
Re-Sisters, the second book by Cosey Fanni Tutti, is not as such a sequel to her first, 2017 memoir Art Sex Music. It does though cover related autobiographical territory, much of it events which transpired since the publication of ASM – whose success seems to have been a catalyst for this threefold study of noted transgressive women to come into being.
Those women are, in chronological order, Margery Kempe, a Christian pilgrim and mystic from the late Middle Ages; Delia Derbyshire, a lynchpin of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the 1960s and electronic music pioneer; and Cosey herself, whose practise (performance art and industrial music in COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle and Chris & Cosey) overlaps with Derbyshire’s, although they never met. If a casual observer might think it narcissistic to clamber onto the podium in this way, Cosey’s storied career arguably justifies it: some of her work has been genuinely paradigm-shifting, especially in hindsight.
As Art Sex Music demonstrated, the author writes compellingly, although various speculative passages about Derbyshire’s inner thoughts can feel trite and superfluous. Structurally, Re-Sisters is enjoyably nonlinear – springing sharply from discussion of one figure to another, in doing so bundling up the various commonalities in their lives and reflecting the spontaneous way in which Cosey ended up building her research into another fine book.
Re-Sisters, Cosey Fanni Tutti (Faber)
Price: £18.99. Info: here
words NOEL GARDNER
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