This Mortal Coil

The following interview took place in Peter Christopherson's room in the Morrison Hotel, Dublin on the afternoon of Saturday, October 23, 2004, a few hours before Coil's final performance as headliners of the Dublin Electronic Arts Festival in City Hall. Upon hearing that the group were to perform at the festival a few weeks previously, I'd immediately put in a request to talk to them.

Although it was stipulated that Peter and his long-term collaborator, Jhonn Balance, only had a few short minutes before sound-check and didn't have the time or the inclination to do an in-depth interview, we ultimately ended up enjoying a lengthy and wide-ranging discussion, during which we touched on numerous phases of the group's career, and Jhonn and Peter talked candidly (and with great eloquence and humour) about many of their friends and collaborators.

Afterwards, there were hugs from Jhonn and Peter, signed copies of the Black Antlers and ANS albums and an offer to stay in touch. In return, I presented them with a couple of items I'd brought along as gifts; an early draft of JT Leroy's novella Harold's End and a copy of M. Ageyev's cult classic Novel With Cocaine. Fittingly, the show that evening was superb, a hugely enjoyable sixty minutes of audio-visual adventure which demonstrated that even after 20-odd years of groundbreaking music, Coil remained among the most vital and innovative of contemporary electronic acts.

Tragically, just over three weeks after the interview, Jhonn died in an accident at his home, leaving the music world without one of its most gifted mavericks. A long term sufferer of depression, he had returned from a lengthy drinking binge, only to fatally injure himself in a fall. Jhonn was one of the friendliest, and most humourous and intelligent, musicians I have ever interviewed. As his many friends and admirers testified after his untimely death, he will be sorely missed.

PAUL NOLAN: You seemed to be very resistant to the idea of playing live for many years. Why have you become more interested in that area in recent times?

PETER CHRISTOPHERSON: For the longest time we didn't want to play live because we didn't want to mime to a backing track; it's so boring when people have the tape running and are just going through the motions. We totally weren't interested in that. But the problem is that the kind of music we do is either electronic or an electronic variation on some other theme. So I think for us, the answer has been to try and represent that approach in a live setting. For example, tonight we're going to have a hurdy-gurdy player, Cliff Stapleton, performing with us, and although on the surface it's a very traditional instrument, the way that we treat it is very non-traditional.

JHONN BALANCE: But it's the way he treats it as well. Cliff has worked in a very broad spectrum of folk music, but he now wants to show what's he's done. He's also done theatre as well, and from that he's got this incredible vocabulary of what the instrument will do; he's like the Jimi Hendrix of the hurdy-gurdy world. He's done stuff that people are shirking away from and are actually quite horrified at, but the sound he's got is absolutely stunning. It's similar to the way that we attack electronic instruments. If we can make something that they're not supposed to do sound good, that's what we'll use first of all, as opposed to more conventional material.

Which live acts have impressed you down through the years?

JHONN: It depends what you go for really. I used to love the Virgin Prunes, I was following them from about 1980. Later on, the Butthole Surfers used to really do it for me, and Throbbing Gristle, although I only ever saw them live when they did the Heathen Earth recording. But recently…I don't really know. My needs and wants have changed - I'm not a teenager or a young adult anymore, so I'm after something else. And when I listen to, say, Leonard Cohen, I think I kind of appreciate it and understand it in a different way than the manner in which I listened to music when I was younger. Ten New Songs was one of my favourite albums ever, but I don't think I'd go and see that live, because I get what I want from that record. So I don't really know what I'm looking for anymore!

PETER: But you did go and see Nina Simone. You were very impressed with that.

JHONN: That's right, Nina Simone moved me to tears; I was really glad that I got to see her before she died. But, y'know, shows of that quality are few and far between.

What's the most recent Coil material you've been working on?

JHONN: We've been working on lots of stuff, but the most recent release was a very pure electronic album called ANS, but that's sort of a side project almost. We were investigating this instrument we came across in Russia. There's a huge machine in the basement of the Institute of Journalism in Moscow, which was designed in the '20s or '30s, I think, and used in the '60s. It's an astonishing thing, it looks like a fucking printing press, and we did a box-set of CDs based purely on our experiments with it. But it's an exploration of the instrument rather than a continuation of the Coil sound or ideas.

How did you first hear about the instrument?

JHONN: Well we've been to Moscow twice, and the first time we were over there, someone said to us that there was this instrument they thought we'd be interested in. But they couldn't find it or set it up while we were there, so a year later we went back and had a recording session with it.

PETER: ANS is much more abstract than the stuff we're working on at the moment, which is more structured and song-based. It's a work-in-progress, currently called Black Antlers, and we've been selling CD-Rs of it at our shows. We're hoping to release it in January or February, and as I say it's more of a proper album, with lyrics and themes and so on.

I've been listening to the Unnatural History Vol. 2 compilation quite a bit recently, and it's amazing how contemporary most of the material still sounds, given that a fair proportion of it was recorded in 1983. You must be very pleased with the way that music has lasted.

JHONN: Yeah, we are. One of the reasons we never played live was that unless you're very careful, you tend to fix yourself to a particular point in time, and we were always very aware of wanting to avoid that. I mean, there are certain sounds on our old records where you think, "Oh my God, it sounds so 1983", but some of it still carries through and has that timeless feel to it, which is a quality we always strive for on our records.

PETER: We don't particularly take any notice of trends or fashions whilst we're working on our music, we tend to be quite reclusive, like some kind of weird hermits. Although we always make sure that the technology we use is cutting edge, because we don't really react to what's going on in the music business, the stuff we do generally doesn't sound like anything else that's around. I mean, there are some people that sound a bit Coil-like now, but we don't sound like anything else, certainly not consciously.

In terms of the way you operate, the nearest comparison I can think of would probably be Boards Of Canada, just because they're also so removed from anything that resembles a scene or a movement.

JHONN: They're friends of ours. We've never actually met them, but we have an avowed affinity with each other. They do astonishing things; they disconnect themselves from the internet while they're recording an album, and don't accept any emails or visit any sites. It's a hermetically sealed environment, such a personal thing. But I don't think it's about being introspective or isolationist necessarily, it's about keeping your music pure.

You can certainly hear that in their music. I remember listening to 'Oirectine' from Twoism for the first time and thinking, "This is so extraordinary, it sounds like it was written on another planet". I think they're one of the best groups in the world.

JHONN: I know what you mean, it's crystalline. You're trying to avoid any contaminants and reach something that's true. That level of purity is something we'd definitely aspire to in our music.

Peter, Throbbing Gristle are often credited with being pioneers of industrial music. Is that an accomplishment you're proud of?

PETER: Well, I'm sorry for the people who've had to listen to the crashing of dustbin lids and stuff in the intervening time (laughs). But I'm proud of the principles behind what TG did, which was basically not to take any notice of musical traditions or rules, but just simply to put yourself in a position where you could make noise, and the sound that you were making accurately conveyed something about the way you were feeling at that moment.

Most musicians and most musical projects don't have that spontaneity. It was about improvisation - and I am wary of using that word, because to me it always has connotations of pretentiousness and jazz and self-indulgence - but even though TG was self-indulgent to a certain extent, it was only a means toward achieving purity and honesty in the music.

Do you think perhaps the mistake a lot of bands who subsequently arrived made was to pick up on the rudiments of the TG sound, and neglect to put their own individual spin on it?

PETER: That's exactly it. It had nothing to do with specific metal sounds or anything like that. In a way, it was trying to do a lot of the things that punk did six months later. Only the people who became famous as the spearheads of the punk movement were very much rooted in the conventions of American rock music. So you ended up with this idea of "get a guitar and learn three chords". But what we were saying was "you don't need a guitar and you don't need three chords". So although in principle they had some good ideas, in reality their music was grounded in a quite conservative New York rock tradition.

Of the work you've done as a director, which of it are you most proud of?

PETER: I suppose the videos that I like best are the ones that most accurately reflect how I was feeling at the time, which ties in with what I was saying about Throbbing Gristle, and also with what we do in Coil as well. And I guess those videos would be the ones that I made for Nine Inch Nails and Rage Against The Machine.

JHONN: The Ministry ones were great too.

PETER: Yeah, the Ministry stuff was good as well. But retrospectively, when you're working for somebody else, when another artist is playing the piper as it were, a dilution of the idea is inevitable.

You've said in the past that it was something you largely did to subsidise your work with Coil. Is that something you don't need to do anymore?

PETER: Well, we've cut our expenses somewhat! (Laughs) We don't live quite the helter-skelter life that we used to.

JHONN: I think the need to not do it became greater than the need to do it, if you know what I mean.

One video see I did see recently, which has became semi-legendary in underground circles, was your long-form video for Nine Inch Nails' Broken EP. It caused huge controversy at the time for its frighteningly authentic snuff-movie visuals. What was the idea behind the film?

PETER: Well, Trent asked me to make the heaviest video ever made, having made some quite heavy videos already. He'd already done 'Happiness In Slavery' with Bob Flanagan, which was a great video, but he said, "I want to go further". Because obviously that was too subtle (laughs).

JHONN: I was very pissed off when they did that "Most Shocking Videos Ever" programme on MTV a while back and they had Bob Flanagan's one and not yours!

PETER: Yeah, mine was way heavier!

Well, yours never got released.

PETER: They had cold feet, and understandably so, because at that time especially the ratings system had a very censorious attitude to visual media, even music videos, and there was no way something like Broken was going to survive in that climate. I believe Trent said recently that the reason it didn't get released was because he was concerned that it would distract people from what he was doing musically, and although it was nice of him to say that, at the time I think I was actually rather foolish in getting so enthusiastic about those projects.

Everybody has to work in the real world, and, you know, material like that can put everybody at risk, including ourselves and even Trent, probably. Horror imagery, especially when it's that extreme, can have a deleterious effect on people's wellbeing, so you have to be very, very careful in how you present it. Particularly with something like Broken, so much of it is dependent on the perception of the person looking at it. Because I knew that we were making it up as we went along, it didn't actually bother me, but I can see in retrospect that someone who believed it to be real could actually be harmed by it. And in that respect I think it was irresponsible of me to do it.

A friend of mine interviewed Will Self recently, and Aleister Crowley popped up in the conversation, in reference to the one of the chapter-opening quotes in My Idea Of Fun. What is it about Crowley that many artists find so attractive?

PETER: Can I just say that the only time I ever met Will Self he asked me for an aspirin in a lift cos he had a hangover. But I'm sure Jhonn could tell you more about him.

JHONN: I've never met him properly either. He tripped over my foot at a party one time and I had to help him up, but I've never had an actual proper conversation with him. Is that quote you mentioned about Crowley crucifying a frog on a cross? Someone asked him why he did it and he said, "it's my idea of fun".

No, I believe it was to do with the conservatism of mainstream society, and how he wanted no more to do with it than he would want to eat canned salmon.

JHONN: (Laughing) That's a very Crowley-esque quote.

You've been a fan of his for a long time, haven't you?

JHONN: Yeah, we have a lot of friends in the OTO, the Aleister Crowley organisation, and some of them have worked with us, so that's a very direct link. But I've been interested in him and his work since about age 11, and I used to get in trouble over it in school quite a lot. I had my books taken off me several times, and I was told to stop astral projecting into other people's heads, ridiculous stuff. The teacher actually believed that I could do that! I think I believed it too (laughs).

I mean, I used to practice magic techniques that he'd laid out in books, just as a discipline to see what mindsets you could get yourself into. I was also interested in the man as a social phenomenon, and how he'd been outcast, and continually came up against this wall of outrage in society. But he remained quite stoic in the face of it all, and he had such self-belief that you couldn't help but admire him. I realised that the only way you can travel through this world intact is to have somehow magically filled yourself with self-belief.

And you can be as humble and as quiet as you like, or you can be ostentatious and outrageous in the way Crowley was - he took a completely different path to the one I would choose. A lot of people who follow him think that they have to be like Aleister Crowley, but they don't; they can be as quiet and introspective as they want, as long as you're being true to what Crowley described as your "holy guardian angel". I just see it in terms of being true to your own beliefs, regardless of the changing tides of opinion that surround you.

Did you admire William Burroughs for similar reasons?

JHONN: Absolutely; he knew what he liked early on - boys, drugs and guns - and he stuck to it. It was really fantastic to meet him. We did videos with him, released one of his records - in fact he may end up on the final version of Black Antlers. He did a magical intonation recording with us which we're still keen to use in some capacity.

PETER: He was a very charming, quiet, generous little old guy.

JHONN: Thursday was the best day to get him on. That was when he went to the clinic to get his weekly methadone injection - he'd always be in high spirits after that. He was on inventive form during that last recording session we did with him, singing songs about astronauts and so forth.

Did he show you his gun collection at any point?

PETER: Yeah, we went shooting with him at his house. He was a really sweet guy, and it's funny, cos if you sat opposite him on the bus you would never have imagined that he had this mad, decadent life going on in his head.

Did you like Cronenberg's version of Naked Lunch?

PETER: No. Some sections of it were okay, but to me it didn't have the bleakness and irony and humour that the books had. I read the books as a teenager, and they entirely changed my vision of the world really. But I don't know, the film seemed kind of sanitised to me somehow. Obviously it was great that there was a film and that it brought his work to a bigger audience, but what was onscreen was nothing like what was in my head.

You've done quite a bit of soundtrack work yourselves over the years. Is that something you'll do more of in the future?

PETER: I don't know, our experiences in that area haven't been the best. We did some stuff with Derek Jarman, which was great because he was such a creative and interesting guy, but other than that…I mean, the Hellraiser stuff didn't get used. Some of our material was used in the adaptation of Dennis Cooper's novel, Frisk, but unfortunately the film was pretty appalling. Our remix of 'Closer' by Nine Inch Nails was used in Ransom, which again was a bit of a dodgy movie, and most notably on the opening credits to Seven, which was better, but we weren't credited or paid for our contribution. We're jinxed!

Considering that the opening credits to Seven are as influential a 120 seconds of film as was made in Hollywood in the '90s, you must have been pretty annoyed about your work going unacknowledged.

JHONN: We went to see the film not knowing it was in there, then the opening credits came on and it's like, "Fuck, that's us!" Admittedly it was a Nine Inch Nails remix, but it was about 80% our material, so for our work to get completely overlooked like that was a bit of a pisser, to say the least.

PETER: In fairness to Trent, we got pretty well paid for doing the remix in the first place. And I remember I went down to his studio some years later, in '96 or '97, and just hung out with him and David Lynch while they were working on Lost Highway. I didn't really do anything except snort too much coke and chat with the both of them - Trent was quite nervous about meeting David - but they did give us publishing on, I think, a drone track in the movie, which still brings in a bit of money even now. So, I guess these things tend to balance themselves out over time.

What did you make of Lynch?

PETER: I thought that he was a bit of a bullshitter, but a very good one. His manner seemed phoney to me; you'd sit and talk to him and he'd have this air of what I can only describe as…affected eccentricity. I mean, I love Dune, I love Blue Velvet, and the early stuff like Eraserhead is fantastic, but it was just…when you'd talk to him, and he'd say, like (adopts demented, Lynchian boy-scout shriek), "I want the music in this scene to sound like a snake leaping at you from a box!" you'd just feel (winces) like he wasn't really talking from the heart. But, you know, he's David Lynch, so what can you say?

Finally, what music is exciting you these days? I'd imagine you're quite keen on people like Labradford, Pan Sonic, Aphex Twin…

PETER: We listen to those things, but sometimes to be honest we do try and avoid them, because as we were saying earlier, we're always aware of trying to keep our music pure and free of outside contaminants, brilliant and exciting as they may be…

JHONN: Your ears become weary - my ears are weary anyway with the age I am. I've listened to an awful lot of stuff for an awful lot of reasons: I've listened to it for enjoyment; I've listened to it because I have to; I've listened to it to make sure we're not copying anybody; I've listened to it to see what excites me sonically. And your ears get tired.

PETER: It's like when you get a package from a record company, or from Rough Trade or some other label, you've got this big pile of CDs to get through, and my first reaction is kind of (rolls eyes) "Here we go…" These people are friends of mine and I've got to listen to them because, well, you know…

JHONN: You have to mention it on the telephone next time you speak to them!

PETER: Yeah. And it's like, "Enough already!"

JHONN: I like Nick Cave's new album a lot. Lyrically, it's superb. As I was saying earlier, that's what's exciting me more now, and that's feeding into what we're doing. I'm actually going back through my record collection, thinking "What artists, male or female, can I listen to and get excited by lyrically? What great vocalists and songwriters have I missed out on?" For example, I like Will Oldham a lot.

You look like him!
JHONN: Well, this is an accidental similarity! (Laughs) Trust me, it's not a homage.