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95.
Yes Coum Are Fab and Kinky.
No place (Hull): no date (1971). Photo-illustrated poster, with lettering in orange, printed offset on pale cream paper stock. 46x29cm. Near Fine.
Genesis P-Orridge’s first COUM publicity poster, illustrated with a studio photo of himself as a young schoolboy propping up a massive tuba. A row of six smaller b/w photographs appear below, each one featuring a member of COUM, including one of P-Orridge as an adult. From left to right they show Tim Poston, Spydeee Gasmantell (Ian Evetts), P-Orridge, Haydn Nobb (Robb), Jonji (John) Smith, and Brook (Tony Menzies), with the name captions intentionally incorrect. One of the captions is for ‘cosey’, though she was omitted, as were other active members Les Maull and Ray Harvey, making the poster, as far as Tutti was concerned, “a disingenuous representation of the reality of COUM” (Art Sex Music, p.84).
The poster’s slogan, one of several conceived by the members of COUM, was used as the headline for an article on them in Torchlight, the newspaper of the University of Hull. In a letter to Lesley Allen, Vice-President of the COUM Van Glub of North America, dated March 1972, P-Orridge wrote that: “Yes E am the little lad with the Tuba in the poster. My mum used to run a child model agency and that was one of the photos of me in her files. E am ironically proud of the fact that E never got a single job as E was too thin to model clothes and too pointed and ugly for close ups.”.
