think that that's been an important factor in what you've both done since then, and how much did it shape your worldview?

Cosey Well, for me, it had a huge, massive importance. The alternative culture was the foundation for everything I’ve done. I’ve never looked back since those early days of not wanting to be in the mainstream. The sixties freed me up completely. 

Chris For me as well. Especially with my music tastes, I think I developed a taste for certain genres back in the sixties and they stayed with me. But these genres don't really influence what we do musically. I think it's the approach of those people that's the influence - what they've done with the freedom of experimenting is what I admire, because they'd do something new, not copying someone else. It was about finding your own way of expressing yourself... I think that the other thing that had a big influence on me was drugs.

Cosey Yeah, drugs were a big influence too.

Chris Because by the seventies, I'd given up drugs.

There's a few ways that electronic music got into popular culture, and drugs was certainly one of them. Do you think psychedelic drugs encouraged people to seek other ways of listening?

Cosey For me, it the kind of drugs we took - we were taking LSD and mescaline and dope.

Chris I only really took LSD and a bit of speed, mainly LSD.

Cosey But they were kind of mind-expanding drugs. They didn't close you down.

Chris It's a bit of a cliche but it it's so true.

Cosey It is, yes. With acid and stuff, you saw the world in a completely different way and you wanted to access that space when you weren’t on drugs. So the way to do that, for me, was through music and through art, finding different ways of being in the world and expressing how you felt, and that there was more than we’re actually seeing and hearing. Because we’d done it on acid, we knew there was more behind the ways our brains had been programmed to see the world. The gates had opened.

What kind of music was important for you in those formative years?

Chris Me personally, I was into prog rock, heavily into prog rock and German Krautrock stuff. Which no one in TG ever really got - it was just my thing. I used to go and see Floyd and people initially, and then it went into more sort of like Black Sabbath and I went through that heavy metal phase. And then I settled on Floyd and Keith Emerson and all that lot, and Yes and Genesis - the band. And I was really into that. It's funny, because in TG, none of our musical tastes were aligned really. 

When did you start making your own equipment? This is another thing that a few people have mentioned - making equipment at home has been quite a theme. From the 1950s onwards, even back to the 1940s, when people were buying these ex-military oscillators and other electronic stuff on Tottenham Court Road in London and then and then trying to try to make music with them at home.

Chris That was me. I used to do that. There was a [electrical supplies] shop in Tottenham Court Road called Proops and I used to go in there and buy old oscillators and all sorts of weird stuff. I was always in there because I worked in Soho for a few years and I used to pop in there with my wages and buy things they were just trying to get rid of, then I would take it to my bedsit and just start taking it apart. And that's where it all started.  

I couldn't afford to go out and buy off-the-shelf synthesizer equipment, I really couldn't. So it was needs must. I used to buy magazines, Practical Electronics magazines, and just do it myself and put it all together myself. The only thing I could really afford to buy back then was a tape recorder. I bought a cassette machine to record onto but most of the stuff I was using was self-built. Because I couldn't really afford to buy anything else. And then it just went from there.

Chris, did you actually do any performances before Throbbing Gristle?

Chris Yeah, with my friend John Lacey. We were doing similar sorts of things, building our own equipment. And I had a light show as well, with projectors and stuff. So we put together a little multimedia show that we used to drive around the country doing performances at arts labs and festivals.

In alternative scene venues.

Chris Yeah, exactly. There used to be a magazine called Grapevine.  We used to advertise in there. And it went out to all the local councils and arts centres. And you could just you put your phone number and basically [say] what you did, and people would bring you up to festivals. And it was one of those shows that you [Cosey] came to, wasn't it? That's how we met.

Cosey, you started developing your DIY style with a guitar – it was this kind of anti-musicianship which later became identified with punk rock, but it was actually before punk, wasn't it?

Cosey Like Chris said, we couldn't afford to buy guitars or anything like that. That's why I bought one for Woolworths for about a fiver or a tenner, my first guitar, and it was just like - yeah, it makes a sound. It makes a sound and I can put it through effects pedals. I didn't want to ‘play’ it properly. I wasn't interested in that. 

Chris Even your effects pedals were DIY effects pedals. 

Cosey Yeah, you built me those. Yeah. Remember the posser [old-fashioned laundry implement]? Yeah, we had what they call a posser, which was used for washing. Back in the fifties. It was like a dome shape on a stick and there was a fuzzbox in it.

Chris This posser had knobs on for distortion and a footswitch too. 

Cosey So I had one of those. I had friends that could play guitar exceptionally well. And I knew that I wasn't interested in doing that. I liked making noise.

One of the things that's important about TG is this interest in mutation of sound and repurposing existing technology to work in a different way. Records like ‘Second Annual Report’ sounded like they came from another dimension completely back then [in the late 1970s].

Chris It's hard to sort of place it in time now... And I can't remember how we did half of that stuff.

Cosey We sometimes get people write to us and say, you know, 16 minutes in on that album, there's that sound, how did you get that? And you sort of have think, well we improvised... You know, everything with TG at that point was a work in progress. And when we took - if you want to call them tracks or songs or whatever - to different gigs, they were up for change at any point, depending on what the atmosphere was like. A lot was just improvised.

Chris I had rhythm tapes. I had a box of tapes, I just used to pull a tape out and put it in the machine, slow it down or speed it up.

Cosey And that was just that was a catalyst for us to then do noise on top.

Chris But I think a lot of it depended on the audience. And there was a lot of interaction with the audience, depending on what type of audience it was, and how they were receiving us or not. And the sort of reaction we were getting, that had a big influence on what we did with TG. But more so in the beginning, I think yeah, because people were coming in like expecting a punk band, but it wasn't a punk band – “where's the drumkit?” 

Cosey It was a two-way assault, at times. They’d assault us and then we’d join in the fight – it was great fun actually.

What do you think was the most important thing about TG’s work in terms of music?

Cosey We wanted to push people out of their comfort zone of what to expect with music. It was about breaking it down to literally sound and how people react to it. And then opening it up for people to build from there. 

Chris For years, we had this thing where we wanted to confound expectations. When people thought they'd got how we worked or what we were going to do, we'd change gear or move in a different direction or go off at a tangent. We always kept doing that. 

There's this massive difference in sound between ‘Second Annual Report’ and ‘20 Jazz Funk Greats’.

Cosey We were responding to what was happening in the music scene more then, especially when I started doing stripping. When I started doing stripping, I had to use records that had rhythm and actually sounded familiar to the audience, so I really got into the disco stuff of the time, Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer. And that’s where, you know, ‘Hot on the Heels of Love’ [on 20 Jazz Funk Greats] came from. 

Chris That's the weird thing because I'd turn up at Beck Road [in Hackney, East London, where Tutti and P-Orridge lived] and you know, most people would think you'd be hearing punk noise and all you'd be hearing was dance records.

Cosey Like ‘Native New Yorker’.

Chris It was like a disco. 

Cosey I was trying them out seeing if they'd work for the routine that I was I was doing, and then we'd talk about it and say, we should use humour and irony and do a TG love song, disco-style, and put our spin on it. So that's where that came from, really.

The 1970s was quite a dark time, wasn't it? There were several states of emergency, power cuts, strikes, the IRA was bombing pubs, there was industrial decline. With hindsight, it's obvious that your music reflected some of that, but how much was it intentional?

Cosey It was just literally, that whole thing of how do you express your position in the world and your feelings about what's going on. It was a very, very dark time. 

There was also a lot to do with the personal side of my life. You’ve read my book [Art Sex Music]? But it also had to do with the modelling in the porn industry that I was doing because it was rife with that kind of thing. You know, there's that manipulation that goes on. So that sort of reflects life as well, but on different levels.

Were you disappointed in what industrial music turned into when it became an established musical genre?

Chris What was that thing we used to say? It was like Frankenstein’s monster. It just became something completely different, it became this macho thing. Whereas industrial for us was all about DIY. Do it yourself. Put your own record out. 

The ethos was sort of aligned with punk in a way, I guess - you don't need to play music, you can do it yourself. You can put your own records out. And it was more industrious than industrial. But then it took people took it too literally. And it became this macho sort of metal banging.

At what point did you realise, OK, it's time for us to do something different?

Cosey I think once we got on to 20 Jazz and we started realising what we could do with new technology, and it was beginning to be more affordable, I think that's when our imagination started firing off in a different direction. 

Plus the fact that me personally, I don't like formulas. I mean, industrial for us at that point, for me, I'd done that, I'd been through that thing. And it was a state of natural progression for me that things I'd discovered doing industrial lent themselves more to new ideas that were coming through. I don't know about you, but that's how it was. It was a metamorphosis. 

And it was the same with Sleazy, he was moving out of the industrial genre as well. So when it came to doing the singles [‘Adrenalin’/‘Distant Dreams (Part Two)’ in 1980], that was like, a real pivotal moment, because us three wanted to take it in one direction…

Chris And it was a direction Gen really pushed against, he really didn't want to do it. He thought it was selling out. I mean, he wanted us to become more of a punk band, ironically, he didn't like the direction we were going. And he pushed against it all the time. It's one of the reasons we split and went off in different directions.

What I really like about your early Chris & Cosey records, they have this very intimate and personal feeling, like entering like a hidden emotional domain. Is that what you were trying to achieve?

Cosey I think we’d suppressed the feelings that we had inside for so long and it all came out in the music, these emotions that were so strong and intense. And I was pregnant, so suddenly there was a whole new life opening up, like there was with the music. 

There was still a dark undertone and you could still hear a bit of TG in it, but ultimately we were saying that we are these people that can actually be decent to one another and love one another. And it was such a nice shift from the nihilism of the seventies that was horrendous, and suddenly, there were these blue skies and this wonderful, amazing feeling. 

Chris We were still in touch with a lot of people that had been in touch with us in TG, like the Cabs and the Sheffield bands. So there was still that scene going on. And it was it was doing quite well. I suppose we felt connected in that way. And we were seeing a lot of people like that, weren't we? But Gen put it around that people shouldn't talk to us. It was like a divorce, you know, you take one side or the other. A lot of people we used to know stopped being in contact.

Cosey We were ostracised, basically. But that in a way just opened the door to fresh air. We made new friends and new music. We started doing a lot of visuals, so it was like an artistic reawakening. It took us in a totally different direction, really positive direction.

Cabaret Voltaire went for this kind of New York electro sound around that time. Were you interested by that in any way?

Chris Not really. I mean, we knew their manager, Paul Smith, and he was helpful, he got into an editing suite. So we still had that connection. But they were going off on a different tangent to us. it didn't really appeal to us, especially the whole New York sound. And they signed to a major label. And we didn't really want to do that, we had already been to Virgin and decided we didn't want to go to that. 

We were pleased for them, really pleased for them, but it wasn't what we wanted to do. We were offered a couple of big tours around that time - Grace Jones and Depeche Mode, we were going to go on the road with Depeche Mode. But because Cosey was pregnant, we decided we wouldn't do that.

Cosey We always kept hold of our freedom. We made sure we were never obligated to anyone.

Did you feel any kind of kinship or any relationship with the acid house and techno scene when it started? 

Chris We listened to it, but it was going on in parallel to what we were doing and we sort of felt slightly separate from it.

Too happy-happy smiley-smiley for you?

Cosey It was a bit too organised. I know it was underground at the time, but it wasn't underground enough. Not for me. 

In the very beginning, I was really pissed off because I've got a heart condition and I couldn't go to the raves. And it was like, I'd have loved to have gone to the raves and danced all night and just really sort of like bathed in it.

Chris Geff Rushton [John Balance of Coil] was always saying to us, “You could do this stuff standing on your head, why don’t you do it?” We had carved out a little Chris and Cosey niche, and we had our touring and we had our audience and we were selling a lot of records then - a lot. We wanted to stay where we were, we had a sort of comfort zone, and we didn't really want to go outside it. 

‘Exotica’ was our first sort of hit. The ‘Exotica’ track sold tens of thousands and it was a dancefloor hit in Goa and all this stuff. We suddenly were known by a lot more people, we did a lot more touring around.

Cosey We were quite shocked because we’d got into something melodic almost without expecting to. We’d accidentally hit our sweet spot. But I think it had been building up over the years. And it just happened. That was what was so nice about it.

Cosey, your autobiography has had a major impact and has given people a different perception of the importance of both of your roles within TG - before it was Genesis was the genius and everyone else was slightly in the background. Do you think that now the record has been set straight?

Cosey I think it's important that you have to remember that it was a collective and someone shouldn't stand at the front and take glory and credit for something they haven't done. I think just putting the record straight to say what actually happened, rather than perpetuate a myth, is really important. 

And in terms of, you know, the personal things [in the book], that is hugely important for women, I mean that the response I had from that book was absolutely mindblowing. It's still going on now, I get handwritten letters via our PO box from women expressing how they are so pleased that I mentioned everything. And I think when I wrote it and put it out there, I just did not expect, I really did not expect anyone to really be that interested.

 

It's also like, in the alternative culture, we sometimes get this idea that we're going to somehow be better than the rest of society. And this has shown that actually, we've got to look at ourselves as well because we have the same problems and the same prejudices. 

Do you think things are different for women musicians in so-called alternative music today? You work with [experimental electronic artist] Nik Void - is it different for musicians of her generation? 

Cosey In some ways, it is. In other ways, not much has changed. We're still women in music, whether in the alternative scene or not, you're still seen as this little puppet that can be moved about and told to do things and be represented in certain ways different to men. You're not an artist, or a musician. You're a woman first. And that's really got to change.

Interview by Matthew Collin for ‘Dream Machines’ on November 29, 2021.

Chris and Cosey photo (1990) courtesy of CTI.