COIL wrote three film soundtracks for Basilisk that included the educational AIDS documentary Gay Man’s Guide to Safer Sex in 1992 and Jarman’s major feature film Blue from 1993, both of which careened more towards the COIL sound in experimental electronic sounds (despite Gay Man’s Guide’s distinct seedy New Age feel that echoes Sara Dale’s). As the figurehead for Basilisk, as Barrington writes, MacKay had established a working relationship with COIL in the mid-1980s from their soundtrack to Jarman’s film The Angelic Conversation in 1985.
According to Phil Barrington’s essay, “ COIL’s Sensual Stroke: Miss Whiplash and Spiny Norman,” the soundtrack was made because of James MacKay who produced and distributed several of Derek Jarman’s works under Basilisk Communications. Scoffed at as a “sort of hetero-erotic thing” by COIL member Jhonn Balance in an interview from 1995, it’s clear this wasn’t the sort of path members Balance and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson necessarily wanted to travel down. The elusive 1992 soundtrack for Sara Dale’s Sensual Massage VHS by COIL remained unreleased for nearly three decades-for good reason.
