Stephen Thrower on Coil

The albums made by Coil in the second half of the eighties and the turn of the nineties remain a remarkably powerful body of work; their reputation as intoxicating, occasionally disturbing pieces of post-industrial electro-acoustic art has only increased over the years. Apart from Geff Rushton/John Balance and Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson, there was another mind involved in these recordings: Stephen Thrower, who was with Coil from ‘Scatology’ to ‘Love’s Secret Doman’, and later went on to form the brilliant experimental-ambient duo Cyclobe.

Rushton (1962-2004) and Christopherson (1955-2010) are no longer with us, but in this interview, Thrower paints a fascinating picture of Coil’s musical processes: the pioneering use of technology, the wild sonic experiments, the creative use of drugs. He also speaks movingly about Coil’s role as one of the very few bands who were openly gay in the darkest years of the 1980s HIV-AIDS crisis, and how they expressed this through their music.

The stature of Coil's work seems to have grown and grown over the years…

It seems that even after Geff and Sleazy died, new listeners are coming along all the time. So in that sense, I guess it's a testament to the fact that the records were not too trapped in their time, even though they are of their time, in some ways - in particular with the sampling and things – but the work seems to have eluded the trap of time to some extent, which is very nice.

I think, also, conceptually, it wasn't ‘of its time’ even in its time, in some ways.

There is an imprint on Coil that is very much of the eighties because of the technology that we were using. At that time in popular music, the only time you were hearing sampling was on records by Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush and Art of Noise, people like that. There are a couple of sounds that I slightly cringe at because they because they sound like they are straight off the Emulator sample discs, but that trap of getting stuck in the obvious presets was swiftly appraised and we worked out how to how to deviate from that with the mutation of the sounds and the treatment of them in the studio.

Going back a bit further, what were the first recordings you made?

The very first recordings I made, I was with a band - by the time we hit vinyl, we were called Possession.

Where were you based at the time?

When I was doing the early stuff, I was in Yorkshire, it was near Wakefield. And I lived there from school days through to about ’84, ’85, which is when I initially started socialising with Geff and Sleazy down in London. So up until up until ’85, I was living in Wakefield

What was it like making music and being into that kind of culture in a place like Wakefield at that time in the early eighties?

Well, there wasn't a great deal going on in Wakefield itself. I mean, you know, Wakefield is a city by dint of the fact that it has a cathedral but in terms of its size, it's  quite small for a city, but nine miles up the road or so is Leeds, and obviously Leeds had a fairly thriving music scene.

So you were only a half hour bus or train journey away from Leeds, which had the Gang of Four and the Mekons and Soft Cell initially. And it weren't that far away from Sheffield, which had Cabaret Voltaire. I think Wakefield itself was a dead loss - there were two very small local bands. I suppose Bill Nelson from Be Bop Deluxe was from around there as well, so there was a sort of a toehold in the world of prog in Wakefield as well.

Were you involved in the tape-swapping scene, people around the country writing letters to each other exchanging cassettes and ideas, these little do-it-yourself underground music networks that operated by post in the early eighties?

Yes, absolutely. That was the way that's the way you did it. I mean, if you wanted to get out of a tiny little place where nothing was happening, you wrote to people; you wrote letters. If you wanted more, if you wanted a wider social circle, and you wanted to start connecting with other people with the same interests, you had to write letters.

Fanzines were one way you would pick up addresses, because fanzines would often give you information about people, ways of reaching people. In that DIY independent scene around that time, people really did share a great deal of information. Sometimes bands were even putting their home addresses on the record covers – it seems unthinkable now. So you just wrote letters to them and such was the culture at the time, people did actually reply. I was writing to Steve Stapleton because I got into Nurse with Wound and just wanted to chat to him, I wrote to Whitehouse, I wrote to the Fall, I wrote to TG.

I got a reply from Mark E, Smith at the time when they were releasing, like, two albums a year and four singles and touring endlessly. And yet, you'd write to him, and he would write back to you, if you had something that caught his attention that you wanted to talk about. I'm hard pressed to remember anybody who didn't write back, funnily enough.

Possession eventually made an album (‘The Thin, White Arms, Obtusely Angled at the Elbow, Methodically Dipping and Emerging’, released in 1984).

I'm very critical of it myself. The instrumentation was rock instrumentation, and we were kind of coming from the same sort of ball park as bands like bands like Pere Ubu, where you had like a rock line-up, but with a heavy presence of electronics, and a fairly avant-garde approach to song structure.

We were still very young, still at the age where we were incorporating influences and, you know, looking back, you can sort of tick them off and say I know what the influence was there. You go through a patch when you're younger, when you're absorbing your influences. And when you look back, you can think, “Oh, my goodness, you know, it’s so obvious what the elements were there.”

I think TG had made a pretty powerful impact in the two or three years before. So I listen back now to the Possession album and I can hear  the rather undigested influences that went into it. I kind of look at it as a period where the things I was interested in were only partially digested.

You moved to London after that…

The album came out in ’84. And it was that year that I started going down to London to hang out with Geff and Sleazy because we'd been corresponding for a while. And they'd said, “Oh, you know, if you want to come down and stay, we've got a spare room, why don't you come and spend a few days down here?”

So I did, we got on very well. And within about three weeks of first meeting, they said to me, “Now we're going into the studio to record tracks for an album, do you want to come in with us?” And so that's how the [Coil album] ‘Scatology’ recording started. So it was actually fairly quick. I think I physically met them for the first time in the summer of ’84, and I think by the autumn of ’84, we'd started recording ‘Scatology’.

How would you describe Geff and Sleazy as people at that time?

Geff was very funny, razor-sharp and had a very, very well-honed love of the absurd. That was kind of all part of the way that we got on, there was a critical consciousness mixed with an absurdist streak, you know, so you could look around you and see the world as it was, and find, first of all, an awful lot of things to attack and criticise, mock and berate, and a lot of absurdities to pinpoint. And so that was kind of the way that we sort of bonded.

Sleazy was, at the time, doing a lot of work, he was doing a lot of video shoots. Sleazy had an enormous amount of technical knowledge, he was an early adopter on everything, he was the first person I knew who had a computer, he learned how to use the Fairlight and programming technology; he was the one that could be bothered to read the entire manual. And if you showed an interest he was very happy to spend time with you, showing you how things were done and showing you what he'd learned.

So I think that was one of the things that is like a hallmark of the Coil mindset and actually it's part of the TG mindset as well, which was no secrets, no jealous guarding of your information, no building of a separation between you and someone else and saying, “Well, I don't want you to know how we do this, it's  private and secret.” There was a willingness and a strong desire, in fact, to share anything that was learned; to share it with other people.

On these first recordings you made with Coil, how did your different roles work out?

Sleazy was the one that was doing the melodic and rhythmic construction most of the time. And then Geff obviously wrote the lyrics and did the vocals, and would want to have a very hands-on attitude to the melodic structures and obviously he could play keyboards to some extent, so he would be able to add motifs and melodic ideas. As long as he didn't need to program then he could add musical and melodic elements with great imagination.

And then I came along, and I sort of played a bit of everything, really. I'd learned music at school, I played a brass instrument in a band when I was a little boy, so I had a grounding - a very shallow grounding, I would say - in music. Because of that, I always had an attitude of “pass me that and I'll see what I can do with it”.

So I learned a little bit of guitar and learned to play drums. I knew my way a little bit around most instruments and I could play saxophone, which was the instrument that I was particularly fond of, and clarinet. So reed instruments I was very keen on. But basically, most wind instruments, a little bit of guitar, a little bit of bass, some drums, and always an interest in keyboards and synths.

I should hasten to add none of these things was anything like virtuoso. It was the jack of all trades attitude, you know, but basically came along and would say, “Why don't we try this? Why don't we try that? How about if we did, this wouldn't this sound good?” And if I met with approval, when I made a suggestion, then I would step up and do it, always within the boundaries of my own technical limitations, but the great thing about punk and postpunk was that you realised that there was lots and lots you could do even with technical limitations, even bearing in mind one's limitations in terms of actually being able to really play well. As long as you had the ability tosvisualize what would be good on a piece, you could then work to put it on there.

And so that was my role really. It was to listen to the backing tracks that Sleezy had created, which were often two-thirds of the way to finished already. And then say, “You know what would sound really good on this? Timpani.” I suppose because I was young, I didn't hesitate to say, “Oh, no, no, no, that's awful, we should do this instead.” So there was a bit of that as well.

They were a little older than me. Sleazy was quite a bit older than me, Geff was a couple of years older. But I think they enjoyed it, having somebody coming in and firing off suggestions and sometimes firing off criticisms, in the unselfconscious way that you have when you're 19 or 20.

They were very open to ideas, at least that's how it seems to me.

Yes, they were, but they also had a very strong sense of what they wanted. So it wasn't like they were short of ideas. I'm sure if my input had been counterproductive, or just firing off in the wrong direction, they would have not wasted any time letting me know, but as it happened, we just seemed to be pulling in the same direction, a lot of the time. So

How much of the time were they reacting against this kind of cliche of industrial music - harsh grinding noise and some bloke shouting about serial killers?

That was already a cliche by then, particularly given that TG had been gone for three years and Sleazy and Gen had already done Psychic TV together, and that had already gone to some lengths to broaden the palette quite a lot. Although, you know, when you look at Throbbing Gristle, the palette's pretty broad there as well. So it's not as if sort of TG was all ‘wall of sound’ the whole time. I know for Sleazy it was very important that you didn't just fall down into one of the gullies that that kind of music could fall into.

Sleazy had a very strong melodic sense. He was a great composer of melodies, and very unusual, quite long-form melodies as well. So he wouldn't have wanted to cut himself off at the knees by just concentrating on bludgeoning sound, even though that's all very enjoyable at times.

But from the very beginning with Coil, certainly, and going back to Sleazy's previous projects, rather than a kind of a monomaniacal obsessive ploughing of a single furrow to try and dig deeper and deeper into some very, very narrow area, there was always a kind of a fecundity. With Coil, there was a very broad, wide-ranging curiosity about sound – what happens if you bring this sound and this apparently totally dichotomous other sound together? What kind of sparks will fly if you collide them? It was experimental in the best sense.

The second album you worked on with them was ‘Horse Rotorvator’ [released in 1986], how was the process different?

The only difference I suppose the only difference was that by the time we did ‘Horse Rotorvator’, I'd moved down to London and I actually become a regular as opposed to a guest. By the time by the time we got round to ‘Horse Rotorvator’, I kind of said, “I simply want to join the group really.” And that was what they wanted. So I suppose the arrangement was a little bit more formalised, we were a three-piece by that point.

Was it a conscious decision to address these themes that came out of the HIV-AIDS crisis at that time - to address issues about death in relation to sex?

It was certainly conscious by the time we were well into it. I think, initially, sound ideas were being assembled independently of a thematic drive, but then, as you start to try and winnow out the chaff and decide what the real contenders are, and then Geff at that point is deciding which ones to write lyrics for, it's at that point, you start to think, “OK, well, if this one's going on the record, and this one is going on the record, and this is what these lyrics are doing”, then something's coalescing.

It's not as if you start with a blank page, and at the top of the page, you write themes. But at a certain point, as things organically start to pull together as the gravity of the project pulls all the elements together. And so you fairly organically start to build a theme out of sound ideas, and gradually the theme emerges. And once you recognize it, once you start to spot the signs, then you start to try and get to try and get the most out of it.

So this was a conscious rather than an unconscious reaction to what was going on at that time.

As a gay man at the time, you couldn’t fail to be aware that the dominant culture wanted you out, wanted you dead. You were being scorned and attacked in the tabloid press and treated as lepers or disease carriers and the agents of your own misfortune and potentially the people who are going to infect “normal” people.

People were dying and friends getting sick and at the same time, as a young man, you’ve got up to two completely contrasting and contradictory things happening in your life – the excitement of becoming involved in sexual activity, but just as you start to taste the fruits of liberation, there’s poison in the air, so it’s very difficult and inevitably leads to some introspection and a great deal of anxiety and dread and horror. And so the darkness, the heaviness of that album came quite naturally from the life that all gay people were living at that time.

But Coil wasn't an activist group, the album wasn't making an overt statement, it was describing a mood and a feeling in sound.

Maybe it wasn’t activist in the same sense that you would get the Gang of Four doing a song about the evils of capitalism or Mark Stewart lacerating international arms dealers, but nonetheless, there was a political dimension – any statement that you made about being gay at the time was a political statement.

I think at the time, there was just us and Bronski Beat who were “out” gay bands – all the other prominent figures, all the other figures in alternative music and pop culture who were gay, were either studiously avoiding discussing it or were actively denying it.

For all the reasons that you just referred to earlier, though, looking back at that time, the decision to come out in public must have been very difficult indeed.

When people were in the closet, it was because they’d been frightened by a hostile culture that was out to get them. So ultimately yes, the blame for closeted gay artists must live with the dominant culture which was enforcing and policing that, but on the other hand you have to applaud courage as well.

In terms of politics we did the ‘Tainted Love’ 12-inch single which was a benefit for the Terrence Higgins Trust [HIV support charity], and that was that was accompanied by a video that Sleazy shot with Marc Almond. Our version of ‘Tainted Love’ probably doesn't equate to pop in a lot of people's minds, but the video was done with all the facilities  and the skills that Sleazy had picked up working on mainstream pop videos, but it was  a video about the AIDS crisis, about a person dying of AIDS and about a dynamic within gay culture to do with the degree to which some people were facing up to their responsibilities and some people weren't.

So a lot of fairly knotty difficult questions to do with how to respond to the crisis, worked into essentially a pop video, which was unheard of at the time. And there was literally no one else doing anything quite so bold as that video. And some people really loved it in the gay scene, and some people thought it was an attack because of the character that Marc Almond plays in it. I think in terms of politics or whatever, the lyrics are not agitprop. But at the same time, the very existence of gay themes at the time was a sort of a political statement in some way.

I remember reading that Sleazy said he thought that gay people have an advantage because they see things in a different way. They have a creative advantage.

I think there's a point that can be made. And it's basically that anybody who is brought up in a culture and who then finds a particular point in their life that they are classed as an outsider or they're being consigned to another category as opposed to the broader body of the culture, that you're being told, “Oh, you're something else,  you're separate to the rest of us, you're another category.” And that can either be told to you in a kind of a dismissive way, or a flagrantly hostile way, or even in an unconscious, unthinking way.

But at some point, as a teenager, sometimes younger, you realise that that's you  - “they're talking about me, I'm being treated as other, as an outsider, as a social problem”, all that kind of thing. So once that happens, and it could happen through other means, not just sexuality, but once it happens, it encourages a slightly more detached point of view, and in a way a spell has been broken. And it can become an opportunity to look at things in a more critical way, because now you're now you no longer have the luxury of just coasting along as part of the general body of discourse, or body of society, you've been asked to see yourself as other and therefore when you do, you suddenly see yourself outside - there's  strength in that as well, there's a benefit to it. It gives you a different kind of wrestle-hold on your sense of what culture is.

How important were drugs to the albums that Coil made when you with them, and to the whole process of creativity in the music itself?

Drugs were very important, inescapably important. People talk about getting out of it – well, you can be looking for a way of getting out of a structure, out of a trap, out of a set of rules. And so drugs can throw the doors wide open and you can find all sorts of ways of getting out – suddenly there are no locked buildings and you can get out into the sky. So yes, they can be hugely, hugely valuable and exciting – until at some point, they’re not anymore.

Was there any specific situation where you felt that drugs had really unlocked a new possibility that you hadn't seen before?

I know that when we were recording ‘Chaostrophe’ which is on [1991 album] ‘Love's Secret Domain’, which was the album that we did where we were constantly high in one shape or form, Sleazy had written a piece on Fairlight or Emulator or whatever, on samples, a beautiful pastoral melody with counterpoints in lots of detail.

But by this point, we’d decided Emulator sounds were not good enough and it was more interesting if we got the melodic ideas played on real instruments. And so Sleazy took the piece to [arranger] Billy McGee who we'd worked with him on ‘Horse Rotorvator’ and he wasone of Mark Almond's regular collaborators.

Billy did the most beautiful arrangement, it was like a Douglas Sirk [Hollywood melodrama] soundtrack or something, with incredible strings and cor anglais. And then when we were in the studio, Sleazy was high and he went into a very strange sort of wormhole and totally distorted the entire piece in a phenomenal way and turned it into this monstrous electrical storm. And I think that journey from this classical beauty to this terrifying storm couldn’t have been taken if he’d not been heavily soaked in otherworldly chemicals. It was the fact that he could fly very, very deep into the heart of a storm in his mind’s eye with whatever he was taking at the time. The sheer scale and depth of the transformation he exerted on that piece, I think was an example of drugs and creativity riding lockstep with each other in a very interesting way.

How did the acid house scene make an impact on the music?

Geff was a voracious record buyer and he would be down in Soho hanging out at various record shops and really building up a fairly wide-ranging awareness of techno and acid house, which he was becoming very fond of, and by the time we actually recorded ‘Love's Secret Domain’, that had sort of elbowed its way into the mix to some degree.

To some degree, but not too much…

I exerted a certain amount of deceleration on that front, because I didn't like it. We had a few debates about it. As it turned out, only a couple of songs ended up on the records that were influenced by that, it didn't really gobble up the whole Coil world in the way that it looked like it might do for a while.

But for a while I thought it was becoming a bit too voracious a maw, and I wasn't terribly keen on the way it seemed to be sort of exerting a very powerful influence. And I did what I could at the time to exert a counter-influence. But yes, as it turned out, it wasn't really going to go too far down that route anyway.

I think you do feel some of the deep strangeness of the endless lost weekend, when you've gone out beyond the borders of Saturday night into whatever day it might be now, you can feel the some of that kind of loss of sense of who you might be.

I think that Geff and Sleazy, even when they were getting quite drawn into this template, they couldn't help but sort of mutate it and change it as well.

So they were very much into the clubbing culture.

Yes, they loved that a lot more than I did. They were quite happy to spend all night on the music and dance aspect of it, or at least the observation of it. Whereas I wasn't, I didn't particularly enjoy that environment.

After that album, ‘Love’s Secret Domain’ [in 1991], that was when you decided to leave.

There were another couple of years and then our relationship sort of hit the buffers’. And we fell out around, I think, late ’92, early 93. But then, you know, we ended up making friends again, a few years later, so it wasn't permanent. But the split in terms of my working with them at least came in late ’92 I guess.

But you stayed in London and kept on making music [with Ossian Brown as Cyclobe].

I lived in London until 2008. So yes, I was in London for quite a long time after ending working with Coil. I met my partner Ossian and he was a lodger at Coil's house and he and I got together, we became friends. After our falling out, me and Ossian met up with each other again out socially in London and that's when we kind of hooked up together and became an item, and then a year or two after that, we decided to do some recording together, and that's how Cyclobe was born.

This is a beautiful story though, isn't it?

Well, I find it quite amusing, certainly, that just around the time that I was reaching the point of no return with Coil, that Ossian and I should have kind of come together just at that point. Another six months and perhaps it would never have happened because we might not have bumped into each other. It was just very good timing.

But out of a time of the collapse of the relationship with Geff and Sleazy, through extreme good fortune, I emerged from the wreckage of that with my long-term life partner, so it was all good, basically.

Interview by Matthew Collin for ‘Dream Machines’, November 5, 2021.