**Genesis and Cosey circa 1969. (Photo by John Krivine)

Your father and Genesis both assumed a position of authority over you, and your art is often about breaking apart those established systems. You’ve said that conflict was essential to the success of Throbbing Gristle, but I still have to wonder how you made music in such a difficult setting.

I just transcended that. Other people’s problems with me weren’t my problem. I was on a different trajectory. It was about creating and being myself. Whatever people did to me along the way, that was their problem, not mine.

That’s not easy for a lot of people. How do you transcend something like that?

A belief in yourself and a belief in the reality that you are equal to other people, and you have the right to do what you want to do, as long as you don’t harm anyone. Even in my childhood I had to deal with that kind of oppression and expectation. But I had the mindset of a male entering into the world—that it was my oyster. I attribute that to my father treating me more like a boy than a girl. I don’t think he intended that to happen. It was a side effect of how he brought me up.

You describe growing up in Hull, England, with all the bombed-out houses and post-war rubble of the 1950s. It was as though you were born into a kind of violence, which became a big part of your work. Do you still need an element of that when creating?

I suppose I’ll always need it. That element in my work is a foundation of what we’re all made from. Our base instincts of survival, sexuality... when you take away all the superficiality of the internet, consumerism, and everything else we’re given, we are just beings who need to interact with one another, to physically feel one another. That’s what I always tap into. I love technology—and I would embrace anything if it would help me do what I want to do—but I don’t see it as a lifestyle. As far as accessing the dark side of the human condition, which is what I’m really talking about, it’s all over the internet. If anything, it’s in our faces more than ever.

What do people misunderstand most about Throbbing Gristle and industrial music as a whole?

There was a lot of irony in TG. “Hot on the Heels of Love” was a Donna Summer meets Martin Denny kind of thing. Industrial music for us was about being industrious. It wasn’t about industrial sounds, literally, which is what I think people interpreted it as. The amount of cassettes we got sent of people doing so-called industrial music… you’re sort of thinking, “Well, we’ve done that. Why would we want to hear someone else trying to do it?” It’s not the sound—it’s the attitude and approach to their work. I’d like to hear some music in the industrial genre that keeps with what it should have been and was originally—it doesn’t even have to sound like TG.

TG songs like “Hamburger Lady” and “Hit By a Rock” evoke disturbing imagery in their language, but it’s the hisses and other noise that become even more abject. How do you strike a balance between work that’s both inherently mechanical and attempting to recreate visceral sounds that affect the body?