Stephen Thrower & Ossian Brown (photograph by Ruth Bayer) I was in Coil from Scatology in 1984 to Stolen and Contaminated Songs in 1992, so I did five albums and various odds and ends. Were we nightmarish? I thought we were beautiful! We did an album in 1987 called Horse Rotorvator, which was heavily influenced by the encroaching AIDS situation, but even then ... I mean, covering Tainted Love at the height of AIDS panic, Daily Mail anti-gay headlines and such, I think we were taking a stand against something really evil. And knowing that we were speaking not just to the mainstream but to the fringes of the gay community ... You tailor your remarks to your likely audience, and we were sure we were not addressing the moral majority - they would never come within a mile of us! The people we were reaching out to were those already at the front line, already developing their private coping strategies in this blizzard of hate from the mainstream media. Tainted Love was a sort of beacon to the awkward squad in gay culture. They understood that we were playing ironically with the ideas and the words and the format. We received some hate mail from gay individuals who felt, wrongly, that the song attacked gay people, and yet a lot of those letters came from gay men safely ensconced within the status quo. Whereas gay outsiders understood what was going on, and they got the sense of humour even in such dark times. (S. Thrower)
Posted on: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 05:37:06 +0000
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