Read It In Books:Art Sex Music.

I'm no expert on Cosey Fanni Tutti and her work. I saw her play in a reunited Throbbing Gristle at Heaven about twelve years ago, I enjoyed her contribution to Caroline Catz's recent Delia Derbyshire:The Myths and Legendary Tapes, and when I listen to Throbbing Gristle now I can hear that they genuinely were as influential and ground-breaking as many have said. I wish I'd paid a bit more attention in the past. So when Darren gave me, as a gift, her 2007 book Art Sex Music I was eager to find out more.

The book is her entering "the lion's den" of her past, using her diaries as her primary source to "avoid the misty goggles of retrospection" though some stories (walking through London Fields with keys clutched firmly in hand in case of being attacked) are still depressingly relevant today. Namedropping is never boastful or showy, mere matter of fact, but the story of her life, of course, can't help but be peppered with the likes of Bridget Riley, John Cage, Yoko Ono, Mary Millington, Carolee Schneemann, Chris Burden, Graeme Revell (of Surgical Penis Klinik), and William Burroughs.

Others appear. Both names you'd suspect and names you would not. Alongside Malcolm McLaren, Siouxsie Sioux, Tony Parsons, Daniel Miller, Julian Cope, Mark Perry, and Billy Idol there is Diana Dors and Mike Yarwood. You're not surprised to hear names like Robert Wyatt, Gilbert & George, Mark Leckey, Andrew Weatherall, and Joseph Beuys mentioned, or even Chris Ofili, Kenneth Anger, Thurston Moore, Andrew Weatherall, and Jeremy Deller, but perhaps a little discombobulated when Frank Bruno, Ricky Hatton, and Tim Burgess rock up.

Cosey seems almost proud that she was born in Kingston upon Hull at a time, 1951, when it was "the most violent city in England" and she speaks lovingly of (most) family members and childhood friends while acknowledging that her rebellious, and curious, nature always seemed likely to lead her into trouble. By her late teens, after narrowly avoiding being raped, she'd lost her virginity - in a car, proper old school style, sooner than she had hoped to.

Though at least to a kindred spirit whom she genuinely was in love with. But it was another man ("a small, beautiful guy dressed in a black graduation gown , complete with a mortarboard and a wispy pale-lilac goatee beard") who was to become a far more dramatic catalyst in her future developments. Artistically, musically, and sexually.

A guy called Genesis (though born Neil Megson) who named her Cosmosis (she was born Christine Newby). For her the relationship began casually. For him, everything seems to have been carried out with intensity. From the start, in retrospect, it appears he played mind games with her to keep her under his control. Exploiting her vulnerability and acting as protector when she needed security. Then withholding love and affection when that was deemed strategically beneficial.

Genesis, too - it was suggested very early on, could never love anyone as much as he loved himself. When he wasn't punching her or kicking her in the face, throwing shoes at her or persuading her to take place in orgies he was telling her off for staying out late (or getting up too early), refusing to wear condoms (resulting in her terminating an unplanned pregnancy when eighteen years old), and abusing cats by throwing them around.

They formed COUM Transmissions together, the logo - a post-coital, limp, sperm-dripping penis, and played at events like the Clockwork Hot Spoiled Acid Test and Exorcism of Shit. Their music was inspired as much by free jazzers like AMM as it was experimental rockers like The Fugs but they saw themselves as more than just a band. They were "a concept, a democratic collective and an all embracing lifestyle". One which sometimes involved Gen(esis) dressing as a baby and writhing around the floor.

It didn't bring much money in. So Cosey tried to (not) get a job. She needed to be seen to be trying to so that she was able to claim dole but she certainly didn't want to work in an office or a factory. So she did things that guaranteed she'd not be offered work. Bring her unsuitable boyfriend along to interviews, dress inappropriately, those kind of things. 

Until money became so desperate she took a position at Humbrol Paints. One of many examples of her being able to, unlike for instance Gen, operate in various worlds. The world of the straights and the world of the freaks. In truth, they were not so different. Pecking orders, bullying, endless filling in of forms, and having to put up with people who seemed hellbent on making life more difficult than it really had to be.

In places Art Sex Music is a wonderful nostalgic look back at a Britain that no longer exists. Not the one of Brexit fantasies, of "two world wars and one world cup", but one of lollipop ladies, bonny baby contests, free milk for school children, austere Victorian hospitals, three day weeks, IRA bombing campaigns in London, and strange old men with suitcases full of sweets under their beds inviting school girls into their houses.

But, obviously, that is balanced with missives from the counterculture - at a time when there really was such a thing as a counterculture. Not every teenage girl in their first job was writing poetry and copying out Leonard Cohen lyrics or was tempted into a world of Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, and LSD. But Cosey was and this took her into a world of performance art, mail art, industrial music, and pornographic magazines.

A scene where you meet characters with names like Pinglewad, Terry the Pill, Robin Rat, Far Out John, and Foxtrot Echo and perform songs like Teddy Bear Hot Water Bottle (not as cute as it sounds, it was about wanting to fuck a hot water bottle) and John Peel carries a card round describing himself as "the most boring man in Britain" and picks up groupies.

There are amusing stories (Gen's love of Smarties (actual Smarties) and the time he got an electric shock from a steel vibrating penis probe and spilled coffee all down his favourite dress) but there are also moving ones. Following the termination of her pregnancy, she is moved by a friend who visits every day and presents her with a pristine, and snug, white-and-lemon eiderdown.

The funeral of her estranged father which brought about a tearful reunion with her sister had me welling up another funeral, that of John Balance, to her and her long term partner Chris Carter - Coil's last performance, in which, bizarrely, their cover of the Are You Being Served theme tune was played also brought a tear to my unmanly eye.

It's insightful too. Cosey writes of how, at first, she was unaware that Gen's obsession with systems of manipulation and control was merely a smokescreen for his own manipulative and controlling behaviour. Behaviour that echoed that of the more straight, corporate, figures he so willingly mocked in his own lyrics.

It can also be lovely. When Cosey first meets Chris Carter he invites her and Gen to him and his girlfriend Simone's wedding (she declined - "I don't go to weddings") before eventually developing a warm and platonic friendship based on mutual respect. When Gen more or less insisted that Chris and Cosey have sex (while he watched) they found they both liked it - and didn't want to go back. Even though they tried to. For a while.

The fourth TG member, Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson, earns his nickname by the way he sidled up to Cosey to ask if he could take her photo at a COUM event but underneath his transgressive, inappropriate, exterior he appears to be a kind, playful, man - and one that is often left playing peacemaker as Cosey and Gen's relationship falls apart and, sure enough, Throbbing Gristle's inter band dynamics suffer accordingly. The death of his life partner, and partner in Coil, John Balance later in the book has Sleazy sobbing uncontrollably and Cosey is always warm when she speaks of him. With Gen it's not so easy for her.

Gen's declarations of being unconventional, 'enlightened', and into magick didn't square with his sexist and cruel behaviour (at one point throwing a breezeblock at Cosey from a window as she sunbathed below) and his dogmatic insistence that Cosey cooked certain meals for him on certain days (also, rather amusingly, he liked to watch Coronation Street and New Faces).

Gen (who died last year), it seems, never truly grew out of this selfish and self-serving behaviour while Chris Carter, in Cosey's eyes - and now in the eyes of us readers, stood as a stark, and admirable, alternative. Of him, Cosey says:- "my whole body was crying out only for him". He was the first "true egalitarian" she had ever met and making contact with him was an "epiphany". He loved life, he loved music, he loved musical instruments and the recording process, and, most of all it seems, he loved, and continues to love, Cosey and their son Nick.

Cosey, the girl who swung naked on a swing while urinating on the audience below through a heart shaped hole, stripped naked with other girls for Knave magazine, and was never shocked by any of the supposedly transgressive performers she met (but often disappointed in how conservative they really were) is also the person who negotiated a world where the editor of Health & Efficiency magazine insisted on being personally responsible for shaving her pubic hair for a photo shoot and had the good sense to decline the offer of a private party with Gary Glitter.

She is quite matter of fact about the exploitation she has suffered and never paints herself as a victim (though, at times, she undoubtedly was) but, more than that, she paints a nuanced and realistic picture of what it was like to be a person, a woman, in a scene that spoke loudly about equality and aimed to shock but was, in many ways, inherently sexist and safely misogynistic.

Her book is an easy and interesting read. I sense she didn't want it to simply be a chance to settle old scores with Gen but, at times, she does linger, understandably, too long on all his character defects, failings, and aggression (both passive and actual) and there are some sections in which business transactions are dutifully described which may have been best left out.

But these are minor quibbles. Cosey's memoir sheds light on a time that is often eulogised but rarely understood these days. They were, for sure, different times - even if some of the same narcissistic behaviour still exists with current creatives - and it's hard to imagine somebody could bridge the worlds of stripping in pubs and avant-garde art in quite the same way as Cosey Fanni Tutti did ever again. 

Perhaps more than anything, the book is a love story. The way Cosey writes about her love and respect for Chris, Sleazy, and others (and theirs for her) is warm and affectionate and the way she remains passionate about, and proud of, her work and her life equals that, in fact goes hand in hand with it. Her art, her sex, and her music. All three, it seems, make up a wonderfully talented, and for many years underappreciated, person.

Thanks to Darren for this generous gift.