Nurse with Wound is one of the Bureau's foundational Tier-I entries in this archive's post-1978 experimental cluster. The recording name of British musician Steven Stapleton; founded 1978 in London with John Fothergill and Heman Pathak; from circa 1981 onward Stapleton has been the sole curator across 47+ years and 40+ full-length albums. The catalogue explores industrial, noise, dark ambient, drone, musique concrète, dadaism, surrealism, absurdist humour, cabaret music, nursery rhymes, John Cage, krautrock, ambient music and easy listening. The Bureau files NWW at Tier I for the 1978 founding, the 40+ album catalogue across 47+ years, the long-running partnership with David Tibet of Current 93, the influence of the NWW List on the outsider-and-avant-garde collector community, the 2014 Frieze retrospective, and the post-2005 live return after 21 years off the stage.
Stapleton, Fothergill and Pathak were record-collector friends soaking up obscure European prog and experimental music; recorded the début album on a lark with no formal musical experience. The début LP Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella (1979, United Dairies) opened the catalogue; the title taken directly from a line in the Comte de Lautréamont's 1869 Les Chants de Maldoror (the pre-Surrealist French prose-poem reference point that later shaped the NWW thematic vein and the Current 93 / Coil cluster). Per Sounds at the time: a record that "makes The Faust Tapes sound like Carousel."
The NWW List (about 291 entries of obscure influence-artists, compiled by the original trio and appearing as an insert with the début album, later expanded with the 1980 second album To the Quiet Men from a Tiny Girl) was initially intended as a homage to the obscure artists who had influenced the NWW project, but later became a kind of "shopping list" for collectors of outsider and avant-garde music; shaped the post-1980 record-collector culture around krautrock, free improvisation, French Zeuhl, obscure prog, and the European experimental cluster. Per Stapleton in the 2019 Loud and Quiet retrospective: "Nobody initially thought the list was of any interest at all... then at record fairs you'd start to see stickers on albums saying part of the NWW List... it went global. I've been in record shops in America that have sections just of albums featured in the Nurse With Wound list." In a 1997 The Wire interview Stapleton boasted that some of the names on the list were invented; later absolutely refuted by John Fothergill in David Keenan's 2003 book England's Hidden Reverse.
Pathak departed within a few months of the début to work with David Vorhaus of White Noise; Fothergill fell out with Stapleton later. From Merzbild Schwet (1980, third album) onward Stapleton was the sole helm. Per Stapleton's own assessment the 1982 Homotopy to Marie is the catalogue's first proper NWW release; the post-trio sole-curator opening. The long-running United Dairies label position (founded by Stapleton) carries most of the NWW catalogue across exceptions including the 1981 The 150 Murderous Passions collaboration with Whitehouse, the 1984 Brained by Falling Masonry (L.A.Y.L.A.H. Antirecords), the 1985 The Sylvie and Babs Hi-Fi Companion (L.A.Y.L.A.H., later reissued United Dairies 1995), the 1986 Spiral Insana (Torso, later reissued United Dairies 1997), and the 1988 Soliloquy for Lilith (Idle Hole 3xLP set).
The 1984 meeting with David Tibet at a Current 93 (then-Lashtal-era) event opened the catalogue's long-running creative-friendship and collaborative partnership. Later Stapleton produced, engineered and added atmospherics to almost every Current 93 album across the entire post-1984 catalogue (the sonic-direction position behind the Tibet apocalyptic-folk and earlier industrial catalogues); Tibet appears on NWW material including Nylon Coverin' Body Smotherin' (1984 with Current 93), Two Shaves and a Shine (with Tibet's piss-take rap delivery) and portions of the NWW collaborator catalogue. The Stapleton + Tibet partnership the structural anchor of the NWW / Current 93 / Coil cluster (the so-called "holy trinity" per the post-2003 England's Hidden Reverse reception).
The 1988 Soliloquy for Lilith 3xLP set opened the catalogue's dark-ambient position; six sides of vinyl of dark-ambient drones rather than the catalogue's usual musique-concrète method. Per the reception, created via a no-input feedback loop of effects pedals that Stapleton discovered mid-session he could play like a theremin. The 1992 Thunder Perfect Mind (recorded at Colin Potter's ICR studio) shifted the catalogue to a Stapleton + Potter core-duo line-up; Potter has appeared on almost every NWW release since 1992.
The 1990s saw the catalogue distributed through the World Serpent Distribution infrastructure that handled United Dairies alongside Durtro (Current 93), Threshold House (Coil), New European Recordings (Death in June) and Tursa (Sol Invictus). The post-2003 distribution context: later World Serpent's 2004 bankruptcy closed the distribution position for the NWW / Current 93 / Coil cluster; later NWW shifted to direct release via United Dairies, Dirter, Coptic Cat, and other smaller distribution-and-release infrastructures across the post-2004 period. The 1998 Foxtrot compilation CD (GRAAL CD1, World Serpent Distribution) is a particularly poignant document of the cluster: a benefit release for John Balance's alcohol-recovery, in very limited edition, featuring Current 93, Nurse with Wound, Coil and a solo Peter Christopherson track. Later Balance died in November 2004 from a fall at the Weston-super-Mare home he shared with Christopherson.
After 21 years' absence from live performance NWW returned to live work 2005. Stapleton + Potter + Matt Waldron + Diana Rogerson + Andrew Liles played three improvisations on Salt Marie Celeste at the Narrenturm (the famous Tower of Fools, the world's oldest psychiatric institution building, in Vienna); these were not billed as NWW appearances. The first official NWW appearances since 1984 were at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco in June 2006; later December 2006 All Tomorrow's Parties performance at Thurston Moore's curated event. Later 2007-onwards European live position including Austria, Belgium, France, Barcelona, London, Moscow, Berlin and Venice. The post-2005 live-return position extended the catalogue into a new performance-and-improvisation working idiom.
The post-2008 catalogue extended the collaborator position. Andrew Liles became the new long-serving collaborator alongside Potter; the 2008 Huffin' Rag Blues (an homage to post-wartime American lounge and jazz music) was primarily a Liles collaboration with the companion mini-LP The Bacteria Magnet; the 2009 Ød Lot CD contained solo recordings by Stapleton, Potter, Waldron and Liles. The 2007 Disconnected CD with German krautrock mainstays Faust substantively closed a 1979–2007 loop between the NWW List's krautrock homage and the contemporary catalogue. Diana Rogerson (Stapleton's wife) contributed across the post-1990 catalogue; the personal-and-creative-partnership position. The 2014 Frieze magazine retrospective "35 Years of Steven Stapleton's Nurse With Wound" positioned NWW as "one of the great connections that we still have to the legacy of Dada and Surrealism, to a particular sensibility of horror and bemusement which continues to make art possible and life bearable."