“It was really raw emotion, explosions going off in the brain while I listening to it,” says Cosey Fanni Tutti of the recording and editing process that lead to TUTTI, her first solo record since the 1980s; “it was like insanity”. The release of this strident, propulsive album of heady not-quite-techno and sensual atmospherics comes at the end of a heavy period of retrospective work for Cosey, with the publishing of her memoir Art Sex Music and curation of Hull City of Culture’s COUM Transmissions retrospective in 2017.
“I’d done so much in the last two years that my mind didn’t know which direction to go in, and that manifested itself in my remixing of Tutti,” she says now. The shift in outlook from reflectively backwards to forward is undoubtedly what gives Tutti its considerable welly and sense of life. As Cosey says, “I loved it because it was an outpouring, an exorcism – I’ve got rid of that.”
There’s just one more bit of retrospective thing for Cosey to get down to, however, and that’s her Baker’s Dozen. Reflecting on her early years in Hull, Cosey remembers that her mum loved to sing around the house, a family tradition she’s maintained today. “I tend to sings songs from way back then that are really melodic,” she says. “I don’t sing songs that are on the charts, unless something pops up and I get an earworm, then I’m singing it constantly”.
She didn’t have access to the means to play her own music until COUM Transmissions settled in their locus of operations on Hull’s Prince Street. “In the Funhouse I didn’t have anything, I had to go and buy a mattress in the auction room,” Cosey remembers, “Nowadays you’d think of fleas and stuff like that but I didn’t back then for some reason. Perhaps there weren’t any – it was too cold in Hull, nothing survived the winters” What has endured is the warmth of Cosey’s deeply felt love of the music that soundtracked the north-eastern outpost of the 60s hippy dream, as you’ll read below as she discusses these 13 cuts of what is, appropriately enough art sex music. To begin reading, just click on the image of Cosey below.
