ThighPaulSandra aside from working in Coil and Spritualized has been putting out his own solo releases for many years. Through our email correspondence I find out about Double Vulgar II and his other projects.

Heathen Harvest: I'd like to start off the interview discussing your solo release Double Vulgar II. For me, the album was the first of your work I picked up aside from coil. I must admit I was drawn to it by the homoerotic graphic design. I feel these pictures taken by Peter Christopherson compliment the tracks especially the vocals on Vomiting Child and Bost Sanvay Unst Bit Sumonver. Could you tell me more about your process of combining the two artforms?

ThighPaulSandra: The cover art on DV2 is a continuation of some themes Peter (Christopherson) and I explored on DV1. We both have a great interest in homoerotic photography and Peter has some fantastic examples in his portfolio which impressed me greatly. Some of these photographs became part of the artwork of a few Coil albums and others remained in his private collection.

Although the homoerotic references in the music are often delivered in a surreal form we felt the covers should be a little more direct. Unfortunately this has caused countless problems with CD manufacturers and printers who have refused to handle the material either on the grounds of not wishing to offend their staff or not wishing to risk prosecution from customs officials or the police. It has been necessary to "tone down" the homoerotic content just to get the CDs manufactured in several instances. The same problems occurred with a limited edition set of prints that we intended to produce as a companion to the music. The printer agreed to manufacture them but at the last minute cancelled my order because one of his workforce complained.

I am constantly experimenting with this type of photography and my future releases will continue to have homoerotic covers but probably with a greater surreal content. As Peter now lives in Thailand it may be difficult to stage the same kind of scenes that we have used in the past but I'm sure his new concepts will not disappoint. Although the cover images do not directly relate to the lyrical content of the songs they do contribute to the general atmosphere I immerse myself in. Many of the themes I explore in my songs, like kidnap, rape and sexual abuse are reflected there in some form.

HH: Well the pictures that made it through the censors were still hot! Not since Bruce LaBruce films had I seen something so queer blurring the lines between art and pornography. What images did you have to cut in order to get the cd printed? My boyfriend Scooter does a comic book called Boy Sluts of America [www.boy-sluts.com]. He had trouble with the printers just getting the stickers done. I can't image what the printers in the US would do with a live nude boy. Any interesting stories behind finding or using your boy model?

TPS: On DV2 we had to cut a few images containing erections and had to move the one erection image that survived onto a separate card because the printers who manufacture the CD Digipaks would not print it. Another firm did the card. On DV1 we had to remove some fake torture images and soften the image of a boy with a gag in his mouth. Peter removed the intense frown lines and made his mouth less twisted with pain. We received a lot of complaints about the boy being pulled from the bathtub by a neck tie. He looks dead and a few people expressed their concern as to whether these were actually snuff pictures.

Get real....I'm a musician not a serial killer. This kind of comment infuriates me. You can go to any news stand in the UK and buy pornography which has far more graphic and often extremely violent pictures featuring women and this it seems is perfectly acceptable. The hate mail and criticism I've received over these album covers has been quite amazing to me. Even my long time collaborator, Julian Cope, a man widely known for his radical stance on many issues, has now dissociated himself from me because of the artwork on DV 1 and 2. He will not speak to me in person about it but has instead commented to mutual associates that his withdrawal is for the sake of his family. Make of that what you will.

On DV1, there are several boys on the cover all in various states of apparent distress and myself pictured in largely a dominant role. All the guys who modeled for me are friends. Siôn, the guy in the bathtub is straight and has a young son. He didn't have a problem taking part or even being associated with such an openly gay project and is really proud of the work we did. The other two guys, Devon and Danny, were very happy too and have asked to model again.

Chris the guy on DV2 is now a close friend of mine. I found him on www.gaydar.co.uk and asked him to model for me after seeing his profile pictures. We had only met briefly before the day of the shoot so Chris did not really know what to expect. On the day of the shoot we went to Peter's house, a large gothic mansion by the sea, not dissimilar to a house in one of the Edgar Allen Poe film adaptations of The Pit and The Pendulum. We took Chris to the basement, tied him to a chair, plied him with Viagra and then started the shoot with Peter and I muttering to each other...."there's not enough blood". Chris later admitted to be being very nervous, expecting the worst but luckily he was confident and trusting enough to provide us with the images we needed.

Chris and I have recently shot the cover for my new 'Am Smear Challenger' EP. This cover is in a very glossy Pierre et Gilles style and features two erect cocks in profile dripping with semen against a backdrop of lilies. It is a beautiful picture but no doubt it will cause outrage in certain quarters. I am yet to find a willing printer.

HH: You mentioned that you received much hate mail from "fans" and a distancing from Julian Cope. What was your expectation for the viewer? Personally, I found myself entering a trance like state while listening and viewing DV2. There, I began to feel drawn to either of the queer archetypes of boy/daddy and submission/aggression. This hypnotic fantasy allowed me to see and push past my traditional sexual boundaries. As gay men, we either unconsciously or with conscious intent explore those boundaries during physical BDSM play. Some groups like the radical faerie's "black leather wings" explore the spiritual and mystical sides of SM. Could you tell us more about the themes of kidnapping, rape, sexual abuse and how it relates to gay men?

TPS: The majority of the outrage and aggression directed toward me was as a result of the erect penis image on DV2. This was not helped by the fact that this was the image that Beta - Lactam Records and some other sellers chose to advertise the record. I was disappointed that so many people took this image out of context from the rest of the artwork and maintained that what I was doing was a cheap shot at sensationalism. Perhaps naively my expectation from my audience for DVs 1&2, considering my background in Coil, was of appreciation and acceptance. I did not expect the wave of homophobia, quite often masked by very wordy and pseudo-intellectual responses, that ensued. I expected more of Julian Cope too. He had always seemed to me a very forward thinking individual ready to embrace radical ideas and stances but he showed his true colours publicly and privately distancing himself from my work. I should have suspected that he would do this because as much as he always expressed great respect for Coil I always felt he held deep suspicions over the 'satanic child abuse' allegations surrounding Psychic TV, and by association, Coil.

Unfortunately there seems to be ingrained in western social consciousness a close link between paedophiles and homosexuals. The themes of kidnap, rape and sexual abuse that appear in my work have grown partly through personal experience and partly out of the observation of friends and associates. I have found that many gay men have rape fantasies both active and passive and these form at a very early age, quite often before the onset of puberty. I remember at about the age of eight wanting to kidnap one of my classmates from school and keep him locked up at home. Quite what my intent was I'm not sure but I knew I wanted to control him and be able to have him close to me. Whenever he came to my house I would always insist we went up to my room and I would try to keep him in my room as long as possible. His apparent distress on occasions only made me more determined to continue. As I grew older these fantasies mutated more toward rape and sexual abuse and as these are largely taboo subjects even among many gay men I feel it is my duty to explore them. None of my straight friends seem to have experienced this. I am often surprised by the amount of gay men who have no interest in S&M related activities but who find the potential of kidnap, rape and even, if they are honest, sexual abuse quite appealing.

For me it is the element of control and the fear in others not submission or aggression that excites me. It is interesting that you say you entered almost a trance like state when listening to the album. I too feel like this even though I have an intimate knowledge of its construction. One of the reasons my album structures are so convoluted and take so much time to evolve is that I am trying to lose the listener in a maze of aural distractions hopefully with a disorientating or hypnotic effect.

HH: The taboo subject of paedophiles and homosexuality is such a peculiar thing in western culture. First, most adults pretend that children don't have feelings of any sexuality, gay or straight. The director Larry Clark has had trouble exploring this issue in his movies such as Kids and Ken Park. I had to find a dubbed bootlegged copy of Ken Park b/c it was banned in the united states.

I also remember from about the age of eight fooling around with a neighbor boy. Our games of hide and seek became more and more elaborate as we got older. Him tying me up and putting duck tape over my mouth while being locked in his closet. The objective would be to escape from the imprisonment and find him before his parents got home. The prize being to see him stroke his cock or take a piss. As we started reaching puberty, he became more interested in knife play which was fun but on one occasion he became entranced and started stabbing through his family's couch. I stopped hanging around him b/c of that last incident since I felt a boundary was past. I wasn't sure if he'd hurt/kill me if others found out what we were up to. But those early experiences still play into my current fantasies.

Has your work been influenced by other writers who have worked with these issues? Such as Ken Park, George Bataille, William Burroughs, or Dennis Cooper...

TPS: The taboo of paedophilia haunts me constantly. My boundaries on this and many related subjects seem to be way over the horizon in comparison with popular opinion. Some of my earliest memories are of wanting intimacy and closeness with a male adult and I remember fantasising over some older boys who visited the school to play rugby when I saw them taking a shower. I must have been six or seven years old and they had reached puberty. I longed to be close to an older boy and although I knew nothing of sex at that age the male body became an obsession for me. I don't feel that this is wrong or should be the subject of public morality. I find many younger boys attractive and I'm sure there must be many young boys who feel as I did.

Larry Clark is a great favourite of mine and I consider him quite brave in making the films he does although I feel he is quite clever in the way he manages to possibly divert the censors attention (certainly in Europe) by dealing with drugs and morality in equal measure. Most of his films are available here but I had to download Ken Park from the internet. This was his first film to feature erections as far as I'm aware which is probably why you can't get it in the USA and is difficult to get here.

John (Balance) from Coil was greatly influenced by Burroughs and although I have read all his work and that of Dennis Cooper I would not say that I am influenced by them in the way that John was. My greatest influence from Burroughs and the aspect of his work I admire the most is his cut-up technique and the sheer presence of his personality in almost every line he wrote. I also love the way he manages to pace the eroticism and entwine it within some other narrative.

It's weird that you should mention both Burroughs and Larry Clark because I've always felt that Larry Clark would be the ideal director to make a Burroughs book into a film. Although I love David Cronenberg's films I felt that his attempt at Naked Lunch failed because he missed the queer aspect that ran through Burroughs'work.

HH: As for Larry Clark doing a Burroughs adaptation, I'd love to see him do wild boys. I still love Cronenberg's Naked Lunch since I consider it the first queer film that I ever saw. Yeah, maybe a gay director could have taken it further but there hasn't been a Cronenberg film I haven't loved. He's always including penetrating objects and ass-like orifices into his films.

Could you tell me more about how Burrough and Gysin's style of cut-up has influenced your recordings? What is your process from the beginning to the final edit of a track?

TPS: Burroughs' cut up style has always fascinated me from the moment I first read his work. I had always written lyrics and poems in a very free and sometimes surreal style and this method seemed a great way of further extending this technique to me. I have a large book which I write in constantly. Every thought, snippets of conversation, television programs all get thrown in. I write them all end to end without punctuation. I've been doing this for years so as you can imagine I have a large volume of text amassed. My technique for writing is then to select a phrase or part of a phrase and rewrite it on a fresh page. I then cross the original out so that I'm not tempted to use it again. I then leaf through the book looking for other complimentary phrases till I have a lyric that I find interesting.

I love the depersonalization that occurs with this technique and the random mix of thoughts and speech from different spaces and times. I sometimes become confused between my thoughts and those of others which end up on the page. It is almost a self-induced literary psychosis. Sometimes after living with a text I've constructed for some time I become dissatisfied with it but I have a rule of never discarding anything as I feel this is wasted energy.

At this point I often use the Burroughs technique of folding in text. I take two pages and fold them in half vertically so each new line is made of a composite of two completed pieces of text creating something new. I could probably do all this on a computer but I prefer doing it on paper as folding techniques would take too long to realize in software whereas it has the advantage of instant gratification on paper. I employ a similar technique in the construction of the music. Musical phrases and sometimes whole completed songs are cut up and rearranged. I am very fond of the effect of multiple tempi occurring simultaneously and also the complex harmonic structures that can be achieved by layering both diatonic and dissonant harmonies together even at its most basic level of creating tension and resolution. Although I consider myself a fast worker the actual process of creating a piece of music may take several months after the initial recording. I quite often have several pieces of music under construction at the same time and often these are merged or elements of one 'infect' another to the extent of them becoming part of a new whole. Occasionally a piece is realized from start to finish in a short space of time (perhaps a few days) but then once completed it may become the subject of editing or mutation into another piece. I have no fixed working methods and as such a definitive process is hard to describe.