Dead But Dreaming: Fields of the Nephilim
Musica Spirituum #1, an occasional series exploring the varied intersections of music and esoterica
This is the first emission in an occasional series exploring the many and varied intersections of music and esoterica. If you’d like to contribute an essay of your own, please DM me.
The Preacher says to all his men: I hear Godly laughter
Can it be the end?
With eyes on fire, couldn't be so cold
I hear Godly laughter, let it be the end
In the mid to late 1980s, British youth culture was obsessively tribal. On any given Saturday afternoon, in the provincial town where I grew up, one could circumambulate its streets and observe its various cult centres; it was a Via Dolorosa of disconsolate teenagers huddling around their respective stations.
Even though a spent force by this time, the punks still endured, sat beneath the awning and between the doors of the local Woolworths, drinking cider and sniffing glue. The skinheads could be found on a graffiti-spattered bench next to Halfords. The goths were on another bench just inside the fenced enclosure of the churchyard (natch.) The soul boys and casuals clustered around their parked cars, listening to Luther Vandross. The breakdancers would go anywhere they could lay down their four-square-foot of kitchen lino. Meanwhile, metalheads and rockers were encamped in the local pub where, if you were over 15 years old, you’d get served, no questions asked. Anyone of a certain age will be familiar with these tableaux, recurring as they did in towns and cities across Britain.
It was echoed in microcosm in the common room of the school I attended. The metalheads with their Hi-Tec basketball boots and mullets commandeered the pool table. The goths huddled in the furthest, darkest corner. The indie kids formed a protective ring around the stereo. My friends and I perched on a windowsill overlooking the quadrangle, not strictly part of any of these music-led cults. We had our own thing going on.
One of us had the genius idea of setting up a Dungeons & Dragons club, of which we would be the only members. This granted us privileged access to the interview room (key obtained from, and returned to, school reception at the start and end of dinner break) on the pretext that we needed somewhere quiet to play. We always locked the door from the inside, granting us sixty precious minutes of relative freedom. Of course, we didn’t play much D&D (that was reserved for the weekend, the preferred games being RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu and WFRP.) Instead, we flung open the windows and smoked cigarettes, and invented simple games of chance with our D20s.
On one occasion, someone removed a weighty tome from their bag: the first fruits of a book club joined via an advert on the back of a Sunday newspaper supplement. The proposition was this: pick three heavily discounted books from the selection available in the advert, then choose one full-price book per month, for six months, thereafter. All five of us chipped in the earnings from our Saturday jobs; the books would then be circulated between us. The one in question on this occasion was Magick in Theory and Practice by Aleister Crowley.
I cannot remember why we selected it. Most likely because of its mystique; its dangerous aura, and a curiosity to know more. None of us knew what ‘magick’ was, or had any clue about Aleister Crowley, although someone asserted he was a Satanist. That was good enough. Our little group of aspiring intellectual iconoclasts liked to think of itself as anti-establishment, anti-religion, anti-Christian. Once, someone recited the Lord’s Prayer backwards. Nothing happened.
It was my turn to own Magick for a time. Admittedly, I did not read all of it because I barely understood any of it. I was less clear what ‘magick’ was at the end of the week than at the start. Crowley seemed to be saying that magick was life, and life was magick, and some kind of enlightenment could be gained when life was lived ‘magickally’. Even though much of the book was hard, if not impossible, to parse, some of it got its claws into me. What intrigued me most was the idea that there was another route to encountering divinity, outside of religion. But it required a huge amount of training to get there; more than I had time for, what with school studies, exams, girls, weed, booze and music. What we did recognise as a group however was that, through playing RPGs, we were already familiar with the lingua franca of magick. Through our characters, we were engaging by proxy with spells, ceremony, ritual, demons, deities etc etc. Maybe the Christians were right after all: RPGs really were a gateway drug to the occult. Regardless, Crowley’s claws had put their poison in my blood. My interest in esoterica only grew thereafter.
Musically, I stood largely in the electronic camp. Depeche Mode was my north star. Through their label, Mute, I’d discovered Nitzer Ebb and The Normal, which led to the likes of Cabaret Voltaire, 23 Skidoo and Clock DVA, Front 242 and Front Line Assembly. According to the NME, the latter two crossed over into a genre called ‘industrial’, which required more investigation. So I’d return from exploratory trips to Sister Ray and Rough Trade record shops in London with vinyl from KMFDM, Ministry, Skinny Puppy and Killing Joke.
I was fascinated by Killing Joke especially; like Depeche Mode, they transcended and defied genres, with a sound fusing elements of metal, industrial and goth. Jaz Coleman’s lyrics were far superior to Martin Gore’s however (the couplet ‘words are very / unnecessary’ proving DM’s Achille’s heel.) And from reading interviews, my fascination grew as it became clear that Coleman was an accomplished lifelong occultist; Crowley being a particular influence.1 At this time Killing Joke were at their zenith in terms of popularity; Love Like Blood had peaked at no. 16 in the charts, and the LP Brighter Than a Thousand Suns was released a year later. I listened to them obsessively. But over time I began to develop a strange queasiness towards their music. It was hard to define, but seemed to be a response to what I perceived to be an unsettling, existential darkness seeping through their musical alchemy; I heard a bleakness and a desolation in Jaz’s plaintive vocals and Geordie’s intense, haunting guitar work. It just didn’t sit well with me. In retrospect I think they were channeling some dark and potent energies. Even though Killing Joke was, in many ways, my perfect band, at the time I was psychically too vulnerable to cope with their creations to the level of intensity my teenage self demanded. Now older, wiser and more resilient, I dip back in regularly, although I still sense the shadow that stretches across their work.
Of all the musical subcults from the 80s, goth intrigued me the most. I remained ‘goth-adjacent’ however, never fully able to cultivate the studiously maudlin air, or the painstaking aesthetic. I appreciated its attitude though: its aloofness; its pomp and histrionics. And the goths I knew were, in contrast to their personas, hard-drinking hedonists (e.g. snakebite and black); they threw some of the best, most notorious parties. For me, the music never quite lived up to the promise though. I was enthusiastic about early Cure, Sisters of Mercy and Siouxsie and the Banshees, but I wanted more atmosphere than the minimalist punk-ish tracks I was hearing; something more epic and cinematic. I desired less introspection too; lyrically, goth appeared to be obsessed with dissipation, melancholia and relationship-based angst. Where were the occult themes I’d come to expect from Killing Joke and which, from outside looking in, goth seemed to promise? Where was the mystery?
Enter Fields of the Nephilim. I believe I first heard them during a goth night at a local village hall. The growled vocals were unfamiliar but compelling; the guitars were heavy and layered. Best of all, there was a sense of swagger and menace. The track I had heard was Slow Kill. As soon as possible, I went to the local record shop and bought the album Dawnrazor.
I was completely seduced by every aspect of the band: the explicit occult mythos and references corralled by frontman Carl McCoy; the weather-beaten ‘dust and death’ look: duster coats, leathers, shades; the graphic design: densely-layered occult iconography, sigils, lamen, hints of the Sigillum Dei, ostensibly produced by design agency Sheerfaith but in reality undertaken by McCoy; the early videos, directed by Richard Stanley; the intensity of the flour-spattered gigs.
Muscially, FoTN hit the sweet spot. In contrast to much of the minimalism of goth, their sound was rich, textured, and soaked in atmosphere. McCoy’s baritone voice and barked delivery gave an urgent and aggressive edge. The progressive and sometimes lengthy song structures imparted a ceremonial, ritualistic dimension lacking in so many other bands from the genre. It was Killing Joke all over again, but this time the effect on the listener was invigorating, not attenuating.
The Nephilim followed Dawnrazor, and McCoy’s occult inspiration became more definitive. The first single was Moonchild, in homage to Crowley’s novel (its cover photo - McCoy’s scowling, mud-encrusted face - became a classic.) The second single, Psychonaut, was a nod to seminal chaos magician Peter Carroll. At the time I had been reading the Biblical Apocrypha, especially Enoch I and II, so was attentive to McCoy’s lyrical references to the Watchers, the Nephilim and their role in the evolution of human civilisation around the Fertile Crescent (readers of Shalat will recognise my ongoing interest in the Nephilim mythos.)
FoTN’s apogee was and remains the astonishing 1990 record Elizium. Produced by the Pink Floyd engineer Andy Jackson, the entire album can be listened to as a single evocational work, ebbing and flowing, drawing in and guiding the listener through what feels like a genuinely magickal experience. For me, it possesses a powerfully hypnagogic quality. It was through this record, as much as any other, that I understood the power of music as a meditative and visionary tool, to evoke and invoke, to stimulate and direct the imaginal.
Notably, Elizium contains spoken word samples of Crowley. From my first exposure to Magick in Theory and Practice, to the Crowley-inspired works of Killing Joke, to FoTN, the old serpent had been there, in the background, all along.
This is not an exhaustive account of the band’s life and works, but I would additionally recommend McCoy’s Mourning Sun from 2005. FoTN still occasionally perform live, and this is the best medium to encounter them. The last time I saw them was at the Whitby Bram Stoker Festival in 2015, and they were magnificent. Ceromonies captures the FoTN live experience, and is well worth watching.
The band received virtually no radio play throughout their career, were ridiculed and dismissed in the music press, and subsequently received no mention at all in three supposedly authoritative accounts of the goth movement.2 They are unforgivable omissions, as FoTN are regularly cited as seminal influences in later goth acts, as well as by the doom and black metal fraternity. For example, Behemoth frontman Nergal appeared live with McCoy at a Fields of the Nephilim tour stop in Poland in 2011 to perform the song Penetration. And Watain frontman Erik Danielsson invited McCoy to perform on the song Waters of Ain.
Something must briefly be said of FoTN’s collaborator: the esotericist and auteur Richard Stanley. As a filmmaker he directed several of their videos and featured McCoy in the 1990 movie Hardware as the ‘zone tripper’. Stanley’s career was almost destroyed by the disastrous The Island of Doctor Moreau, although his rehabilitation was helped by the recent success of The Colour Out of Space. In the intervening years, he researched the Grail Mysteries, Catharism, Montségur and Rennes le Chateau. Fiercely intelligent, a true seeker and a genuine eccentric, he deserves his own essay, and may well get one.
A note on listening to music or, more specifically, ‘magickal’ listening. Creativity is an inspirational act, a process of channelling and refracting the ineffable through the prism of the self. It is a surpassing of Nature and a reaching-into-the-cosmos, returning and recounting in a manner that is almost shamanistic. The fact that, in the West at least, ‘art’ is regarded primarily as a commodity tells us everything we need to know about the state of our culture. But the true artist is a magician, and music enjoys an especial distinction amongst the arts inasmuch as it is freed from the hegemony of materiality, images and sight; music has the realms of spirit as its source and is itself a spirit-being. Thus, when listening to music ‘magickally’ we are not simply engaging with it critically or aesthetically, but in relation to its effects on our subtle bodies, our spirit-selves. We can also hold and be conscious of the intent of the artist-magician, of music as an expression of directed Will. The terms in which we meet the music are as an exchange, an in-flowing and out-flowing; a relationality. The power of music to heal and cleanse, to curse, ward, remember, enlighten, sacralise or desecrate, evoke and invoke, are topics too great to discuss here (although they will be addressed over time), but they form part of our awareness in unison with the music we listen to.
Killing Joke will likely get their own essay at some point
The books in question are: The Art of Darkness: The History of Goth by John Robb; Goth: A History by Lol Tolhurst; and Season of the Witch: The Book of Goth by Cathi Unsworth.
Great essay, despite having travelled through many musical obsessions in the decades since it came out, most a million miles away from goth, Elizium remains a sublime experience, and an album that often gets played in full, far far too loud, at too late a time on the rare occasions I have the house to myself.
Yes! I've always thought of FotN albums as being immersive rituals, they certainly sit outside the wider goth genre in this respect as like you say, the atmospherics, themes and theatrics command an atmospheric weight that is rarely seen by any other acts. I have a similar feeling to Coil's music, but as much as I enjoy some of their work, it hits from a very different, queasier angle! Very much looking forward reading what you have to say about Killing Joke.