'Whatever I do, I do it to excess'

Musician and performance artist Cosey Fanni Tutti is revisiting her life in the company of two other women who succeeded against the odds

- Fiona Sturges

There was a time when the performance artist and musician Cosey Fanni Tutti was persona non grata. In her late teens, when she was still Christine Newby , her father threw her out of the family home and cut offall con-tact. Later, as leading lights of the art collective COUM Transmissions and experimental noise-makers Throbbing Gristle , Tutti and her then partner, Genesis P-Orridge , were driven out of their home town of Hull by police who were scandalised by their live “enactments”, which involved buckets of offal and P-Orridge dressing up as a baby.

Relocating to London, they mounted an exhibition of COUM work at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 1976 . It featured magazine spreads from Tutti’s two-year f oray into the porn industry as part of her art practice, along with a 1.5 -metre dildo and a Perspex box containing her used tampons, which were crawling with maggots . The show, entitled Prostitution , prompted outraged headlines and a discussion in parliament, where the duo were called “wreckers of civilisation”.