They were called 'destroyers of civilization' and accused of all the deadly sins. They truly understood sin and redemption. This book is about the people who upended society's understanding of creativity, mysticism, and extreme lifestyles—the British experimenters who conducted experiments on themselves and their listeners. Coil, Throbbing Gristle, Current 93, Nurse With Wound—the history of turn-of-the-century music is inconceivable without these bands; their traces are visible everywhere, from the underground to pop culture.

'Britain's Esoteric Underground' is also a genealogy of a rich tradition of English eccentricity and visionary art: the book's pages feature the great mystic William Blake, the otherworldly-obsessed artists Louis Wain, Charles Sims, and Austin Osman Spare, director Derek Jarman, and many other seekers of the transcendental.

It can also be read as a saga of desperate creators, sorcerers, and madmen who blurred the boundaries of the real and the imaginary. The destinies of its characters are intertwined with incredible ambitions, resistance to the ordinary, magic, a queer movement persecuted by the authorities, self-containment, and the search for light in the midst of utter darkness. This edition of the famous book by Scottish journalist and novelist David Keenan is based on the text expanded by the author in 2016.

Author: David Keenan
Publishing House: Individuum
Year: 2021
Number of pages: 400
Cover type: Paperback
Translator: Ilya Davydov
Age group: 18+