From Plan B Magazine:

ON BALANCE
Words : Mark Pilkington
Photos: Mark Pilkington

“Death, he is my friend, he promised me a quick end.”
‘Blood from the Air’, from Horse Rotorvator, Coil (1986)

Geff Rushton, aka John Balance of Coil, died on the afternoon of Saturday 13 November, in a fall from the first floor landing of his home. He was 42.

Founded by a young Balance in 1983, and bolstered by his musical and, until recently, life-partner Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, for 21 years, Coil’s music changed, deranged, detoured and matured with its creators. Each new album – and sometimes these were several years apart – brought new sounds and ideas to the fore: Coil’s sonic vision was persistently transgressive and transcendent, both aesthetically and technologically. Whether they were peering down into the sewers or upwards to the stars, Coil were always several steps ahead, or at least one step to the side, of their contemporaries, with much of their music sounding like transmissions from another dimension. In fact, some of it they claimed was from another dimension. Certainly they were bold explorers of psychedelic space, much of their sound being informed by the glittering jewels brought back from these inner-landscape excursions. Their capacity to merge heavy-duty avant-garde weirdness with a canny pop sensibility and an ear for a tune has made Coil’s sonic legacy an enduring one. What happens next for Coil is anyone’s guess, but it’s hard to believe that Balance’s untimely death will do anything other than heighten their already semi-legendary status.

I first discovered Coil as a horror-film obsessed 14-year-old. They had brought out an unused soundtrack to Clive Barker’s film Hellraiser. I was hoping for something like the terror-funk of Goblin, who were my favourite band at the time, but what I got was something very different indeed, a haunting, captivating soundscape of tones, rumbles and music box tinkling. It was several years before I realised that I had been playing it at the wrong speed all that time, but it never seemed to matter. I would eventually pick up all their records and, while my tastes have changed (though not that much) over the past 16 years, their back catalogue still provides refreshing and rewarding listening. Their more recent output, especially a collection of improvisations recorded on the solstices and equinoxes of 2001–2002, remains sonically inspiring, forward-looking and defiantly uncategorisable.

Late in 2000 I interviewed Balance for Fortean Times magazine, at the home where he died, while Peter snoozed upstairs. It was a very human discussion about drugs, magick, birds and dreams.

Following this, Balance (I always called him this, though I knew he was Geff) and I kept in touch, sometimes regularly, mostly not.

In 2002 Coil performed at Conway Hall alongside Drew Mulholland’s Mount Vernon Astral Temple and others at the Megalithomania event I co-curated with Neil Mortimer of the now defunct Third Stone Magazine. Feeling like Kermit the frog, I introduced them and wound the curtains open with a huge handle offstage. Their performance was uniquely odd and a one off, with a clearly drunk and unhappy-to-be-there Balance yelling largely incoherent abuse over a pulsing, shifting synthesised backdrop provided by Sleazy, Thighpaulsandra and Simon Norris. Meanwhile their Italian dancer friends Massimo and Pierce freaked the audience out inside barely-moving black-hooded entity costumes on the sides of the stage. At one point Balance hurled a large stuffed rabbit into the audience, hitting the Lovecraftian magician and anthropologist Justin Woodman, and towards the end looked like he was about to throw one of the London Musicians’ Collective’s monitors (hired by us at some expense) overboard. I projected a telepathic plea to him to put it down, which he did, afterwards insisting that it was only because he’d wanted to, even though he’d got the message.

We can all only know aspects of each other. I knew Balance as a mercurial, warm, funny, sharp and highly curious individual. I only caught glimpses of his demons, most of them seemingly borne of the alcohol that would eventually kill him, but got the impression from talking to others that he’d upset many people over the years.

Our last real conversation was in February of this year at the Strange Attractor Journal launch at London’s Horse Hospital. We discussed beards, garlic, magick, the whereabouts of Atlantis and psychedelic jazz. At one point we were both startled as a full beer bottle spontaneously exploded as it stood on the floor at our feet. Our final encounter was a fleeting one, as I snapped away from the photo trench beneath the stage at Hackney’s Ocean venue in August, at what would be Balance’s last London performance with Coil. Curiously a friend had told me beforehand that this was to be the band’s final gig – I don’t know where he’d got that information from. Balance did a double take as I sent a friendly wink his way from under his feet. It was a good gig, though perhaps not as awe-inspiring as I know they were capable of, presenting some of the group’s more melodic new electronic offerings, including the cosmi-comic ‘Sex With Sun Ra’ that’s sure to become a posthumous favourite.

At gig’s end John waved and said “Thanks Mark!” through the PA.

Thanks John/Geff, wherever you are now.