England`s Hidden Reverse – A Secret History of The Esoteric Underground 2e

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Nämlich jenem, das ich zunehmend verspürte, als ich, vorm Bücherregal stehend, England's Hidden Reverse immer wieder auf später verschob. Throbbing Gristle had created a kind of defiled psychedelia that all three bands stretched and redefined in their own ways, drawing on the esoteric Magickal lore of Aleister Crowley, Austin Osman Spare and a host of other fringe figures, and pursuing a common interest in altered states of consciousness. It’s a touching and frequently funny read for mature adults interested in experimental post-industrial music of the 80’s and 90’s. Together, these genre-defying bands and their circles represent the English underground in all its cultural, artistic, and sexual variety. I was absolutely devastated, and coincidentally it was the start of a dark time in my own life for various reasons.

Where pop music exists as a soundtrack to nine-to-five work and consumption, noise provides the cover of night that facilitates transgressive activities, liberating suppressed personas and jamming the wavelengths that consensual reality broadcasts on.Und nicht zuletzt, wie wohlwollend man mit den Schrullen der jeweiligen Person umgehen kann oder will. The text is a fascinating look at the lives of London-based musicians from these and other bands and the interconnected nature of their social and artistic endeavours. Entgegen der einen oder anderen Behauptung seitens zum Glück weniger Kritikerplebse, Keenan würde hier bewusst verschiedenste Teilstränge im UK-Underground-Künstlerzirkel der frühen 80er aussparen, macht und machte es nur Sinn, sich die drei wichtigsten und prägendsten (und langlebigsten, prä-, inter- oder posthum erfolgreichsten, etc. Das Problem mit Begriffen wie Meisterwerk besteht dabei in erster Linie darin, dass sie allzu flächendeckend verwendet werden, was letztlich die Wertigkeit des Begriffs selbst verwässert. 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.

It's something of a history of a particular era and mindset in Great Britain, focusing on three bands in particular: Coil, Current 93, and Nurse With Wound. Dabei hatte ich freilich Glück, dass die bereits erwähnten drei Größen hier als Fixpunkte gesetzt wurden. The same hipsters who leeched onto anodyne black metal bands like Wolves in the Throne Room, scrubbing ‘problematic’ bands like Burzum and Graveland from history in good Orwellian fashion.

Where Keenan shines, and where he most clearly prefigures his work as a novelist – aside from This Is Memorial Device’s amusingly snarky use of music taste to tell the reader something about the characters – is in his argument that Coil, Current 93 and Nurse With Wound sit at the heart of this hidden reverse of English culture. 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. My only criticisms of the book are that (1) Keenan sets the bar pretty high in an excellent polemical introduction, but this discursive style is quickly abandoned for a more conventional rockumentary narrative.

The enamel pin is still clipped to the front cover of Furfur; the pages have a slight indent where the pin has been pressed into the book over the years. Alongside these names, it also folds Throbbing Gristle, Whitehouse, Shirley Collins, Charles Sims and AE Housman into the esoteric narrative, making for a book that has become highly influential and increasingly pertinent to a lot of music and literature produced in recent years, such as that by Grumbling Fur, English Heretic and Kemper Norton. This newly expanded edition of England’s Hidden Reverse, the classic exploration of the English esoteric musical underground that includes the first, and only, biographies of Coil, Current 93, and Nurse With Wound, is based on exclusive interviews and unprecedented access to all three bands’ personal archives. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of books about the music and musicians toiling in virtual, cultural obscurity, but this is one of them, and this one is not to be missed. 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.Over the years, as these artists relentlessly pursued their own unique artistic visions, these would remain the sole constant members of these bands, however they would collaborate extensively with each other and a revolving cast of experimental musicians and artists. Based on several years' worth of exclusive interviews and unprecedented access to all three bands' personal archives, this is the first, definitive, biography of Coil, Current 93 and Nurse With Wound. How interesting it would be to someone with no prior knowledge of its subject matter is an open question. Each act like a magus, sitting in a dense knot of references and cultural influences, gaining a talismanic significance that extends beyond their music. But for anyone interested in a vibrant alternative to the overwhelmingly over-produced, glossy blandness of the era (and one that is, mystifyingly, being 'rebooted' at the moment), this is an essential read.