The official biography--for the first time all three artists have allowed access to their vaults.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2017ROUGH TRADE BOOK OF THE MONTHLRB BOOK OF THE WEEKCAUGHT BY THE RIVER BOOK OF THE MONTHSHORTLISTED FOR THE COLLYER BRISTOW PRIZE This Is Memorial Device, the debut novel by David Keenan, is a love letter to the small towns of Lanarkshire in the west of Scotland in the late 1970s and early 80s as they were temporarily transformed by the endless possibilities that came out of the freefall from punk rock. It follows a cast of misfits, drop-outs, small town visionaries and would-be artists and musicians through a period of time where anything seemed possible, a moment where art and the demands it made were as serious as your life. At its core is the story of Memorial Device, a mythic post-punk group that could have gone all the way were it not for the visionary excess and uncompromising bloody-minded belief that served to confirm them as underground legends. Written in a series of hallucinatory first-person eye-witness accounts that capture the prosaic madness of the time and place, heady with the magic of youth recalled, This Is Memorial Device combines the formal experimentation of David Foster Wallace at his peak circa Brief Interviews With Hideous Men with moments of delirious psychedelic modernism, laugh out loud bathos and tender poignancy.

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. Together, the bands represent the real English underground in all its sexual, cultural and artistic variety. A shadowy scene whose work accents peculiarities of Englishness through the links and affinities they've forged with earlier generations of outsiders. The three groups have maintained a symbiotic, yet uneasy relationship with the mainstream of pop culture.

LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2019 SHORTLISTED FOR THE ENCORE PRIZE 2020 Sammy and his three friends are country boys from Armagh, the disputed borderlands of a country cannbalising itself. They love sharp clothes, a drink, and a night on the town singing Perry Como's classics. Their dream is a Free State, and their methods for achieving this are uncompromising. Heading for Belfast - ground zero of the Troubles - they find themselves in the incongruous position of running a comic book shop by day. Their clandestine activities belong in the x-rated pages of graphic fiction: burglary, blackmail, extortion, torture, and murder. No criminal act is too taboo for these boys. But when punk rock arrives and the hard edge of the decade starts to reveal its true paranoid colours, Sammy finds himself increasingly isolated. Camaraderie and loyalty is the fuel of a terrorist cell. When those virtues prove faulty, the game is up - and Sammy's world starts to radically shrink. For the Good Times shouts and sings with visionary intensity and gallows humour. It is not just a book about the IRA, but an exploration of what it means to 'go rogue', and the heartbreak and devastation that commitment to 'the cause' can engender. It unpacks any dewy-eyed romance associated with the Troubles, and establishes David Keenan as one of our generation's most fearless and entertaining literary stylists.

Core members of the legendary British experimental band Coil tell its story in the present-tense, as events unfold across their twenty-year history. Between 1983 and 2004 the legendary British experimental band Coil established themselves as shape-shifting doyens of esoteric music whose influence has grown spectacularly in the years since their untimely end. With music that could be dark, queer, and difficult, but often retained a warped pop sensibility, Coil’s albums were multi-faceted repositories of esoteric knowledge, lysergic wisdom and acerbic humor. In Everything Keeps Dissolving, core members John Balance and Peter Christopherson tell Coil’s story in the present-tense, and from their personal perspectives, as events unfold across their twenty-year history. Accompanied by their various collaborators, Coil describe the fertile eruption of ideas, inspirations, and stray tangents that informed their lyrical and musical visions—as well as those dead paths and castoff concepts that didn’t take root. No only a worm’s eye view of Coil, these interviews provide insight into the late twentieth century’s evolving British cultural underground as channeled through two of its most astutely mercurial minds.

The secind installment of the acclaimed new anthology series. Includes 24 articles exploring the outer edges of anthropology, psychology, magick, literature, art, history, science and religion. This journal has become a true product of London's undergound and this new edition opens the gates to a parallel sultural universe that few knew existed a little further.

An alternative view of the North West of England that delves into its stranger past. I Hate the Lake District offers a different vision of the rural environment from those found in much contemporary nature writing. Based on the author's trips around North West England, the book engages with nuclear power and nuclear war, slavery, imperialism, ghosts, love, God, cockroaches, and the sheer violence and contingency of “nature” itself—of which the human presence is merely a part. Each chapter starts with an account of a visit to a place in this remote part of England, the deep north, but digresses and wanders through multifarious themes and subjects. Among the sites Gere visits are the defunct nuclear power station at Sellafield, home of all British nuclear waste; Lake Coniston, where Donald Campbell died trying to break the water speed record; Hadrian's Wall, furthermost reach of the Roman Empire; the mysterious and deathly Morecambe Bay; sites of slavery in the North West; places where UFOs have been sighted, avant-garde artists created work, and Islamic terrorists trained; shantytowns where the navvies who built the railways lived with their families; and even the remains of Blobbyland in Morecambe. In I Hate the Lake District, Gere challenges the bourgeois pastoralism of popular nature writing and reveals the landscape of North West England as profoundly unnatural and strange.