Cosey Fanni Tutti: Hold Your Ground

For almost six decades, Cosey Fanni Tutti has been at the vanguard of art, challenging the boundaries of music and – unforgettably, as part of Throbbing Gristle – society. Her new album, 2t2, recorded during a time of personal turmoil, channels the same uncompromising spirit that has always made her such a vital and transgressive force.

Musician, performer, artist and author Cosey Fanni Tutti has continually challenged boundaries and sensibilities through her work. Originating from a working-class community in East Yorkshire, she became a founding member of COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle, Chris & Cosey and Carter Tutti Void, creating obstinate, often abrasive electronic music that echoed the industrial landscape that surrounded her early years. As an artist, she has consistently played the roles of provocateur and auteur, believing that “my life is my art, my art is my life”. Her first solo album, Time To Tell (1983), was followed by 2019’s Tutti and 2022’s Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes, her score to Caroline Catz’s docudrama about the BBC Radiophonic trailblazer. Cosey’s new record, 2t2, is out on her own label, Conspiracy International, this summer. 

Cosey (born Christine Newby in 1951) grew up on Hull’s Bilton Grange estate, in a tough northern city of headscarf revolutionaries, three-day millionaires and a fishing industry that was a regional powerhouse in its day. As a girl, foghorns were a familiar sound. Like Delia Derbyshire’s air raid sirens, they are buried deep in her musical psyche. In 2t2, they provoke a spectral resonance of trawlers returning up the Humber estuary, cloaked in haar, emerging from darkness into light. Her father, a former Navy man, dredged for Second World War landmines in the local docks; her grandmother was born on a barge; and relatives worked on sea rescue. She recalls of the men who went missing overboard: “Whenever a ship went down, we’d be in the hall singing hymns for those in peril on the sea, for kids in our school who had lost their fathers or were injured in some way. The threat to life and earning a living in dangerous conditions was always hanging over us.”

Like MC5 and The Stooges, who used the clattering steel and machine noise of Detroit’s motor plants, her previous band, Throbbing Gristle, harnessed the harsh industrial discordance of their close environment. They broke music industry rules, ultimately becoming successful with their own record label, Industrial Records. Cosey’s live show in 2017 at Hull City of Culture saw her return to the same streets where, decades earlier, she had squatted at the communal warehouse home of Hull’s counterculture, Ho-Ho Funhouse. The prodigal daughter played a jaw-dropping insurrection of techno and slamming dissonance to an ecstatic crowd at the Fruit Market with Carter Tutti Void. It was a reminder to those who had forgotten what an important cultural figure she is.

As the author of two acclaimed books – a memoir, Art Sex Music, and Re-Sisters, a meditation on three women (the musician and composer Delia Derbyshire, the 15th-century mystic Margery Kempe and herself) – Cosey has become respected for her written works too. As part of researching Re-Sisters, she interviewed Andy Christian, an artist friend of Derbyshire’s, which led to him collaborating on 2t2’s Threnody. “He sent me some of what they’d worked on together, then a few things in envelopes, and I’d send them back,” she explains. “It was a brief but unexpected connection with someone I’d never have met otherwise; without the book, this wouldn’t have happened.”  

In contrast, To Be, Curæ and Stound contain the writhing, propulsive rhythm that is a distillation of all that is Cosey. Other tracks are elegiac, ambient and hypnagogic, with cornet, guitar and harmonica running like a seam through the album. The ability to carve out this original sound is testament to the power of its creator. In some tonal respects, there are connections to X-TG’s Desertshore, first conceived in 2006 by Throbbing Gristle bandmate Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson, who began preparations to record before dying unexpectedly in Bangkok. Completed by Cosey and Chris, it became the ultimate tribute. She agrees there are parallels. “Musically, it’s not the same, but the sentiment is similar: ‘I’m not going to let this get me down. Just because these people aren’t here any more, it doesn’t mean they don’t have the same presence within me.’ That fire, I was aware of what was coming from inside my emotions… Then Chris got seriously ill, touch-and-go, and I was like, ‘What the hell?’” 

Having only just recovered from health problems herself, personal loss and grief once again interrupted daily life – a painful and turbulent period during the recording of 2t2. When she returned to record after a year away, Cosey formed a unique relationship with an instrument previously unknown to her: a SOMA Terra synthesiser, made from a slice of tree trunk and gifted to her by Chris. “It became my bible of sounds, as it took me out of myself and into another dimension. It’s touch-sensitive and you can change and bend the sound physically. I was lost in its world.”

Those who follow Cosey’s career will know of her cameo as a dancer in Sylvester’s classic You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) video from 1978, and for many years she also performed striptease. That sense of physical connection is an alchemy she carries forward in her work today. “I dance when I compose and record. When I stripped, it would always be to music that the audience liked – that was my job. They had to relate to the music and me. But then I’d slip in some of my own choices, such as Alternative TV’s Love Lies Limp, their cod reggae song about impotence. I was being a bit naughty and ironic with that one,” she confesses. 

Although much of her recent work has been in the studio or facing the blank page, it is Cosey’s radical pornographic aesthetics that first brought infamy through her Prostitution exhibition at the ICA in 1976 – an event that earned her and COUM Transmissions the moniker “wreckers of civilisation”, a title bestowed by Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn. Her distinctive brand of confrontational art could still be seen as quite shocking, even now. Does Cosey think there is still an appetite for provocation in contemporary culture? “I look at what we did live, and it was a bit like batting out a sound bomb and seeing it explode out there, just to see what happened. You can’t do that online. It’s a physical thing, and I think that’s what is missing. That rapport you can only get if you’re in the same room where you read people. On social media, everyone is just pretending to be someone else. When we first started out, we never tried or wanted to fit in. We lived for the now, never thinking or worrying about the future. Except for The Second Annual Report, when we joked it would be nice if our grandchildren had it in their record collection. As if! That was the only one we ever considered might survive.” 

COUM once stated that “the future of music lies in non-musicians” – a sensibility that predated punk, long before 1976 reared its ugly head. Does she believe that statement to be true? “I agree with it to this day. We weren’t trained, so we never replicated anything.” Cosey, unlike many who followed in her footsteps, never chased material reward. Maybe this attitude is behind her longevity. “That’s the key,” she concludes. “What are you looking for when you’re making music? If you’re looking for money and success in a world that will manipulate you to make the most profit out of you, then that’s fine, but you will have to sacrifice everything for it.”