S/he Is Still Her/e: The Official Genesis P-Orridge Doc review – Throbbing Gristle's gender-challenging tabloid-baiter
Genesis P-Orridge was the performance artist, shaman and lead singer of Throbbing Gristle who was born as Neil Megson in Manchester in 1950, but from the 90s lived in the US. P-Orridge challenged gender identity but it is clear from the interviewees that there were no wrong answers when it came to pronouns: 'he', 'she' and 'they' are all used. This is a sympathetic and amiable official docu-biography in which the subject comes across as a mix of Aleister Crowley, Charles Manson and Screaming Lord Sutch. The 'P-Orridge' surname makes me suspect that Spike Milligan might have been an indirect influence, although there's also a bit of Klaus Kinski in there as well.
Genesis P-Orridge, known to friends and family as Gen, started as a radical conceptual artist, rule-breaker, consciousness-expander and tabloid-baiter who with Throbbing Gristle influentially coined the term 'industrial music', a term later to be borrowed without acknowledgment by many. They were, in the words of Janet Street-Porter, shown here in archive footage, 'too shocking for punk'. P-Orridge formed a new band, Psychic TV, in the 1980s, and then also formed a group of likeminded occultist provocateurs called Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. (The film tactfully passes over how very annoying that spelling is.)
At the beginning of the 90s, P-Orridge and his family, including first wife Paula P-Orridge, went to the US to escape a (later retracted) allegation of ritual sexual abuse. In the US, they were the guests of counterculture figure Michael Horowitz, father of Winona Ryder, and P-Orridge's career in art, music and peripheral celebrity blossomed. After divorce from Paula, P-Orridge married the artist Jacqueline Breyer, known as Lady Jaye, with whom Gen pursued a radical project of 'pandrogynous' fusion, involving breast and lip surgery.
By the end, there is maybe a you-had-to-be-there factor with all this, and the film leaves you with a nagging feeling that P-Orridge was not seriously important in either art or music – but was pugnaciously sincere, too unselfconscious to be a narcissist and certainly a real one-off.
S/he Is Still Her/e: The Official Genesis P-Orridge Doc is in UK and Irish cinemas from 20 June.
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