Cosey Fanni Tutti

Emma Warren

So, we are very pleased to have Cosey Fanni Tutti [with us] [applause]. Now, when someone has a discography as long as yours, I mean, we could sit here for probably four weeks talking about the music you have made. We could probably spend 84 days talking about Throbbing Gristle alone, but we only have 90 minutes and some time for you guys to ask questions, so we can’t be definitive, we can’t talk about everything. But before we even go back and talk about the specifics of who you are and where you’ve come from, I thought it would be interesting to ask something general about you and the continuing creativity that you have had throughout your whole life. You are still making music and art now, when lots of your peers aren’t. Why do you think that is?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

I think the reason I started making music and the reason they started making music is probably why. They’ve stopped doing it and I have carried on. I suppose, it really began way back in 1969 when I was doing more art actions and art performance pieces, that kind of thing. I suppose you would look at them and think they were more like happenings, a left-over from the ’60s, where we set up these weird kinds of environments from anything we could collect from old rejects from factories and all that kind of thing. Then we would take instruments along and we would play some of the instruments amongst all this debris, and people couldn’t necessarily see us, and leave instruments around for people to pick up and join in. So, it goes back as far as that and the looseness of the approach to music goes back that far. I have never been orthodox in my approach to music at all. I have never seen a reason to be.

In fact, when I was sent for piano lessons at 11 I had already started playing with the piano at home, like a prepared piano, which my father was disillusioned about because I should have been, practicing my scales. I’ve found very little of interest in me doing proper music as it was supposed to be. So, I think, that’s one of the main reasons that I have a different interest and a different reason for doing music to a lot of my peers. It’s more a way of life for me, commenting on that and my assimilation of events and everything that went on, things I wanted to communicate to people, I did that through music. Other people did it as a career, as a way of making a place for them in the culture and earning a living and being famous, I suppose.

Emma Warren

And, I suppose, a pop career is finite, isn’t it? It’s necessarily finite, whereas a creative career perhaps is infinite or at least as long as we continue on this place.

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Totally, and I think your motives for doing it dictates what you’re doing and where that ends, basically.

Emma Warren

So, would you say that you have always been more interested in sound than what you just described as “proper” music?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

I suppose, as a teenager, I came in and hit the scene of more experimental music, really. So, I grew up through my teens, having that kind of attitude to it that music stirred feelings within you and it wasn’t just a means of just dancing the night away, getting out of your head, then going home, working through the week or going to college, and next weekend doing the same thing. In fact, when a lot of the drugs were going around then in the ’60s I looked at a lot of my peers and saw them basically the same as I saw the people in the discotheques getting drunk. My peers were getting stoned or tripping out, doing the same thing at festivals, it was just a different thing, but they weren’t doing anything with what they learned from that experience. Just criticizing the people that got drunk instead of getting stoned. Like there was some big difference, but there wasn’t.

Emma Warren

Do you think if you had grown up in America in the ’80s or ’90s you might have been a straight edge girl?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

I don’t know [laughs]. I’m glad I was born when I was born, because I got to straddle all kinds of different movements.

Emma Warren

You touched on it a second ago, talking about using music and art, although I know that perhaps there isn’t any difference for you, as a way of touching on things or expressing things. Would you say that your artistic position is about thinking about feelings, and then finding sounds that will reflect that and will communicate that?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Yes, because it’s all about communicating. Getting out there. The means of communicating is either art actions, visual or physical actions, or with the music, and then sharing it with people. “Audience” is a very loose term to me. I prefer that we are all there in the same room together so it’s a joint experience. I’m not delivering something that they have got to be passive about, I’m not interested in that. It’s about communication and then feedback. And that’s what we started when Throbbing Gristle began. It was all about connecting with people and then connecting with other people, much like here, like you are doing at the workshops here, where people get to suddenly think, “Oh actually, we might not in musical terms have anything similar to each other but in other ways we do have an affinity that clicks somehow that would really be good for a collaboration.” Although on the surface it doesn’t seem likely. It’s the same with all the work that we do and that we have done all these years, you meet people and something magic happens.

Emma Warren

Now, when people talk about expressing emotion in music, there is usually an assumption that you are talking about positive music. When people talk about emotional music they usually talk about happy or love-sounding music. In the kind of music that you’ve made, there has been music that does sound like that, but there has also been music that has sounded very strange and disturbing and upsetting sometimes and extreme, certainly. The visuals that went along with that also reinforce that – the cutting animals’ heads open etc. Is it easier to make beautiful music or hard and disturbing music, or is there no difference for you?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

I think when you are doing music that addresses really hard issues, there is a kind of ecstasy at some point where it suddenly clicks and there’s a beauty in it, because you have located that feeling deep down inside that has made sense of something that’s really hard to face, which is what we started doing with TG. And we have continued, even after TG finished, and I went on to do in Chris & Cosey and Carter Tutti even today, we still do the same thing. When Throbbing Gristle regrouped, the same again.

I am not interested in music that’s trite and sings about love on a certain level that everyone can fall in love and have a family and live happily ever after and go through the fields of corn with the children and all that crap. I’m interested in what society, culture and human beings are capable of doing to one another, good and bad. And the bad has to be spoken about. It has to be discussed, it has to be assimilated, and sound is a fantastic medium for that, because it tweaks little nerve endings in you that bypasses any kind of conditioning you have had because it’s a very physical thing, you can’t do anything about that.

So, a lot of music that we do and sounds that we use, that’s why we use them, because it’s more about the sounds triggering those kinds of emotions than about the lyrics or the chord changes or the choruses. I am not interested in any of that. It’s just the sounds that speak to people, really.

Emma Warren

I definitely noticed a strong twinkle in your eye when you were just talking about that impact that sound can have and the fact that you shouldn’t be afraid of what we think of as negative feelings. I don’t even know what the word would be, we’re kind of very limited in our vocabulary to talk about the bad…

Cosey Fanni Tutti

You get down to your gut feelings and certain sounds speak to you in the gut and those are the ones that really evoke emotions that I am interested in when you’re making music.

Emma Warren

Can you play us something specific maybe as an idea, one of the records you made, perhaps in the Throbbing Gristle area, which did that?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Oh God, there are so many. I don’t know, what have we got on the playlist here?

(music: Throbbing Gristle – “Hamburger Lady (Carter Tutti Remix)”)

(music: Throbbing Gristle – “Hit By A Rock”])

Emma Warren

Now you are mentioning Chris, can you tell is who Chris Carter is and what role he played in Throbbing Gristle?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

He is over there [points]. He was the linchpin of TG, actually, because before Chris came into the fold we had no means of us being able technically to get out what we had in our minds. So, when he started coming to the studio and we started doing jam sessions together, that’s when things really started taking off because he had the technical know-how to make real the ideas, and the way that we could actually start using guitars in a different way to the norm. He knew how to build certain boxes and things like that. He would do that back at his flat, and then come over to see us in Hackney on the weekend and say, “I’ve got this, let’s try this out.” He is the linchpin, really.

Emma Warren

I understand that in the beginning before Chris came along you were trying to do stuff like that, maybe taking acoustic instruments and hooking them up to contact microphones, but then he came along and allowed you to do different things.

Cosey Fanni Tutti

The thing was, in COUM, we had instruments all along, but it was limited by our own knowledge and capability of doing anything beyond that. We did a couple of performances where we used contact mics in art actions, and did a couple of electronic festivals that way. But what we really needed to do was to get away from that because it was kind of musique concrete and it was a very precious area for us to go into, really. We didn’t really want to go in that direction. The friend that we were working with knew Chris, and that’s how we met Chris. One of his friends had already built us an amp and a couple of things and then Chris came along and was building his own synths at the time, and it was just like, “Well, you know, that’s really where we want to be.”

Emma Warren

When I was making sure that I had enough knowledge about you and doing the research and whatever, and I was reading about the early days of Throbbing Gristle, you think about it externally and it sounds so extreme, so hardcore and full-on in this passionate way that’s not afraid of looking at despair and doom and that pit of the stomach you were talking about. But then you’re talking about things like just hanging out at weekends and building speaker cabinets and making sounds and going to the caff, and working out which sounds you like and going back and recording them. It sounds different somehow to this idea of you living a very hardcore life. Was that how it was to you?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Well, we had to eat. There are certain human functions have to take place between the creative bit, but it was pretty hardcore in Hackney then. It’s very friendly in comparison now. We would be chased through London Fields by gangs, that kind of thing, and we had our aggressive moments as well [laughs]. So, it was extreme on all levels, really, because we all had our separate lives as well and came together at the weekends, and what we did separately had extreme elements anyway. And then we came together and did things together that were extreme, so there is a real mix of all kinds of weird stuff.

Emma Warren

So, how did the kind of squat living affect what was happening at this time?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

In terms of what? It was just an opportunity to get a house and get out of the studio and, funnily, enough it was a music band that we saw in the Broadway Market, and they had been squatting this house on Beck Road and had just got a deal or something. They said when we move out we will give you the key and you can move in – that’s how we got it. But it meant that we had somewhere to live as opposed to living in the basement studio with mold.

Emma Warren

In England these days, there is not really a culture of people squatting houses. Again, I don’t know how much squatting happens in other countries, but certainly in the UK, in the ’60s and ’70s, and maybe up to the early ’80s, in cities it was really relatively easy to take over a house that was empty and just live in it. And often people used this as a way of funding their own creative lives: they would live in them, turn them into art spaces, maybe just turn them into hovels, whatever. But certainly, there was a culture of squatting houses, and making that a way of you being able to do what you want to do in your life. After 12 years of you living in a house or something it became legally yours, there’s a law called squatters rights, so if you had been there long enough it actually became yours at the end of it.

Cosey Fanni Tutti

What happened down Beck Road was that we squatted it and then as houses became empty we told other people and now the whole street is just an artist community. I think most of them are, they bought them in the end.

Emma Warren

Rather than waiting for the 12 years to be up?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Yes, it’s easier.

Emma Warren

We have kind of talked a bit about Throbbing Gristle and those people in the audience who don’t necessarily know the music might get an idea of the sort of extremities of it, as well. But there was also music that came out through Throbbing Gristle that ended up being really influential on music that you may be more familiar with. Say, Detroit techno people like Carl Craig, who directly referenced Throbbing Gristle’s album 20 Jazz Funk Greats on 69’s “4 Jazz Funk Classics.” You weren’t aware of that connection at the time, were you?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

No, not at all. We just worked and did what we did. It sounds really, not arrogant, but we weren’t interested about anyone else really in the music scene other, than people like Cabs, Clock DVA, all those kind of people that were around then. I think even some of the punk bands like Adam & The Ants, they used to come around sometimes, Alternative TV, all those people, but they weren’t about what we were about, what they did was still rock & roll to us but we still, like I said, you don’t have to like someone’s music to have something in common with them.

The bands then, it’s quite weird because, because like I said before, it wasn’t a career to us and it wasn’t a career to most of them – it was to Adam and the Ants and that’s something else with punk, but the Cabs and all those people, there was such a spirit of collaboration there because no one had much money, so whatever gear you had you would kind of say, “Look, let’s do a gig and if we all go, then we can share the gear.” It was as simple as that. So, we used to do a lot of things like that, where we would have people over on things and then just jammed together, that kind of thing. And also, we released the Cabs first cassette for them as well on Industrial Records.

Emma Warren

Cassette?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Yeah, cassette tapes!

Emma Warren

Can we have a listen to something from 20 Jazz Funk Greats, maybe? You choose.

(music: Throbbing Gristle – “Still Walking”)

Emma Warren

You made this in 1978, when most people weren’t making music like this. Can you talk us through how you were creating music and what you were using?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Disco was very big then in the ’70s. You had all the usual Saturday Night Fever, and that kind of thing going on, so that will give you an idea of how different TG was at the time. It was totally different. Just looking at this, the equipment that Chris was using for that because he did a lot of the prep on the music that we did and he still does. He prepares the foundation of tracks that we all then listen to and then decide which we feel that we can actually play along with and make adjustments, and so on. There is definitely [times], where we can listen to something and say that’s TG or that isn’t, because we just know. As I said, we used vibes, we managed to get some of those, Space Echo, modular system, Roland CR 78, drum machines, and my cornet. I started playing cornet at the time, putting it through anything and everything I can, played in any way but normal. So, we just basically took whatever instruments and drum machines and everything else, and just did what we felt right and went together properly. The cornet became quite important in TG quite by accident, because it was Sleazy who brought it into Martello Street, and he couldn’t pucker up properly and get a note out of it. So, he just handed it to me one day and said, “How do you do it?” And I just happened to do it first blast, so I took over cornet from that day on, and he went back to his little sample keyboard.

Emma Warren

Do you think it’s easier to be irreverent with music if you are not classically trained, if you are not told how to do it?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Possibly, because I think if there are no rules then you are not aware of breaking any rules, are you? But Sleazy had been trained, I think he was taught to play the piano, wasn’t he, like I was. So, he’s the one out of all four of us that every now and again will say, “That’s not in tune,” as if it matters [laughs]. But, for some reason, it matters to him and you have to diplomatically spin things around a bit. I think it is, but I’ve always been of the mind that if you are not taught how to do something and you come in with a free mind, then anything is open to you and anything is possible. I have always found that when I worked with trained musicians, they seem to have a fallback formula to go on when they suddenly can’t think what to do, when they are improvising. I think that’s the worst thing about being trained, you have a fallback that’s been programmed. Whereas, if you have not been trained, you have no fallback and your imagination is endless.

Emma Warren

That’s quite a scary place creatively for most people, though.

Cosey Fanni Tutti

What, when you don’t know what to do next? I think that’s the best place, isn’t it?

Emma Warren

But most people would disagree, I suspect?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Possibly [to the audience]. Would you disagree? No, I think it’s the best place to be, to be honest, because that’s where you find new territory and most exciting territory, I think. I’m not interested in riffs or anything else like that.

Emma Warren

And, I guess, that’s the difference between approaching something as a career, where you need to have something to fall back on, so that you can continue in your career, and doing something just because you want to.

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Yes, totally. Working with trained musicians is quite a strange experience, really, because I seem to sort of feel that I should try and untrain them somehow. It’s like breaking a horse or something, “Just loosen up, please don’t do that!” [Laughs]

Emma Warren

You mentioned when you were talking about the things that you were using at this time, you mention the Roland, some specific equipment, how easy or hard was it to get that equipment at the time?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

It was really difficult for us because it was expensive. We did try and get a Roland deal – TG trying to get a Roland deal – and we did a really sort of kitsch promo photo and sent it in. That was something that we used to enjoy doing things like that because we knew it was a hiding to nothing, really. But yes, it was very difficult. When Chris got the 808, it was just like, he was just so excited. He rushed down to Rod Argent’s because he was the one who got the first ones in the UK, and Chris got one of the first ones. It was very difficult because we had no money, basically. Chris used to make all our stuff but that’s where the sound came from as well. It wasn’t a hardship, in a way, because even when we bought the gear Chris would modify it, we wouldn’t use it out of the box.

Emma Warren

You were very early adopters of the 303 and the 808 as well, what did you want to do with them when you first got them?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

We played with them at first as a novelty. Like, “Listen to this. It sounds just like…” It was fun, you know? But then Chris started doing it for real and giving it the TG edge, and that’s when it sort of came into its own for us, really.

Emma Warren

What modifications were you doing?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

You can’t ask me; the mod man is in the audience! [Laughs]

Emma Warren

Which mods are you aware of?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

One of the first mods we had was on your keyboard, wasn’t it [to Chris in audience]? When we were in America with TG, we had trouble getting it back in the country.

Emma Warren

Why?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Why, Chris?

Chris Carter

I’d had this keyboard modified that I bought in America, and the company that did it sent me back some other bits to go with the keyboard. And customs wanted to charge me a lot of money for it – it got really complicated, it’s a boring story.

Cosey Fanni Tutti

So, he modified stuff himself at home after that.

Emma Warren

So, how much do you personally enjoy getting involved in the piece of equipment and learning to use it and seeing what you can do with it?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

I’m a very physical musician, so even if I work with laptops now, I’ll work on Ableton, I have a laptop, but I have to have a physical contact with things and feel things moving and going out. So, when I get a piece of equipment and Chris shows me the basics of it, so that I can get in and start working with it and see what it can do for me, I don’t typically want to know the backend story of it and all the rest, to be honest, because I only need to know what it can do. I usually have a notion of what I want to use it for.

Chris will say, “This will be really good for you because of the way you work.” And I’ll say, “In what way?” And then he’ll tell me, and then show me how it works roughly, and I start using it. One of the good things about that’s if you don’t know what something does or is supposed to do, like being trained with instruments, you can come across something. It has happened a few times in the studio where I have done something and Chris will say, “How did you do that?” And I’ll say, “I don’t know but it sounds good, doesn’t it?” That’s what I’m more interested in. Chris is super, super-clever with gear and I am spoiled in that way, that I can call on his expertise.

Emma Warren

What pieces of equipment have you enjoyed getting involved with recently?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

The Faderfox on Ableton has been my biggest shift ever, and doing samples, stretch and squeezing live and all that kind of stuff, I really enjoy that. Also, getting Guitar Rig, so that I can change my guitar even more. While we’re on stage with TG it’s used and I’ve seen reviews afterwards saying, “Sleazy was great on that.” And I was thinking, “Actually, he was drinking his wine at that point and it was my guitar, but never mind.” And that’s the kind of thing that happens within TG, you don’t know who does what, and that’s the way we like it.

Emma Warren

You have got hands-on experience yourself, and you’ve been involved with those key bits of technology throughout the last 30 years or whatever. What do you think are the pros and cons of working with programs like Ableton?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

The downside of it is that you can instantly recognize when someone is using Ableton and if they are just using it as-is, kind of thing. It does have its own kind of sound. But I really love it, especially for when we are doing live soundtracks and stuff like that, free-flowing material. I think it’s brilliant for that. I did a gig with a Russian guy that I did a project with, I think it was the year before last, and that was fantastic. It was the first time I had used it on my own with samples I had done of him. He sent me some audio of his voice, and then I had modified them and everything before I came out, and then just played the clips and used the effects within Ableton and everything. It was brilliant and I loved it, but everyone knows how Ableton works, it’s really good, and it’s what you bring to it. It’s not the machine or anything else, it’s what you bring to it.

Emma Warren

Obviously, after Throbbing Gristle finished, you and Chris started making music together as Chris & Cosey. Which pieces of equipment tipped you into the stuff you were doing in the early days of Chris & Cosey?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

I suppose, Chris doing all the sequencing. I was still doing striptease then, so I heard a lot of different music going on in the clubs, and things like that. And Chris was really interested in sequencing and we just fancied doing something a little more lightweight like that, but with an edge to it and stuff. that’s why Chris & Cosey started off the way it did. There was a sort of crossover period with Heartbeat and Trancebut then came [Songs of] Love & Lust and that was the Chris & Cosey sound, really.

Emma Warren

The music was directly related to the artwork you were doing, with yourself as the artwork in the strip clubs, and with the exhibitions you were doing.

Cosey Fanni Tutti

I did dance to Throbbing Gristle, I danced to “United,” and the guys in the pubs could not figure out what was going on. I danced to “Love Lies Limp” by Alternative TV as well, that was a funny one, and Pere Ubu. So, I used to bring in a couple of songs like that.

Emma Warren

Did you bring your own music with you?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Very rarely. I was there incognito, if you like, because that was the best place to be because that’s when you get an honest response from people in that situation.

Emma Warren

I meant more, did you transport your own little cassette player with you to press play for the music for the gigs in the strip ?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

No, you had a DJ there.

Emma Warren

So, you would slip him some Throbbing Gristle to play, “Put this on next for me.”

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Rarely, because it didn’t go well with striptease at all, and I was earning a living, you know? [Laughs]

Emma Warren

That must have been fantastically confusing for the clients.

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Funnily enough, I used to use “Hard Workin’ Man” by Captain Beefheart solidly throughout doing striptease. It was a fantastic rhythm and it was heavy, and it was dirty and it works really well. Then there’s no other people I knew except Eurythmics, I used to use some of their stuff.

Emma Warren

I think now is the time to listen to some early Chris & Cosey so we get an aural sense of where we are.

Cosey Fanni Tutti

This is from Songs Of Love & Lust.

(music: Chris & Cosey – “Love Cuts”)

Cosey Fanni Tutti

We wanted to bring all the knowledge and experience and emotions that preceded that into that little melting pot and see what came out of it with the present day, which was the sounds around the studio and everything else, and the sounds that evoked particular feelings in us. Whereas the Human League and people like that were totally different. I suppose, it was a crisp, clean look at now towards the future, whereas we wanted a dirty look at the past and a “hands getting dirty” feel to the present, moving onwards to the future.

Emma Warren

There is a difference, and sometimes you can listen to this stuff, and it sounds like it’s roughly coming from the same area, but there’s the idea that it’s propelling you forwards or pushing you in quite different directions. Can you give us a sense of the kind of breadth? Again, some people would be very familiar with the music, and some people less so. What is the kind of spectrum of Chris & Cosey and how it sounded at that time? Some of it sounded very beautiful and very exquisite and some of it was channeling more of this darker stuff that you are talking about. Can you find something on there that shows us a little bit of an idea about some of the edges that Chris & Cosey would go to?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Early, or mid or...?

Emma Warren

I guess, we don’t need to be too chronological about it.

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Exotika was a very clean kind of sound for us and this was inspired by lounge music, really.

(music: Chris & Cosey – “Exotika”)

Cosey Fanni Tutti

I think there is a danger, because you make music as you listen to it, you analyze how it has been made – that’s one of the pitfalls of making music, you can’t enjoy some music because all you recognize immediately is some preset, that’s usually what turns me off. I think, “Lazy bastard,” and that colors the rest of the track for me. I think, “How could they think that was good to put that on there when it’s going to appear on some ad on TV any minute now because someone else has bought it as an easy thing to use?” I don’t know, I think usually what gets me when I listen to things, is when I can’t figure out how they’ve done it, or I haven’t heard someone use that machine or instrument in that way before, or it just sounds totally mental. That’s really good because something good is going to come out of that at some point because they have just gone blaaaaaagh!, you know? And that’s the stuff that excites me, but as for practicing listening, I don’t know. I think that smacks a little bit of forcing yourselves that you have to listen to something that you’re not enjoying, just for the sake of listening. There is not enough time in our lives to be doing that [laughs].

Emma Warren

One of the things you like when you listen to things is the idea that something sounds completely mental. Can you just tell us about a couple of experiences when you have had that with artists, so pieces of music or artists that you have been drawn to? It doesn’t have to be now, although it could be now.

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Well, it happened yesterday, actually. I went to my MySpace, and there was a Korean girl, who had sent me a little message just to say, I think it says on my page, “My life is my art and my art is my life.” And she said, “My art is my life, too.” So, I went on to her MySpace page, and I went through and it just said on there, first of all, I read something, speaking in the third person, she doesn’t know how anything works but she doesn’t care. And then I turned on the music and it was just great. It was just totally anarchic, but it had a kind of feel to it that immediately drew you in and made you smile. The energy of it came through, which I suppose is what I’m interested in. People charging me with energy, with their music, and I think [for] everybody that’s what music is about.

Emma Warren

Now again, this also might sound a little bit like the listening question but I think it’s interesting: Is there something that you always do before you start doing something? You know, some people need to, I don’t know, go for a run or drink a cup of tea or wear a certain piece of clothing. Some people have little things that they will do before they start being creative, maybe a way of signaling that they are in that mode or whatever. Is there anything that you do before you make music?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

No, we tend to just decide that it’s about time to get working again, for a start. Until you get in there and turn all the gear on and start messing around, it isn’t going to happen. We do that, but that’s the only thing we do is just turn on the gear, and start thinking what kind of mood are we in and usually it goes from there. You start off with something, and you keep adding to it and it doesn’t seem to go anywhere and you shelve it. You play another sound and think, “Let’s start from scratch.” And then you suddenly think, ‘Actually, what we’ve just done will sound really good with this,’ and then you go back to that bit. You know, it’s the usual.

Emma Warren

If people are talking about music that would be considered high culture they may think about how the people practice and all that kind of stuff, how often are you in the studio?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

[Laughs] It’s difficult, we don’t practice, we’re not interested in practicing.

Emma Warren

I’m not asking about practicing...

Cosey Fanni Tutti

The practice of making music, I know what you mean.

Emma Warren

I suppose I’m interested in how often you are in there. Obviously, you’ve got other things going on, because you’re a visual artist as well, so it’s competing demands on your time between the different aspects of what you create.

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Chris is always in the studio. He is never out of the studio, because the studio is the hub of everything, including all the website design and everything. So, he is either doing the website and all the visuals are in there as well, all the video gear, so he is always in there. We don’t have a manager or anything, we do everything ourselves, so if I am doing admin for our label or anything else, or answering requests for remixes and stuff like that, he is downstairs sourcing the tapes for the things and all the rest of it. So, he is more in the studio than I am. But, as far as practice goes, we spend a lot of time... obviously, with TG stuff, we’ve been in the studio non-stop since we got back together again, really.

Emma Warren

That was 2004?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

In 2002, we regrouped again. So, finding the time to do our own material, which we regard as Carter Tutti really, is more and more difficult. We are starting a new album this year, actually. But we would spend a lot of time doing remixes and that kind of thing, and tracks for compilations, so although we don’t do our own stuff, we are still sort of doing music. But our lifeblood is that we have launched into something that’s not necessarily our territory but it’s interesting to us, so we don’t ever discount any kind of proposals from people, because that’s what we’re about. We do a hell of a lot of collaborative work in those terms.

Emma Warren

Some of the collaborations you’ve done have been with people very close to you and others have been with people who apparently are quite far removed, certainly in terms of the sound of what they did. What for you makes a good collaboration?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

When it works out, basically [laughs]. A good collaboration is where you have a fever pitch of ideas that you throw at each other, not worrying about rejection, because part of the whole collaboration thing is that somebody has to compromise at some point. This isn’t your track. It’s a collaboration. Learning the diplomacy of rejecting someone’s idea, you don’t say “That’s shit!” - although you could if you are really close to them, which is what we do in Throbbing Gristle. But if it’s with someone else you have to show some kind of respect for any ideas they throw in and kind of maneuver around things.

Emma Warren

Have you got any tips for people who may find themselves in those collaborative situations?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

From a recent experience of a collaboration gone wrong, I would say make sure that you agree at the beginning this is going to be a 50/50 collaboration because that’s what the spirit of collaborating is. No matter who does what, without one another it would not happen, so it’s 50/50.

Emma Warren

And what about collaboration as a way of expanding what is possible for you to do musically, perhaps taking yourself out of your comfort zone?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

I think that’s crucial to collaborations and I think that’s what’s so great about them.

Emma Warren

And what has been an experience that you’ve had in collaboration that has done that for you?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

The one I just spoke about that has gone bad. That was very much like that.

Emma Warren

We talked a little bit about Core and some of the collaborations on the Core album. We talked about Robert Wyatt very briefly. Why was that an interesting collaboration for you?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Yes, because he’s about as far removed away from what we do as anyone could get. While not quite, actually, because he is very experimental in his music. But the fact that he is structured in his music-making is very alien to us, but that is what he liked about working with us and that’s what we liked about working with him. Working with Robert was a distance collaboration, he couldn’t have got down to our studio physically because of his wheelchair and so on, but, also, he was very technophobic at the time as well, so he felt more comfortable sending stuff on cassette. He sent me lyrics as well, which were words, they weren’t lyrics at the time, they were like cut-ups. He sent me a load of words and I made lyrics out of them, placed them in the song, and he also sent us some little snippets of his voice going [sings rhythmically] “doot, doot, doot,” which we put in as a kind of a little drumbeat, really. And then sent that back to him and then he sent back little harmonies, harmonizing little parts of my vocal and things, so it was a great collaboration. I think the thing with collaborations is, using that as a for instance, if one person seems to have a flow, then I think it’s good, and very intuitive if someone can sit back while they are comfortable with that flow and let it happen. And then come in and bring things to the piece because if you keep interrupting it, you’re never going to get anywhere, you are just going to piss each other off. It’s a bit like saying, “I can do better than that, I want to put my drums in there now.” And that’s not what it’s about, it’s about feeling your way through it together.

Emma Warren

Do you have any of Core with you?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

I do, actually. [Looks through computer] There’s three tracks I’ve got down here. I’ve got them all on the other one… I don’t know if any of you know Coil, but Sleazy was in Coil with Geff Rushton and this collaboration was done similar to the one with Robert Wyatt, but Geff sent us a lot of his vocals, About 20 minutes of vocals, loads and loads of vocals.

(music: Coil – “Feeder”)

Emma Warren

When you were talking a minute ago about this situation at home of Chris in the studio and you doing some other stuff as well when you’re not in the studio and doing your other art, you were talking about dealing with requests for people to license things, which is the song that seems to be most requested or you are still being asked about others that change over time?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

It changes, but it’s usually “October Love Song,” “Exotika” has been asked for, “Heartbeat,” “Re-Education Through Labour,” “Dancing Ghosts” and “Impulse.” The Trance kind of era.

Emma Warren

“Dancing Ghosts,” that was one of the first tunes with the 808, why do you think people are still interested in that?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

I don’t know. I think sometimes it’s because it’s from an album called Trance and that was back in ’82, and yet trance as it’s known now has come all those years later and yet they look back and think, “Trance, way back then?” I think they listen to it and make the connection in that way. The music on it’s quite relevant to today still for that reason.

Emma Warren

And, I guess, that’s the same kind of era as “October Love Song” as well. It would be nice to give people a sense of what those pieces sound like if they don’t already know, give them a burst.

(music: CTI - Dancing Ghosts)

Cosey Fanni Tutti

In those years when we were with those two labels and we played a lot in America. I think, because we had done so much live work it did affect our studio work, to be honest, because it’s so visceral when you play live and you want to get that energy in the records, but at the same time the studio gives you that control to get it just how you want it. I think in the ’90s we started thinking about live work – and it sounds really weird, but live work and studio work as two separate things. We had to keep our sanity, really. There is no way we wanted or could reproduce what we did in the studio on stage, and we sort of accepted that as well as part of our approach to our music. We didn’t mind the fact that we couldn’t reproduce it live.

We never did, to be honest, but there was an expectation because of the labels we had gone with. Play It Again Sam at the time had 2 Unlimited, and all that kind of stuff so there was a lot of going and doing PAs to a backing tape, which just wasn’t us. In that sense, we made a mental decision that what we did live was live, and that’s how it sounded, it wasn’t going to be the record. Yes, it would be that track, and it would be recognizable, but it would have a life of its own.

Emma Warren

And there were technological shifts as well?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

We got a computer! It was like, “Oh, wow, we don’t need that huge mixing desk anymore.” And that was a huge turning point for us, again. Ditch the samplers, all those floppy disks and all that crap. That was a revolution and a revelation for us as well.

Emma Warren

The way you were talking about it, it appears that it made you feel very free, to be able to do that. What was the sort of freeness that you associate with that shift?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

I think when you work with some equipment, you fall into a kind of a rut almost and there is an end to certain equipment at some point. Even although to us the [Akai] S 900 and 950, and the 1000 we got after that, it was a sampler, and you only get out what you put in it. Just the physical action of doing that and the way you do that, repeatedly, you were talking about the practice of recording, that in itself starts to taint the experience a lot of ways, because you want some other way of putting in and getting out. It’s hard to explain, but the whole world opened up for us with software and everything. We could tweak and tweak to our hearts’ content and we didn’t have the cost of tape, which was a big, big factor. We weren’t in a position where we had a big record deal or had an advance or someone paying us to do this. We had a child to bring up, as well, and those mundane things do impact on your creative life. You have to start thinking school uniform or tape? Stupid things like that, when you are not earning any money out of your work.

Emma Warren

Those kind of small real-life things. You mentioned earlier and just referenced it again, doing things yourself, and not having a manager, not having a big record deal, there are some obvious advantages and disadvantages, what is the main advantage of doing things that way?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

I don’t think there is any disadvantage, to be honest…

Emma Warren

Sometimes people prefer to shove that stuff to someone else so they can just concentrate on the music?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Well, I haven’t got a clone of me that would know what I want and a manager would have to be that. If I had a manager going off and doing things like that, I would be constantly checking that they had done the right thing. It’s not a control-freak thing with me, it’s just the fact that I have never found anyone that could do that yet. I mean, in Throbbing Gristle we have a manager, but, even so, we are constantly going back and forth saying, “Make sure it’s not like that, it’s like this. Otherwise it’s just not going to work.” I don’t see a disadvantage, other than, I haven’t got all the time in the world to do everything, but the freedom it gives me to be independent is worth it.

Emma Warren

So, was it around that time, you are talking about making a decisive shift between live and studio, which albums are you talking about there?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

I think Exotika was very produced. I mean, even Love & Lust was still a bit raw, but Exotika was the one that was very produced, and we knew when we did that. I mean, we loved it, and we knew that we would never be able to do this live. But, so what? It’s great as a record. That flip happened about then.

Emma Warren

But if you are thinking about the last album that you put out, what is the connection between any live representation of it and the music itself, and some of the art work or the films, the vignettes that you’ve done that go along with it?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

As Chris & Cosey, we have always done video and visuals when we have played live, always.

Emma Warren

And also destroying or messing about with the video equipment in the same way as you were with the samplers.

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Yeah, the videos were always cut-ups and mash-ups and all kinds of things going on. But prior to that, it was slides and film, so there were always multi-layers of things going on. It first started off where we wanted people, the visuals, it’s not to distract people from us but just to lose themselves in the sound, to forget that we were performing it. Then you get over that thing of someone performing the song off the album, which is what I was talking about, and they go there just for what you are creating for them right there and then. I am not interested in people seeing me on the front of the stage, fronting a band or anything – all I am interested in is doing the music. It was a way of making them connect with something visual and those visuals would represent a feeling or an emotion or warmth or coldness about the tracks we will be playing live, and they still do. But now, more so, they are not cut-ups or random, because we used to rely a lot on chance with those, which was great, but now we do little vignettes more. For the last album, we did vignettes for the tracks.

Emma Warren

So do you have something from Feral Vapours to show us?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Yes, I have a video piece.

(music: Carter Tutti - unknown)

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Sorry, I think it looks better on my laptop, actually.

Emma Warren

I apologize for that. I know external perceptions aren’t really what you’re interested in, but how do you think external perceptions of what you do have changed over the years? How did people see you then, and how do people see you now and how has that changed?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

I think just by the very fact of the way that time works. People, unless they come to you from nowhere, come to you from knowing some of your history, therefore that paints how they see you now. That’s inevitable, really.

Emma Warren

Before we hand over to these guys to see what they want to ask you, and I’m sure there are lots of other things to ask you, what is the single thing you think you can do to remain creatively interesting or creatively interested?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

That’s a difficult one. I think to do it for yourself. That’s a contradiction in terms, because you are doing it for other people to share it with them, but what I’m talking about is, you know yourself whether you are expressing who you are. The minute you start expressing something for someone else, then there is a kind of betrayal there, and you have left yourself behind somewhere. It’s a long road back because I have known a lot of people like that, that have started off doing great music, and been seduced by Hollywood and everything else, and they just can’t get back. They are rather unhappy but very rich, which seems to go hand-in-hand. But, if that’s the lifestyle you want, then that’s fine.

Emma Warren

I like that idea, if you betray yourself, it actually being very hard to come back from. It’s a really interesting way to start compartmentalizing the routes people take, but I guess that’s a whole other conversation. Shall we throw questions out over here? Before you ask your question you just need to wait for the microphone, otherwise it won’t be recorded and everyone else won’t gain the benefit of what you are asking.

Audience member

Purely from a perspective of someone listening to the music and seeing the covers, and knowing about bands that are kind of friends of Throbbing Gristle and Chris & Cosey and stuff, like David Tibet, this may be a flawed perspective, but somehow it feels like there is always this content that’s about something mystical and almost occult. Like, you guys are trying to decode something through the music. I am really curious about this part, maybe it’s not important for the other people?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

I think the reason you do music is important to anyone, really, so that’s the relevance of the question. When you are interested in things like the occult, and magick with a “k” and so on, and that kind of lifestyle, just connecting with yourself on that level, rather than on a superficial level – it’s more about that, it’s denying superficiality, really, and getting inside yourself and inside other people. That’s what it’s about. Music generally is about that. Whether it’s just to go out dancing, getting off your head, whatever. But for me, that has turned into some kind of superficial act now, because getting out of your head in the ’60s and ’70s is very different to how they do it now, and the reasons why they do it now. It doesn’t lead to anywhere or any advancement. It tends to hold people back, and I’m very much against that kind of activity, because to me it smacks a form of control. When people are that drugged up and so on you can keep them where you want them, basically. Even if they cause trouble, you have got a bill for that, you have got an amount of money to spend on that. They’re not doing anything else politically active, that’s for sure.

Audience member

Just another thing, what you were saying about nowadays, club culture...

Cosey Fanni Tutti

I am talking about club culture as in binge-drinking kind of club culture, not the subcultures that are really interesting.

Audience member

I remember reading in an interview from Andy Blake from the label Dissident, which I kind of knew, he said something about some club music can be a pacifying thing for a crowd, instead of what you are saying about charging people with energy. Do you think it’s kind of meant to be that way?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

That’s a big question, am I supposed to answer that? [Laughter] We’re getting into philosophy. There is always that conflict in society, because without it, you have to have black and white to then start pushing against the barriers and start changing things. If you have no black, you can’t say, “Hang on a minute. What about this?” You have got to have the thing that you are fighting against. But, on the other hand, I don’t think it needs to be quite as destructive as it is now. I have been here a lot longer than you, and I know those kind of club scenes that were just hedonistic weren’t as destructive as they are now. With the internet on top of that, which removes people from one-to-one even more, then it’s even more damaging to then go out and maintain that, and just tick off lists of things to do and never really connect properly with those activities. I’m talking about people going and seeing all these fantastic sights and everything, “Well, I’ve done that.” But how long did you do it? “I went out there for two weeks,” you know? But that’s not what I’m talking about, most people engage with something for a very long time, because they want something out of it. Whether they agree with it or not, whether they use it to move forward or not, at least then, they have access to information and knowledge, whereas I don’t think a lot of people do nowadays. I think it is just so instantaneous on the internet to sort of look things up and not go and actually physically interact with things, which is what we are talking about with one kind of club to another.

Audience member

I just wanted to thank you for being here, first of all. I really appreciate that your music is very moody, it’s very visual, and it evokes different kinds of emotions. One thing that I find as a vocalist is that sometimes – an untrained vocalist, at that – is that sometimes people want you to sing a certain way to evoke a certain type of feeling, and it’s usually always the same feelings. It’s like when they hear this song they want to feel cool, or want to feel sexy, or they want to feel strong, and it’s constantly those same feelings…

Cosey Fanni Tutti

It’s about them, isn’t it? But if it comes from you, they will get what they want.

Audience member

I just wondered if you ever felt that type of pressure to not explore other ranges of emotion and feelings – I find a lot of this in mainstream music – it’s constantly focused on these types of feelings, when you can escape in a variety of emotions and feelings, and not just these same ones that I feel are constantly being [demanded], you know? You want to go out and feel strong, feel really cool in the club, and want to make music that reflects that.

Cosey Fanni Tutti

You can communicate and say things in very different ways, even vocally. You don’t even have to use words and you probably know that if you are not a trained singer. And also, with vocals, I think that everyone has their own unique voice and I think you find that yourself, by just expressing your feelings, to be honest. When someone comes in and says, ”Can you sing this? It’s in this key,” which means absolutely nothing to me, I haven’t got a clue. Chris will back me up on that, I go by the music. I don’t know about you, but I go by the music, and what sound I can create from my body will go with that. I’m a sound box, I am not a vocalist, really. If there are certain words that I want to get across, like on the last album, specifically it’s a very emotional album that we did. There were things as we were talking earlier about things that had happened to others and members of our family around the world in the last four years that were quite devastating, so the words in that respect were really important. But, more than that, was the timbre of the voice, and how you said the words, and how they sat with the sounds that you put with them. And someone to come and start telling you how to sing, it’s like telling a piano how to play. It is crazy, you know? But you have to have that mental leap, and not everybody has it.

Audience member

Hi. Some of us here are probably still in the process of trying to find their own sound, their own philosophy or their own approach of what music is, and what sound is, and what identifies them. What advice do you have for somebody who’s just in the beginning process of trying to figure out what sort of sound or what sort of image defines him or her?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

It’s very difficult, because as I have said, you have to feel your way through and you have to open yourself up as a conduit, really. When you do music that’s the key to it, but, at the same time, you are looking for something, so it’s very difficult. You are in a real push-and-pull situation the whole time. I am sure that when you do music you have recognized that feeling that it just feels right, and you don’t know why and you don’t know how it happened so quickly. But suddenly you have got a track or something within 30 minutes, and it took you four days to do the last one, but those moments are really magical and they are few and far between, I think. I think that’s what you have to remember all the time. It’s very difficult to explain but I think it’s one of the most exciting moments, to be honest, where you are, because you have no history yet, it’s all to come. I mean, that’s really exciting, but it’s also very difficult, very, very difficult. But you must know, yourself, when things sit well with you, do you not? Yeah. I think that’s all you can go by, not worry about someone else, because history tells us that some of the greatest artists and musicians have been slam-dunked no end of times for what they did and now they are heralded as geniuses.

Audience member

Hello. I’ll get up so you can see me. Being a woman in the music industry, did you get any discrimination in your early years, do you still get it sometimes?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

We were talking about this earlier, actually, whether we wanted to bring up the issue of gender, because music is music, but I understand what you are saying. More so now, because I get that more now ironically than I did in the ’70s, which is really weird to me.

Emma Warren

Do you think that’s because the ’70s were more political, so people would have been more [aware]?

Cosey Fanni Tutti

They were too busy being active, there was too much to put right in the ’70s. And now there is so much passivity from people, much more, I don’t know, ego, “I want to be there,” kind of attitude, that it has got to the point where they are being quiet derogatory towards women. And I have found that, which shocked me, to be honest, because the thought has never gone through my mind that I am a woman doing music until the last three or four years, when I have had it shoved in my face. Like, “Hang on a minute! He meant that because I am a woman. That is weird.” I can’t quite grasp that, because in my mind human beings are human beings, and it makes no bloody difference what sex you are, other than when you get together, obviously. But as far as anything else goes, I am not a dog, I am not a bird, I am not a mouse, so why is it a big deal that I am doing music? But I understand where you’re coming from. The only time I got it in the ’70s was when a Japanese reporter came and asked me what it was like to be the only girl in the band of Throbbing Gristle and we all looked and went, “What?” Like I said earlier, Throbbing Gristle now, Gen has gone transgender, and it’s a question you can’t even answer anyway, because there is one half of me and two blokes, and one’s gay so it really doesn’t matter. But it does to some people, which is I think is becoming a problem.

Emma Warren

In that case do we have any final questions, or is it now time to say thank you very much, Cosey Fanni Tutti?

[Applause]