Psychic TV at Gretchen Berlin / Saturday, 20.09.2014

After Genesis P-Orridge dissolved the seminal industrial rock outfit Throbbing Gristle, he and Gristle cohorts Peter Christopherson and Cosey Fanni Tutti, plus Geoff Rushton, formed Psychic TV in 1979 as a means of continuing their confrontational, shock-oriented approach to music and their multimedia live performances.

Psychic TV draws much of its inspiration from the literary underground, including situationist philosophy, William Burroughs (a professed fan), the Marquis de Sade, and Philip K. Dick. The group also claims to be the mouthpiece for its own quasi-religious group, the Temple Ov Psychick Youth.

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P-Orridge has been branded a dangerous deviant in several publications, and police raided his home in 1992, seizing videos, books, and magazines following a television show concerning child abuse in which a Psychic TV performance art video was shown out of context.

As for the music itself, Psychic TV’s earlier years continued in the experimental vein of Throbbing Gristle’s work, encompassing melodic pop, barely listenable white noise, gentle ballads, industrial found-sound collages, spoken word pieces, and experiments with ethnic instruments and world music, all tied together by a dadaist sensibility.

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Force the Hand of Chance, the group’s first album, was released in 1982; during the ’80s, Psychic TV’s prodigious output totaled over 20 albums. Much of this stemmed from a publicity stunt beginning in 1986 for which the group attempted to release one live album, each from a different nation, on the 23rd of each month for 23 months. Even though the group didn’t quite achieve its goal, the 14 albums Psychic TV released in 18 months were enough to get the group into the Guinness Book of World Records.

Christopherson and Rushton both left the group rather early on to form Coil, and Psychic TV has since become an open-ended collective with contributors such as Alex Fergusson, formerly of Alternative TV. Psychic TV scored a minor U.K. pop hit in 1986 with “Godstar,” a tribute to Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones, and 1988 saw the group’s first album release in America with Allegory and Self.

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Beginning in 1988, P-Orridge became a pioneer on the British club and rave scene. Records from the Chicago house scene by Frankie Knuckles and Farley Jackmaster Funk made their way to London, and when P-Orridge noticed the word “acid” on one of them, he dubbed the British psychedelic variation “acid house” and began recording and experimenting with the style on Jack the Tab: Acid Tablets, Vol. 1 and Towards Thee Infinite Beat.

P-Orridge has since released albums under the name Psychic TV as well as using a variety of aliases to produce “compilation” albums actually featuring all his own music. Several Psychic TV collections, as well as new material, appeared in the ’90s; the best of the retrospectives are the two singles compilations Hex Sex and Godstar, and the 1999 overview Best Ov: Time’s Up.

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New Psychic TV material took a backseat as P-Orridge’s commitment to his spoken word project Thee Majesty and a new philosophy he dubbed “Pandrogeny” occupied his time. It was the latter that had him going under the knife for breast implants and enforcing the use of the pronoun s/he. PTV work began again in 2003 with two years of touring leading to studio work.

A new album was delayed when Throbbing Gristle reunited for a short time, but work resumed in 2006. The finished product, Hell Is Invisible…Heaven Is Here, arrived a year later. P-Orridge’s wife and bandmate, Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge, died of heart failure a few months after its release. A tribute to her, Mr. Alien Brain vs. the Skinwalkers, was released near the end of 2008, featuring versions of Syd Barrett’s “No Good Trying” and the Velvet Underground’s “Foggy Notion.” (Steve Huey – Allmusic)