Steven Stapleton on Nurse With Wound

Sonic surrealist, magus of the absurd, self-proclaimed ‘purveyor of sinister whimsy’: with his musical alter-ego Nurse With Wound, Steven Stapleton has been delivering esoteric electro-acoustic soundscapes to enthralled admirers since 1978.

I spoke to him about the origins of Nurse With Wound in his passions for krautrock and free improvisation; his love of unexpected creative incidents, his disdain for computer technology, and his ambivalent relationship with the industrial genre.

Before Nurse With Wound, you were a record collector. What made you think, “I can do this myself”?

I was a sign writer, and I was asked to write a sign on the window at a studio in Wardour Street [in Soho, central London]. And I started painting the window, and the [studio] engineers were sitting behind me at a tea break. And they were just making jokes about putting the paint on backwards because I had to write the sign backwards so it could be read from the front forwards.

And then on the other side of the road, John Cleese passed by, with a briefcase, and almost doing the silly walk, and we all just sat around laughing. And that broke the ice. And we just got talking, you know - talking about music. And I said I like experimental music. And the studio engineer said, “If you ever feel coming in and making some noises on the weekend, then we'd be up for it.”

And at the time, I couldn't play any instrument. None of my friends played any instruments, but it sounded like a kind of cool thing to do. So I got my two record collecting friends together [Heman Pathak and John Fothergill] and we booked a weekend session with the engineers there in a couple of weeks. So we had two weeks to prepare for our first album.

What did you use as your sound sources?

We had decided to use anything whatsoever as our sound sources. We loved avant-garde music and we loved the [free improvisation] stuff coming out of the London Musicians’ Collective where anything went – people like Han Bennink and percussionists like that who just would use anything.

John went out and bought a guitar and a treble booster. Heman had a got an old Farfisa organ. And I as I worked in a sign shop, an engraving shop, there was loads of interesting pieces of metal and bric à brac and things. So we just lugged it all to the studio, and we went from not having any idea about making a record to making one in two weeks [the first Nurse With Wound album, ‘Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella’, released in 1979].

The thing about someone like Han Bennink is that he's a virtuoso musician who decided to throw the rules out the window. It's quite audacious to think you can just go and do it without musical ability.

Oh, I agree. I totally agree. We didn’t think we would ever press or release the record, it was just an adventure. I happened to like various European bands that were very experimental and weren't musicians and used a lot of noise and clutter. And I just thought, “We could do that.”

How much do you think that Nurse was some kind of descendant of the late sixties, early seventies era of musical experimentation?

One hundred per cent. Absolutely. That was the music I liked, that's where we came from. I didn't think that you needed to have a lot of skills to create that kind of music. It was just about making sounds that were interesting regardless of their musical worth – as John Cage says, you don’t have to call it music if you don’t want to.

Basically it was three guys having fun, not knowing what they were doing. And out of it came some kind of creation, and then that set me on the road to keep on doing it because I loved the process so much. Walking into the studio and coming out with something completely unique and different really appealed to me.

As a confirmed non-musician, did you ever have much interest in Brian Eno's ideas of making music using systems or strategies?

I was aware of you know, right from the very beginning, but no, not really. I appreciate Eno as an innovator. But I don't particularly like his music very much.

Were you interested in the more eccentric British composers like Basil Kirchin or Ron Geesin, who are pretty much completely unclassifiable?

Yeah, love that stuff. I think both of those guys are mentioned on our first album insert.

The famous ‘Nurse With Wound List’ [which came with ‘Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella’]…

Yeah. Ron Geesin - brilliant, totally off the wall, wonderful tape edits. I saw a documentary on him, with his spanners. He has thousands of spanners meticulously hung on the walls of his shed-museum. Fascinating.

So did you see yourself in some way as being part of that kind of tradition of totally out-there music-makers?

Not really, not really - it would be contrived to say that. We were completely naive. We didn't see ourselves as anything. We when we pressed that first record, we pressed 500, we didn't think we'd ever sell them. And it was only because it was picked up by Sounds magazine and a guy called John Gill who reviewed it and gave it a great review which set us up really.

We never thought of ourselves as innovators or doing anything radical, it was just “let's see what we can do”, really. And it was only in later years, after I'd done five or six albums, that I thought that you know what, I am doing something slightly different. Well, different to most other people.

It's always seemed to me that your music has always been closer to free improvisation than to what would be considered electronic music. Would you agree with that?

Yes, very much. I seldom use synthesizers and I don’t like a lot of electronic keyboards. I prefer acoustic sounds that are then manipulated.

Do have a kind of set repertoire of sound sources that you use? Or is it really that with each recording, you just go and take anything to the studio?

I used to love just going into the studio with absolutely no ideas whatsoever. Blank. And then just start fresh. And whatever is there, usually I wouldn't even take any noise-making devices in with me - whatever was in the studio, I would use.

And you know, the worst thing in that respect was a well-equipped studio because there was too much choice. If you went into a broken-down little studio that only had a plate reverb that was working, then that's what you would use. And most of the time when we did those early records, apart from the first one, which I say was in a real high-quality 24-track studio, all the rest were in really shitty little basement dumps.

But you must have developed some kind of skill in the assembly of this kind of electro-acoustic collage, or whatever you want to call it.

I mean, this comes with practice, I suppose. I didn't feel that I actually created a proper record until about the fourth or fifth one. Just finding my way really . By the time I got to make ‘Spiral Insana’ [in 1986], I thought I knew what I was doing.

In terms of structuring the music, or in terms of the sounds you used?

In terms of “I can see this piece of music before I've recorded it”. I can visualise what I want now. And I can achieve what I can visualise. Whereas before it was always a bit more ad hoc: “Hey, this sounds great. Let's keep that,” you know what I mean.

Every recording I did was totally different, not only just with the sounds, but I tried to vary the recording process and the people I had in the studio with me as much as I possibly could every time. Really just to keep it fresh, because I’m not a professional musician – if I’m anything, I’m an artist who works with sound.

What's kind of remained constant is this surrealist impulse, this idea of the absurd and the incongruous…

Yeah, that's true. That's probably the colour of my brushstroke. That is what interests me, you know. I love absurdity. I love Surrealism, I love Dada, I love quirk, I love comedy. And they all sometimes come together. Sometimes not, but sometimes they come together quite nicely.

How important is the psychedelic experience to Nurse music?

What, as in drugs?

Yes. Psychedelic drugs.

Well it was quite a lot at one point. I used to take a lot of a lot of LSD and various other things but never recorded on heavy drugs - that was just impossible.

What do you think it brought to the music?

Well, recently I put out an album called ‘Tripping Music’ which was six half-hour pieces designed to be played whilst on ecstasy. Ecstasy as a drug when it first arrived in the eighties was just completely amazing, and to try and emulate that feeling with music was something that actually came really naturally to me.

How much of a role does chance play when you're making a record?

It depends. Sometimes I have a complete, clear view of what I want to do, and it normally comes out as I want it to, but other times, yeah - chance, completely. Absolutely.

I've made some pieces of music where I've carefully edited the magnetic tape, I've been surrounded by edits on the floor, then I've ditched the piece of music, stuck all the edits together on the floor and started off with that as the basis for the music.

Some of the Nurse records that really resonate with me are the ones that sound like they pick up where krautrock left off in some kind of way, like ‘Soliloquy for Lilith’ and maybe even ‘Spiral Insana’ as well. How much do you think that some of your music is a kind of twisted reimagining of the freakier edges of krautrock?

Yeah, sure. Absolutely. That was the music I grew up on and the music I still love now. I see my music as a continuation of some of the more outlandish krautrock of the early seventies.

That’s interesting because often Nurse is seen as part of the early eighties industrial genre but as time goes on it becomes clearer and clearer that it isn't.

No, basically I was tarred with that brush because I befriended or became friends with David Tibet [of Current 93]. And he brought with him a lot of baggage when it came to industrial music, and plus also just being around the scene at the time, when everybody and their dog was making industrial records.

We were always  on the edge of it anyway. You know, I was never a fan of Throbbing Gristle, I was always much more of a fan of anything that was going on at the London Musicians’ Collective.

But a lot of good things came out of that, you know I met John Balance [of Coil] and made some recordings with him. And there were some really interesting people in that scene.

You've always had interesting collaborators. How do you choose who you're going to collaborate with?

That's by chance. It just so happens. That kind of thing is a very ad hoc kind of approach.

You've had longer term collaborations with certain people like David Tibet. What was it you liked about working with him?

Well, David was great fun to have in the studio. He's very innovative with some of the things he could do with his voice. And we were just very close friends, you know.

When you moved to Ireland [Stapleton moved to a rural farmhouse in Cooloorta in the late eighties], did  the way you made music change?

No, no, not at all. I would always go to a studio. I don't own any recording equipment, I never have done. I don't have a recording studio of my own and I don't do any recording when I'm not in the studio.

So basically, it was always like a little holiday for me. I’d head over to England, or to Holland where I used to do some recording with the Legendary Pink Dots and bands like that, and head to various studios for a week or whatever – [electronic musician] Colin Potter's studio or more recently, [sound artist] Andrew Liles's studio. But moving to Ireland - no, I don't think it affected the music at all.

So what's your situation now in terms of recording?

Well, the situation for me now [November 2021] is that I was halfway through an album two years ago. And Covid came along, and the studio I would use, the guy was fairly old and became paranoid and we couldn't continue the album. And travelling got difficult and I didn’t want to be vaccinated. So at the moment, I'm kind of in limbo.

The last couple of years, I've just spent basically bringing myself up to date with the all the live recordings that we've been doing, because we've played over 60 gigs, and I've got most of them recorded. So it's been really interesting going through those gigs.

What about recording in studios in Ireland?

I did an album a good few years ago called ‘Rock ’n Roll Station’ [in 1994], and that was mostly recorded in Ireland in a traditional music studio in Ennis in County Clare. That was the first time this engineer had ever heard anything that wasn't either pop or traditional. That was quite an eye-opening few months for him,  us working there. But that closed down.

Honestly, if you're working the way I do in the studio, you need the engineer to be a friend and a collaborator.

You haven't been tempted to start using computer programs at home to manipulate the sounds from all the gigs you’ve done that have been recorded?

I’ve never turned on a computer. I hate technology. The only technology I have is this phone. My wife has a computer and she runs our [Nurse With Wound] shop [online]. But I have nothing to do with it.

Interview by Matthew Collin for ‘Dream Machines’, November 14, 2021.