Nitzer Ebb were born in violence. In 1976, 10-year-old soon-to-be vocalist Douglas McCarthy met drummer David Gooday while looking for a Chelmsford hill down which to ride his new skateboard. “He put me in a headlock, gave me the knuckles and tortured me for hours,” McCarthy recalls, creasing up with laughter. “He was fond of french fancies, so he’d torture me, wave one in front of me and then eat the whole thing.”
Gooday had already anointed his friendship with synth player Bon Harris by whacking him on the head with a spirit level during a game of hide-and-seek. After becoming firm friends, the trio would get drunk and head to Chelmsford’s Parrot Records, where they met Simon Granger, who wound up designing their record sleeves and has joined the band for their current reunion. “These three would stagger past and shout abuse at me, and I’d shout back,” Granger says. “It’s all done deliberately, affectionately, but people outside would have seen it as aggressive.”
It’s a statement that says a lot about Nitzer Ebb. Founded in 1982, they were the tough cousins to label-mates and touring partners Depeche Mode, all pulsing rhythms, rubbery synths and McCarthy’s performance style, which he succinctly describes as “shouting and pointing”.
Gathered in the living room of Gooday’s synth-packed Chelmsford flat, Nitzer Ebb knock back beer and red wine as they reflect on their past and present. Gooday and Granger have stayed in their home town, and, though Harris and McCarthy now live in Los Angeles, it is clear that their relationship has barely changed – their chat is fast-paced, expletive-laden, rude and tender. They represent a tradition that extends back into the Victorian music hall of tough, working-class art and entertainment that self-deprecates while taking itself very seriously indeed. It is a mixture of camp and machismo that should never be approached at face value, and is quite unlike anything else around today. “We’re a bunch of herberts,” says Gooday the torturer. “It’s a real Essex word, herbert.”
The four herberts of Nitzer Ebb have reunited on the back of a resurgence in influence. They have always had it, of course, inspiring everyone from the legends of Detroit techno to Andrew Weatherall, who once told them that “the closest I felt to God was listening to Join in the Chant in a club in Windsor” – but in 2018, their taut funk is regularly deployed by DJs on dancefloors from Berlin’s Berghain to the London queer club night, Kaos. Their return, for a recent tour and a series of reissues and festival dates, is timely, yet it’s not surprising that they have had such a lasting impact.
Nitzer Ebb’s music has at its core a metallic and militant funk, a legacy of music the members grew up with. “The clubs we knew were disco and funk,” McCarthy says. “It’s in the DNA of the area.” The underage Gooday would be smuggled beneath a coat into nights at the Canvey Island Goldmine, while baby-faced McCarthy went to the same venue’s under-10s disco on a Saturday afternoon. It didn’t last long. “We all got rushed out because someone had stabbed someone,” he remembers.
The undercurrent of violence in the early days of Thatcher’s Britain shaped the young men. “Notoriously, Essex has a reputation, and we bore the brunt of that insecure machismo,” McCarthy says. “If anyone looked different it was: ‘You’re a bender, and I’m going to punch you in the face.’ The funny thing was that when you were in a club with ‘normal’ people and the DJ played Sylvester, they didn’t have that understanding of who he was.” He adopts a young music geek voice: “‘Just so you know, before you punch me in the face, he’s a cross-dressing black man.’ ‘YOU WHAT?’”
With a cheap Wasp synth and various members taking turns to whack “John” – a bin made by McCarthy’s metalworker father – the embryonic Nitzer Ebb practised for hours in Harris’s mum’s house, making a racket that the group recall with typical fast-paced wit. Gooday: “She’d go and walk the dogs for five hours.” Harris: “Don’t blame her.” McCarthy: “Many times, I wished I could have joined her.”
Despite rehearsing for more than a year, their first gig was a disaster, with the synth playing at the wrong speed and 15-year-old McCarthy rooted to the spot in fear. After that, he realised: “I just have to go fucking mental.” They were further inspired by a trip to London to see Nick Cave’s the Birthday Party. “I realised we had to have our own identity,” McCarthy recalls. “The takeaway basically was: ‘Fuck everyone.’”
Nitzer Ebb’s aesthetic was as tough and provocative as their music, for they satirised and embraced the “insecure machismo” around them, in Essex and beyond. Granger would take a razor to a local bookshop, slice pages out of unaffordable art tomes on constructivism, and take the stolen imagery home to photograph and turn into blocky, propaganda-style images that adorned the covers of the album That Total Age. This extended to the homoerotic deployment of military buzzcuts, jodhpurs, boots and braces seen on stage and in the lo-fi 1985 video to So Bright, So Strong, as well as less conventional promotional activities. “We went to the NME offices all ‘Krauted out’,” McCarthy says. “Thanks to the jodhpurs, halfway up the stairs I twisted a nut. ‘Oh, wait. Ow, boys!’ I couldn’t work out which way to turn it. We opened a door and threw vinyl at everyone in the office and hobbled off.”
That totalitarian aesthetic jars today. Yet the defiantly leftwing, anti-racist group were not alone – Depeche Mode looked the same when they appeared on Top of the Pops, and Nazi imagery was deployed by everyone from punks such as Siouxsie Sioux and the Sex Pistols to experimental pioneers Throbbing Gristle. “We were leaving ourselves open to misinterpretation – we were nailing our arses to the mast,” Harris reflects. “The totalitarian imagery reflected the austere political time, the miners’ strikes and riots. The people who got offended were the most rightwing, who didn’t like gay or black people. It was a bit too clever for our own good – we got beaten up.”
Small-town violence wouldn’t leave Nitzer Ebb alone. At a gig in Brentwood, Essex, they stopped playing to fight stage-diving punks. Pop producer Phil Harding, making a name for himself with Stock Aitken Waterman hits including Dead Or Alive’s You Spin Me Round (Like a Record), had come to the gig, as McCarthy remembers: “We thought we’d blown it, but he said: ‘Blokes dressed in leather, banging music, a fight, home by 10 – that’s a great night out!’”
Suitably impressed, Harding agreed the band could use Pete Waterman’s studio in downtime. Post-pub, they would hare down the A12 to London in Gooday’s car after Kylie Minogue had vacated the studio for the day, and work from midnight until 8am. There, they augmented the noise of John the Bin with the new technology lying around in the studio. “Listen to some Mel & Kim from that time,” says McCarthy with a knowing look. “It sounds exactly the same as us.”
This had the inadvertent bonus that the tracks they came up with slotted in perfectly with the hi-NRG music being played at the London gay club Heaven. Granger now says that, as well as embracing the overlap between totalitarian and gay aesthetics like a home counties Tom of Finland tribute act, they tried to bring something back from Heaven to the pubs of Chelmsford. “Back in the music scene around us then, what they call ‘woke’ now, was normal,” he says.
Most of all, Nitzer Ebb made some of the most libidinous music of the 1980s. Tracks such as Let Your Body Learn ooze a queasy, very English awkward fascination with the sexual potential of the human form. At one date on Nitzer Ebb’s 2009 UK tour, I ended up behind a couple who rather indiscreetly whispered to each other exactly what they would do when they got back to their hotel afterwards. “There was always a lot of sexual energy – we’d get blokes turning up and saying: ‘This is my wife – I want to watch you fuck her,’” says McCarthy. “Throbbing, pointing … it’s all going on in there.”
With age, if anything, it’s getting weirder, more seedy. “The years have taken their toll,” McCarthy chuckles, “but as long as people aren’t looking at the stage, it still can be sexual. We’re now going to have a lot of shadows, a lot of backlighting … maybe corsets.”
Nitzer Ebb: still herberts, after all these years.
A Nitzer Ebb compilation, Body of Work, is released by Mute in February. Out of the Woods by Luke Turner is published by Orion on 24 January
