Psychic TV

After industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle dissolved in 1981, Genesis P-Orridge channeled their energies primarily through the multimedia collective and experimental rock group Psychic TV. The outfit preserved the earlier band's taste for confrontational performance art and deliberately shocking music, routinely weaving obscene or subversive video footage together with hallucinogenic lighting into their live appearances. Literary sources such as situationist philosophy, William Burroughs (who openly admired the group), and Philip K. Dick supplied much of the conceptual framework, while the collective also helped establish the quasi-religious network Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth. Across its catalog the band roamed freely through every shade of psychedelic and experimental sound; the 1982 debut Force the Hand of Chance, for instance, juxtaposed melodic pop, barely tolerable white noise, delicate ballads, industrial collages of found sound, spoken-word passages, and ethnic-instrument experiments under an overarching Dadaist logic. In 1988 Psychic TV became one of the first British acts to adopt the Chicago acid-house aesthetic, issuing recordings such as Jack the Tab: Acid Tablets, Vol. 1 that were frequently packaged to resemble various-artists compilations. Beginning with the 1996 album Trip Reset, the continually shifting ensemble gravitated toward psychedelic rock rather than house or industrial textures and often interpreted classic 1960s and 1970s material by Pink Floyd and Funkadelic. From 2003 onward drummer and producer Edley O'Dowd became a central member, frequently credited under the PTV3 banner and appearing on albums including Hell Is Invisible...Heaven Is Her/e (2007) and Alienist (2016).

Psychic TV originated in 1981 when P-Orridge teamed with Alternative TV's Alex Fergusson; the “TV” component alluded both to that prior group and to the collective’s visual identity, whose logo echoed an “As Seen on TV” graphic. Former Throbbing Gristle member Peter Christopherson joined in 1982, and the band made its live debut that year at Final Academy, an event honoring William Burroughs. Later in 1982 the debut album Force the Hand of Chance appeared, early copies accompanied by a bonus disc titled Themes. Dreams Less Sweet, which included contributions from Geoff Rushton (also known as John Balance), followed in 1983. Throughout the 1980s Psychic TV maintained an extraordinarily prolific pace, releasing more than twenty albums; a 1986 publicity campaign accounted for much of that output when the group sought to issue one live album from a different country on the twenty-third of each month for twenty-three consecutive months. Although the full target was not met, the fourteen albums released within eighteen months earned the band an entry in The Guinness Book of World Records. Christopherson and Rushton departed early to form Coil, leaving Psychic TV as an open-ended collective. A minor U.K. pop hit arrived in 1986 with “Godstar,” a tribute to Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones, and 1988 brought the group’s first American release, Allegory and Self.

Also in 1988 Psychic TV began exploring acid house after records by Chicago figures Frankie Knuckles and Farley Jackmaster Funk reached London and P-Orridge recognized the music’s psychedelic potential. Fergusson exited, and additional producers including Fred Giannelli, Dave Ball of Soft Cell, and Richard Norris (later of the Grid with Ball) joined the lineup. Both Jack the Tab: Acid Tablets, Vol. 1 and Tekno Acid Beat were presented as compilations yet were created entirely by Psychic TV members working under pseudonyms. The 1990 and 1992 albums Towards Thee Infinite Beat and Beyond Thee Infinite Beat, however, carried straightforward Psychic TV credit.

Several publications portrayed P-Orridge as a dangerous deviant, and in 1992 police raided the family home, confiscating videos, books, and magazines after a television program on child abuse aired a Psychic TV performance-art clip removed from its original context. Following a period of “self-imposed exile” during which P-Orridge and family relocated from England to California, Larry Thrasher of Thessalonians entered the group and the collective began restoring its earlier psychedelic-pop orientation. In addition to studio releases such as Trip Reset (1996), numerous compilations and fresh material surfaced during the 1990s; among the strongest retrospectives were the singles anthologies Hex Sex and Godstar together with the 1999 overview Best Ov: Time’s Up. P-Orridge and Thrasher also launched the related project Splinter Test.

New Psychic TV recordings receded in priority while P-Orridge concentrated on the spoken-word endeavor Thee Majesty and the philosophical concept known as “Pandrogeny,” the latter prompting breast-implant surgery and the adoption of the pronoun s/he. Activity under the Psychic TV name resumed in 2003 (now styled PTV3), two years of touring paving the way for studio sessions. Throbbing Gristle’s temporary reunion postponed completion of a new album, yet work recommenced in 2006 and Hell Is Invisible...Heaven Is Her/e appeared the following year. A few months after its release P-Orridge’s wife and bandmate Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge succumbed to heart failure; the 2008 tribute Mr. Alien Brain vs. the Skinwalkers honored her with renditions of Syd Barrett’s “No Good Trying” and the Velvet Underground’s “Foggy Notion.”

Live albums drawn from throughout Psychic TV’s history continued to surface on Cold Spring and Vinyl-On-Demand, while singles emerged on Vanity Case and Angry Love Productions, among them a 2010 interpretation of Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain.” The studio album Snakes, credited simply to Psychic TV, was issued by Angry Love in 2014 and merged the group’s dense psychedelic-rock approach with voodoo-related themes. In 2015 Dark Entries released a single containing the 1988 acid-house track “Alien Be-In,” accompanied by fresh remixes from Giannelli, Silent Servant, and John Tejada. After the limited mixtape-style LP Fishscales Falling appeared for Record Store Day in April 2016, Alienist followed in September; Fishscales Falling, Vol. 2 arrived for Record Store Day in 2017. Kondole, the 1989 album, was reissued in 2018 as Kondole/Dead Cat, presenting the rare film Dead Cat on DVD together with its complete forty-eight-minute soundtrack previously excerpted on the original release. The Evening Sun Turns Crimson, documenting the band’s live score for a 2017 screening of Derek Jarman’s In the Shadow of the Sun, emerged in 2019. Genesis P-Orridge died in New York City on March 14, 2020, after a two-and-a-half-year battle with leukemia.