* When Some Bizzare reissued Coil’s recordings in the 1990s, the band claimed Pearce had no right to do so, as they believed he still owed them an estimated £30,000 in mechanical and publishing royalties. In 2001, Coil then reissued Scatology and Horse Rotorvator on their own in retaliation, newly titling them Stevø, Pay Us What You Owe Us. Pearce alleges as of 2011 that he has disbursed £17,000 pounds to Dimehart, including Coil’s royalties, which Dimehart ought to have forwarded to the band.¹⁵ However, Dimehart’s Chung denies having received payment for publishing: “As Stevo/Some Bizzare has never paid any monies owed for publishing rights … he cannot have paid any monies for Coil. I have spent years trying to get him to at least pay the writers if he didn’t want to pay the publishing company he co-owned. … It’s frankly a nightmarish mess and underneath all that maybe a sad story too.”¹⁶ With both Balance and Christopher-son now deceased, the dispute may never be fully resolved. Einstürzende Neubauten and Genesis P-Orridge have also claimed that Pearce owes them money. In his defense regarding Einstürzende Neubauten, he paid for months of studio time beyond their album budgets. Chung and the band acknowledge that the expenses lavished on their albums allowed them to experiment and develop as a band.

* In 1979 SPK’s Graeme Revell had been living in Paris; 1980 was also, incidentally, the same year that Nick Cave’s Australian punk band the Birthday Party moved to London. Blixa Bargeld would play in Cave’s later band, the Bad Seeds.

* To Neil Hill (who was called Nihil), interest in subversive politics verged on the paranoid. In 1980, Slash magazine boasted he was “a certified schizophrenic.”¹⁸ More reliably, onetime SPK bassist David Virgin recalls, “Nihil was like a Joseph Conrad character, I’m thinking, Secret Agent. He always had a carry bag filled with vitally important documents. One had the strange feeling that at any moment we would all be blown to pieces.”¹⁹

** Hill didn’t participate in making the record, having stayed behind in Australia; he would commit suicide in 1984, days before his wife succumbed to anorexia. It’s potentially troubling that former nurse Revell and Dr. Wolfgang Huber were the public figureheads of SPK and the Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv, given that these were ostensibly pro-patient groups.

* If there’s any conceivable defense to be offered here, it would include the mention that Best was fourteen years old at the time. He has since earned a doctoral degree in English literature, for what that may be worth. His unspoken thought processes, however, bear little functional impact on the way these words, sounds, and symbols behave once turned loose to the public.

* Peters adds to the end of this passage, “or, in stark contrast, no body at all”—an idea potentially applicable to some musicians’ attitudes, although Noë, writing in the same book, argues that regardless of intent, such a decorporeal music is impossible; in either case, the issue of bodilessness is all but intrinsically inapplicable to EBM.

** Contrast this approach with the more fluid equation of metal and flesh that Psychic TV offered. As stars of RE/Search Publications’ book Modern Primitives, which addresses body modification, band members Genesis and Paula P-Orridge had extensively explored piercing. Jean-Pierre Turmel’s liner notes to 1985’s live album Descending pontificate: “What is to be thought of this masculine sex pierced by a ring (the feminine symbol)? A desire for the feminine sex to become ‘the penetrator’ and the phallus ‘the penetrated’? (the fact that the ring on the photo enters by the urethra seems to confirm this) A desire not for castration but for reunification.”⁴⁷