Thursday 23 May 2013

Coil - Hellraiser Themes

Coil was an English cross-genre, experimental music group formed in 1982 by John Balance—later credited as "Jhonn Balance"—and his partner Peter Christopherson, aka "Sleazy". The duo worked together on a series of releases before Balance chose the name Coil, which he claimed to be inspired by the omnipresence of the coil's shape in nature. Today, Coil remains one of the most influential and best known industrial music groups.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coil_(band)

The Unreleased Themes for Hellraiser (subtitled The Consequences of Raising Hell) was the fourth album that Coil released in the year 1987. The album was released on the CD, cassette and 10″ vinyl. It was the proposed soundtrack to the film Hellraiser, however was turned down because it was not considered commercial enough.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreleased_Themes_for_Hellraiser



This is by far my favorite Coil release, if just for the fact that it could have been what accompanied one of the greatest horror movies of all time, until the studio people butted in. Ah well, our loss. At least we can hear what might have been, some of the most melodic sounds from this band ever. There is also a track on 'Gold Is The Metal (With The Broadest Shoulders)' called 'Cardinal Points' that was recorded during these sessions and was meant to appear on the Hellraiser soundtrack, an excellent addition to this stellar landmark.  
jedi4q2
http://www.discogs.com/Coil-Hellraiser-Themes/release/130646

While Clive Barker was writing the story "The Hellbound Heart" that would eventually become Hellraiser, he visited his acquaintances in the experimental music group Coil. Barker was a fan -- he once described Coil as "the only group I've heard on disc, whose records I've taken off because they made my bowels churn." And yes, that was a compliment. The story goes that Coil loaned Barker a stack of extreme bodypiercing magazines that inspired the birth of, you guessed it, Pinhead. Barker later invited Coil to compose the soundtrack for the Hellraiser film. Coil did their magic on the score but, ultimately, the Hollywood studio went with the safe (and far less sinister) sounds of Christopher Young. Of course, Young did a respectable job but, well, it isn't Coil.
David Pescovitz
http://boingboing.net/2011/01/28/coils-hellraiser-the.html 





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.

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