Genesis P Orridge

Genesis P-Orridge (born Neil Andrew Megson February 22 , 1950 ), is an English musician , performance artist , writer , and advocate of various counterculture ideas. His early confrontational performance work with COUM Transmissions in the late 1960s - early 1970s along with the original Industrial band Throbbing Gristle dealt with subjects such as prostitution , pornography , serial killers and occultism generated controversy. Later musical work with Psychic TV received wider exposure, including some chart-topping singles.

Genesis P-Orridge was instrumental to the development of numerous musical scenes, most especially the Industrial , Post-Industrial and Acid House scenes. The extent of his involvement in the later genre is often debated though it seems likely thathe and his cohorts in Psychic TV were among the first to import the DetroitAcid music to England and to fuse it with a psychedelic attitude via a series of pseudo-compliation albums designed to suggestthat such a scene already existed.

Genesis P-Orridge has been associated with the culture of bodymodification , as well as magical or religious movements, founding the Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth aka TOPY. In the mid-1990s Genesis chose to distance himselffrom TOPY, even going so far as to claim that the project has been ended. This statement was and is of course dismissed by thosestill activing within the TOPY Network.

Following entry into personal and political exile in the United States in the late 1990s Genesis has been engaged in variousspoken word performances including work with Timothy Leary , documentariesand a new band, Thee Majesty. Now living in Brooklyn, NY, he and his wife Lady Jaye have also been engaged in an ongoingexperiment in extreme body modification (the most recent of which is Genesis's breast implants) aimed at creating a"Pandrogenous" combined being named "Genesis Breyer P-Orridge" out of the two of them.

In December of 2003 Genesis unveiled PTV3, a new act drawing upon the early "Hyperdelic" work of Psychic TV and includes mediatheorist Douglas Rushkoff among its members.