Monday 15/04/2024 18.38pm on the train home from work // Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound On Radio Panik 105.4 FM Part 1 + 2
It's hard to remember when Nurse With Wound entered my life, England's Hidden Reverse by David Keenan would have been the catalyst that sparked a since then never ending fascination with Steven Stapleton's also never ending surrealist kaleidoscope art-audio project, but I'm pretty sure they were on my radar ever since I was a hungry for post-punk and industrial music teenager and I definitely know I was excited about the NWW list throughout my years working for the Finders Keepers reissue label in my early 20's (a time when playing the odd United Dirter NWW drift alongside tracks from brilliant L.A. new wave group DVA Damas via the Finders Keepers forever incredible Strange Passion Irish post-punk compilation, the psychedelic dreams and radiophonic fuzz of Broadcast’s Tender Buttons and into the just unearthed Mala Morska Vila soundtrack and ever-green Finders Keepers psychedelic trip Galwad Y Mynydd and toward my favourite record of all time Tropic Of Cancer's The Dull Age and onwards to the new to me then (minus an old VHS copy found and since lost that I watched as a 14/15 year old b-movie fan) The Wicker Man soundtrack Trunk reissue last track with the sound of the wicker man on fire and the people from Summerisle singing while Sergeant Howie sizzles inside, all played in small bars around Manchester on a Friday night as part of the B-Music banner with my DJ partner/top pal David Orphan when he was first starting the incredible Folklore Tapes label/universe, tremendous times!) so the Nurse With Wound spectre has definitely been rolling around in the corner of my eye and record collection for as long as this sentence has been going on. As ever on surprisingly an also equally never ending sentence my quest for more information on the tunes and projects I love lands at this two part Steven Stapleton radio interview that's chopped up with segments of NWW classics (I say classics, who knows really with Nurse With Wound where/what/when anything really came to be or what really are the classics or best bits, the music just sort of appears like a Discog’s listing hallucination before disappearing in favour of the next record) is a truly life affirming soundtrack/experience. The interview moves between the earliest days of the project, John Cleese walking through Soho while Steven Stapleton writes backwards on the studio window (the surrealist sense of humour of the project means that could easily be an album title) to travelling across Europe in search of connections and finding hugely warm welcomes from kindred spirits connected and found by visiting addresses and calling up phone numbers listed on the sleeves of obscure and mysterious looking records by strangely named groups that Steven Stapleton and his crew dug out of the racks of London's 1970s second hand record shops when they were teenagers or thereabouts. He tells tales of falling out of love with London and of a chance meeting with Richard Branson who expressed his love of the S&M collage themed cover of the first NWW record, and from there we travel with him through his relocation to rural Ireland and discover the absence of a telephone that led to David Tibet of Current 93 never visiting after his first trip over (there's a brilliant Brainwashed YouTube video if you want to see more of the real life NWW world) and into the early United Dairies days releasing some properly seminal early records from Danielle Dax's Lemon Kittens to Whitehouse and a pre-Omni Trio Robert Haigh, framing in retrospect NWW's United Diaries label as an almost decades before proto-Blackest Ever Black, joining the dots between some of the most unique operators within industrial & the wider post-punk landscape with shockout hardcore and jungle. Across the two hours, the show moves with all the lovingly cut and pasted tape record-button pause and play of a homemade mixtape, with Steven Stapleton's fascinating interview segments acting as the brush strokes that hold the entire thing together, moving it from an abstract sound collage/radio dial spin to something more like a DIY radio documentary. From the mystical NWW sleep concerts (I am 100% sure I remember emailing the NWW website contact email to enquire about putting one of these gigs on when I rolled with a crew putting on amazing nights in Manchester back in the early 2010s - Cosmin TRG, Boddika & Substance/DJ Pete one night, Joy Orbison, Skudge, G.H. from Pendle Coven on another were I imagine mind blowing, but I can't really remember much of either or the others (!)(our Manchester nightlife adventures in the 00s were very much like that) when a top pal was managing the Sankey’s Soap nightclub over Ancoats way) to the rural Irish countryside postal system (again, not hard to imagine these as NWW album titles; The House With The Green Door, The House With Two Chimneys) and the tourists who stand outside taking photos of his house/world. It's a fascinating insight into the NWW universe that is almost like a puzzle to dive into and unlock before it disappears into an almost out of step with time as we know it as it is as the records are and always will be of themselves, if that makes any sense, having never thought to check when this was recorded it's hard to pinpoint as it just drifts with the calming chill of an afternoon in a pub chatting ace tunes and recalling top memories of good times with an old, close pal. For those hoping for a NWW list style checklist ticking album by album information off I'd say look elsewhere, but for those looking for a dreamlike journey through the far away edges of Steven Stapleton's NWWorld it's a brilliant and fascinating listen that doesn't really give anything cryptic away, but it also doesn't hide anything, yet is continuously a hugely humorous offering and a comfortably close connection to the surrounding swirling sphere that has led to Nurse With Wound continually delivering myself/the fans/and possibly even you if you have even a passing interest in the project before or after reading/enduring this, decades of brilliant otherworldly records. We discover his 3 years spent listening to nothing but Pere Ubu, and a love of Missy Elliott and Lil Kim, venturing from the inspiration of The Faust Tapes 49p album, to learning the power of the edit. We hear of attending friends early concerts, notably Foetus, Whitehouse and The Legendary Pink Dots to the difficulty described with finding new tunes within modern music "I keep going backwards rather than forward to discover new music" and we are guided through his gap of space before listening to recently finished Nurse With Wound albums (‘years after making them makes it feel like discovering the audio as almost as if they were someone else's records’). The energetic vitality in which he has and does engage with the music he loves, art he creates and the worlds he builds shows he is always going to be a truly ever curious explorer of all the endless adventures offered by odd records and experimental music. I always sort of think of Nurse With Wound as like The Fall if Mark E. Smith had spent more time picking mushrooms in the early days instead of sinking pints in the local, the inspirations of outer edges avant-garde forever searched and inspired to build new pathways on the map, or maybe just the shared love of 1970s Germanic new wave rock (Faust, Damo Suzuki era-Can etc) and endless albums that can make even the maker of them a fan (in Adam Buxton's podcast with Frank Skinner, Frank Skinner says MES told him that he's also a Fall fan). The music between the interview strains, cracks and breaks between abstract jazz, krautrock and and all the other sorts of madness from the psychedelic underground that has driven many record collectors themselves mad while trying to locate all of them using the infamous NWW list as a guide, while shards of electronic pulses leak/escape into the ambience of the background of the interview recording interfering with the audio in the same way as Steven Stapleton describes interfering with the sleep concert audiences dreams. To view this interview and radio show as anything less than an album would be to limit its reach, to take a quote from Stapleton talking about his rural mostly hand built house, for me this line sums up this radio show recording, "it's the same as the music, it's the same as the art, it's all the same thing really". The thing I take most from this is the never ending quest of an uncynical, humorous "one could say that I have not progressed at all in my music" and utterly unique person following nothing but the flow of top tunes, there's no backward looking nervous to not have a legacy assertion or contemporary paranoia with making sure to fit in or not fall behind the current trends and styles in whatever genre Nurse With Wound music would be labelled at were if it were created for the first time now. There is just what we as NWW fans have received since joining the journey, a never ending excitement and fascination with all the things great within the avant-garde, a proper listen from a proper legend. If I were a terrible writer I'd end this by typing as I'm sitting now on the train home from work, I imagine everyone around me has Audible, while I have the avant-garde... but that would be a terrible way to end this so I won't. Nice one!
Listen to Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound On Radio Panik 105.4 FM here > >
Part 1 - https://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/moacrealsloa/steven-stapleton-of-nurse-with-wound-interview-part-1/
Part 2 - https://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/moacrealsloa/steven-stapleton-of-nurse-with-wound-interview-part-2/
First time I heard of NWW was buying Switched On Vol 2 by Stereolab and listing to Crumb Duck etc which were colabs with him. Intrigued me enough to find copies of albums in Manchester Central Library…