For about 8 and a half years, our former (and beloved) co-host Dave had been mulling over doing this album. Then one day, out of the blue, he messaged us: I'm coming in I want to talk about One Minute Science by Sunna.

In another timeline, we'd have gotten this out of the way a long time ago. Hell, Chris almost suggested it himself. And yet here he was, unprompted, reopening a wound he'd apparently been carrying since he was fourteen.

One Minute Science came out in 2000, and on paper it shouldn't have needed anyone's courage. Sunna were a Bristol grunge (?)/electronic rock(?)/industrial metal (?)/nu metal (?) band with a genuinely unlikely pedigree: the album was produced by Neil Davidge, Massive Attack's long-term studio partner, and frontman Jon Harris reputedly played on Mezzanine itself. They signed to Melankolic, the label Massive Attack half-owned, then to Astralwerks in the States, and eventually toured with Smashing Pumpkins, A Perfect Circle and Vast, and picked up Best New Band at the Kerrang Awards in 2001. Lead single Power Struggle found itself on the Hollow Man soundtrack and they even almost had a song from their second album appear on the soundtrack to Spider-Man 2. A fate the film industry's collective good sense narrowly spared everyone. This was, by any measure, a band with momentum.

But it didn't pan out. The album stalled at 151 in the UK charts, the press treated it as an inconvenience to be filed under nu metal and dismissed, and Sunna never really recovered - three more records, increasingly hard to find, never on Spotify, cover art that gets worse with each release. One reviewer's verdict at the time, that if Sunna were foreboding and menacing then so were Creed and Bush, turned out to be a pretty efficient way of ending a career.

So why the secret almost nine-year fandom? We get into it properly this week, with...mixed results. Dave defends the record as a load-bearing piece of his adolescence, uncompromising and strange even now. Chris tries, valiantly and with increasing desperation, to make a case for the production doing the heavy lifting. And Mark - hearing it stone cold for the first time in his life - declares it not just bad but the worst thing he's heard on this podcast in very nearly nine years of doing it. Grim.

Nobody comes out of this one agreeing with anybody else. Which is exactly how this podcast used to be, back in the days of yore. Everyone's got a record like this. The question is whether you'd admit it on air.

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction

04:04 The Sunna Reveal: Dave's Unprompted Text After 8.5 Years

08:11 One Minute Science, Sunna & First Impressions

11:03 The Massive Attack Connection: Neil Davidge & Mezzanine

12:38 Band History: Chillum, John Harris & the Bristol Scene

18:47 Drummer Departures & Mark Richardson's Near Miss with Feeder

19:30 Jon Harris's Accident-Prone Years, Kenya & the Exorcism Story

21:00 Genre Confusion: Nu Metal, Post-Grunge & the UK Scene Comparisons

28:00 DJ Flatline, Bristol Trip-Hop DNA & the Hollow Man Cameo

29:00 The Spider-Man Near-Miss & the Hulk Screening Anecdote

30:07 The Press Reviews: "Tool to Travis" and Getting Savaged

32:11 The Worst Album Art in Music History

35:26 The Follow-Up Records: Two Minute Terror, Third Pin & Global Morning

42:00 Standalone Singles: Swimming with Snakes & Sentiment Attacked

43:26 Track-by-Track Begins: I'm Not Trading & the Production Debate

1:05:10 Dave's Conclusion: A Flawed Nostalgic Safety Blanket

1:07:55 Chris's Conclusion: The Racist Uncle Defence

1:10:36 Mark's Verdict: "The Worst Thing I've Heard on This Show"

1:14:00 Bush, Nickelback & Finding Mark's True Hated Genre

1:17:00 Wrap-Up & Sign-Off

Last time we admitted defeat in our attempts try to summarise a fifty-plus album discography. This time our play P6 turns up with an actual diagram (which you can see right here) and we spend an hour and a half trying to work out whether that's a genuinely useful map or just a very elegant way of saying "it's complicated."

We get into what actually meant when they called one period of their music “solar music” and the other “moon music”, both to themselves and to people writing about them afterwards. We begin with Scatology and then go into a long stretch on Coil as a queer band specifically: not queer-adjacent, not later reclaimed as queer, but a band who were writing directly out of the AIDS crisis while the gay mainstream press was too frightened to touch them. We talk about the rejected Hellraiser score, Clive Barker's actual bowels, and how a soundtrack too creepy for a horror franchise ended up as one of the most bootlegged, most fought-over corners of their catalogue.

We get into Trent Reznor giving them free run of a New Orleans studio for their aborted album Backwards, the slow drift into drone and ritual with Time Machines, and the posthumous artefact economy that's grown up around the band.

There's a lot of Coil in this episode that isn't really music in any conventional sense; arguably a lot of it is more like documentation. Documentation of a relationship, of a pandemic that was devastating their community, and of two people slowly working out what they were for. Whether that makes the later, harder-to-love records worth the effort is something we argue about without really resolving. We’d say give it a go anyway – you might find something you love.

Chapters

00:00 – Welcome back, and the state of the venues in Glasgow

00:04 – Phil's solar/moon diagram, and the pivot point of Horse Rotorvator

00:07 – Scatology as manifesto: no personality cult, just "this is us"

00:12 – Defining solar vs moon in Coil's own terms

00:16 – "Kill a queer for Christ": the hostility Coil were writing against

00:20 – Coil as a queer band, not a queer-adjacent one

00:24 – The AIDS pandemic as the actual subject of the solar period

00:27 – Why Coil succeeded where Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the "gay icons" of the 80s didn't

00:31 – The Spanner case, outlaw community, and the limits of gay respectability

00:35 – The artefact economy begins: box sets, reissues, and "picking at the corpse of Coil"

00:36 – The rejected Hellraiser score and Clive Barker's bowels

00:44 – Love's Secret Domain, clubbing, and ecstasy as a response to the fear of touch

00:48 – Derek Jarman, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and Phil's own ordination

00:55 – Into moon music: The Angelic Conversation and the shift toward mysticism

00:57 – Trent Reznor, free studio time, and Nine Inch Nails' debt to Horse Rotorvator

01:02 – Membership shifts: Danny Hyde, Drew McDowell, and Thighpaulsandra

01:04 – Black Light District and the "dank, downbeat" transitional period

01:14 – Moving toward live performance and the birth of Coil's occult stage identity

01:19 – Balance's addiction, Funeral Music for Lady Diana, and the Foxtrot testimony

01:26 – Post-9/11 visuals, prisoners, and a return to transgression on stage

01:27 – Closing thought: boredom, labour, and what it cost to make this music

Coil have a reputation for being genuinely difficult: ritualistic, transgressive, the kind of band you approach the way you'd approach a locked door marked "occult correspondence, keep out." So it's a bit disarming that this episode opens with hand-written Christmas cards from Jhonn Balance and Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, sent to a teenage psychiatric nursing student in Paisley who wrote to them out of genuine fandom. Coil, it turns out, wrote back.

The student in question is Phil Eaglesham, or P6 as he is perhaps better known, formerly of Desalvo, Stretchheads and currently of OMO and Security. He's returning after breaking our brains once already with Cabaret Volatire, and this time he's turned up armed with decades of correspondence, first-hand context, and a refusal to let Coil calcify into myth.

We trace the band from Jhonn Balance's teenage letters to Throbbing Gristle, through Psychic TV and the deliberately porous, ceremony-blurred confrontation of early industrial music, into the Temple of Psychic Youth and its uncomfortably close relationship to actual cult structure. We get into the brass dildos sent to record labels as a two-fingered thank-you-for-nothing. We get into AIDS-era queer culture, MDMA, and the particular kind of self-medicating grief that eventually caught up with Balance. And we get into why a band this steeped in the esoteric and apocalyptic was, underneath it, trying to build something more human and more DIY than the mysticism suggests.

Jhon Balance himself suggested that Coil would forgotten within ten years after their end. They weren't. Whether that's a triumph of the work outlasting the intent, or proof that even planned obsolescence can't out-manoeuvre a good back catalogue, is something you can decide for yourselves. And we'll give you a bit of time to do that, because there's a whole second episode of this still to come next week.

Highlights

00:00 – Welcome back, Phil Eaglesham

00:04 – Setting the scene: resources, Tony Dickey, and the Coil album map

00:06 – The letters: correspondence with a psychiatric hospital

00:10 – Reading list: England's Hidden Reverse and Everything Keeps Dissolving

00:14 – A quick word from our sponsors (that's you)

00:16 – Origins: Jhonn Balance, Throbbing Gristle, and teenage letter-writing

00:20 – Psychic TV forms, Warner Brothers money, and the 23 brass dildos

00:23 – Temple of Psychic Youth and its uncomfortable proximity to cult logic

00:27 – Coil as an alternative: queerness, esotericism, without the cult of personality

00:29 – Ecstasy, connection, and the AIDS-era comedown that became alcoholism

00:32 – "In ten years, nobody will remember" — legacy, reissues, and Mute Records

00:34 – Sleazy in Bangkok, and his death in 2010

00:39 – Peter Christopherson's design career: Hipgnosis, Pink Floyd, Sex Pistols

00:42 – The boy shop window, the leg, and the police raid

00:44 – Industrial music's roots in performance art and danger music

If you've been tuned into the news around the Scottish grassroots music scene at any point in the last few weeks, you'll likely have seen there's been a bit of controversy brewing around King Tut's Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow and their owners, DF Concerts.

Following a piece published in The Bell, where numerous people spoke out about the poor terms that King Tut's offers to emerging artists, various corners of social media were ablaze with righteous fury. It prompted DF to threaten to take The Bell to court, and also saw The Herald get in on the action. So we think it's fair to say that this is a blaze that might be threatening to run amok.

The terms that King Tut's offers has been something of a known issue in the Scottish music community for a number of years, and whilst there are certainly reasons for small artists to be aggrieved (reasons which we share), the matter is not quite as clear cut as The Bell article would have you think.

On this week's episode we draw from our own experiences as musicians and promoters to try to give a more complete picture of the issue. We also do a wee exercise where we map out whether putting on gigs yourself is more cost effective, using examples of the rates offered by many venues in Glasgow to paint a picture of what the costs of running a show yourself actually are.

Which ultimately leads us to ask a few questions: is what King Tut's offer fair? Is it just better to put on gigs yourself? And if King Tut's parent company, DF Concerts, used their corporate backing to pay artists more, what might be the outcome of that on the wider grassroots scene as a whole?

If you like this episode please consider subscribing to our Patreon at www.patreon.com/unsungpod

This week we sit down with Jon Zipp of The Zips — one of Glasgow's original 1977 punk bands — for a conversation that doubles as an oral history of Scottish punk.

The Zips' story is a strange and charming one. Formed in '77, gigging by '78, split by the end of 1980 after two small-run EPs — 500 copies of the debut, sold out in six weeks — the band lay dormant for over two decades until a record collector tracked down the drummer via the West of Scotland phone book. It turned out The Zips' records had been bootlegged all over Europe, their EPs had become prized collectors' items, and a new generation of bands citing the Clash and Buzzcocks as influences had made the world safe for them again. They've been at it ever since, complete with a "Zips USA" franchise lineup, European squat tours.

But the real revelation of this episode is John's first-hand account of Glasgow's infamous punk "ban". In the late 1970s, Glasgow City Council — having decided after a Stranglers gig at the City Hall that the city "had enough hooligans without importing them from down south" — made it known that any pub or venue hosting punk bands risked losing its licence. The effect was chilling: a generation of would-be Glasgow punk bands strangled at birth, touring acts like Elvis Costello turned away on the day of the show, and a city now famed as one of the great music capitals of the world temporarily hostile to the most vital music of its era.

Along the way we get John's reflections on punk's flirtation with fascist imagery and provocation, why John Lydon is his biggest disappointment (and Paul Weller one of his quiet triumphs), the surprising resurgence of very young audiences going wild for original 77-style punk, and a truly outrageous tale of how, with his post Zips band in the 80, how he blagged — via the Mitchell Library's phone books and Harvey Goldsmith's office — onto a 30,000-capacity bill at Ibrox with Rod Stewart in 1983.

We reach into the vault this week to extra an old bonus episode that has a fairly unique format we liked to called the Split 7". In this episode, we talk build our own festival line ups.

ORIGINAL SHOW NOTE

We’re going to be 4 years old soon and for pretty much every single week of those 4 years (with the sole of exception of around this time last year when a technical issue made us lose an entire episode) we’ve been able to release an episode a week. However, this week we just couldn’t. Some life things got in the way and we had to take care of that. We couldn’t just leave everyone hanging though, so we decided to reach way back into our vault of bonus content and excise this little gem from back in October 2019. One of our subscribers, Chris Hynd, asked us what our perfect festival line-up would be and we duly obliged. So enjoy as Chris, Mark and Dave talk about who would play their festivals. We will return next week with special guest Neil from The Accordion Podcast as we talk about Finelines by My Vitrol.

In this interview, Mark Davyd, founder and CEO of Music Venue Trust, mentions the "famous" and famously misattributed Hunter S. Thompson quote about the music industry. It goes "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."

It's now common knowledge that Thompson didn't actually say this, or at the very least if he did it wasn't about the music industry. Mark acknowledges as much in this interview. And yet, it remains a perfect summation of the music industry at large even today, and in this interview Mark expounds upon that at length.

In April 2026 he unleashed a series of 4 Substack posts which shone a light on the dodgy dealings of the UK's performing rights body PRS for Music. In them, he details how each year millions of pounds earmarked for artists who perform in grassroots music venues is "held" by PRS because they are unable to attribute it to anyone — ostensibly because many of the artists who are due it have never signed up to PRS, and thus the money goes unclaimed. After 3 years, this money is then distributed to the largest music publishers and most successful songwriters in the world.

The true figure is difficult to ascertain due to the opaque nature of PRS' reporting, but it is estimated to be around £18m — more than the combined profit generated by all 800+ grassroots music venues in the UK each year. What's happening is, in effect, a reverse Robin Hood scenario where huge amounts of money are being transferred to the most high-profile, wealthiest musicians and publishers.

In this episode we dive deep into those 4 articles with Mark, getting to the heart of all that is rotten with the current PRS model, the organisation's response, and some suggestions for how it might be fixed.

You can read Mark's articles here: Part 1: https://markdavyd.substack.com/p/prs-for-music-and-the-grassroots Part 2: https://markdavyd.substack.com/p/prs-for-music-and-the-grassroots-5a0 Part 3: https://markdavyd.substack.com/p/prs-for-music-and-the-grassroots-618 Part 4: https://markdavyd.substack.com/p/prs-for-music-and-the-grassroots-3d9

Highlights:

00:00 Grassroots Cash Grab

00:24 Meet the Hosts

01:46 What Music Venues Trust Does

03:30 COVID Crisis Response

07:23 Venue People Helping Venues

09:16 Why PRS Matters Here

12:45 How PRS Works

16:02 Unclaimed Royalties Problem

21:35 Archaic Setlist System

23:22 Tariff LP vs Tariff P

27:35 Real World Money Example

30:40 Show Me the Money

32:00 Unclaimed Royalties Black Box

32:58 Venue Economics And Losses

34:00 Rules Court Case And Publishers

35:53 Broken Reform Promises

39:20 Why PRS Won't Change

42:00 Estimated Bills And CCJs

44:44 Scale Of Grassroots Impact

48:18 Audio Recognition Solution

55:08 PRS Rebuttals And Backlash

59:16 Wrap Up And Where To Read

You might think you don't know Christophe Szpajdel's work. You almost certainly do. The Emperor logo. The Metallica Mankind clip. The Rihanna lettering that went a hundred feet high at the MTV VMAs. If you've spent any time near heavy music, his hand has been on things you've stared at without knowing his name.

This week we sit down with the man known as Lord of the Logos — Belgian-born, Devon-based, currently on shift at the Co-op — to talk about a career that has produced somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 logos, and counting. We get into his early years doodling in school notebooks in Liège, the Art Nouveau obsession that underpins everything, and how a chance encounter on the Tube ended with his work displayed at one of the biggest awards shows on the planet for £500 — a fee he only learned was for Rihanna after he'd already quoted it.

We cover the Emperor logo that defined his reputation, the Metallica commission that required him to draw at Heathrow five hours before a flight to Japan, and the Foo Fighters Christmas jumper that was a mutilation of his work, and what he did about it. We also discuss the readability question that divides the scene, the three-month creative block triggered by a South Korean band, his forestry degree and why nature sits at the centre of everything he makes, and the political stance on Ukraine that has cost him ten logos in one go.

The question running through all of it: how does someone this prolific stay original?

Highlights

00:00 Intro

01:00 Meet Christophe Szpajdel — Lord of the Logos

04:00 Logo Count and the Goal of 20,000 by 2030

06:00 The Process Explained

09:00 The Unsung Logo and Chris's Tattoo

10:00 Background: Belgium, Poland, Ukraine, Devon

11:00 The Co-op Day Job and Why It Works

13:00 Side Projects: Murals and the Polish Calendar

17:00 Musical Influences: Kiss, Motörhead, Celtic Frost

19:00 First Logos and Early Career

21:00 The Emperor Logo

25:00 Chilean Influence: Rick Zuniga

26:00 Nature, Art Nouveau, and the Forestry Degree

28:00 Best Work Comes from Anger or Obsession with Death

29:00 Symmetry, Creative Block, and the Client Problem

33:00 Live: Working Through the Drag Logo

38:00 The Readability Debate

43:00 The Rihanna Story

47:00 Metallica at Heathrow

53:00 The Foo Fighters Bootleg Response

54:00 The Mandy Soundtrack

57:00 AI and Market Saturation

59:00 Ukraine, Politics, and the Russian Flatmate

01:02:00 Losing Ten Logos Over a Political Stance

01:03:00 Black Metal, Church Burnings, and Forbidden Fruit

01:08:00 The Trump/Putin Artwork

01:09:00 The Books: Lord of the Logos, Archaic Modernism, Oracles in Black

In our previous episode, we went deep into the history of Cabaret Voltaire and their importance to UK industrial and, latterly, dance music. Now, we follow the trail we laid therein by taking a journey through the band's extensive discography, really fleshing out how they went from a Sheffield attic in 1973 to a Patagonian field site recording lizards for David Attenborough. Along the way, we take in televangelists, voodoo, Charles Manson samples, Velvet Underground covers, a near-miss with Todd Terry, and a Taylor Swift pressing-plant mix-up that turned a forgotten ambient track into a viral curiosity decades later.

Phil Eaglesham (aka P6 - ex-Stretchheads and De Salvo, current OMO frontman) returns to bestow upon us his encyclopaedic knowledge of the band and British industrial music. We start in 1974 with the lo-fi bedroom experiments of Cabaret Voltaire 1974–76, work through the rough-edged early Rough Trade EPs, the spring-reverb wilderness of Three Mantras and Voice of America, the cult monument that is Red Mecca, and the band's stylistic pivots through Hai!, 2x45, The Crackdown, Micro-Phonies, The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord, Code, and beyond. We also pick at the more controversial late chapters, including the major-label years, the slightly-too-late acid house pivot, and Richard H. Kirk's solo reactivation of the name.

Along the way, we explore the band as a video production company that happened to make music; their roles as curators and tastemakers via Double Vision; the Burroughs-and-televangelism worldview that made them frighteningly prescient about Reagan-era Christian nationalism; and their unsung debt to Black American music and dub. Chris also offers a wider reflection on what it means to lose the egoless purity of your earliest creative work as ambition and industry pressures take hold.

We get deep in the weeds talking about the producers they worked with (Flood, Adrian Sherwood, John Robie, Marshall Jefferson); the labels (Rough Trade, Some Bizzare, Virgin, EMI, Mute); their collaborators and contemporaries (DAF, Wire, Throbbing Gristle, Clock DVA, Soft Cell, New Order, The Shamen); and the bands that lifted from them wholesale (Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, The Rapture, White Zombie, and a generation of Glasgow acts you've heard but can't quite place).

It all culminates in us taking a closer look at Eight Crepuscule Tracks, a record that Phil thinks is their best and a very pure statement of what the band can and did achieve. We also settle upon what is perhaps the most important lesson to be gleaned from the Cabs' music: the importance of never compromising on your vision. By entering the belly of the beast and somehow remaining intact, they became one of the rare bands in this corner of music history whom nobody has a bad word for.

Highlights

00:00 Intro

01:18 Welcome Back, Phil

02:46 1974–76: Egoless Experimentation

04:51 Bedroom Records

06:30 Extended Play and DAF

07:37 The Velvet Underground Cover

08:26 Nag Nag Nag

10:20 Van With a PA

11:38 Three Mantras

12:24 Mix-Up

14:50 William Burroughs

16:48 Voice of America

19:35 Peter Care and Double Vision

21:41 Red Mecca

24:25 Encyclopaedia Bands

27:36 Hai!

29:36 2x45 in New York

32:07 Sheffield's Family Tree

32:55 Chris Watson Leaves

36:16 The Crackdown

42:23 Micro-Phonies

46:38 Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord

49:48 Drinking Gasoline

51:45 Code

54:58 Listen Up and Reissues

57:12 Groovy, Laidback and Nasty

1:00:15 Body and Soul

1:03:56 Shadow of Fear

1:04:51 The Taylor Swift Accident

1:08:27 Richard Kirk's Death

1:14:50 Bus Shelter Bashes

1:19:58 Sincerity vs Seriousness

1:25:00 Debt to Black Music

1:29:00 Eight Crepuscule Tracks

1:51:00 Why Everyone Loves Cab Vol

1:58:36 Coming Soon: Coil?!

Cabaret Voltaire are no one thing. Depending on which corner of the internet you found us from, you might know them as the caustic Sheffield noise act who preceded post-punk, the sinister electro-industrial outfit with a penchant for evangelical samples and anti-fascist agitprop, or the dancefloor-adjacent act who fetched up on Factory's Belgian satellite label and made something close to club music. You're all correct.

This week, we have a guide. Phil Eaglesham — P6, former front person of Stretchheads and De Salvo, current singer in OMO, musical walking tour operator, man of broad and alarming musical learnings — is here to help us navigate one of the most complex and wilfully uncommercial bands to come out of the UK, via their transitional compilation Eight Crepuscule Tracks.

We trace the band's origins in a Sheffield attic in 1973, chart their debts to dub, Black American music, and the sci-fi soundscapes that shaped a generation of working-class ears, and make the case that Cabaret Voltaire — despite their apparent difficulty — were one of the most industrious and fundamentally political bands of their era. We also get into their time at Western Works Studio, which functioned less like a recording facility and more like the gravitational centre of an entire Sheffield scene; their complicated relationship with Rough Trade; and their connections to Joy Division, Lydia Lunch, Clock DVA, and the bands that would become the Human League and ABC.

Along the way, Phil brings original artefacts including a signed 1979 TG/Cab Vol/Rema Rema poster from Tottenham Court Road, and the original 12-inches the album is built from. We also ask what would have happened to Cabaret Voltaire without punk — and conclude they'd likely have ended up an academic footnote rather than a foundational text. Highlights: 00:00 Intro

03:56 Meet Phil Eaglesham

07:47 P6 — The Name and the Character

09:29 Queer Identity in the Industrial Scene

12:55 Pseudonyms and Rockism

17:44 Cabaret Voltaire: The Basics

22:32 Sheffield, Western Works, and the Scene

25:18 Rough Trade, The Fall, and Being Prolific

29:10 Working-Class Roots and Industrial Culture

32:33 Sci-Fi Soundscapes and Electronic Prehistory

35:11 Musique Concrète to Cab Vol: How Close Were They?

36:13 Dadaism, Situationism, and Confrontational Art

38:40 Punk's Effect on Audiences (Not Just Music)

40:11 The Counterfactual: Cab Vol Without Punk

41:43 Black Music, Funk, and the DNA Nobody Talks About

43:39 New Wave, No Wave, and New York Connections

46:29 Factory Records, Crépuscule, and the Belgian Connection

47:49 Original Artefacts: Posters, 12-Inches, and History

50:31 Why Eight Crepuscule Tracks?

52:54 Looking Towards Next Week and Outro