Genesis P-Orridge: In He/r Own Words

In summer 2016, I went to visit artist, musician and all-round visionary Genesis P-Orridge at he/r apartment in New York’s Lower East Side. We were there to talk for AnOther Magazine about Genesis’s trip to Benin in West Africa, where s/he made a film with friend and filmmaker Hazel McCarthy III about the local ‘twin cult’, called Bight of the Twin. There, Genesis had embarked on an unexpected journey of personal discovery that ended up with he/r taking part in a vodou ritual to animate a ‘jumeaux’, or small carved wooden doll, with the spirit of he/r late wife Lady Jaye, who tragically ‘dropped her body’, as Genesis phrases it, back in 2007.

We had a couple of vodka-cranberries and ended up having a much more expansive discussion. Due to a lack of space in the print edition, there wasn’t much room to include the details of the fascinating and moving story about the trip to Benin, let alone anything else, so I have posted a lightly edited monologue here, with a lot of other material about Genesis’s life, career and ideas – in he/r own words.

ON LADY JAYE, WEST AFRICA AND VOODOO DOLLS

About two and a half years ago, my friend Hazel Hill McCarthy III was visiting. She said, ‘Let me show you something, Gen.’ She went online and brought up these incredible photographs of voodoo priests in Benin, West Africa. The outfits were just so cool, amazingly psychedelic and weird, that the only way we could explain it was Leigh Bowery on DMT. We just thought it’s not often we see something that’s totally new and unique!

She said, ‘Well, you took me to Kathmandu last year and paid for me to go there and showed me all of what you love about Nepal and the Himalayas, so I’m going to take you to Africa as a thank you.’ That’s what we did. Because she’s a filmmaker, she decided to take film stuff, and we thought we were just going to film this festival that happens every seven years, this voodoo festival, and watch them dancing and see these costumes.

The first night, we’re in this little tiny port called Ouidah on the coast, which is where they estimate 15 million slaves were exported from that beach. She’d been in touch online and got hold of these two people who said they could be guides, and spoke okay English. It turned out they spoke very little English and were using a software to write nice emails, but they were so sweet that we stayed with them. They found us a house.

The first night, we arrive. We plunk our stuff down. We’ve been traveling for about 20 odd hours. We go into the little tiny town square, and we’re drinking some beers because you can’t drink the water. Everyone sat around this table, and we’re looking in that direction and we see what looks like a very, very tall man in blue, who seems to be floating in the shadows, and then vanishes. Out load, we just blurt, I bet that’s a high priest. Everybody looks around, and they goes, ‘Who? What?’ It was like, ‘Oh. He’s disappeared.’ They’re like, ‘You’re jet-lagged.’ Okay.

The first full day, we wander around a bit. Then Sardu says, ‘I’d love you to meet my family. Would you come and meet them?’ He takes us back to the town square, and along the wall that we were looking at is a gate we couldn’t see from where we were. That’s the gate to his father’s compound. That’s why the person vanished. We go inside, and there is his father who is about seven foot tall, really slim, and wearing blue robes. ‘Oh shit. That’s him, isn’t it?’ Immediately he sees me, speaks to his son who translates and says, ‘My father says you had a twin but she died and was wearing those gold earrings that you’re wearing right now,’ which was totally true. As you know, we always kind of saw Jaye as a twin.

He had no idea who we were. None of them did. It was like a tiny little place in Africa. They don’t speak English and why would they know. Anyway, the next day, Dah who’s the father, the High Priest … Dah is just his everyday honorific. Dah is sort of looking at me, and says again through the translation, “You need a jumeaux’. We go, ‘What’s a jumeaux?’ He said, ‘It’s a doll, and it represents Lady Jaye. We have to do prayers and offerings and see if the spirits will agree to let it become animated and be a direct link with Lady Jaye, with her soul.’ We go, ‘All right.’

Jaye had another saying which was, ‘See a cliff, jump off.’ What’s the worst that could happen? Jump off, so we go, ‘All right.’ By the end of the second day, we’re in the middle of a voodoo ritual, at night, in Ouidah, Benin, sacrificing chickens and praying. They’re throwing nuts, the coconuts, they’re casting them to see, ‘Will you accept this gift from Genesis to the spirits?’ and so on. We had to go through various deities and offerings. They all went yes, and so, here she is. My jumeaux. She eats when I eat. I take her everywhere, even if she’s inside my purse. As Dah put it, if you’re nice to her, she’ll look after you. If you forget about her and you’re not nice to her, be very afraid. I have taken that advice very seriously.

So, here she is. I talk to her all the time, and I … She has a little place that she sleeps … [door slams] That was, like… perfectly cued. That’s called the ‘Of Course factor’! I think they were just saying to you, ‘Take us seriously…’

She sleeps in the bedroom. I’ll show you. Obviously, because this is Lady Jaye, it’s the most precious thing I have. At night, she sleeps in here. So she can keep her eye on me. We have four or five matching outfits now. And that’s from yesterday. Last night’s food. That’s the Santeria one. You can’t touch that one. He’s been with me for ages. We were initiated as a priest in Santeria. Lady Jaye was a Priestess when we met. We didn’t know anything about Santeria yet. It’s completely misconstrued and misunderstood in the United States.

Needless to say, because of Hollywood and television programs and scare-mongering, but it’s actually a religion of balance. One reason we wanted to go to Benin was to see what the mother-story was of the religion, because you can tell when you’re in Santeria situations that it’s not the original religion. It’s mutated. For example, Dah, the one we know, he is the High Priest of the Python cult. Then we also met and became friends with the dah of trees, and there’s a dah of yams. You realize it’s all the things they need for life.

There’s the grandfather of the sea, there’s a dah of the water in the rivers, and there’s one for fish and so on. It’s about all the things that at the very, very beginning that were essential to the continuation of the species. It’s actually a form of wisdom. Don’t leave a footprint. Find balance. Find a way to take what’s necessary but not damage at the same time. Find balance. Otherwise things get totally screwed up and it’s a disaster. When people think they’re primitive because they continued in that religion, to me, they’re sophisticated because they continued in that religion, because they’re very aware that to add in greed and power and all these other things would create disaster and destruction.

It’s worth pointing out that at no time did Dah ask me for any money. They didn’t care about money. That was irrelevant. Now, in Santeria, they do, and some of them, in certain houses, ask really exorbitant amounts of money, particularly if you’re white. We wondered about that later. In Africa there was no dark side at all. It was all about keeping people healthy, so if you’re ill, you go to the dah. If you need food, you go to the dah. It’s all about keeping healthy and alive and thanking the world itself for life and continuation of life.

Why is it darker in Santeria? There is a dark side. We thought, “Well, if you’ve been exported from Africa and put on a boat when you’ve never seen an ocean before, and think that you’re going to sail off the edge of the world or whatever, that your brain can’t even take in what’s going on and your women are raped next to you on the boat, then there’s going to be an anger that will develop. You’re treated as slaves in the United States and the Caribbean and Europe, and you really want to get revenge. My guess is, and it’s only a guess, that the dark side, the parts of cursing and revenge, grew from the mistreatment, and that makes total sense.

My jumeaux keeps me grounded. She’s always there. Dah was looking at me, and was saying, ‘This is Lady Jaye, and you’ve got to look after her and feed her.’ And then he says, ‘Oh, and by the way, she tells me that you’re really bad with money.’ I went, ‘Yeah, I am because Jaye always used to look after all the money, and I’m always totally broke.’ He said, “Well, I told her that she should try and help you look after money better.’ Ever since then, and it’s happened, more than a dozen times, I’ve been down to zero in the bank, and sold books and run out of things to sell. The same day I’m down to zero, money has appeared from somewhere I didn’t know it was due from Every time. Royalties from a record we don’t remember we made 30 years ago. It’s just weird and wonderful.

She’s company. She’s a transmitter/receiver and more than that, she’s alive. It’s funny, too, because we go in restaurants. We take her out. We put her on the table. We put put bits of everything on the napkin, and we give her a little sip of everything. Nobody bats an eye or says anything. It’s like she’s invisible.

Hazel was doing research when we got back. She was in California where she lives, and she contacted me. She said, ‘I’ve been getting these emails from these anthropologists.’ She said, ‘They’ve been saying that world-wide, the incidence of twins and multiple births per thousand is 4. In Benin, it’s 25 to 30 per thousand…’ It’s not genetic, so why the hell are there so many twins there? Every so often, there’s a festival of the twins there. The first week is for twins who have died, and the second week is for the living. We went back, and the priestess of the twin cult had been refusing all the way through the first visit, and the first half of our second visit, to do an interview. She did the first ever interview about the twin cult for our film. Needless to say, at one point we say, ‘How come there’s so many twins in Benin?’

She said, “Well, they know that we’ll love them whether they live or die, so they’d rather be born here.’ Because you’re talked to every day like you’re still physically there. You get washed. You get fed. You’re at family meetings and meals. You go everywhere with the family. You’re still there. They celebrate them because they’re still there. They were born or they died but they were born, and they still have a soul. Therefore we love them.

Everything is very open. There’s not this fear of guilt and shame. It’s just celebrating. In a whole week, they dance and chant and drum and talk to them and do rituals for them and sacrifices. Then the second week, the same for the ones who are living, so they don’t feel left out. They get cookies and biscuits and more drumming and chanting.

Suddenly, the film became about twins, and this twin cult which we didn’t even know existed when we decided to go. It’s really invigorating, and it’s very positive. We grieve every day for the loss of Jaye’s physical presence, still, because we were so bonded and connected, but having that jumeaux here… feeling pretty confident there’s a connection because we do believe in at least occasional reincarnation.

We used to talk to each other about what happens when one of us dies? What’s going to happen? Will we be able to reincarnate? Will we still have mastered consciousness enough to remember that we’re an individual being but just consciousness. How will we communicate with each other? Because obviously you want to and say actually, ‘Hey. I’m here. Hi.’ We came up with three things which were: 1) Something physical had to happen, some kind of physical, material evidence. 2) It had to have witnesses. And 3) It should have a special meaning to her or me, whatever it was.

On the third day, after she dropped her body, we were sat around at the old apartment in Ridgewood, and the children, my two daughters were trying to get me to go back with them to California, so they could look after me because they were scared I was depressed and I might try and commit suicide. They didn’t say that, but that’s what they were thinking. There was, I think, seven people all together and me. Nobody had had any drinks. Nobody had had any drugs. We’re sitting there, and suddenly in my head I get this really strong thing, ‘Well, if you’re going to go to California, you need a photo of you and Jaye together.’ We just got up and went through the house to the bedroom. On Jaye’s wall on her side of the bed were about 20 or so photographs of us kissing in different places all over the world. Outside where we met, in Nepal, all over. She had it like that so that so the last thing she saw as she fell asleep was us being in love, and the first thing she saw was us being in love. In the middle was one of us both in Kathmandu, and we were both wearing red robes, sat on one chair cuddling. It was a big blob of red with two heads kissing.

We took it off the wall and carried it back to the other room. We put it face-down, like that, and sat back down in this armchair. A couple of things were said, and then the kids went, ‘Are you going to come with us to California?’ As we started to open my mouth to speak, it did this — up it went and floated across the front of everyone… in front of me, then it turned the right way up. Then it went like that, on the floor, and we looked at everybody and said, ‘I guess I’m staying here with Jaye.’ Thank fuck there were people there, because even now we’ll sometimes say, ‘Did that really happen?’ And I go, ‘Yeah. It did.’

So many people when we are on tour, definitely a higher percentage of women, come up to me, and say how that film [The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye] really inspired them and made them realize they’d never truly been 100%, unconditionally dedicated to a relationship and that they’d missed so much by not doing more. And that it’s inspired them to always give everything to love. That’s pretty damn good. I laughed when we were called the most evil man in Britain, too. It’s like what are they seeing? Hello, but what exactly are you looking at that makes you think that way? This is who we really are. We are about love.

ON WILLIAM BURROUGHS AND “ACCEPTING THE MISSION”

I’m 21, and I’m meeting the William Burroughs. London. Duke Street, St James’s off Piccadilly, in this little, tiny apartment. His full apartment was probably less than this one room. It was minute. He had the only color TV with a remote I’d ever seen in my life, because there were only, I think, 3 channels in England then. BBC1, BBC2, and ITV or something…

We’re in his little room and we’ve got this big TV on, and he’s got this remote. He’s going click, click, click, just cutting it up the whole time we’re together. Click, click, click in the background. He said, “Have a drink,” and we have a drink. It was sort of halfway through the evening, so from the late morning on … Halfway through the evening, we look and we realize we’re halfway through bottle number 2. We’re thinking, “I wanted to remember this really clearly, and I don’t know if I’m going to now.” It was great. He showed me The Wild Boys. He’d just got proofed copies of it and everything, and most wonderful, he showed me all of his notebooks, his journals, with actual cut-ups in and photographic things, collages.

We said to him, “William …” — It’s difficult because when it’s historical, it’s really still I, but we jumble sometimes. — As you know, we prefer we from 93. Anyway, we’re sort of there, and he’s showing me this and showing me that … We said, “William, do you still do cut-ups, like literally do cut-ups?” As in get bits of paper and chop them up and reassemble them and then retype them. He went, “Not much, very rarely…” He said, “My brain has mutated and it does it on its own.” Having written in a certain idiosyncratic style myself for so long, I realize that’s totally true! Mine does that as well. My mind jumbles things, reassembles them, and plays with words without even being asked. It just does it. His brain became a cut-up computer, basically.

It made a lot more sense — because of the tape recorder experiments, the mirror staring, the Moroccan magic… All of these different things fed into him trying to, as he put it, short-circuit control. As language is a control system or a virus, whichever you want to look at it… To me, it’s a control system… How do you break that? By developing something that absolutely rejects linearity, common sense, and meaning. Just breaks it, apparently arbitrarily, and as William would say, to see what it really says.

We kind of knew it, but it was much more visceral to see him doing it physically, mentally, and in a conversation all at the same time. He stopped me as we were going out, and he goes, “Genesis, your task that I’m giving you right now …” That’s not the exact words…”Is I want you to figure out how to short-circuit control,” and we went, “Okay, William,” blithely.

Amazingly, it’s really what we’ve been doing ever since, in different ways, from different angles, to different degrees of just a bit of focus. You hinted at it, very astutely, which is if human behavior cannot be changed, then we’re doomed, as a species, to extinction. Rightly so, if we can’t change. There’s a basic flaw in our programming that goes back to the pre-language, pre-agriculture, earliest times when we were living in caves as little clowns and the only objective was to survive, which as an aside is still what 99% of the population of this planet are trying to do, have food every day. That’s basically it. That’s their entire modus operandi. Can I and my children eat? Well, that’s how it was right way back. That imperative is incredibly ingrained in the program, in DNA, and in genetics.

ON HUMANITY, THE KILLING IMPULSE AND BIRTH OF PATRIARCHY

The very beginning, the male of our species, because there were several versions of us at that point, developed an impulse to use their strength and ability to be ruthless and kill… That was a survival mechanism for the whole tribe. Without that as a behavioral trait, we as a species would have been gone just like that. That was fine. It had a reason to be. It was a healthy, necessary, genetic impulse or program.

As time went by … we gradually changed our environment. We don’t know there’s such a thing as linear time. There’s no way of measuring it. They don’t know that when you fuck, eventually a baby comes out because there’s such a big gap, they don’t remember. There’s only survival, but then bit by bit, we started to control the environment a bit more. Eventually, women gave up their most potent secret which was that sex made babies, at which point the male of the species wanted to control women, because that was the only way for them to continue to live after that body died, through children.

Only about 40,000 years ago, right there is when suddenly the male of the species became the patriarchy. I don’t want to die, but I don’t have to if I make babies! Therefore, whoever is making the babies, I have to own them. Of course, women wisely kept it secret that they understood linear time. Because of menstruation, they knew about months. Because of that, they could foretell seasons, and because they gave birth, they were the only ones who could create life. For ages, the men were just like, oh my God — women are amazing. They can make babies out of nothing! They know when the buffalo are coming back! They know when to go in a cave and start building fire and gather extra wood! Women had this incredible overview that the male of the species worshipped and then, of course, became very jealous of…

And here we are, all these millennia later. The environment is now massively altered, primarily through our activities as a species, but no one’s bothered to reassess and adjust and consider in really serious terms that this impulse of the male to be violent to survive is still in the genetic program, and the jealousy of women as creators of life is just as entrenched. As we’ve got better and better at the environment, we’ve ignored behavior. That’s so dangerous… In an evolutionary sense, we’ve stayed completely inert, in cave mode, but we’ve gone out to space in genius mode. Everyone knows that when things are out of balance, things go wrong.

ON RELIGION, REINCARNATION AND HUMANITY AS A VIRUS

70% of the Tibetan population were devoted to meditation and out-of-body travel to try and understand what’s going on. Is this really here? If it is, what is it? Do we have a purpose? If we do, what is it? Can we adjust it? Can we have so much research done that we can literally reincarnate consciously, which His Holiness the Dalai Lama is supposed to have done — and we believe it. We don’t think many do, but we do believe it’s possible for a humane being to actually maintain a sense of individual self-consciousness without a body.

Now, look at the world — we have and the so-called religions, the worst of them all being Christianity as an organized religion. Not the belief, but the organized system is just stuck in the Middle Ages and unaware that the greatest struggle of humanity has always been — can we truly change the basic behavioral blocks of all people in a positive way?

One of my questions when I give talks at universities: How could there ever be a second war? You would think that after it was over, this first battle, whatever it was, and people walked around and saw their loved ones with severed limbs, bleeding to death, already dead, children maimed, places burned down, food destroyed, et cetera. You would think they would go, “Well, that was a really stupid idea.” Let’s never do that again. Yet we’re still doing it every effing day.

Gandhi changed India but was assassinated. It’s like the struggle between this prehistoric impulse of masculinity and the intellectual, philosophical desire towards perfecting as beings is anathema, and it’s destroying everything.

We wrote a piece, an essay, and it said, “Humanity is the virus.” People said, “What do you mean it’s the virus?” We said, “Well, if you think of this planet as an organism or a place that’s beautiful and that has this sort of ecology that’s swirling and changing but has a sort of myriad of variations. It’s beautiful and cruel, but it makes sense. What does a virus do? It invades its host, the planet or a body, and it starts to mutate aspects of that environment, the body, the planet. It will continue to do that and mutate it and kill off pieces of it until the whole thing dies. Isn’t that what we’re doing?” Almost precisely.

Humanity is a virus. The only conclusion you can come to is that we have to change the perspective we look from, and now we’ve learned from quantum physics that wherever you look from changes reality, and particles only exist when you look at them and all that stuff, which sounds so much like Tibetan mysticism and any kind of African mysticism, et cetera. No, wise people have been telling this for a very long time. Now, we’re at this place where we just have to really revisualize the human species… You know how there’s an organism. Say it’s an amoeba or a snake, whichever. Whenever it gets wounded, it marshals all of its resources, internal and external, to repair and heal the wounds, the damage. If part of it is dying through lack of water or nutrition, then it will again amass what nutrition and water it has and put it in the place that needs it the most.

If you imagine the humanE — We like to say humane with a big E on the end, which stands for Humane and Evolution — If the humane species visualizes itself as one organism, which is what we really are, the humane species, just one huge organism and we’re like the cells, then when anything is damaged or wounded, whether it be economically, physically, through the weather, illness, whatever it may be, then the whole species should marshal every resource it has to deal with that as quickly as possible and heal it. If there’s drought somewhere, the same should occur because organisms are innately supposed to continue to be alive as long as possible and propagate.

That’s not what we’re doing. Far from it. If we did that as a species and visualized ourself as one tiny bit of this wonderful, incredibly clever, beautiful, creative, technologically brilliant creature, this huge wonderful creature with so much potential, then we could deal with and erase war and the need for the industrial bullshit that is basically the root of the United States economy, the British economy, French economy… We could move into space. We could direct our technological genius to moving into space.

[Some countries like Norway] are working in the way it should be done, on behalf of the whole organism. Then you get China and the United States — if certain people become in charge (this interview took place in summer 2016), going: Oh, it’s not real. We’re not really wounded. There’s not really more plastic in the sea than fish. They’re not really dying off at this tremendous rate, and more and more illnesses aren’t going to come through because we’ve used too many antibiotics, and all this stuff that we all know. Tragedies one after the other, and they’re all based on greed. Greed, fear, and laziness.

ON POSTWAR REVOLUTION AND REINVENTING IDENTITY

Lady Jaye used to say the United States is three countries: the West Coast, the East Coast, and the rest. The West Coast and the East Coast are very liberal and tolerant most of the time, and the middle is, as we used to say way back in the 60s when we were an angry, anarchist teenager, the rest of the United States is the toilet of Europe where we flushed all the lunatic, religious crazies. Shipped them to Australia and America. Mainly the crazies came to the United States. They’re still here, and they’re still ignorant. Europe knew that they were so dangerous and anti-progress, so incapable of true tolerance and love, that they wanted them out. They didn’t want them in Europe, never mind in any particular town, so they sent them over here. They’ve been this canker ever since in the culture of the United States.

From the 60s, to answer the question really, that was when suddenly there was this unique moment in the history of our species when there was enough money around for people to be able to drop out and survive. Not with much, but not have to go into the 9 to 5 routine. Same in Britain and same in a lot of Europe. Suddenly, across a huge swathe of the educated Western capitalist system, millions upon millions of young people rejected the status quo and said, “We’re not impressed. You’ve had endless wars over nothing, and when you’ve finished murdering millions of each other, you shake hands and sign a treaty.” Why did they die? Why should millions of people lose their husbands, brothers, children, wives, et cetera? Why, when politicians just shake hands behind the scenes — okay, now let’s get on with business.

I was born in Manchester, England. In a way, we think we were really fortunate, born in 1950, so we remember rock and roll and Elvis, which we didn’t like. It seemed kind of hokey to me. We were a mod, and then we heard the Rolling Stones. Wow. Fabulous. Before that, my dad, very luckily for me, was into jazz. He was a jazz drummer before the war. He took me, and we saw Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Buddy Rich, all these amazing jazz people. Over and over at the Free Trade Hall.

Suddenly there’s this gap, which allowed people to start to think about details of daily life that normally just never got addressed — like I’m gay, but I’m not allowed to tell anyone. I’m black, but I’m not allowed in certain places. All these things. Why are there empty houses in Notting Hill Gate when there’s all of us who have nowhere. In the 60s in Britain and in the United States and all over Europe, there was this whole generation, we’re one of them, that said, “Let’s rewrite the book. Let’s just write the story ourselves.” Wipe it clean, say there’s nothing, no history. There’s A story, as we prefer to call it, with a big A. There’s A story, not the history, herstory, or the story. There are so many other options. We thought, “ What do we need to be alive? Some food, and preferably a roof,” and that’s it. We used to live on 2 pounds a week for years. We were in these two Georgian houses that were crumbling, and there were big holes in the roof, but still two Georgian houses.

In Hull, the first was a fruit warehouse. The second was the Georgian houses. You could go to the butcher and say, “Have you got any lights?” which is sheep’s lungs, and they’d say, “Yeah. Nobody wants them. Have them.” That would feed the cats and the dogs. They would give you bones. They would give you all this stuff that they weren’t legally allowed to sell the next day. The same in the baker’s and the cake shops, and you go to Woolworths, and they give you all the broken cheese from when they were cutting it and bits fell off. They kept it all, and they gave it away. Suddenly, you could eat for free. You could go to the fruit market and just pick fruit and vegetables off the floor, that had fallen out of the crate. You could eat really well, and clothes … What are clothes? Stuff you put over your skin. That’s it. Who cares what you look like?

Just by reducing what you’re actually experiencing, what the needs really are, and they’re minimal, you come to the point when you say, “Well, what’s the very worst that could happen?” If we decide to truly dedicate our life to being a Bohemian poet/artist?? We could MAYBE starve to death. Very hard in Britain, which has, thank goodness, still got some kind of safety net. Big deal.

Once you’ve got rid of the fear of that, there is no fear! You invent whatever you want to make next — I want a new name. I don’t want to do rock and roll with a drummer that’s based on the blues. I want to do something that talks about growing up playing in bomb sites and watching all the steam engines being cut up for scrap and seeing all these empty cotton factories being demolished, and so on. That’s what we’ve experienced. There was still rationing when I was a kid. We could only get chocolate once a week.

From all of that, that erasing of the fear of hunger and whatever else, then you’re free to imagine — and you get the gay liberation front. You get squatters’ rights, prisoners’ rights… The Whole Earth Catalog, geodesic domes, communes and communities … Just endless experimentation. What happens when we do this? Why can’t we do this here but we can it there? Why can we have sex in the bedroom but not on a stage? What’s changed? The sex is the same, so what’s changed? The context. What’s the context? And so on. You keep fighting like that. What is this?

Gay rights, such as they are, would never have happened without that. That’s where the impetus for so much came from — homeopathy, alternative medicine, ancient aliens, alternatives to versions of what the history of our species might be. How did they build this? We don’t know. We’ll say they got slaves. It still wouldn’t work. Oh, well, we’ll still say that it was lots of slaves. We still can’t do that with all of our lasers and everything today, so how did they do it? Oh, we’ll just say we don’t know. Even in the sciences … Guess who it was who brought out computers. Hippies. Tripping hippies.

ON MARS MISSIONS, PSYCHEDELICS AND POLICING THE INTERNET

Alexander Shulgin (pioneering research chemist who introduced MDMA to the world) invited me to his house when we were living up in northern California, through friends because we knew Terence McKenna and Timothy Leary and all those people. We went down and were hanging out. It’s a beautiful party, and there’s people of all age groups and types. I bump into these young, kind of hipster-looking guys of the time and say, “Oh, yeah, what do you do?” They say, “Oh, we’re from NASA.” I went, “Really?” I said, “How come NASA’s here?”

Beginning of the 90s. 92, I guess it was. We said, “What are you working on?” They go, “Oh, we’re working on trying to get to Mars…” We got talking, and somehow at one point, inspiration for new ideas came up. They said, “Well, what do you think we do?” They said, “We take fucking acid and… Why do you think we’re here with Alexander Shulgin? He gives us all these psychedelics… and we brainstorm when we’re all tripping.” Of course, we think that makes total sense. They said, “Hey, if you knew who else was here, you’d be shocked.”

That grew from the 60s, too. The Mars program comes from the 60s and tripping. Computers are from that, which means smartphones. We had another psychedelic experience with smartphones. We were working with Timothy Leary, because how this all happened was we became friends with Michael Horowitz and Cindy Palmer who are Winona Ryder’s parents. Michael has the largest library of drug-related books and manuscripts in the world. Like 15,000 or something. He’s got handwritten diaries by Thomas De Quincey about his opium habit. I mean, it’s mind-boggling. Luckily, when we came to the United States and couldn’t go back to England, we stayed with Michael, and in the basement was his library. Can you imagine? For me it was like, WOW. I would just go down there and pick out books by all these people and read their manuscripts and letters. That’s what we would do all day. It was brilliant.

Through Michael, we met Timothy Leary who was a big fan, it turned out. We ended up being his personal assistant part-time. We’d drive down to LA every weekend or so, and work with him and help him organize his papers. One day, he says, “Gen, would you come down next weekend?… There’s some people I want you to meet.” We get down there, and he’s a little bit weird compared to usual. We’re thinking, “What’s going on?” Then these very, very straight-looking people turn up. Six of them, and they explain that they’re a think tank for… Bill Gates. They said Bill Gates said to them he would give them the profits from one day’s sales in the stock market, which was 12 million dollars — whatever that day’s money was, that’s what they got… And their brief was, from Bill Gates, how do we commercialize the internet and how do we police the internet? We went off with Timothy, and said, “Timothy, that exactly what we’re trying to NOT do. That’s the reason it’s so great. It’s a free zone. For the first time ever, it is going to become, because it hadn’t yet, a global free zone.”

He said, “Yeah, well, I know, but if you just talk to them, they’re going to pay us 3000 dollars.” I was like, “Well, I don’t know. These are the enemy, aren’t they?” I was a bit thrown by him wanting to talk to them. We had a dinner, and then he said, “So now, Genesis… Give them a presentation.” I was like, “What? You never told me I had to give a presentation. What about? That’s when they said privatizing the internet… And policing it.

We said, “Well, we have thought about that a little bit, but we’re certainly not going to tell you!” Oh. Then there was this kind of weird moment, and they said, “Well, what about the hardware? Could you talk about that? What do you think is going to happen?” We said, “Well, that bit is obvious. It’s going to get smaller and smaller and have more and more functions. That’s what always happens.” They weren’t satisfied with that. They left. One woman there actually got really angry at me and says, “We’re paying you for all of this.”

I said, “Well, first of all, I’ve not been paid yet. Secondly, no one told me, so fuck you.” I didn’t accept any money. I let Timothy keep the money because I just didn’t want to be involved. I was very disappointed. It definitely… I pulled away somewhat. He was a very likable, wonderful, smart guy, but that definitely worried me.

Everybody can be bribed if they’re desperate for money. But this is the thing that I always get upset with, is that people will then dismiss everything he said… because of this one error of judgment. You know, he was getting older. It turned out he had prostate cancer and was dying, and he just lost his wife he was madly in love with. She’d left him. The guy was suffering, and so I take that into account.

When you remember he was in prison, sentenced to 30 years for half a joint. You look at his life and what he went through on behalf of humanity, and he did do it for that, no matter what anyone else might say. Just because he had an ego doesn’t mean he wasn’t an altruist. He was. One or two slips when you’ve devoted and given up your entire life to trying to get the species to bloody change, which is what is his campaign was. It’s what mine is, and it’s what we believe any artist or creative person should have at the bottom of what they do is trying to wake up and/or change people for the better. “The better of people?” you go. “Well, what’s that?” Well, it’s easy. It’s not raping. It’s not killing. It’s not war. It’s not greed. It’s all the things that it’s not.

ON THE MIDDLE AGES, WAR AND SHORT-CIRCUITING CONTROL

In the Middle Ages, there were the landowners in Europe and the aristocrats. Then there were the serfs, which is like indentured slaves. The serfs were forced to go to war if the feudal lord had an argument with someone. They had to give up their farms and go out and fight. They were taxed by the feudal lords for their farms, which he owned anyway. They were basically kept in poverty so they could never get out of that cycle. Sound familiar?

Then, as things developed and we ended up moving towards the Industrial Revolution, they suddenly realized that they needed a different type of resource in the general population of serfs that would work in cotton mills and cotton factories and steel factories. And that meant they needed lots of people of people in cities, which meant they needed cramped housing which made people sick. They had to come up with a health program. This is Europe, don’t forget. Here [the US], they’re still talking about maybe. In Europe, they realized they had to have them healthier in order for them to slave away in the mills, so they brought in various different acts. They brought in sewage. They brought in clean water. A certain amount of health care.

Then, as things got a little more complex and the economy of Europe got more complex, they needed people who were up to a blue-collar level. They needed managers, middle-class. They needed people who knew how to do accounting and banking and so on. They started to bring in schools and expand how many universities they were, and they let in people who weren’t from the rich, aristocratic classes. They started to share education because that’s what they needed, educated serfs. That’s basically how it moved.

Through the wars, they were still the ones who went and fought for the rich. It was exactly the same dynamic, just on a bigger scale. Millions died in just certain battles in France in the first world war, just machine-gunned down for fucking generals who sat in their big houses… It makes me sick. It went like that, and they were giving more to the people in order to keep them to the level they needed, but then we got the digital age. Suddenly, they don’t need a massive army of educated, middle-class executives and managerial people, et cetera. They just don’t need them any more. It’s awkward because they would love to just sack everybody and forget about them, but there’s too many media. How do you get rid of all these excess people? There’s two basic techniques that have always been used, which are disease and war.

We’re walking towards another one of disease and war. We have to be because they need to get rid of about one and a half billion people they don’t need for their fucking business. That’s why they’re building their bunkers, and that’s why there’s… an island where they’ve all got places. Well, they’ve all been buying places in New Zealand because when there’s an atomic war, it’s the place with the least fallout. Always has been. Something to do with the way the air moves around. They’ve been buying up and building bunkers. The Queen has a bunker in New Zealand.

Then they discovered that with the new technology, they need really unusual rare metals, so suddenly they want to recolonize Africa all over again. That’s what they’ve been doing. French have been going back. The Chinese are there. The British have been back. The Americans are trying to get in there even though they have no history of being there, which makes it difficult for the United States. Basically, Europe is recolonizing Africa because they need different resources out of the ground. They don’t need people. They need what’s in the ground.

What I’m saying is, there are, in a way, two species of humane beings… the two species of the species. There’s the humane beings, which is most of us, with the potential we hope to change and ultimately who want to be left alone and have enough to eat and be happy. There’s this simple life most people want, to be left alone. Then there’s the other species, which is not humane. It’s as if they are literally different in their genetic structure, and they could be. They are the ones who Burroughs meant when he said, “How would you short-circuit control?”

They’re still there, and they’re still ruthless. They are still totally amoral, immoral, cruel, and brutal, and they do not care what damage they do to anyone, anything, anywhere, as long as they maintain their control and their power.

ON THE CONTINUED MISSION AND LIVING IN EXILE

[This mission Burroughs gave me] still exists, and it’s harder than ever. We didn’t starve to death, but we have been put in court two or three times in Britain for doing things like collages of the fucking Queen. Eventually, we had to leave. We have not done anything. We were never even charged with a parking ticket. They couldn’t even find a bit of pot because we don’t smoke. They couldn’t find anything, but they took away every film, every video, every photograph, every slide. They took all of that plus African drums, anything they thought was weird, and never gave anything back to this day. Because we couldn’t come home, because we were suddenly in exile, we lost our two houses, which are both worth more than a million pounds now. One was a Georgian listed building that we improved beautifully. We lost it.

When we couldn’t keep up the mortgage because of everything that was happening, we invited friends who were into the rave scene, DJs in Brighton, because we were living in Brighton. We said, ‘Would you all live there and look after the house and pay the mortgage? It’s not very much.’ They went, ‘Yeah,’ so that’s what they were doing. One day, these thugs came in. They broke in through the front door, and smashed the Georgian marble fireplaces and broke anything that looked like it had any value and sprayed ‘Fuck you, Genesis. We’ll get you Genesis. You’ll be dead,’ all over the walls. They were off-duty police, and they boasted about it and said ‘prove it’. We can’t. They made the house unlivable, and we lost it because of that.

My children had to be told overnight, ‘Oh, you can’t go home any more. All the friends that you’ve made since you were born, you can’t see them any more. You can’t go and see your grandparents. You can’t go to their funerals when they die.’ Because of what? Because the government don’t like what I say. Lucky for me, my kids see it as the government’s evil, not my responsibility. Which worried me! I mean, how do you tell them this all happened to you because of me having a big mouth?