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

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