End Of Era.
Circa:
1987
...bring home Horse Rotovator (on the recommendation of a one-eyed Record seller at a Yeovil Record Fair: "like Psychic TV, only good...") only to find the speakers are shot... can just about make out the textures of this record from pressing my head very close to the needle itself... hear the opening silos of Anal Staircase, only almost without sound... even then, it was the greatest record ever... the horn blasts, the whorls... this was about to become my music, the only band that ever touched my dead-eyed soul...
...heard at last a few days later and then played repeatedely, ritualistically, obsessive-compulsively... a new world/whirled opening up... insect chatter, humchatter, big songs when I'd just about started a period of getting rid of songs...
...heard a day or so later through the gauze of just too much hashish... at times, during Penetralia, the world really does seem to slow down...
it becomes the downer LSD record of choice (the upper LSD record seems a long way away) - starts unravelling things... the world is a wound? Yes, of course...
Huge argument: no way this is Goth... this is the nonGoth death record... this is Mexican Goth i.e. not Goth at all...
...consider Malcolm Lowry for a little while.
...go backwards, find myself in a squat with Thatcher On Acid and Blyth Power practising in the basement... spend a few fruitless moments jumping up and down on the roof of the JAMMs car used in the Doctorin' the Tardis video... I've got a copy of Scatology under my arms, bought 2nd Hand at Notting Hill gate... insist on playing it to all the squat's hippies... curdles Soya... whiteouts....
...search.... Maldoror... De Sade... Bataille... it's an odd path but I keep going....
The Black Sun brings us to Harry Crosby... to Austin Osman Spare... to Richard fucking Dawkins...
1988
...hear an odd version of Tainted Love... a spun off version... a black hole of a record... it turns out much much later that it's isn't Coil I'm hearing except that it is...
...wake up in the woods with Coil's advert musics from the hellraiser 10" playing on a loop on a battered cassette player... someone (now also sadly dead and gone, our own version of Balance rather than Sleazy, has mixed the track so that it plays for the whole 45mins...)
...this is the beginnings of An Idiot's Guide... My Book Of Dreams
...read the Wild Boys, decide that Coil are the soundtrack of the film that never was.
Start seeing pirates again.... and not just in the music...
...keep digging... Gold Is The Metal... feels weightless.. true shards... but hearing Sleazy sing seems like he's talking from outside the grave....
1990
Trying to work out the Wrong Eye single... the slurrs not quite making sense... something seems missing from this... like this is a fragment of a bad dream... it's supremely odd... we sit around playing it over and over.... trying out different speeds... at 78rpm it starts to dance and we have to consider that whatever comes next is going to open up new depths....
...but instead... a new, crystalline brother turns out, blinking into the sunlight... Windowpane... this is a new curl, a turn up, a moment of sudden clarity when we weren't expecting it...
it took awhile before we could be turned from Horse Rotovator's churnings...
a little while...
then, Ecstacy.
Oh, yeah. I get it. This isn't about-
1991
I met a perfect girl on the day I bought ...Love's Secret Domain... a girl that would take me right the way through the end of my teenage years and onto my twenties... I'm talking to her and I'm holding this record... Chaostrophy will sort of become our song... without her, I couldn't have found my perfect wife... without this record, I couldn't have hoped to understand girls
from here this record soundtracks every acid trip for six years or more...
LP? yes. Cassette? Yes. CD? Well, you just had to.
The Acid squiggle is getting to me, finally. Before, I'd been following it; now it's following me...
Lying semi-conscious, wracked with shingles and pleurosy, those evil twins, those nasty little Kray fish - can now only listen to the Hellraiser themes, words are making no sense...
Later, humchatter.
1992
it's twin, Stolen and Contaminated Songs, comes a little later and that too keeps pressing at my brain, keeps me understanding the delirium, devastation and fun and frolics of drug use... these twins are the only records that make any drug sense to me... we sometimes played Shamanarchy compilations or early Shamen records but these two are just boiling and immense... these are why.
1993
very drunk, publicschool educated drunk, backstage at a Brighton Festival... Further Back and Faster is playing really loud over a PA, I can't findthe source, it seems to be following me... I've lost everyone I know... I can't even remember what this Press Pass means or who I'm supposed to be innerviewing.... holy fuck, Leigh Bowery is walking towards me... Further Back and Faster... Minty are playing, I think... soundchecking to... this?
A grin is sliding across my face like an open razor... Leigh Bowery looks mental of course but I'm freaking him out I think... I find myself mouthing the words of the song: "Fingers of the left hand, spell..."
I need out of here.
This music is way too much away from my little psychedelic cocoons...
Much later, on the beach at Brighton on Christmas Day: Chaostrophy blasting onto an empty beach, the perfect Christmas song.
Later, Derek Jarman's Blue premiers on TV... Coil blends... all Coil... the blue suddenly starts to make a lot of sense.. the fact there are all these people, out there, listening to Coil while I'm listening...
There's a glimpse, it seems. A new world. Coil on TOTP. Coil on Richard and Judy. Coil switching on the Christmas Lights...
But...
1994-1998
...Coil music thin on the ground... music itself losing significance a little... finding new things: work taking over, drink taking over... just obsessively scanning the Coil fanlist letters, looking for evidence that all is not lost...
played LSD to someone and they hated it: barely checked fury... music ebbing away...
The Glitch gets worshipped, though it takes it's spacetime to find its right place.
A car, going dead slow in the snow, The Solar Lodge is making a comeback. In the trees, odd figures that will reappear on the Moon's Milk CD just a few years away... for a little while, this Essex backwoods is flipping into Apocalypse Now...
1998
The Solstice singles start creeping out - these will eventually coalesce into my favourite album of the noughties, will eventually make all the sense of the world...
they soundtrack all seasons equally, as such suck air in in all kinds of ways... hot becomes cold, cold becomes hot... this is weather-baiting music...
A car journey full of flashing speedcamera lights and allCoil... I'm deranging the girl who's driving, kinda hoping for a crash.... I'm in an odd place...
1999
Kate Bush appears, as she always threatened to... this is a waves... this is a disappointment at first... not as sparkly as the Solstice singles, too windswept... but it grows... they always grow...
2000
Music To Play In The Dark is played in the dark. Another new direction that no one saw coming. This has been ages in coming.
Eyes closed, sucking it all in. A new child gurgling in the background. Perfect. Moon Musick at a time when the moon is always out; perpetual dawn.
Lots of mushrooming. Red Birds Will Fly Out Of The East And Destroy Paris In A Night takes over. This track will creep, will creep forever now. Begin to understand Thighpaulsandra.
Discover Salvia. Time Machines is the only CD I can listen to while this plant takes hold. Everything else is impossibly intrusive. All words shriek. Flashback to pleurosy/shingles time.
2002
See Coil live, with the wrong girl. The tubes on strike, everything circling.
2003
The live albums keep spilling... each one is a different mystic beast... they will go on and on and on... Coil will live forever...
2004
They. Don't. Fuck. ImBalance. This is the first rock star death that I feel. I'd just managed to have the courage to go an innerview him. He'd been very nice on email and over the phone. He lived just up the road. I sent the questions and then he was gone.
Gutted.
What can we see in the entrails, Roman?
Then: Shards, fragments, totems... there must be more product out there, mustn't there? Thousand of unreleased gems from when Jhonn was alive. It'll all come out now, won't it? There must be ghosts of vocal tracks lying dormant on harddrives, elPHing out, waiting in the shadows...
2005
Oh Christ, the multiverse... Chaostrophy reemerges. For a brief moment, things might be alright...
The Ape Of Naples comes and... it's not enough. It's great, but it's not enough. The harddrives aren't there - is this machine recording?
There's shards, fragments, totems but...
"Some of the songs from Backwards are here too; mostly in much improved versions from the bootlegs that crawled the Russian cracks in the net... mostly in versions where the vocals rise and fall, clambering to get out because he knows it's almost time for words to end...
So far, we've had Boy In A Suitcase and Broccoli but, now this is out, the question remains: will Peter sing again?"
2006-2010
I hear hidden things. An odd sort of hope.
Peter Christopherson is regrouping, getting ready, coming up with some brilliant angles. It's not Coil but it's a breathlike, a tangible, a skew. He's gaining in confidence, the Thresholds being met allover again. He's going to release something immense soon...
These tickles, these treats.
I can't believe he's gone. There must be more. Collaborations, compilations, missing tracks, oddbins, entrails, humchatter...
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