John Balance
[This is a rough-draft excerpt from my forthcoming book concerning the history of modern Pagan and occult music. All work is copyright 2007 Jason Pitzl-Waters, and is posted under a Creative Commons License.]
"When people think about music and modern paganism, they inevitably think in terms of folk or heavy rock. To a certain degree they may also think about "festival music" too or electronic music... However, there is another major genre that is listened to by pagans and occultists, namely the "Industrial" and "post-Industrial" musics, which started at the same time as and shared certain features with Punk. This whole musical arena has been largely shunned by "decent" society, with its explorations of "darker" themes. Much of it has been directly influenced by and has in turn influenced magical themes." - Ed Richardson, "In Memory of Jhonn Balance"
Geff Rushton, a.k.a. John (or Jhonn) Balance, could very well be considered an English counterpart to Gwydion Pendderwen. While the music of Balance, and his primary musical project Coil, in no way resembled the American Pagan folk-singer's output, he, like Pendderwen, was a strongly influential figure on Pagan and occult modern music. Citing famous occult figures like Aleister Crowley, and Austin Osman Spare (in addition to several pre-Christian traditions) as inspirations for his work, instead of a laundry list of well-regarded bands, Balance along with co-collaborator (and former lover) Peter Christopherson created a diverse, beautiful, ugly, inspiring, and challenging body of work that has helped form new genres of music, and provided direct inspiration for dozens of artists both mainstream and underground. Coil, to this day, is heralded as one of the most important "Pagan" bands to emerge from the turbulently creative period of the mid-to-late 1970s.
Unlike other artists who flirted with witchcraft or occult practices in the 1960s and 70s, Balance from an early age was deeply interested in Pagan and occult practices, an interest that alienated him from the adults in his life and led to a stay in a mental institution:
"I have been interested and actively involved in [magick] since I was 10. And have been forcefully and repeatedly discouraged by parents, teachers, doctors etc. to have nothing to do with such things. I was put in a mental home for 2 months and was diagnosed as a schizophrenic because they messed me around and stopped me doing things like that. The breakdown came as a result of their interference and not because of the things I was doing." - John Balance
As a teenager, Balance was a fan of proto-Industrial band Throbbing Gristle, and became friends with member Peter Christopherson. This led Balance to eventually join the post-TG project Psychic TV. Balance collaborated on Psychic TV's second album Dreams Less Sweet and several smaller works. By 1982, both Balance and Christopherson were growing weary of the cultic aspects of PTV. Initially working with John Gosling on a project called Zos Kia (a name taken from Austin Spare's 'Zos Kia Cultus' school of magical practice), by 1983 the duo decided to strike out on their own as Coil, and recorded a ritualistic, sixteen-minute layered soundscape entitled "How to Destroy Angels", a work for the "accumulation of male sexual energy."
From that point forward Coil became a vibrant creative force. Between 1984 and 1991 Coil released three of their best-loved albums, Scatology, Horse Rotorvator, and Love's Secret Domain, which spearheaded the "post-industrial" musical period. The three albums incorporate elements of ambient, industrial, techno, sampled and folk music, along with spoken word elements and subject matter touching on ancient paganism, mysticism, gnosticism, and the ritualistic theories of people like Aleister Crowley. One artistic high-point during this era was their brilliant cover of Gloria Jones' soul song "Tainted Love" (previously popularized by Marc Almond), which was released as a single benefiting the AIDS charity, the Terrence Higgins Trust. Their ground-breaking (and explicit) video for "Tainted Love" is on permanent display at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In addition to the groundbreaking work Balance was doing in Coil, he also participated in several side-projects that made him integral to the formation of the genre now known as "Neofolk" (also called "Apocalyptic Folk" or "Folk Noir"). Specifically, he worked closely with fellow former Psychic TV member David Michael (a.k.a. David Tibet), releasing an early split single with Tibet's band Current 93, and collaborating on several Current 93 releases. Balance, in addition to working with Tibet, also collaborated with most of the major players in the Neofolk genre (to be covered in depth later), and participated in the Neofolk "supergroup" called The Nodding Folk. It would be fair to say that many of the Pagan and occult themes so prevalent within the current Neofolk scene originated with John Balance.
Through the late 1990s and the early part of the twenty-first century, Balance continued to explore new musical territory with Coil, now delving into more ambient and drone-influenced sounds, and collaborating with several artists on a host of side projects. Balance's interest in Pagan themes continued to manifest, including a series of singles released at the equinoxes and solstices of the pre-Christian festival calendar, and two albums in a series entitled "Musick to Play in the Dark" which heralded the "moon music" phase of the band, following their earlier solar-oriented work. Messages etched into the vinyl editions carried lunar-themed sayings such as "Hathor is the cow that jumped over the moon". In an interview with Fortean Times, Balance explained this shift in his creative output:
"The first thing we did, How to Destroy Angels, was a conjuration of Martian energy, male, homosexual energy. In fact people claimed that it was misogynist, and Rough Trade almost wouldn't stock it - a controversy in a tea cup. But now we're in a lunar phase, very moon orientated. Arabic culture uses a lunar calendar, they have moon letters and sun letters, and the pre-Christian Celts also used a lunar calendar. It's so much more natural. I'm on a mission to put the moon back into perspective. So like Sun Ra came from Saturn, we, at the moment are at the moon. Maybe we'll reach Saturn one day."
Sadly, this exciting new phase in Balance's creative life was cut tragically short in November of 2004, when he fell down the stairs of his home while intoxicated (Balance had long struggled with alcoholism). He was rushed to the hospital, where he died soon thereafter. Balance's fans, friends, and collaborators were all struck with grief for his passing. David Tibet of Current 93 posted this on his website:
"With burning sadness and with burning sorrow I remember You as: kindest of men, funniest of men, most intuitive of men, most incisive of men, most generous of men a great artist, a great voice, a great visionary, a great Soul and a great Heart Finally You were overwhelmed by it all: by all the beauty and by all the pain. You perhaps never knew how much You were loved."
Coil partner Peter Christopherson would put a posthumous end to their long-term project, finishing the final works. Artists from all over the world would collaborate on tribute albums to Coil, and 'listening parties' were held in Balance's memory. It is clear that John Balance represented a musical and magickal visionary who influenced popular culture more than anyone could have guessed. Certainly the Industrial and post-Industrial landscape would be very different today without his influence. Today Balance is considered by many to be a ground-breaking occultist in the vein of Aleister Crowley and Austin Spare, for his work in melding the world of modern music to magical theory and practice.
Labels: Coil, John Balance, neofolk, Pagan Music, post-industrial
