Avant-garde artist Cosey Fanni Tutti drops a haunting new tune, Never The Same, from her forthcoming solo album 2t2.

“Whatever I do, I have to do it to excess, to explore it to the very edges, step over into the unknown, affirm my existence.”

Those are the words of Cosey Fanni Tutti in her book Re-Sisters, the follow-up to her excellent memoir Art Sex Music – three words that summarise her life and career.

I first met her when she made me a cup of tea at the house she shared in Beck Road, by London Fields, with Genesis P-Orridge, with whom I had somehow become friendly soon after starting my first job on the Hackney Gazette.

The next time I saw her was one lunchtime when I was playing pool in a pub on Kingsland Road, opposite the Gazette, and the stripper onstage (almost every East End pub had lunchtime strippers in those days, believe it or not) waved hello at me; I almost didn’t recognise Cosey without her clothes.

I was unaware that she subsidised their band Throbbing Gristle by working in what was euphemistically known as the “glamour industry.”

Anyway, after splitting from Gen, whose obsessive compulsion to shock my teenage self included showing me photos of human remains from crime scenes from his bizarre book collection, Cosey pursued her own avant-garde artistic and musical path with her new partner, TG bandmate Chris Carter.

Now comes a solo album, 2t2, from which comes this hauntingly beautiful tune, Never The Same, which somehow seems to communicate both melancholy and joy at the same time.