John Balance was the voice and the language of Coil, and the Bureau files him at Tier I as one half of a partnership central to the British esoteric strand of the form. Where Peter Christopherson brought the studio and the image, Balance brought the words, the singing and the magical frame, and the two are not separable in the result. He passes the founding test as a co-originator of Coil and the documentary test as a figure through whom a large part of the British experimental underground can be traced.
He was active before he was a musician in any settled sense. As a young man in the early 1980s he published seven issues of the fanzine Stabmental, kept up a wide correspondence across the British and international scene, and compiled cassette anthologies of the music he cared about. He was a fan of Throbbing Gristle first, and that enthusiasm drew him into the circle around it; he joined Psychic TV alongside Christopherson and worked within Zos Kia before the two left to concentrate on a project of their own. The split tape Transparent, shared with Zos Kia, stands as the first Coil release.
Inside Coil, Balance was the singer and the writer. He had studied voice formally, with Saral Bohm, and across the catalogue his delivery moved from flat, deliberate incantation to a full and frequently ravaged melody. The lyrics are the band's signature as much as the sound: drawn from occultism, desire, illness, dream and ritual, exact in their imagery and often very beautiful. A serious occultist from his youth, he read Austin Osman Spare and Aleister Crowley closely, and with Christopherson assembled a notable collection of their artworks; the esoteric in Coil was the organising principle, not a surface. Around the central work ran a web of collaboration, with Nurse With Wound, Current 93 and others, that places him at one of the busier junctions of the London underground.
Balance died on 13 November 2004, after a fall at the home he shared with Christopherson. Christopherson completed The Ape of Naples from the work the two had in progress and released it in 2005, and oversaw a small number of further posthumous Coil records before his own death in 2010.
The Bureau's reading. John Balance is filed at Tier I as the voice, lyricist and magical centre of Coil, a co-founder of one of the British experimental tradition's essential projects. His words and singing are inseparable from the band's identity, and his early work as a writer, compiler and correspondent makes him a connective figure in the underground as well as a maker within it. He is filed beside Peter Christopherson, with whom the work was made, and the music itself is documented at the Coil file.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Anthropocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene