Carte Blanche à Stephen Thrower

Stephen Thrower was born 1963 in Lancashire, the North of England, and educated in Yorkshire. He formed his first group, Possession, in 1980. Possession released one LP (The Thin White Arms) in 1984, after which he moved to London and joined the the group Coil, with ex-member of Throbbing Gristle Peter Christopherson and Psychic TV's John Balance. He recorded numerous albums with Coil between 1984 and 1993, including the highly regarded Scatology, Horse Rotorvator and Love's Secret Domain. During his time with Coil he also contributed music to the score of Derek Jarman's film The Angelic Conversation, and made screen appearances in Jarman's films Caravaggio, The Last of England and Imagining October. In 1986 he worked with Coil on the intended music for Clive Barker's debut feature Hellraiser, although the score was ultimately dropped when New Line Pictures decided it was too extreme for their vision of the film. He also scored work by the British underground filmmaker Anna Thew (Cling-Film, 1993) and performance artist Franko B.

In 1989, after a period writing for the seminal British horror fanzine Shock Xpress, Thrower launched the film periodical Eyeball, concentrating at first on European Horror, but branching out to cover all aspects of fantastic cinema, with contributors including the novelist Ramsey Campbell, and the film critics Kim Newman, Alan Jones and Tim Lucas. He subsequently moved into books, beginning in 1999 with Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci. This was followed in 2003 by The Eyeball Compendium (a collection of material from Eyeball magazine), and in 2007 Nightmare USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents, an enormous undertaking concentrating on the exploitation cinema of the 1970s, featuring in-depth interviews with 25 directors and many associated industry professionals.

Since 1999 Thrower has been recording and releasing music as Cyclobe, in collaboration with his partner Ossian Brown. Their first album Luminous Darkness was released in 1999, followed by The Visitors and Paraparaparallelogrammatica, the latter in collaboration with Nurse With Wound. Cyclobe wrote the theme music for the restored DVD version of George Barry's Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, while Thrower went solo to score the first ever Pakistani gore film Zibahkhana aka Hell's Ground (2007). In 2009 he contributed electronic music to the film Down Terrace directed by Kill List's Ben Wheatley. Recently, Cyclobe have released their fourth album Wounded Galaxies Tap at The Window along with a single The Eclipser/The Moths of Pre-Sleep.

Thrower also records and performs with improvisation group The Amal Gamal Ensemble and with David Knight in the group UnicaZürn, whose debut album Temporal Bends featuring artwork and a guest appearance from the musician/singer/artist Danielle Dax. He is currently working on a book about the Spanish filmmaker Jesús Franco, and in 2012 begins work on the mammoth second volume of Nightmare USA.