England’s Hidden Reverse, the celebrated history of the UK’s esoteric underground by The Wire contributor David Keenan, is getting a long-awaited republication. The new edition comes redesigned and expanded with two new chapters, one of which "traces the transgressive urge that animates industrial culture all the way from Palaeolithic cave art through rock n roll and punk rock and up to contemporary noise music", as well as previously unseen photographs, and will be published in late November by Strange Attractor Press, the publishing house that put out tQ editor John Doran’s recent book, Jolly Lad.
Introducing the book, text on the Strange Attractor website reads: "Based around hundreds of hours of interviews with members of Coil, Nurse With Wound and Current 93 as well as contemporaries, friends and associates, EHR illuminates a shadowy English underground scene whose work accented peculiarities of Englishness through the links and affinities they forged with earlier generations of the island’s marginals and outsiders, such as playwright Joe Orton, writers like death decadent Eric, Count Stenbock, ecstatic mystic novelist Arthur Machen and occult figures like Austin Osman Spare and Aleister Crowley." 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. Pre-order the book, which is available as part of either the standard 1000-copy run or in the 250-copy ‘Reverse Edition’, signed by the author and coming with an enamel sigil badge designed by Elijah Burgher, here.
