Born Geoffrey Laurence Burton on February 16, 1962, the man who was the driving imagination behind the band Coil was known by various names throughout his life. As a youth he adopted his stepfather's surname and became Geff Rushton. Later, his public persona would be known variously as John, Jhon, or Jhonn Balance.
When he was a boy, Balance studied music under Saral Bohm (widow of the famous physicist). During his adolescence and early adulthood he was involved in a series of musical projects of an experimental or occult stripe, including Psychic TV, 23 Skidoo, and Zos Kia, before founding Coil with his partner Peter Christopherson in 1983. Coil's music reflected Balance's own mercurial nature: sometimes glitchy (Queens of the Circulating Library), sometimes melodic (Horse Rotorvator), sometimes dancy (Love's Secret Domain), sometimes drony (Time Machines), often difficult, and always complex. Christopherson was the technical genius, translating Balance's ideas into music through his mastery of studio equipment and electronics. But the vision generally came from Balance -- and, he would say, the supernatural beings that spoke to him.
Music(k) and magic(k) were always intimately connected for Balance. Unlike a lot of musicians who dabble in Crowley just to earn street cred among poseur goths and two-bit poets, Balance read, wrote, and experimented in the occult with utter seriousness -- which, in his case, often looped around into playfulness. Perhaps his most obvious influence is Austin Osman Spare -- with whom Balance honestly believed he was in regular communication -- but what Balance did with it was always uniquely his own.
The members of Coil were always willing (some would say much, much too willing) to stretch the limits of their consciousness through sex, drugs, or ritual. Balance was the most fearless in this regard, and the results of his experiments frequently terrified everyone around him. Simon Norris recalls one particularly harrowing MDMA trip:
[We] had to go home because Balance was in a very extreme state. We couldn't understand a word he was saying, he almost sounded like a cut-up tape slowing down and speeding up. It was very peculiar because there was a confidence behind the delivery, it wasn't like he was trying to talk but couldn't, he was definitely communicating something to somebody, but not us. (...) It was like psychic epilepsy, almost as if deep inside he was living the life of something else, a completely different animal, an ancestral backslide.1
The seizure lasted for days, and years later Balance would write about it in the liner notes for the first Musick to Play in the Dark album. "I once regressed to BIrd MIND and only squarked and chirriped for three worrying days," he wrote. "I was away with the birds."
It is a terrible irony that the copious amounts of illegal drugs that Balance ingested did not do nearly as much damage to him as an accessible legal drug: alcohol. Balance believed that while hallucinogenics expanded the mind, encouraged experimentation, and opened the user up to religious experiences, alcohol could only suffocate and cripple the drinker both physically and spiritually. Yet, even knowing this, he was addicted. His drinking binges were so severe that more than once he needed to be hospitalized.
Everyone knew that alcohol was the demon (and he did literally see it as a demon) that would eventually kill Jhonn, though the moment when it actually happened came as an awful surprise. On 13 November 2004, Balance fell down some stairs in his home in London and landed badly. He was rushed to ER but the doctors could not save him.
I only met John Balance once. I was not sure what to expect. Having listened to Coil for years, I had assumed that he would be moody and grim, with the brooding intensity that I generally associate with serious occultists. But he was not at all like that. On the contrary, he was childlike and gleeful, always laughing and always in motion. His mind leapt from topic to topic, making conversation surreal and practically impossible to keep up with. He was a true Dionysian, and I think that one must understand that in order to understand him.
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1Quoted in David Keenan, England's Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground (SAF Publishing, 2003), p. 220.
Some details from this writeup have been drawn from William Breeze's eulogy to John Balance at http://brainwashed.com/coil/main.html
For information about Balance's death, along with links to obituaries and the program of his funeral service, visit the Threshold House web site here: http://www.thresholdhouse.com/death.html
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