Unsung Podcast

Last time we admitted defeat in our attempts try to summarise a fifty-plus album discography. This time our play P6 turns up with an actual diagram (which you can see right here) and we spend an hour and a half trying to work out whether that's a genuinely useful map or just a very elegant way of saying "it's complicated."
We get into what actually meant when they called one period of their music “solar music” and the other “moon music”, both to themselves and to people writing about them afterwards. We begin with Scatology and then go into a long stretch on Coil as a queer band specifically: not queer-adjacent, not later reclaimed as queer, but a band who were writing directly out of the AIDS crisis while the gay mainstream press was too frightened to touch them. We talk about the rejected Hellraiser score, Clive Barker's actual bowels, and how a soundtrack too creepy for a horror franchise ended up as one of the most bootlegged, most fought-over corners of their catalogue.
We get into Trent Reznor giving them free run of a New Orleans studio for their aborted album Backwards, the slow drift into drone and ritual with Time Machines, and the posthumous artefact economy that's grown up around the band.
There's a lot of Coil in this episode that isn't really music in any conventional sense; arguably a lot of it is more like documentation. Documentation of a relationship, of a pandemic that was devastating their community, and of two people slowly working out what they were for. Whether that makes the later, harder-to-love records worth the effort is something we argue about without really resolving. We’d say give it a go anyway – you might find something you love.
Chapters
00:00 – Welcome back, and the state of the venues in Glasgow
00:04 – Phil's solar/moon diagram, and the pivot point of Horse Rotorvator
00:07 – Scatology as manifesto: no personality cult, just "this is us"
00:12 – Defining solar vs moon in Coil's own terms
00:16 – "Kill a queer for Christ": the hostility Coil were writing against
00:20 – Coil as a queer band, not a queer-adjacent one
00:24 – The AIDS pandemic as the actual subject of the solar period
00:27 – Why Coil succeeded where Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the "gay icons" of the 80s didn't
00:31 – The Spanner case, outlaw community, and the limits of gay respectability
00:35 – The artefact economy begins: box sets, reissues, and "picking at the corpse of Coil"
00:36 – The rejected Hellraiser score and Clive Barker's bowels
00:44 – Love's Secret Domain, clubbing, and ecstasy as a response to the fear of touch
00:48 – Derek Jarman, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and Phil's own ordination
00:55 – Into moon music: The Angelic Conversation and the shift toward mysticism
00:57 – Trent Reznor, free studio time, and Nine Inch Nails' debt to Horse Rotorvator
01:02 – Membership shifts: Danny Hyde, Drew McDowell, and Thighpaulsandra
01:04 – Black Light District and the "dank, downbeat" transitional period
01:14 – Moving toward live performance and the birth of Coil's occult stage identity
01:19 – Balance's addiction, Funeral Music for Lady Diana, and the Foxtrot testimony
01:26 – Post-9/11 visuals, prisoners, and a return to transgression on stage
01:27 – Closing thought: boredom, labour, and what it cost to make this music

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

If you've been tuned into the news around the Scottish grassroots music scene at any point in the last few weeks, you'll likely have seen there's been a bit of controversy brewing around King Tut's Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow and their owners, DF Concerts.
Following a piece published in The Bell, where numerous people spoke out about the poor terms that King Tut's offers to emerging artists, various corners of social media were ablaze with righteous fury. It prompted DF to threaten to take The Bell to court, and also saw The Herald get in on the action. So we think it's fair to say that this is a blaze that might be threatening to run amok.
The terms that King Tut's offers has been something of a known issue in the Scottish music community for a number of years, and whilst there are certainly reasons for small artists to be aggrieved (reasons which we share), the matter is not quite as clear cut as The Bell article would have you think.
On this week's episode we draw from our own experiences as musicians and promoters to try to give a more complete picture of the issue. We also do a wee exercise where we map out whether putting on gigs yourself is more cost effective, using examples of the rates offered by many venues in Glasgow to paint a picture of what the costs of running a show yourself actually are.
Which ultimately leads us to ask a few questions: is what King Tut's offer fair? Is it just better to put on gigs yourself? And if King Tut's parent company, DF Concerts, used their corporate backing to pay artists more, what might be the outcome of that on the wider grassroots scene as a whole?
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This week we sit down with Jon Zipp of The Zips — one of Glasgow's original 1977 punk bands — for a conversation that doubles as an oral history of Scottish punk.
The Zips' story is a strange and charming one. Formed in '77, gigging by '78, split by the end of 1980 after two small-run EPs — 500 copies of the debut, sold out in six weeks — the band lay dormant for over two decades until a record collector tracked down the drummer via the West of Scotland phone book. It turned out The Zips' records had been bootlegged all over Europe, their EPs had become prized collectors' items, and a new generation of bands citing the Clash and Buzzcocks as influences had made the world safe for them again. They've been at it ever since, complete with a "Zips USA" franchise lineup, European squat tours.
But the real revelation of this episode is John's first-hand account of Glasgow's infamous punk "ban". In the late 1970s, Glasgow City Council — having decided after a Stranglers gig at the City Hall that the city "had enough hooligans without importing them from down south" — made it known that any pub or venue hosting punk bands risked losing its licence. The effect was chilling: a generation of would-be Glasgow punk bands strangled at birth, touring acts like Elvis Costello turned away on the day of the show, and a city now famed as one of the great music capitals of the world temporarily hostile to the most vital music of its era.
Along the way we get John's reflections on punk's flirtation with fascist imagery and provocation, why John Lydon is his biggest disappointment (and Paul Weller one of his quiet triumphs), the surprising resurgence of very young audiences going wild for original 77-style punk, and a truly outrageous tale of how, with his post Zips band in the 80, how he blagged — via the Mitchell Library's phone books and Harvey Goldsmith's office — onto a 30,000-capacity bill at Ibrox with Rod Stewart in 1983.

We reach into the vault this week to extra an old bonus episode that has a fairly unique format we liked to called the Split 7". In this episode, we talk build our own festival line ups.
ORIGINAL SHOW NOTE
We’re going to be 4 years old soon and for pretty much every single week of those 4 years (with the sole of exception of around this time last year when a technical issue made us lose an entire episode) we’ve been able to release an episode a week. However, this week we just couldn’t. Some life things got in the way and we had to take care of that. We couldn’t just leave everyone hanging though, so we decided to reach way back into our vault of bonus content and excise this little gem from back in October 2019. One of our subscribers, Chris Hynd, asked us what our perfect festival line-up would be and we duly obliged. So enjoy as Chris, Mark and Dave talk about who would play their festivals. We will return next week with special guest Neil from The Accordion Podcast as we talk about Finelines by My Vitrol.