COUM TRANSMISSIONS ... are, or were, a performance art group that featured two of the founding members of Throbbing Gristle: Genesis P Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti. unlike certain performance artists - or at least, what most people consider performance artists to be like (i.e. Laurie Anderson), COUM were slightly different.

Genesis recalls: I used to do things like stick severed chicken's heads over my penis, and then try to masturbate them, whilst pouring maggots all over it... In Los Angeles, in 1976, at the Isntitute of Contemporary Arts (LAICA), Cosey and I did a performance where I was naked, I drank a bottle of whiskey and stood on a lot of tacks. And then i gave myself enemas with blood, milk and urine, and then broke wind so a jet of blood milk and urine combined shot across the floor in front of Chris Burden and assorted visual artists. I then licked it off the floor, which was a not-clean concrete floor. Then I got a 10-inch nail and tried to swallow it, which made me vomit. Then I licked the vomit off the floor and Cosey helped me lick the vomit off the floor. And she was naked and trying to sever her vagina to her navel with a razor blade-- well, she cut it from her vagina to her navel with a razor blade, and she injected blood into her vagina which then trickled out, and we sucked the blood from her vagina into a syringe and injected it into eggs painted black, which we then tried to eat. And we vomited again,