Dorothy Max Prior interviewed by John Wisniewski.
3:AM: When and how did you become interested in music and art?
Dorothy Max Prior: I’ve always been interested in music, from as far back as I can remember. I didn’t play a musical instrument, but I’ve been dancing since I was 5 or 6 – Irish Dancing, tap, stage, jazz, and more.
In the 1960s I used to listen to Radio Luxembourg and the pirate radio stations like Radio Caroline on my transistor radio, under the bed covers when I was supposed to be going to sleep… And I made my own radio shows on my Grundig tape machine, taping things like The Monkees and The Kinks and adding in my own commentary. When slightly older, I become an obsessive Marc Bolan/T. Rex, and then David Bowie, fan.
Art came a bit later – the late teenage years.
3:AM: What was it like being in Rema Rema with Marco Pirroni? You actually released a record of your own, that did well. Could you tell us more about this?
DMP: Well, before I joined what would become Rema Rema, I used to be a bit scared of Marco. I’d see him at Louise’s club with Sid Vicious and I’d carefully avoid them! They both looked tough. Of course, when Marco and co placed an ad in Melody Maker, looking for a drummer, and I met him, I realised he was very sweet, not scary at all.
Rema Rema was brilliant for the first year – mid 1978 to mid 1979. We all spent massive amounts of time together, co-writing music, rehearsing, and recording. We didn’t play live until we were really ready to, in January 1979, but we did the recordings you can hear on the 4AD album Fond Reflections in autumn 1978 (not released till 2018).
In late summer/autumn 1979, things started to fall apart. Marco wasn’t happy with the music we were making, and wanted something different, more pop (Roxy Music were his favourite band – he wanted to go more in that direction – experimental, but poppy – which he did later on with Adam in the new Ants). Then, our friends The Banshees went through a big crisis in the autumn of 1979 when guitarist John McKay and drummer Kenny Morris ran away… and Siouxsie asked Marco to step in on guitar for their tour. Which, in the end, he didn’t (Robert Smith from The Cure did) – but there was a rift, and Rema Rema were dropped from the Banshees tour. Not long after this, Marco left Rema Rema. It was a tough time, as he was my boyfriend as well as my bandmate, and I felt quite torn. I stayed with the other three for a while, but it didn’t feel right, so I left too at the end of 1979, and they formed Mass which morphed into Wolfgang Press.
We did, though, all five of us, record the Wheel in the Roses EP for 4AD before we went our separate ways – Ivo of 4AD wanted us as their first signing even though we’d split up!
At around about this time, early 1980, I made a record with Genesis P Orridge and Alex Fergusson, I Confess and Softness, which we co-wrote. It was released on Industrial Records – despite being very poppy and totally different to TG and other Industrial artists. Throbbing Gristle were coming to an end at that point. Chris and Cosey were together; Gen was heartbroken and looking for new ventures. He tried to persuade me and Alex to form a band with him, playing psychedelic music. I resisted – but Alex and he formed Psychic TV, which I eventually joined in late 1984 / early 1985.
3:AM: What was it like during the later 70s being around those in punk rock and performing yourself?
DMP: What became called ‘punk’ in 1976 was a slow-growing art and music movement, in London and New York, in the early to mid 1970s. Of course, at the time, we didn’t know it was going to burst out of the underground and become a massive worldwide youth movement. We were just enjoying being over-the-top and making art and music and having fun in a true DIY spirit.
At the time, the influences in the UK were a mix of the Warhol Factory scene (New York) and the gay disco and alternative performance art scene in the UK. So, everyone from Patti Smith and Debbie Harry and Richard Hell and the New York Dolls (NYC) to the London scene of Malcolm and Viv’s SEX shop on the King’s Road, the alternative art and performance scene at the ICA and other venues, artist Derek Jarman and Andrew Logan, gay clubs like Louise’s and Sombrero, people who were fans of David Bowie and Roxy Music wanting to do something of their own… It was a complete mish-mash of people and ideas, eventually getting summed up rather oddly as ‘punk’. By the time it had a name, it had become something else…
For many years, I lived with Ants bass player Andy Warren, at 69 Exhibition Road (the house that gave me the title for my first memoir – which is subtitled ‘True-life tales from the fag end of punk, porn and performance’). So my life was completely enmeshed with that of Andy, Adam, the Ants, the Banshees, Jordan, SEX…
3:AM: You were a dancer for a while as well as a performer. What was that experience like?
DMP: More than a while! I started dancing onstage age 6 or 7, in the early 1960s, and I retired two years ago… so it’s a bit hard to sum up 60+ years of experience, I’m afraid! I’ve worked as a jazz dancer, a cabaret dancer, a go-go dancer and striptease dancer, a showgirl, a street theatre performer, a ballroom dancer, a dance-theatre performer… and in more recent years, as a choreographer and director, taking dance and performance work across the world.
3:AM: Hard to sum up my memories of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge as they later became knonw. Plain ‘Gen’ in my day! There are very long chapters about my relationship with Gen in both books – 69 Exhibition Road and Sex is No Emergency. Here’s an excerpt from 69 Exhibition Road about my first meeting with Gen and Cosey, to glean stuff from:
Autumn 1976
Outside the Institute of Contemporary Arts there’s a thronging crowd of what will soon be called punks. But this is six weeks PBG (pre Bill Grundy – when the Sex Pistols swore on tea-time TV, and the whole world moved on its axis), and the Daily Mail and Evening Standard haven’t discovered that word yet, so reporting on the event the next day they splutter on about the typical art connoisseurs of today: “A bunch of Hell’s Angels, girls dressed as whores, and boys with dyed hair and nail varnish.”
Inside, I’m with Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti of performance art group Coum Transmissions, who are getting things ready for the opening of their new show, which is called Prostitution. I’m on the inside because I work here at the ICA, as an arty Jill-of-all-trades – when I’m not working as a go-go dancer and stripper in the pubs of East London, that is.
Gen has shoulder-length hair parted on the side and held off his face with a turquoise plastic hair-slide. Cosey is long-legged and gorgeous in Mary Quant stripy tights. They are kind and friendly and enthusiastic, and they walk and talk me around the exhibition, which spreads across the ground-floor gallery, as we make sure that everything is OK and ready for the press launch.
Photos from Cosey’s work as a model for porn mags – work that was both actual money-earning work, and concurrently an art project – check. Used tampons in glass cases. Syringes. Bloodied bandages. Knives. Chains. Manifesto statements on the walls… All present and correct. Well, all except the more hardcore images from the porn mags that the ICA have squirrelled away, Cosey says, for fear of offending anyone. There is an irony here, given what later happens. This particular Coum Transmissions exhibition mostly circles around Cosey’s work – her examination of what it is to prostitute yourself, and then to turn the exploitation back on itself, so that the usually voiceless porn model takes control of the images created, displaying them for her own purposes, as art.
As we walk around looking at the exhibits, Gen talks non-stop, his face close to mine, his eyes growing bigger and rounder as he tells me about his hatred of the ‘death factories’ – suburban streets filled with the ghostly blue light from TV screens, people sitting zombie-like on their sofas. It’s the start of a beautiful friendship – I go on to become muse and confidante, Industrial Records artist and eventually drummer in his future band Psychic TV.
But all that’s to come. Now, it’s 18 October 1976, and almost time for the Prostitution exhibition launch party. Just minutes till we open!
Coum Transmissions are tonight going to commit artistic suicide and then rise phoenix-like from the ashes, reinventing themselves as Death Rock group Throbbing Gristle. The two other members of the group, Chris (Carter) and Sleazy (Peter Christopherson), are fiddling with the musical equipment – great big bass bins and a bank of synthesisers, tape recorders, mixers, amplifiers, and other machinery. Chris is an electronics whizz-kid and sound engineer, and he and Sleazy have some interesting ideas about new sound experiments. There’s an electric guitar sitting there, that Cosey is going to play. She doesn’t play guitar. Genesis is going to sing, or perhaps howl, chant or declaim.
Doors open, and in come the crowd.
When Coum Transmissions take to the stage they announce themselves as Throbbing Gristle. I think most here see it as a great and wonderful art prank, and perhaps some people are surprised when they stick at it and actually start up a label, Industrial, and put out records.
But I’m not, because this is about far more than shocking the bourgeoisie, or parodying rock music. The sound coming from the stage is something else altogether – a wondrous barrage of noise with bass notes so deep they hurt your belly, and layers of squealing sounds of every tone and pitch and register known to mankind (and a few new ones too, probably). I’m a fan of early electronics and musique concrète – and what I’m hearing here is interesting, seems to relate to these things, and has a real breadth and depth of sound. Pure, beautiful sound. And Genesis P-Orridge makes a fine frontman. He shares with Johnny Rotten an ability to stare out anyone giving him the evil eye, with a similar we-don’t-care air of lunacy that suggests that it is best not to mess with him. But there’s something else too – something shamanic and transcendent, that moves him and us into a different state of being. It’s hard to say whether it makes us more animal-like or more spiritually exalted, somehow it’s both at the same time.
The day after the Prostitution opening party, the newspapers are full of it. Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn, who’d attended the show, is quoted in a Daily Mail headline: “These People are the Wreckers of Civilisation.” Elsewhere, over the coming days, there is more and more outrage: “Every social evil is celebrated” say the Daily Telegraph, and the Sun gets in on the act with “Mr Orridge is prostituting Britain and sending us the bill”. Questions are asked in the House of Commons about the Arts Council of Great Britain and the use of public money. Yes, yes, thank you. We couldn’t have planned it better if we’d tried. Coum Transmissions collect all the ‘reviews’ as they come in and we post them up on the walls, so that they become part of the exhibition.
It’s totally wonderful, a brief moment of brilliance and glory, but our cards are marked. ICA director Ted Little is called in to speak to the Arts Council. The Bill Grundy debacle, in which the Sex Pistols appear on tea-time television’s Today programme and are goaded into swearing, adds fuel to the moral panic. Out with the filth, in with the fury. Ted Little steps down soon after, and quite a lot of the ICA staff are publicly sacked or quietly let go.
There’s an interesting coda to this tale when that outraged Tory MP, Nicholas Fairbairn, is caught and charged with indecent exposure. Fairbairn, who boasted about his insatiable sexual appetite, was later also implicated in an investigation into the sexual abuse of young boys. As Sex Pistol Steve Jones might say: “You dirty bastard! You dirty fucker! What a fucking rotter!”
3:AM: What inspires you to create your art? Do you see everything that you have done as a creative whole?
DMP: There are very many different things, in many different genres and artforms, throughout the past 70 years of life and work – but ultimately it is all about the expression of ideas, and communication… I’ve always happily moved back and forth from dancing to drumming to writing to DJing to making theatre or installation works. The ideas are more important than the medium…
3:AM: Any memories of the Sex Pistols?
DMP: I first saw the Sex Pistols at the Babalu Club, a disco on Finchley Road in North London, in May 1976. They were a fabulous mess – performance art! By the time they debuted ‘Anarchy in the UK’ in November 1976 they’d become more of a regular band, and (in my eyes, anyway) less interesting for it… I liked them live, but can take or leave the records.
Again, do read 69 Exhibition Road – there’s a whole chapter on the Sex Pistols in there…
See above q for thoughts on the emergence of punk.
3:AM: Any future plans and projects?
DMP: Yep, I’m writing a book about my teen years – 1965 to 1975. I also continue to make installation and performance art (occasionally). And I have an ongoing radio show on Slack City Radio called Granny (Max) Takes a Trip. Plus, I’m busy promoting the new book, Sex is No Emergency.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWEE
Dorothy Max Prior is an artist and writer, born and bred in London but now living in Brighton. 69 Exhibition Road: Twelve True-life Tales from the Fag End of Punk, Porn and Performance, was published by Strange Attractor Press in 2022. Dorothy’s new memoir, Sex is No Emergency: Adventures in a Post Punk Wonderland (2025), covers her time in Psychic TV, amongst many other tales, from 1982 to 1992.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
John Wisniewski has written for amfm Magazine, Perfect Sound Forever, LARB, and Chiron Review.
