The NWW list was compiled by the original Nurse With Wound trio of Steven Stapleton, John Fothergill, and Heman Pathak. It was intended as a homage to the obscure artists which influenced the Nurse With Wound project. It has since become a type of 'shopping list' for collectors of outsider music. The list only included group names, and collectors have speculated on the specific albums which would have influenced Nurse With Wound. In a 1997 interview in UK magazine The Wire, Stapleton boasted that some of the names on the list were invented, a statement absolutely refuted by John Fothergill in David Keenan's book England's Hidden Reverse, published in 2003. Keenan, having researched the matter, declares Fothergill to be correct.