Cosey Fanni Tutti: Re-Sisters – The Lives and Recordings of Delia Derbyshire, Margery Kempe and Cosey Fanni Tutti

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Hardcover |15.88 x 3.18 x 24.13 cm | 400 pp

Faber & Faber | 2022 | 9780571362189

In 2018, boundary-breaking visual and sonic artist Cosey Fanni Tutti received a commission to write the soundtrack to a film about Delia Derbyshire, the pioneering electronic composer who influenced the likes of Aphex Twin and the Chemical Brothers. While researching Delia’s life, Cosey became immersed in Derbyshire’s story and uncovered some fascinating parallels with her own life. At the same time Cosey began reading about Margery Kempe, the 15th century mystic visionary who wrote the first English language autobiography.

Re-sisters is the story of three women consumed by their passion for life, a passion they expressed through music, art and lifestyle; they were undaunted by the consequences they faced in pursuit of enriching their lives, and fiercely challenged the societal and cultural norms of their time.

Musician and artist Cosey Fanni Tutti has continually challenged boundaries and conventions for four decades. As a founding member of the hugely influential avant-garde band Throbbing Gristle, as one half of electronic pioneers Chris & Cosey, and as an artist channelling her experience in pornographic modelling and striptease, her work on the margins has come to reshape the mainstream. 

‘Myself, Delia and Margery – a trinity of the sacred and profane , sinners and saints of a kind. Three defiant women with our individual, unconventional attitude to life. Untameable spirits, progressive thinkers living within the inherent societal constraints of our times.’ COSEY FANNI TUTTI

‘An impeccably researched meditation on womanhood as viewed through the lives of three firebrands.’ GUARDIAN

‘Awe-inspiring. Read these revelatory portraits: this book is for anybody who wants to discover the work of three women who, without fanfare, have enriched our world.’
ROBERT WYATT

‘Cosey Fanni Tutti has lived the life and has the stories to tell: not just hers, but those of two other still unheralded female pioneers.’ JON SAVAGE