The 120 Days of Sodom

More p0rn to prise you away from your favourite dens of iniquity... Penguin's recently published edition of the 120 Days of Sodom is currently an Amazon UK bestseller, and I'm rather pleased that such an unhinged work of debauched imagination has joined the cannon of classics. I read the bulk of the 120 Days in my early teens, courtesy of  Arrow Books' 1990 edition, the novel, along with Naked Lunch, Crash and Last Exit to Brooklyn, was one of those transgressive works I was eager to investigate. But enthusiasm soon gave way to boredom, and the book’s wayward plotting, unrelenting repetition and Sade’s penchant for exhaustive detail eventually led to my abandoning the book after some 500 pages.

And yet… I find myself intrigued once again by the 120 Days. So much cultural water has passed under the bridge in the intervening years I feel much better placed now to tackle the novel which has been marinated with all sorts of interesting personal connections - I’ve seen the Pasolini film, Peter Brook’s 1966 film Marat/Sade, the Sade-influenced films of Jess Franco, and there are the odd stray references that I enjoy - Peter Cushing possessed by the spirit of the Marquis in the 1966 film The Skull, the cameo appearance of the 120 Days of Sodom in Clive Barker’s Hellbound Heart, as well as the titular reference of the 1981 Nurse With Wound/Whitehouse collaboration album 150 Murderous Passions.

Another interesting connection emerges with this latest edition of the novel, thanks to Penguin’s design team who have selected Man Ray’s 1933 photograph Monument à D.A.F. de Sade for the book cover. Ray’s photograph reflects two of Sade’s obsessions – the anti-Christian sentiment of the inverted crucifix, and Marquis’ predilection for anal sex. The photograph was re-staged for Coil’s 1984 debut album Scatology, which in turn reflected Coil’s interest in the occult and male sexuality. There’s a pleasing symmetry at work here: Coil sampled dialogue from Salò on the Scatology-era track Homage to Sewage, while the album itself contains some Sadean liner notes – a fictional sexual encounter between two men written to accompany the track The Sewage Worker's Birthday Party.

Moon inscriptions

Listening to the limited edition bonus disc that came with Coil’s Moon's Milk (In Four Phases) set. The music is fantastic of course, three long tracks of beautiful sustained bell tones and drones, a psychedelic synth workout, and a text by Angus MacLise, read by Jhon Balance. But it’s the sleeve art I’m currently obsessing over. Each of the 333 discs that were issued came in a cardboard sleeve adorned with a unique hand-painted Stan Brakhage-style burst of abstract color, accompanied by a surreal inscription. I wasn’t lucky enough to grab the Moon’s Milk supplement disc but Brainwashed’s Coil archive has cataloged the inscriptions and they make for evocative reading. Like Oblique Strategies or Cut-ups, I find the list can work as a powerful agent for unlocking creativity, and among my favorites are the Lovecraftian entry “The City Had Completely Disappeared”, the eerie “Procession Of Possessed Mothers And Infants” and the fever Beat dream, “Ploughed Fields Of Benzedrine”. Check out the list here: here:

The Remote Viewer

I'm pursuing a Coil obsession at the moment (is there any other way to experience Coil?) and I'm thinking about the various film references scattered throughout their work. There is the unused music for Hellraiser of course, but I'm thinking of song titles like Tenderness of Wolves, Vanishing Point, Red Queen (possibly a reference to the 1972 giallo The Red Queen Kills Seven Times). And there's the homage to Pasolini on Coil's second LP, with the song Ostia (The Death of Pasolini). The Horse Rotarvator album also contains a song referencing Salo, entitled Circles of Mania, and getting back to Hellraiser, one of the titles from the Worship the Glitch album We Have Always Been Here is a line of dialogue from Hellbound: Hellraiser 2... Elsewhere Coil have sampled dialogue from Salo (on the track Homage to Sewage), The Wizard of Gore (pictured below) and Trash (Further), Performance and Trash (Further Back And Faster), The Reflecting Skin (Omlagus Garfungiloops) and Marat/Sade (Answers Come In Dreams 1). In addition the track Further Back And Faster samples some dialogue from a Charles Laughton spoken word album based on Night of the Hunter ("The fingers of the left hand spell...love, those of the right spell... hate"). Have I missed anything ?

Peter Christopherson 1955 - 2010

I'm still stunned and confused by the sudden death yesterday of Peter Christopherson aka Sleazy, one-quarter of Throbbing Gristle and one-half of Coil. I've been listening to TG and Coil for 18 years now so Peter has always been a huge presence in my life. Hardly a few days would go by without me putting on one of their albums. Peter was also one of the designers at Hipgnosis (and worked on sleeve designs for Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here and Animals, and Peter Gabriel's early solo LPs), in between TG and Coil, he was a member of Psychic TV, he was an accomplished video director (Erasure's A Little Respect, videos for Rage Against the Machine, Sepultura, Ministry, and Nine Inch Nails' The Broken Movie) and in recent times was still producing brilliant post-Coil music with The Threshold HouseBoys Choir, SoiSong and the reformed Throbbing Gristle. A few years ago we swapped emails - I was bugging him about re-issuing old Coil albums and he was always friendly, accessible and generous with his time. I will miss him dearly.

Reflecting on Peter's work today, I found myself drawn to his photography and those recurring themes - urban landscapes, naked flesh, injured bodies, and the kind of violent, thugish youth that might have stepped from the pages of Burroughs' 1971 novel The Wild Boys. I gathered together some favorites...

John Lydon photographed in 1976. Malcolm McClaren commissioned Peter to take the first publicity photos of the Sex Pistols but deciding that the portraits were too grim the photographs were never used.

Val Denham with Hitler Youth knife photographed in 1979. This image appeared on Volume 1 of Mute's Live TG collection while an alternative shot appeared on Fetish's Discipline 12"

One of Peter's "Casualty Simulation" photographs, date unknown.

Adrenalin/Distant Dreams (Part 2) 7" single. The image of a desolate suburban street is given a sinister flavor by the presence of a singe discarded shoe. The inset picture is more mysterious - some kind of machine, possibly the bellows of an old camera.

An evocative photo of the Golden Gate bridge for the Mission of Dead Souls album, Throbbing Gristle's original final concert in San Francisco in 1981. Photographing the bridge from this particular angle, the vanishing point makes it appear that the bridge goes on forever

Reel to reel tape recorder photographed for the William Burroughs tape experiments collection Nothing Here Now But The Recordings, the original final release on Industrial Records, 1981

Clive Barker, Coil and Hellraiser

Book lovers in my hometown of Cork will know that Vibes & Scribes is a good place to find an interesting book, and yesterday I picked up a copy of Douglas Winter's biography of Clive Barker, which I had completely missed. It's a weighty tome, the hardback edition has some 500 pages of reading so I'm looking forward to getting into this sometime.

Disappointingly, Coil get only one short mention in the book. Coil, an extraordinary experimental electronic collective (one of my favourite bands) were commissioned by Clive Barker to write the soundtrack for Hellraiser, which they did but New World, who financed the film rejected the score for being "too intense". Hellraiser went on to be released with a very fine Christopher Young score, and Coil released their unused soundtrack as The Unreleased Themes For Hellraiser

Coil interviewed in Compulsion magazine (Issue 1, Winter 1992) spoke about the Hellraiser project...

Regarding Hellraiser, what actually happened? Did Coil pull out or did the financial backers think the music was too weird?
Well we pulled out about 10 minutes before they said we were going to pull out anyway. The thing is we were in right at the very beginning of the project, like Clive Barker was writing a screenplay and he came to our house and took away a load of piercing magazines and things. Which is where they got all the Pinhead stuff from.
Apparently, it was quite S/M orientated
Yeah, we saw some original footage which we unfortunately didn't keep but it was really heavy and good, like a sort of twisted English horror film. And then when the Americans saw this footage they thought it was too extreme and they also gave Clive ten times the original money.

It completely changed then
Yeah, so then Clive sort of felt, because it was his first film and with Hollywood being involved it was his gateway to the stars. So they changed the location to America, dubbed all the actors over and took out a lot of the explicit sex.
Did you feel let down about this? It could have been your gateway as well
Yeah, it would have been brilliant but we wouldn't have carried on because they were changing everything and they weren't being very nice to us the actual film people. They were keeping us in the dark a lot. We said we'd had enough just at the same time they decided they wanted to use Howard Shore (sic). They just wanted normal film music. They didn't want anything too scary which is sad and ridiculous for a horror film.