Throbbing Gristle’s Genesis P-Orridge has passed away

English musician and performance artist Genesis P-Orridge has died aged 70. P-Orridge was diagnosed with chronic leukaemia in 2017. The disease took the avant-garde icon’s life on the morning of March 14 2020. 

P-Orridge famously co-founded and performed lead vocals for the British anti-establishment punk band Throbbing Gristle. Throbbing Gristle are often credited with pioneering the industrial music genre. It’s not an association they shied away from – the term directly correlates with the band’s own label, Industrial Records.

Watch: Throbbing Gristle – Discipline

P-Orridge and co. founded Industrial Records in the mid-1970s chiefly as a means to self-release Throbbing Gristle’s music. The band’s 1977 album The Second Annual Report was the label’s first proper release. A variety of other labels issued TB compilations after the band’s 1981 breakup, but fittingly the band’s final album – 2009’s The Third Mind Movements – came out via Industrial.

The label was also used to nourish the careers of similarly-minded creatives. American industrial progenitor Monte Cazazza became the label’s first signee in 1979, while England’s other major industrial pioneers, Cabaret Voltaire, also worked with the label.

P-Orridge, who adopted gender neutral pronouns, oversaw a number of other projects in their lifetime. Psychic TV is the most prominent of these. Psychic TV formed after TG’s 1981 breakup and made a similar embrace of mixed media and provocation.

Prolific does not even begin to described Psychic TV, who made the Guinness Book of World Records in 1986 for most records released in a single year.

Watch: Psychic TV – Have Mercy

Psychic TV split up in 1999, but P-Orridge revived the band with an all new line-up in 2003. Psychic TV remained operational up until P-Orridge’s leukaemia diagnosis in 2017. This put on hold their European tour, however the band managed to play a small selection of shows the following year.

“It is shocking and uncanny to read that Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is gone, even as I knew it was coming,” wrote Matmos’ Drew Daniel. “I have complicated and mixed feelings about their actions and legacy but absolute and deep gratitude for their musical work and artistic example. R.I.P.”

It is shocking and uncanny to read that Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is gone, even as I knew it was coming. I have complicated and mixed feelings about their actions and legacy but absolute and deep gratitude for their musical work and artistic example. R.I.P. pic.twitter.com/5E0p8kk3Jg

— DREW DANIEL (@DDDrewDaniel) March 14, 2020

Many others posted online tributes to P-Orridge, including Cold Cave, Machinedrum and TV host Richard Metzger.

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