Birthed in the fall-out from legendary 'Industrial' units Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV in the late Seventies/early Eighties, David Tibet's Current 93, John Balance and Peter Christopherson's Coil and Steven Stapleton's Nurse With Wound represent the real English underground in all its sexual, cultural and artistic variety. For reasons of social inadequacy, or because their work was deemed too damned perverse, decadent or mad, such artists frequently went unnoticed in their own lifetimes.

For all that, the three groups of friends have maintained a symbiotic, yet uneasy relationship with the mainstream of popular culture, even as their beliefs and practices repel them farthest from it. Their impact goes deeper than is usually acknowledged. Their early pioneering work with samplers, tape loops and electronics has been soaked up and assimilated via the fringes of dance culture and through close friends and collaborators such as Nick Cave, Bjork and Marc Almond, they retain a loose connection to contemporary pop. That said, they'd be the last people to deny that theirs remains very much a secret history. Until now.

HARDBACK including CD

ISBN: 0 946719 40 3

Publication date: June 2003

320 pages - illustrated.
Price UK £35 US $45

ENGLAND'S HIDDEN REVERSE

A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground

David Keenan

About the Author

David Keenan has been writing about jazz, noise, underground rock, avant-classical woosh and as many mutant sub-genres as you'd care to invent for the past decade. He's a heavyweight presence in the pages of the UK's The Wire magazine where he writes the regular jazz, avant rock and outer limits columns and contributes features on everyone from David S Ware and William Hooker through Nick Cave and The Pastels. His work has also been published in Mojo Collections, NME, Melody Maker, UNCUT, The Scotsman, The List and The Sunday Herald. He's also a musician and plays out in avant-rock grouping Telstar Ponies and the all-improvised Phantom Engineer. He lives in Argyll, in Scotland.

• The first book about Coil, Current 93 and Nurse With Wound;

• Each book is a limited edition with photographs and original artwork, complete with free previously unreleased CD
  
  
  

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  Limited edition hardback including CD containing: Nurse With Wound: Pre-Menstrual Music For Merry Maidens (re-worked tracks: Soliloquy For Lilith, Strange Play Of The Mouth, Sea Armchair, Great Balls Of Fur, Two Shaves And A Shine, The Schmürz, Mummer's Little Weeper, Rock And Roll Station.)
  
  Current 93: The Great Bloody and Bruised Veil Of This World, Niemandswasser, In The Heart Of The Wood And What I Found There, The Frolic
  
  Coil: Are You Shivering?, Chaostrophy, Amethyst Deceivers, The Lost Rivers Of London

£35 plus postage

Currently out of print