COIL - Biography

One of the biggest names in experimental music is Coil. The founder members John Balance and Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson (the same man behind Throbbing Gristle, we've seen), met at a live concert of the band when Throbbing Gristle performed at Oundle School. UK sound manipulators and experimentalists Coil were formed in the aftermath of Throbbing Gristle's artistic fallout when Peter Christopherson (keyboards, programming) split from Genesis P. Orridge's Psychic TV to join John Balance (vocals, percussion) in 1982. Balance had already been recording under the name Coil. The band has gone on to include numerous other personnel, notably Clint Ruin (Foetus). However, the core members remained Balance, Christopherson and Stephen Thrower (programming, keyboards) until the early 90s. Transparent was the first ever Coil release as Coil. Where this gets tricky is the fact that Coil and Zos Kia were the same band for a while. By that I mean, not just that John Balance was a member (which was also true of Psychic TV), but several of what would later become Coil tracks were done during this period. By that token, the first-ever Coil release is Zos Kia's 'Rape' single, 'Rape' being an early version of 'Here To Here (A Double Headed Secret)'. The seventeen-minute, one-sided 12' titled 'How To Destroy Angels' was released in 1984 and was described on the cover notes as 'ritual music for the accumulation of male sexual energy'. It was dedicated to the god Mars and used predominantly iron and steel instruments, such as swords and gongs.

They set their stall with a 1985 long-playing debut, Scatology. This, regarded as a work of unequalled genius in some sectors of the industrial community, used elementary electronics and primitive samples as a basis for exploring lyrical themes that included religion, sexual freedom and alchemy. Housed in a black-and-white sleeve that only reinforced the hostility of some of the enclosed music, Scatology was an innovative staging post in music's post-punk revolution. Coil's next release was a 12' single covering Soft Cell's 'Tainted Love' (1984) with 'Aqua Regis' and a restructured version of 'Panic' on the B-side. Coil produced a video to accompany the single: featuring car crashes, hallucinogenic putrefaction and Marc Almond as the Angel of Death, it was widely banned, but the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought a copy. Between 1984 and 1986 Coil collaborated with Derek Jarman on the film The Angelic Conversation, the soundtrack to which was reworked and remixed before release under the same title.

After Nightmare Culture (1986), a collaboration with Boyd Rice, Coil recruited Stephen Thrower as a full member of the band and released the album Horse Rotorvator (1986) and an EP called Anal Staircase (1986). Horse Rotorvator combined Fairlight brass and clunky percussion with lyrics about sex, death and cannibalism. However, the album's most striking feature was Christopherson's sampling - notably on 'Ostia', where a recording of grasshoppers on the Aztec pyramid at Chichen Itza is used as the vehicle for a song about the Italian film maker Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was murdered by a rent-boy in Ostia. Horse Rotorvator was a less ostentatiously uncompromising audio experience, this collection saw the group supplant the more abrasive elements of its sound with classical and jazz textures, though the messages thus sweetened remained grim.

Occasionally the more prominent placing of the poetry/vocals, aided by a musical background drawing from Arabic and Middle Eastern cultures, produced an uncharacteristically accessible, clean sound. Unreleased Themes From Hellraiser contained exactly that - a series of mood instrumentals written for the film but rejected. Clive Barker's loss proved a boon to Coil fans on an often overlooked set that is among the most evocative in the band's consistently excellent discography. In 1987 Coil incorporated Otto Avery into the line-up and went through their archives to produce Gold is the Metal, a remastering and remixing job that embraced a range of music wide enough to offend and inspire most people. Though self-consciously experimental, it stands out as one of their best albums because of the way it concentrates many of their obsessions - magic, bizarre and ambivalent sexuality, shifting states of consciousness, and alchemical transformation. Although Gold Is The Metal With The Broadest Shoulders is a compilation, it is worth consideration in its own right as the versions of the songs contained (drawn from the previous albums and EPs plus compilation appearances) are often in radically different form. This sense of summing up continued with the first volume of the Unnatural History retrospective (1990), after which there came a substantial change in musical direction, as Coil began a foray into the techno/rave scene with the 'Windowpane' and 'Wrong Eye'. These prepared the way for Love's Secret Domain (1991), a large-scale multi-collaborator production that switched between psychotic dance tracks and freaked-out industrial experimentalism.