IT JUST IS.

by Simon Hampson

There’s a video on the internet that is, I would say, a perfect piece of art. It’s a recording of the final song of the final gig by the experimental band COIL, performed in Dublin in October 2004.

The song is called ‘Going Up’, which was a phrase that the couple at the centre of COIL — John Balance and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson — used as a joking euphemism for death. In what turned out to be his and COIL’s final live performance, Balance adlibs some lyrics that seem to shade into a statement of a readiness for, and resignation to, death — ‘are you ready to go now?’ And then, finally: ‘It just is.’

John Balance died a few weeks later. He had been an alcoholic since the early 90s, and died in a drunken fall from a second-storey balcony in his home. His body was found by Sleazy, who was downstairs watching TV — the two had been a couple for 2 decades and, while they were no longer partners at the time of John’s death, they still lived together, with Sleazy caring for him as he drank himself into oblivion.

After John’s death, Sleazy threw himself into finishing COIL’s Ape of Naples album. ‘Going Up’ is the final song on this final album, with John’s vocals on the track taken from a rough, bootlegged recording of that final gig.  You can hear the background noise and chatter of the gig, the echo of ‘it just is’ talking to itself through the bad acoustics of the venue (COIL performed underneath the neo-classical dome of Dublin’s City Hall). A beer bottle hits the floor towards the end. It sounds like a green one.

So what’s happening here? The Ape of Naples album version of ‘Going Up’ is the final statement of COIL, both as a live act, and in the studio. It’s based around the last ever words said on stage by John Balance. It was produced in an act of grief for a dead ex-lover, in which the dead man himself speaks about preparing for death.

There’s countless songs about death, but with ‘Going Up’ the connection is much tighter, much more disturbing and also more beautiful than just being ‘about’ death. The song is riddled with death, being both a premonition of death and a grieving reflection upon that death after the fact. In it, the dead speak, but only to talk about their own death. And then it ends with a bottle breaking — a final act of finality, of death by drowning in alcohol.

I should also say that the bulk of ‘Going Up’ — the bit that isn’t John talking about his own death — is based on the theme from the 70s British sitcom Are You Being Served? The opening bars play the main melody from the theme, but psychedelically refracted. After this, the main body of the song is the lyrics from that theme tune, sung in an operatic falsetto by François Testory (who performs half-naked, looking like a faun). The lyrics tick off the various goods to be bought on each floor of the department store: stationery; leather goods; shirts; ties; hats; underwear and shoes. It’s been suggested elsewhere that this was COIL’s final act of alchemy, turning shit into gold.

COIL frequently spoke about the importance of artists keeping their antennae open. It is the role of the artist, they suggest, to tap into the magical universe, and act as its conduit. John Balance equated their music with channelling spiritual entities: ‘It feels like we’ve been taken over by something higher. Higher beings are commanding’. The art is already out there, in the ether. All it needs is a vessel. Keep listening, and filter nothing.  You must ‘Kill the censor’, as a friend says.

COIL’s music is embedded deep inside their magic — their occult practice provides the mycelial networks, the music its occasional fruiting bodies. COIL music was made on solstices, equinoxes, recorded under rivers, after weeks-long drug binges. The recordings and the live shows were intended as magical artefacts and rituals, to induce a realignment of awareness, jolt the channels open, and — as they put it — fuck your mind for good.

 In COIL’s understanding of the magical universe there are no accidents and there are no coincidences. Which begs the question of whether, channels open, John heard death calling.

COIL’s music is thick with allusions, even premonitions, of the moments of John’s fall to his death.  Sleazy commented: ‘Much of the work of COIL, Jhonn’s life’s work in fact, described or addressed that Very Moment, nevertheless, it came as a great shock to all of us.’ 

 ‘Most accidents occur at home’, said COIL in their song ‘Sex with Sun Ra’. An earlier track, ‘Who’ll Fall’ is even more direct - the track is based around an answer phone message from one of their friends, telling how his partner had killed himself by jumping off a cliff. The message ends with a line that, in hindsight, seems both a warning and a piece of clairvoyance: ‘one day, you’re gonna fall’.  I find it very distressing to listen to this track.

There are countless other examples laid through their discography. The Ape of Naples album welcomes us with the following line, the very first lyric on the record — ‘Does death come alone, or with eager reinforcements?’. Even more spookily, in finalising the album for release, Sleazy was surprised to find a previously unheard line from John that popped up in the mix: ‘I don’t expect I’ll ever understand, how life just trickled through my hand.’ Keep the channels open, and what do you hear? Death, stalking behind, breathing down your neck.

One COIL track — ‘The Golden Section’ - has a thick sample of stampeding horses’ hooves piled upon each other. Which makes sense, because — as I hear it anyway — death has hooves. Do you get that too?

So, one way to hear the whole of COIL’s history is as being about John’s death. Death is everywhere. ‘Going Up’ is where all these references and allusions to the death get sharpened to a knife point for one final throw. COIL were never so directly and devastatingly about John’s death.

And this can be spellbinding. It is horrible to admit this, but there is something entrancing and satisfying about the deep well of tragedy and love and pain that ‘Going Up’ comes from, in the sheer formal beauty of its perfection as an ending. Horrible, because this is of course not only an artwork. This is the reality of a person drinking themselves to death, and his partner of decades hearing the crash, turning from the TV and finding him dead on the floor, his body broken.

‘Going Up’ is monotonically about death, but death isn’t really there. Not the ugly prosaic reality of death. Not the receiving of a late-night phone call from your mum or dad speaking in a rough, choking way, trying to tell you that death has come to another loved one, struggling to get the words out but it’s pointless because you know what they are saying without even listening to the words. Not the grind of cleaning a house left to sink into rot and uneaten food. Not the red blotches on skin through sleeping in hospital chairs. Not the shit, unglamorous deadliness of death.

So, one way to think about what COIL are doing here is that they’re cheating death. In an immediate way — John is speaking from beyond the grave. But there’s something else — death has come calling, but it has been transmuted. The ugliness and the pain have been transformed through an act of creation. It is about death, but it is not of death. It is alive, fertile, eternal, beautiful.

Funerals likewise cheat death — or at least the typically reserved British funerals. There is no death there. No chaos or sluminess of death. Replaced by smart clothes, considered speeches with a beginning, middle and end. An ordered narrative, that sticks to a timetable and a script. A final fuck you to death and the havoc it has waged.

(In the final performance of ‘Going Up’ in Dublin, John Balance wears a white shirt and dark tie. This is radically different from his stage clothes at all previous gigs, which included furry onesies, strait jackets, dresses. The shift in stage outfit for Dublin confused me until I realised — he’s wearing what you would wear to a funeral.)

Just as much as we’re cheating death here, death is also skipping away from us. It just is. It’s said gently, wistfully in the video. But it’s like a book slamming shut, isn’t it? It just is. No answers, no explanations. It just is. You can devote your artistic project to these premonitions of death, but what light does it shed? Death is always a step ahead, in the unfathomable depths, and it just is.

 There’s one final thing that disturbs me about the consummation of the death narrative within COIL. It’s almost too neat. Balance sings repeatedly about death, his own death. He plants clues along the way. He plays one final gig, where he finishes by singing of his own death. And then he falls, just like COIL predicted. Most accidents occur at home. It’s so tightly tied up, there seem to be no loose ends. And this is disturbing because in itself it seems to run against the whole grain of COIL. Because this band were, more than anything, about letting those loose ends get tangled, wrapping them around you, pulling you under. ‘Goddess save us from single vision’, sings John on one tune, following William Blake, a celebration of ambiguity, the liminal. But where did this go, at the final hour? Were all the tensions and conflicts embedded within COIL to resolve themselves into this pristine, almost Hollywood narrative? There has to be a chink, a glitch within the narrative. Goddess save us.

Perhaps this is the chink. This death, the death of John Balance after “Going Up”, this death is not final. It’s tempting to think it so. To think that the story ended, and all loose ends were tied together into a bow. But death is not the end. Rather the death just marks the point at which it’s over to us now, the living, to carry on the story. We’ll have no more answers from John and Sleazy (who died six years after John). And the story will mutate and end up being ever more about our imaginations, our hopes, desires, perversions. We’ll project, and hypothesise, and talk to them and converse with them. The end of COIL has led to an ever-growing hydra of reissues, fan sites, books, pieces like this, bootlegs, theories, and conspiracies. John and Sleazy are gone, but they’re everywhere, mutating and twisting and multiplying.

The problem of people dying is that they are never more present to us. You never think about someone as much as when they are dead. You never talk to them so much as when the time comes that they can’t answer.

This is what always happens. The dead are so loud because they can’t speak. And so we speak for them. And we create something out of nothing. And death has been cheated, for another day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wO9ZLxwUrgs