In the late 1970's and early 1980's, England was home to a constellation of musicians, performance artists, occultists, fetishists, and visionaries whose obsessions drove them to create very strange records. Most of these musicians were members of, or otherwise affiliated with, Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle, the grandfathers of what is now called industrial music.
Though nothing about this group could be called "stable," exactly, a core of sorts began to coalesce around the following artists in the mid-1980's:
- David Tibet, of Current 93,
- Steven Stapleton, of Nurse With Wound,
- Tony Wakeford, of Sol Invictus,
- John Balance and Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, of Coil
(not to be confused with This Mortal Coil, a 4AD band),
- Douglas Pearce, of Death in June.
These artists were in the habit of releasing music in extremely limited quantities on fly-by-night record labels, which had names like United Dairies, Maldoror, L.A.Y.L.A.H., Torso, and Durtro. Coil were something of an exception, having slightly wider distribution through Some Bizarre, a label that also signed better-known (but still underground) bands such as Soft Cell, Foetus, Diamanda Galas, and Einsturzende Neubauten. That story, however, was eventually to end in tears, since the owner of Some Bizarre did not pay many of his artists and refused to release the master tapes to them. Some years later, this would earn him a formal curse from John Balance, and no small amount of vitriol from other musicians as well.
At any rate, since so many of these musicians were working so closely together -- Tibet and Stapleton were particularly close, and still are -- it seemed a good idea to centralize the distribution of their records. After a false start with the distributor Vinyl Experience in 1989, Alan Trench, David "Gibby" Gibson, and Alison Webster formed the distribution company People Who Can't, but soon changed the name to World Serpent Distribution. For the next fifteen years, WSD would serve as a clearinghouse for some of the most intense, interesting, and difficult music ever seen in England or perhaps anywhere.
World Serpent always insisted that it was a distributor, and not a label strictly speaking. But since so many of the "real" labels (United Dairies, Durtro, etc.) were vanity affairs, and since the artists were so incestuously related to one another in both their lives and in their work, World Serpent soon developed a kind of brand recognition that none of the other labels had had before that point. WSD went on to sign a large number of other bands, including Backworld, The Moon Lay Hidden Beneath A Cloud, Antony and the Johnsons, and In Gowan Ring. They would also distribute records by well-established bands that had their homes on other labels, the Legendary Pink Dots and Chris and Cosey in particular.
Though none of these bands sounded like each other in any superficial way -- Nurse With Wound is very dada, filled with odd samples and cutups, while Death In June is folksy-acoustic, the Pink Dots are psychedelic and playful, and Moon Lay Hidden is militaristic and violent -- they do have a kind of occultist-experimental aesthetic in common, which means that a fan of any one of the bands will almost certainly like many of the others.
Most of the bands on WSD mellowed over the years, leaving behind their drug-addled, blood-spattered adolescence in favour of something more intellectual and complex. However, it was inevitable that they would grow in different directions, and sometimes this led to personal conflicts between the artists. Douglas P. of Death in June had a serious falling-out with both the company and with David Tibet in the early 1990's. He broke from WSD and formed his own record label, Tursa, and took Sol Invictus and Der Blutharsch (a Moon Lay Hidden side-project) with him. WSD was already suffering from serious financial problems, and the loss of Death in June only exacerbated them. In the late 1990's a number of bands stopped receiving royalties entirely.
In August of 2004, WSD very suddenly announced its bankruptcy, and shut down its web page and online store without offering any explanation to anyone. A number of artists were left "homeless," label-wise, and as of this writing, some are still scrambling to find distributors. The more established bands have started to make arrangements with other labels; Current 93, for example, is pursuing a relationship with Revolver U.S.A. and plans to release records Stateside under the banner Durtro-Jnana.
Be that as it may, most fans of Current 93, Nurse With Wound, Coil, and even to some extent Death in June and Sol Invictus, think of them as "World Serpent bands," and often use "World Serpent" as shorthand for the kind of music they like. I don't imagine that changing any time soon, even though World Serpent itself has dissolved.
Further Information:
- A detailed and entertaining history of this group of artists can be found in the book England's Hidden Reverse, written by Wire columnist David Keenan and published by SAF in 2003. However, the book is already sadly out of date; it does not mention the bankruptcy of World Serpent or the tragic death of John Balance, both of which took place in 2004.
- The definitive web site for discussions and discographies of World Serpent artists is Brainwashed, http://www.brainwashed.com, maintained with care by the amazing Jon Whitney.
- The best way to introduce oneself to the World Serpent "sound" is through the superb Terra Serpentes compilation, now out of print but given its (comparatively large) print run, probably not too difficult to find.