Product Description

Definitive history of Coil, Current 93 and Nurse With Wound-a peculiarly English underground phenomenon. Deluxe paperback edition of last season's bestseller, written with full co-operation of all three bands. Lavishly illustrated with color and black & white photos, including a CD of material from Nurse With Wound, Current 93 and Coil. Cover designed by Stephen Stapleton.

"A superb document that effortlessly unravels the intricacies of his protagonists and their relationship to post industrial England."-The Wire

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1620817 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 332 pages

Customer Reviews

Anybody know what's going on with this edition?
I refuse to pay over $400 for a used hardback edition! These are 3 great "bands," but why do I suspect that this more affordable edition is being held back just to increase the collector's value of the hardbound edition? Collector scum really piss me off!

The God's Got Three Faces and The Child's Got No Name
Nurse With Wound, Coil and Current 93 are musically manifestation of the same creative force. They are interdependent and each compliments the others. David Keenen describes this connection beautifully in this work. It begins by describing the musical scene out of which the bands all took their shape. In the strange days of the early eighties the post punk musical world was really going into several directions: oblivious pop, new wave pretension, industrial and Goth and finally bands like Current 93 Coil and NWW. These sounded more similar in there early days than they do now but still have the same vibe. What's most interesting about them is that they keep artistic focus and this book tells this story in a beautifully bound form.

The book uses a lot of quotes and pictures to tell the story of these bands using information from collaborators of the bands. It is very well researched and while many have said it reads like journalism it seems more like academia to me. The style is great and with so little actual documentation to work with quotes are one of the few viable options. It is really interesting to peer into the lives of these individuals and sometimes it is stranger than fiction: Tibet Balance Stapleton and Christofersen lead bizarre lives. This is a part of why they make such interesting work. It would have been more interesting to me if there was more said about the specific influences of the artists and the works. While we can infer much there could certainly be more here. Nevertheless what is written in this book is very enlightening to me. We as fans of the work often dissociate Coil and John Balance as a distant cousin to c93 and NWW but reading this really put the perspective in order. This book puts the artists in perspective so that even a non fan would find it interesting.

Overall I really appreciated reading this book. Being a huge fan of these bands I would be happy with anything and have often been placated by reading incomplete web pages and bad 'zine articles. This book is far better than that and really makes me appreciate the music all the more. It is by no means definitive and is missing many other bands (most notably Death In June). But I guess the book would loose focus if it were to contain more bands. This is a book that you will love to have and read again and again. Being fans of musicians that the mainstream media doesn't care about or cant understand we are thrilled to see stuff like this.

This is a Reprint of the Original... Lower Cost Same great material

-- Ted Murena