GENESIS P-ORRIDGE,
1950-2020

Genesis P-Orridge, a founder of the influential and experimental bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, died Saturday of leukemia in New York City. P-Orridge was 70.

P-Orridge’s daughters and the label that released P-Orridge’s music, Dais Records, announced his death via social media.

Born Neil Megson, the pseudonym Genesis P-Orridge was an avant-garde performance artist whose collective COUM Transmissions, which shocked the London art world in 1976 with the exhibition Prostitution, would become Throbbing Gristle.

The band formed Industrial Records, and their debut, 1977’s The Second Annual Report, was one of the first industrial music records. P-Orridge was the bassist and singer; the band was known for performing nude, self-mutilation and using dead animals while singing about the Holocaust and cannibalism among other taboo subjects..

Among the artists the band heavily influenced was Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor.

Throbbing Gristle broke up on 1981, and Psychic TV, a band at the forefront of acid house music, was born in 1982 and released studio and live albums up through 2016. P-Orridge took a break in 1991, moving the family temporarily to Kathmandu.

P-Orridge was active in provocative art projects that ranged included the surgical and spiritual: P-Orridge, who preferred female pronouns, had one surgical project with wife Jacqueline Mary Breyer to become what they called “pandrogyne.” Breyer was injured in a 1995 fire at the home of Rick Rubin, which led to them moving to New York. She died in 2007.

A painter as well, P-Orridge’s work has been show at the Tate in London and the Rubin in New York.