In October, Matmos’ Drew Daniel is releasing his latest album as the Soft Pink Truth, Is It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This?. But before that, he’s putting out a mini-album called Was It Ever Real? this Friday, which somewhat confusingly features the title track to his forthcoming album (which isn’t on Is It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This?). Less confusingly, it also includes a cover of Coil’s “The Anal Staircase,” which Daniel has been performing live for a while now. Today, the Soft Pink Truth is sharing the studio version of that cover, and Daniel had some stuff to say about the song and its accompanying video:
I discovered Coil at age 16, buying their albums “Scatology” and “Horse Rotorvator” as a follow-up to loving Throbbing Gristle, but they were their own elegant proposition, and the idea of two gay men who are a couple and made music together looked to me like an ideal for living. Eventually, life took a turn and I wound up meeting them both in person and becoming, if not friends (I was too much of a fanboy to be relaxed enough around them for it to be a true friendship), then at least acquaintances. John would phone me up and we would talk, and we hung out in London and Barcelona when in the same orbit with each other. After John Balance’s death, I began to play a cover of “The Anal Staircase”, and had the chance to play it live in front of Sleazy before his own passing. We hugged and talked about John backstage, and Sleazy was moved by the cover and thanked me.
In the wake of their deaths, the cover was something that I wanted to record properly and finally decided that the time was right only this year, after talking to Stephen Thrower about it (Thrower was the third member of Coil at the time the song was recorded, and is now a member of Cyclobe and Unica Zürn, and a friend of mine).
For the video, I wanted to visually depict the feeling of an endless spiral that picks up the anal / intestinal / rectal but also architectural conceit of the original Coil artwork for the single, and asked Fletcher Pratt to animate something that would represent that formally, and to foreground the lyrics in a direct way. The bright white font is supposed to recall the kind of fonts used in pornographic “hypnosis” videos, in which large texts bombard the viewer with mind-altering commandments. The cover and the video are dedicated to John Balance, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, and Stephen Thrower.”
Watch and listen below.
49