[porkmarras]

DIRT. Why have you switched your attentions from the art world to the music scene?

COSEY. 'Cause that's what we like doing at the moment, we started off with music anyway right in the beginning in 1969. Gen even before that. He used to do a lot of acoustic stuff with his violin and bongos and talking drums. Then it sort of got side tracked into experimental theatre and then we got told that what we were doing was art and we could get a grant for it etc., to make things a little bit easier. We worked really hard to get the grant as well, it didn't come easy at all. That was another thing that made us leave the whole thing, as well as the art scene, was as far as grants were concerned; 'cause it's really sickening, the whole thing is really sickening, all the artists are sickening, the whole lot, it's just horrible. The money isn't going to the people who should get it. When we used to get our grant we used to do accounts and send them in, so they knew where the grant had gone and I just assumed that everybody else was doing the same thing, being an honest person you know, but no, they weren't we were the only ones up until the year before the ICA, that were actually sending in accounts and then they demanded that accounts were sent in by everyone else, 'cause people were buying houses and that on it. That's what sickened me more than anything else, that everybody was spending their money on houses and cars and clothes. It was just rotten the whole scene. Then of course we didn't fit in with everybody else 'cause we wouldn't do the circuit as such of arts centres and community halls. We weren't interested in it, it was just a safe option, they did the same thing each year, just changed the colour or changed the costumes you know, it was just the same thing, year in, year out, and we just didn't fit into it. So we got sort of outcast in a way and then the grant came under question, 'cause we no longer fitted in and we were no longer doing as we were told either. They used to send you a sheet with every day for three months on it, a diary thing that you had to fill in what you were doing on it, where the venue was etc., and we just used to stamp it with Gens rubber stamp and we'd just put in if we were doing anything every now and then, we turned down 900 pounds from them anyway before we actually split completely, 'cause our grant came under review and they said they wanted to see us doing a performance before Christmas, so they could give us the other 900 pounds, so we said we hadn't got anything planned before Christmas, sorry, and they said surely you can put something on at the Oval House, they'll put you on 'cause the Oval House was then the place you'd go and book a night and a couple of people from the panel would come and watch you and say yeah alright and then you'd get your grant you see, and we just said no, we don't want it, keep it or give it to somebody else. That's what was so ridiculous about the ICA thing. They said we were getting 53000 pounds at one point, we didn't get anything near that. We still do things; the only way we're not connected with it anymore is we're not in established exhibitions, because we don't go to them anymore, we went as far as we could.



DIRT. Since you've been a part of COUM, have you worked outside of it at all, in the way Sleazy does for Hipgnosis?

COSEY. Sleazy's different because he had Hipgnosis before he met us and that is his living as an actual job. It's all official and everything else. I've had very few jobs other than… like I had two factory jobs and a secretarial job when we first came to London… that have been completely separate. Every other thing I've done like modelling, dancing and stripping now, is all connected anyway, it's all part of the whole thing…



DIRT. How's it connected?

COSEY. Just in experience, just the fact that we were interested in things like that and it just seemed a bit naïve not to find out what it was actually like. We kept talking about something and making collages of things, just to start proclaiming this, that and the other. I think it's hypocritical not to experience it. Like when I do the stripping now and when I did the films and the magazine work, I went out as a model and how they'd expect a model to be because to get the jobs that's how you had to do it. When they found out about the ICA, I got black listed from every tit magazine, 'cause they realised I'd taken them for a ride. They actually all got round and said no more Cosey, right! I had to be how they expected a girl to be in all the different kinds of situations I was gonna get into, but then I had to take out of it what I actually wanted. But it was a really good thing to do, it taught me a lot about people, it really did, and how easy it is for them to fall into it and get absolutely destroyed. I mean even stripping now is really bad. You see the girls on the circuit, they get so wrapped up in the guys they see every day they forget that they've got their own lives to lead and the whole circuit becomes their life, which is terrible because when they go home after doing a booking they've got nothing, it's really sad. It's weird because a lot of the girls I'm working with, stripping and dancing, would never do photographic work and a lot of the girls I did modelling with would never do stripping or topless dancing, they've both got different sets of values you see and each side has fallen into it along a certain track. Therefore, it's quite justified for them to be doing that, but to be suddenly switched over they couldn't see it. For a start a lot of the strippers wouldn't be able to model and a lot of the models wouldn't want to strip, because it's degrading, or only tarts or old bags do it. That's how they look at it anyway. A lot of the models are no better anyway 'cause they screw to get jobs.