In the course of my explorations, I discovered a label in the UK, World Serpent Distribution, that handled a number of artists who scratched that itch for me. In case you didn't know, Current 93, Coil and Nurse with Wound are all bands that rose in the wake of Throbbing Gristle / Psychic TV in the late 70s / early 80s. I liked how the book would go back and forth between the artists and it was definitely interesting to learn more about the origins of Nurse With Wound and just anything and everything Coil (as I wasn't that familiar before reading). The Current 93 tracks I've listened to have a maudlin charm, but rarely does the actual music have any spark. Dabei hatte ich freilich Glück, dass die bereits erwähnten drei Größen hier als Fixpunkte gesetzt wurden.

i've always been attracted to these musicians and learned years ago about this book, which was sadly oop at the time. Written over a period of six years and first published in 2003, the book moves between John Balance and Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson of Coil’s original Threshold House in Chiswick and the old boys’ school they later moved to in Weston-super-Mare, to Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound’s goat farm and visionary art environment in Cooloorta in Southern Ireland, to the roof of a house in Muswell Hill where David Tibet of Current 93 receives a vision of Noddy crucified in the sky. Theirs was a clandestine scene whose work accents the many occulted peculiarities of Englishness that flow through generations of outsiders, channeling personalities as diverse as Aleister Crowley, Arthur Machen, Joe Orton, Shirley Collins, Bj rk, and Marc Almond. The music of Coil, Nurse With Wound and Current 93 in some ways couldn't be more different but in other ways they're all kindred spirits. I know Keenan’s work primarily through his fiction — I impulse-bought his book This Is Memorial Device on a trip to Edinburgh five years ago, and found his fictional saga of a music scene on the fringes of society to be incredibly compelling.His debut novel This Is Memorial Device (2017) became a cult classic, and drew on some of the same energy as England’s Hidden Reverse in its fictional portrait of a band and the Airdrie avant-garde music scene, and his incredibly ambitious latest novel Monument Maker (2021) displays the same love of experimentation, occult secret histories and Weird fiction that drew him to this music in the first place.

The stage adaptation of his debut novel This is Memorial Device won the Fringe First award for best play at the Edinburgh Festival 2022. Nicht nur findet er ein nahezu optimales Gleichgewicht darin, wer wann und warum zu Wort kommt, denn ein Gros des Buches besteht aus originell und clever eingebauten Interview-Segmenten. Twenty years on from its first publication, England’s Hidden Reverse stands as a remarkable work of music journalism, and the chronicle of some truly singular artists. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology. Tibet, Sleazy and Balance all start off in Psychic TV, Genesis’s post-TG project, contributing the intellectual scaffolding and musical direction to PTV’s best and most iconic albums Force The Hands Of Chance (1982) and Dreams Less Sweet (1983), before becoming disillusioned with the direction Gen was going in and starting out on their own.It’s interesting to see where this stuff comes from and it turned me on to a lot of things of which I was previously unaware, including many other books, other bands and even painters.

England's Hidden Reverse" concerns the art and music scene built around three (interconnected) groups: Psychic TV/Coil, Nurse With Wound and Current 93. This new volume contains almost 100 pages of extra material culled from Furfur, a collection of interviews with musicians and artists whose careers intersected with the bands', initially published alongside Strange Attractor's first limited edition of the book. So we are talking post-PTV offshoots - Christopherson and Balance’s justly celebrated Coil, myriad of David Tibet’s projects - as well as Stapleton and his nebulous Nurse With Wound orbit. The three groups have maintained a symbiotic, yet uneasy relationship with the mainstream of pop culture.The new edition comes redesigned and expanded with two new chapters, one of which "traces the transgressive urge that animates industrial culture all the way from Palaeolithic cave art through rock n roll and punk rock and up to contemporary noise music", as well as previously unseen photographs, and will be published in late November by Strange Attractor Press, the publishing house that put out tQ editor John Doran's recent book, Jolly Lad. Over the course of the 80s and 90s, Coil, C93 and NWW exist on the fringes of mainstream culture, secretly influencing it from the outside as they cross paths with Clive Barker, Bjork, Trent Reznor, Tiny Tim, Shirley Collins, Derek Jarman and more. The book was the definitive biography of UK experimental music groups Coil, Current 93 and Nurse With Wound, and chronicled these artists’ development and growth alongside the post-punk post-industrial underground music scene that birthed them, from the late 70s through to the present.

Read today, England’s Hidden Reverse stands as the definitive document of a unique collective of uncompromising, original and underrated artists as well as a fascinating glimpse into the early obsessions and development of one of our key authors. I must also point out before I go that it is FILLED with loads and loads of fantastic and rare pictures of the bands; mostly of Coil and C93 (there is a little bit more of a focus on Coil and C93 over NWW - just a little - but I feel that's because NWW have shied away from having a frontman somewhat, and also because their music is less based on literature or esoterica than the other bands - NWW is heavily discussed, dissected and chroniclized though and NWW fans will find plenty here).Since then, I’ve also enjoyed his novel Xstabeth and his chapbook To Run Wild With It: A Handbook of Autonomic Tarot (a collaboration with the artist Sophy Hollington. So as soon as word reached me that someone had actually gone and written a book about them, I simply had to get my paws on a copy. I admit that NWW was usually too disturbing for me in the past, but this book encouraged me to listen to more of his music (recommended starting point: Spiral Insana), and I'm glad I did.