Jhonn Balance at Birnbeck Pier: 1998-2004"
By Phil Barrington.
Weston-super-Mare is a seaside town in North Somerset, England, on the Bristol Channel 18miles (29km) south west of Bristol itself (the city where Balanceās memorial service was held on November 23rd 2004). Its population at the 2011 census was 76,143.
As is common knowledge, it was this bustling coastal town that COIL moved to in 1998 to get away from the vices and negative influences of the city of London (their home together for the past 16 years up to that point). It was here in their large new house and recording studio at Oak Bank (soon nicknamed North Tower) on South Road that Jhonn would battle through his alcoholism with increasingly fraught psychotic episodes, and it was here where they would record some of the very best COIL musick in their extensive catalogue.
This was, perhaps coincidentally, the era of COIL that saw collaboration with Thighpaulsandra, who lives in Wales - now a mere hour or so away by car to the North Tower home studio (as opposed to a 3+ hour drive via the M4 to COILās London abode).
Although Weston-super-Mareās Sand Bay is the tranquil flat coastal terrain where Peter and Jhonn would regularly walk their dogs during the day, it was the rough and rocky coastline beside the seaside resortās disused Birnbeck Pier where the Channel 4 āHello Cultureā TV programme filmed COIL in 2001 for the episode titled āBadnessā (ostensibly for COILās love of Aleister Crowley, the magickian himself a large section of the episodeās content).
It was this spot (which was the closest beach area to Jhonn and Peterās home, a mere 4-minute walk away) where Jhonn spent a portion of his drunken time contemplating and dealing with his emotions, in solitude, on the Carboniferous Limestone rocks overlooking the lapping waves and crumbling pier. He would occasionally lay unconscious on this set of rocks.
Strangely enough, The Beatles themselves sat on the very rocks that Jhonn would pass out on decades later. A 1963 photograph of The Beatles exists where, judging from the angle and the Birnbeck Pier position behind them, the four moptops were sat on the very same rock formation that COIL were filmed crouching on all those years later (38 years, to be precise). The very site where Jhonn used to pass out on has a fairly discreet access point and is in one corner of the whole bay, these rocks often the preferred area to be used for laying on by nude bathers in the mid-1800s during the Victorian medicinal bathing craze.
Peter recounted on more than one occasion in interview the times when he had found Jhonn drunkenly passed out on the rocks at the beach near their home. This, the rocky coastal area overlooking the disused Birnbeck Pier, is that place.
āAre you bathing in moonlight, or drowned on the beach?ā
Jhonn Balance - āWhere Are You?ā, 2000.
āGod saved me from drowning, then kicked me to death on the beachā
Jhonn Balance - 'MU-URā, 1999.
āAs I fell into the water I slipped and broke my aura (Are you asleep? Yes)ā
Jhonn Balance - 'Broken Auraā, 2000.
āAt the time ā Spring 2004 ā living alone with Geff (who was going through a 'bad patchā ā screaming, passing out on the rocksā¦ etc) in the cold and draughty North Tower building, with the rain beating in from the sea onto cracked windowpanes with bits of Geffās hair in the glass where he had smashed his head against them, it was a comforting fantasy for me to imagine a different lifeā¦ā
Peter Christopherson in interview with Regnaert & Ferguson, 2006.
The TV arts and culture series āHello Cultureā, presented by Matthew Collings, was first announced by the UK press in March 2001 as having been commissioned by Channel 4. The summary of the short series of themed episodes was given by the channel as thus:
āRomanticism from 200 years ago to 2001 is a reality system that comes from the imagination. It looks for and recognises extremes - from light to dark, from joy to dejection. Imagination, which creates the world, has to be kept supplied with feeling and intensified, otherwise the world dies. For the world to exist and for imagination to work, something has to be happening.ā
There was one over-arching theme per 60-minute episode of āHello Cultureā;
1. Wildness.
2. Nihilism.
3. Badness (featuring COIL and their āinspirationā Aleister Crowley).
4. Madness.
5. Celebrity.
Presenter Collings, cameraman Ian Moss and Ian MacMillan (the series producer who involved COIL in the episode in the first place) visited COIL at 'North Towerā around March-April 2001 and the whole group travelled down to the Claremont limestone rock strata overlooking the 'Marine Lakeā area of the Bristol Channel, (down the slope beside Birnbeck Pier, past the Prince Consort Gardens). It was here where the team recorded some of the best - and most distinctive - promo footage ever shot of COIL, each of the three members (Thighpaulsandra joined them on the day) hamming it up on the beach, miming along on their expensive vintage analogue synthesizers. Jhonn himself was mimicking a performance on the vintage EMS VCS3 Analog Modular Synthesizer (much sought after - in 2010 one reached Ā£6,700 in an eBay auction).
The TV episode itself overlayed the sounds from the album version of āHigher Beings Commandā on this beach footage, along with an interview at North Tower, a look at COILās book collection (an emphasis on Crowley), and some exclusive live footage from the 19th September 2000 āPersistence is Allā COIL gig at Royal Festival Hall, London.
This series premiered on Sunday July 22nd 2001 on Channel 4 and the COIL-featured 'Badnessā episode aired on Sunday August 05th 2001. It has seldom been seen since, with only a couple of old VHS recordings hissing and sparkling their presence on Youtube.
I personally contacted the original TV production company of the āHello Cultureā series in November 2017 and requested a high quality version of the COIL-related episode for possible critical use by the Live COIL Archive (the website of which I am co-creator/co-admin). I now have the footage in the best quality of this 16-year-old digital video footage that we may ever get, though cannot upload the whole episode or even large chunks of it, due to copyright restraint by the TV production company I had to agree to abide by before they sent me the footage.
However, I travelled to Weston-super-Mare for a couple of days in December 2017 to shoot some more footage of the rock area near Birnbeck Pier on a suitably low-fi camera (and some clips of 'North Towerā too), to bolster the original beach scenes from this 'Hello Cultureā episode - that I now have permission to show, in its current edit of mine, under Fair Dealing use for review purposes (this essay bolstering my use of the footage).
Sitting alone at night on those rocks in the disorientating limbo-period between Christmas 2017 and New Year, the moon shining brightly above, I was struck by the suitably violent whooshing and roaring sound of the waves snapping around the foundation legs of the disused pier far out in the seasonal blackness. The channel water was truly battering the rocks themselves too. Sadly, I could not feel Jhonn there, in that maelstrom of water versus strata. However, upon leaving that shoreline around midnight I gave a broad smile when I passed by an old, weed-choked bandstand in the gardens on the clifftop nearby. Perhaps merely because it was obscured by the bleak December night and the somewhat wild overgrowth (or maybe due to the sauvignon blanc in my belly), the outline of the bandstand under the moon struck more than a passing resemblance to me of the 'Horse Rotorvatorā front cover.
As for the Birnbeck Pier itself? A poignant Youtube description left by a drone operator filming over that area in recent years perhaps says it best; āBirnbeck looks a sinister place now, in a side of town that Weston-super-Mare seems to have forgotten. Such a sad way for a once grand spectacle of huge public interest to end up. During the filming of this the drone picked up on a sign on the floor near the old RNLI Lifeboat station which simply reads "Death Lies This Wayā. This may mean donāt step out onto now-rotted walkway for fear of falling through, or it may just be spelling out the future for Birnbeck Pier.ā
[My humble music video of "Higher Beings Commandā, containing the above-mentioned self-shot footage as well as the highest-quality-thus-far scenes from 'Hello Cultureā, will be popped onto this COIL Facebook Group tomorrow evening, GMT]
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