Sylvie & Babs＜Picture Vinyl＞

Proof that the music of Nurse With Wound (aka Steve Stapleton) has never had anything to do with the industrial scene it's all too often associated with (due perhaps almost exclusively to the disturbing bondage graphics on the extraordinary 1979 debut album, Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella) comes in this hilarious 1985 spoof of 1950s easy listening, which features neither the buxom blonde pinup girls on the album cover nor the "titillating orchestrations of the Murray Fontana Orchestra," but instead Stapleton's hilarious and disconcerting montage of cheesy club organs, Spike Jones, BBC radio comedy punch lines, and assorted coughs, splutters, splats, and wheezes. The booklet accompanying the CD issue on Stapleton's United Dairies imprint features more of the artist's highly original collage work, including a yellowed newspaper cutting relating how he was supposedly apprehended (at the age of 19) in an Oxford Street record shop for opening records and inserting them in the wrong sleeves. Stapleton's mission in life was evidently clear to him back then, and this album is a glorious example of the work of one of music's true originals. ~ Dan Warburton