This is the first in an intended intermittent series of posts about bands I loved in the 1990s who have little or no internet presence.
In an era where every passing whim of band have a professional website and a legion of devoted fans it’s a bit strange to find that The Male Nurse have disappeared into the internet ether. It seems there isn’t so much as a photo of them available anywhere. This record cover is the best we’re going to get
The Male Nurse sounded a bit like The Yummy Fur and The Country Teasers, which is fair enough as they shared members with both. I like to think of them as an unstable hybrid – the post-punk Fall/Fire Engines sound of TYF, plus the pseudo(?)-misogynistic perversion of TCT. The band leader seems to have been Alan Crichton – one of the more unstable elements in TCT – which didn’t seem to work out too well for them in commercial terms. In about seven years they only managed to record three singles and a couple of John Peel sessions. This is from one of those.
The Male Nurse were either terrible or brilliant. I’d obviously go for the latter. Though they only recorded around 5 listenable songs they showed a rare singularity of vision, including great artwork and wonderful, grotesque lyrics, probably written by Ben Wallers from TCT.
Alan Crichton, by all accounts an unstable junkie, died of an OD in 2002. The Male Nurse appears to have died with him.
haonowshaokao 
i remember hearing a song from one of their peel session in about 97 or 98 in the car with my mum. neither of us were impressed to be honest.
i look forward to reading more about these bands though. lungleg?
They were certainly patchy, even in their limited releases. But the song above is brilliant, no?
Lungleg are a bit too famous for this idea, they even have a page on wikipedia. Oh, hold on, I wrote that. But still, I’m thinking of the completely forgotten – Kenny Process Team, The Phantom Pregnancies, Dick Johnson, Pullover. Maybe Powder! And LungLeg a bit later, maybe.
aren’t powder a bit big for it? she’s got an autobiography and she’s in the sunday times style section every other week. i’d still like to hear some of their songs again though.