Exploring the Magickal History of Coil (Part 1) w/ P6 from OMO, Desalvo, Stretchheads and Security

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Coil have a reputation for being genuinely difficult: ritualistic, transgressive, the kind of band you approach the way you'd approach a locked door marked "occult correspondence, keep out." So it's a bit disarming that this episode opens with hand-written Christmas cards from Jhonn Balance and Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, sent to a teenage psychiatric nursing student in Paisley who wrote to them out of genuine fandom. Coil, it turns out, wrote back.

The student in question is Phil Eaglesham, or P6 as he is perhaps better known, formerly of Desalvo, Stretchheads and currently of OMO and Security. He's returning after breaking our brains once already with Cabaret Volatire, and this time he's turned up armed with decades of correspondence, first-hand context, and a refusal to let Coil calcify into myth.

We trace the band from Jhonn Balance's teenage letters to Throbbing Gristle, through Psychic TV and the deliberately porous, ceremony-blurred confrontation of early industrial music, into the Temple of Psychic Youth and its uncomfortably close relationship to actual cult structure. We get into the brass dildos sent to record labels as a two-fingered thank-you-for-nothing. We get into AIDS-era queer culture, MDMA, and the particular kind of self-medicating grief that eventually caught up with Balance. And we get into why a band this steeped in the esoteric and apocalyptic was, underneath it, trying to build something more human and more DIY than the mysticism suggests.

Jhon Balance himself suggested that Coil would forgotten within ten years after their end. They weren't. Whether that's a triumph of the work outlasting the intent, or proof that even planned obsolescence can't out-manoeuvre a good back catalogue, is something you can decide for yourselves. And we'll give you a bit of time to do that, because there's a whole second episode of this still to come next week.

Highlights

00:00 – Welcome back, Phil Eaglesham

00:04 – Setting the scene: resources, Tony Dickey, and the Coil album map

00:06 – The letters: correspondence with a psychiatric hospital

00:10 – Reading list: England's Hidden Reverse and Everything Keeps Dissolving

00:14 – A quick word from our sponsors (that's you)

00:16 – Origins: Jhonn Balance, Throbbing Gristle, and teenage letter-writing

00:20 – Psychic TV forms, Warner Brothers money, and the 23 brass dildos

00:23 – Temple of Psychic Youth and its uncomfortable proximity to cult logic

00:27 – Coil as an alternative: queerness, esotericism, without the cult of personality

00:29 – Ecstasy, connection, and the AIDS-era comedown that became alcoholism

00:32 – "In ten years, nobody will remember" — legacy, reissues, and Mute Records

00:34 – Sleazy in Bangkok, and his death in 2010

00:39 – Peter Christopherson's design career: Hipgnosis, Pink Floyd, Sex Pistols

00:42 – The boy shop window, the leg, and the police raid

00:44 – Industrial music's roots in performance art and danger music