Trans rocker endures setbacks and tragedy
By Larry Nichols
PGN Staff Writer
© 2007 Philadelphia Gay News

GENESIS P-ORRIDGE AND LADY JAYE

To say that 2007 has been a challenging year for the pioneering and influential band Psychic TV is an understatement.

The gender-blurring band released its first album in over a decade, “Hell is Invisible ... Heaven is Her/e,” and has since faced setbacks, financial difficulties and discrimination on their most recent concert tour.

But it was the sudden and tragic death of one of the group’s core members, Lady Jaye, that brought the band to a halt.

The group was founded in 1981 by singer and artist Genesis P-Orridge, whose former band, Throbbing Gristle, helped to forge a sound that would evolve industrial music along with bands like Kraftwerk and Einstürzende Neubauten.

Psychic TV was an artier, more experimental progression of the industrial sound, where P-Orridge incorporated psychedelic rock into the mechanical sounds she had helped to create.

The group remained dormant after the mid-’90s, when P-Orridge decided to focus more on art and spoken-word projects. It was during this time that she met her soul mate, Lady Jaye, and began exploring what they would come to refer to as “pandrogyny.”

PSYCHIC TV Photo: Dan Mandell

“Lady Jaye and I first met in New York in 1993,” P-Orridge said. “When we got married in 1995, I was the bride and Lady Jaye was the groom. From the minute we met, we were always cross-dressing with each other. It was very intuitive, I had found someone who was prepared to follow me in my fantasies and explorations no matter where I went. That natural attraction between us developed into thinking why we enjoyed being more like each other. We started to dress the same and do our hair and makeup the same. We decided that we wanted to explore our attraction to that process more deeply. We started to use cosmetic surgery and all the other modern technologies to physically look more like each other and that would become a third being, a third consciousness that we call the pandrogyn: the positive androgynous person.”

The two lovers further demonstrated their dedication to the concept of pandrogyny when they simultaneously received breast augmentation surgery on Valentine’s Day 2003. P-Orridge, who now identifies as female, explained some of the nuances of pandrogyny.

“We don’t want to change gender,” she said. “We want to include both genders. We started to look at creation legends from different cultures. We discovered that most creation myths originally stated that human beings were hermaphrodite and that the divine state of union is the hermaphrodite. The process of existence is the reclamation and reunion of male and female into one new being which we call the pandrogyn.”

P-Orridge and Lady Jaye were living in New York City when a friend of Lady Jaye’s, future Psychic TV drummer Morrison Edley (of the Toilet Boys) convinced P-Orridge to give the then-dormant band another listen.

“I realized that I did like listening to those songs,” she said. “They were pleasurable in and of themselves. We decided that we would do one gig and see what would happen and it was in New York in 2003. It was in the middle of a big blizzard but it was completely packed. That made me understand that there is a very strong fan base that care very much for what we represent to them.”

The enthusiastic response led the newly reformed band (featuring Lady Jaye singing on live samples) to do a European and North American tour in 2004 and head back into the studio in 2005 to record “Hell is Invisible ... Heaven is Her/e,” which was released in July.

The tour to support the album was fraught with setbacks and controversy. In August, the band was scheduled to perform Anderson’s Fifth Estate in Scottsdale, Ariz., which had made headlines last year after the owner banned transgender patrons. Apparently, owner Tom Anderson was unaware that Psychic TV had transgender members.

Transgender advocates planned to picket and crash the concert, but Psychic TV opted to move the show to a different venue to avoid a violent confrontation and the appearance of endorsing the club’s policies. (The club owner has since changed his policy and now allows transgender patrons.)

A planned European tour in October had to be cancelled after the band discovered that the tour’s organizers had misled them about the number of shows booked and that they would end up losing money on the trek.

The band was gearing up for a tour of the East Coast when tragedy struck. Lady Jaye collapsed and died Oct. 9 in her home in Brooklyn from a previously undiagnosed heart condition.

Jaye’s sudden passing was devastating to the band, and especially to P-Orridge, whose life was extraordinarily intertwined with Jaye’s.

“We were together for 14 years and because we were so fortunate that we tended to make money doing creative work of our own, we spent every minute of every day and year together,” she said. “Our intellectual life was an ongoing dialogue between ourselves about pandrogyny, evolution and identity. Every single aspect of my personal life was fully integrated with Lady Jaye.”

Psychic TV canceled all tour plans for the rest of the year until they can sort out their future.

“We really weren’t sure at first what we should do,” P-Orridge said. “Even now, when we have had offers to do concerts — we were offered to play with Bjork in Mexico City this month — we agreed that if we looked behind us and she’s not there, it’s going to be really hard. At the same time, luckily, she’s left a legacy of a great number of samples for what she’s already created and what she was working on for new songs. So we will be able to play again. It’s just going to be a very emotional situation for a while. Everyone in the band agreed we would wait until after the New Year before we’d start to get specific.”

P-Orridge said that Jaye’s spirit lives on, at the very least, in her art and idea, which she intends to continue on with.

“I don’t usually use the word ‘I’ anymore,” she said. “I’m training myself to say ‘we.’ Pandrogyny was fantastic when Lady Jaye was alive but since she passed on, we’ve received several very strange paranormal messages and phenomenon that suggest she’s still active in whatever the other dimension is that we travel to. So while emotionally it’s terribly difficult for my person to even function right now, intellectually, the pandrogyn is now two spirits and two different dimensions and one body. So we’re going to carry on changing my body to still look more and more like Lady Jaye’s.”

For more information on Genesis P-Orridge, Psychic TV and pandrogyny, visit www.genesisp-orridge.com.

Larry Nichols can be reached at larry@epgn.com.