Special Episode: Coil (with Hannah Pezzack)

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.6 • 842 Ratings

🗓️ 12 August 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today, we welcome music writer Hannah Pezzack to talk about the experimental electronica band Coil – namely, its two frontmen and only consistent members: vocalist Geoff Rushton, who performed under the stage name John Balance, and Peter Christopherson, nicknamed “Sleazy." At the heart of it all was an intense interest in the occult: in magic, alchemy, and esoteric symbolism. But just as central was their homosexuality: a queerness expressed through sexualised violence, the taboo, bodily fluids — blood, sweat, and scat — and an obsession with self-annihilation. Subscribe to EXTRA BAD GAYS on Patreon or Apple Podcasts to join the community of subscribing members who make episodes like this possible, and get our monthly chat show about gay culture and politics! ----more---- SOURCES: Hayes Hampton. The Invocation of the Black Sun: Alchemy and Sexuality in the Work of Coil, in Folk Horror Revival: Harvest Hymns Volume I – Twisted Roots (Durham, UK: Wyrd Harvest Press, 2018) David Keenan. England's Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground, Revised and Expanded Edition (London: Strange Attractor Press, 2023; originally published 2003) Cormac Pentecost. Man is the Animal, zine issues 1–4, (Temporal Boundary Press) Genesis P‑Orridge. Nonbinary (New York: Abrams Press, 2022) Nick Soulsby. Everything Keeps Dissolving: Conversations with Coil (London: Strange Attractor Press, 2023) Spencer Sunshine. Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s Siege (London: Routledge, 2024) Cosey Fanni Tutti. Art Sex Music (London: Faber and Faber, 2017) “AN INTERVIEW WITH COIL (Harvest History Month Pt. I),” conducted by Malahki Thorn, Heathen Harvest (originally published 1 April 2004), https://4ibrecords.com/2014/03/05/an-interview-with-coil-harvest-history-month-pt-i/ Hannah Pezzack on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hanapezzack/?hl=en Hannah Pezzack on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/hannah-pezzack Many thanks to Alina Valentina and Ruben Verkuylen for their invaluable technical assistance. Gratitude to Elina Tapio (who first introduced me to Coil!) and Marco Segato – both part of eoobe – for keeping the spirit of John and Sleazy alive through their music: https://eoobe.bandcamp.com/ Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicdesigner.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to a special episode of Bad Gaze, a podcast all about evil and complicated
0:11.4	queers in history. My name is Ben Miller. I'm a writer, historian, and a member of the board
0:16.5	of the Shulis Museum in Berlin. And today we have a very special guest, Hannah Pezac, who is
0:22.6	a music journalist, a writer, a DJ, a curator, and who's here to talk to us about someone
0:28.6	that I've been trying to get someone to do a special episode about for a while, so I'm really happy
0:32.5	she's here. Hannah, welcome to the show. Hello, it's so good to be here, long time listener.
0:44.3	And yeah, today we're going to be talking about the experimental electronica band Coil. So namely it's two frontmen and only consistent members, the vocalist Jeff Rushden, who performed under the stage name John Balance, and Peter Christopherson, who is
0:55.4	nicknamed Sleazy.
0:57.4	I have to tell you, Hannah, the painting that you see over my shoulder while we're recording
1:01.3	is by a friend of the show, an artist named Elijah Berger, who is a coil superfan.
1:07.0	No way.
1:07.7	And has been very, very excited that this is happening.
1:12.3	So friends, fans of the show will know that we used Elijah's art for a Caligula episode.
1:16.4	And so I know Elijah's really excited to hear this conversation and we're obviously happy to have it as well.
1:21.7	I mean, that's actually really great to know because I was a bit concerned that maybe people would not be very, or you would not
1:28.3	be very familiar with Quayle's music. It is quite difficult to just describe in words, like
1:33.8	what it actually sounds like. Over the course of their, like, they were functional for about
1:39.3	20 years from 1982 to about 2004. And during that time, they built an absolutely very varied sonic repertoire.
1:48.2	You know, there's the industrial noise of their first album Scatology, the warped acid house
1:54.5	of love's secret domain, the dark ambient drone of time machines and the pagan tinged neo-falk of music to play in the dark.
2:03.1	So their sound was constantly evolving and it refused to stay in one genre for long.
2:09.0	And it's also important to say, of course, that Coil was much more than just a band.
	...

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