Coil was an English cross-genre, experimental music group formed in 1982 by ...
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.
The group's first official release as Coil was a 1984 12" titled How to Destroy Angels released on the Belgian Les Disques du Crepuscule's sublabel LAYLAH Antirecords. Following the 12"s success, Coil produced a series of three albums, Scatology, Horse Rotorvator and Love's Secret Domain, which met with little commercial success, but were praised as innovative due to their blend of industrial music and acid house.
In 1985, the group began working on a series of soundtracks, amongst them music for the first Hellraiser movie based on the novel The Hellbound Heart by their acquaintance at that time, Clive Barker. In 1999 the group gave their first live performance in sixteen years, and began a series of mini-tours which would last until 2004. Following the death of John Balance on 13 November 2004, Peter Christopherson announced via their official record label website Threshold House that Coil as an entity had ceased to exist.