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When a handful of teenagers strode on stage in London's Chelsea in 1982, propelled by their own "bloody-mindedness" yet half-paralyzed with stage fright and bewildering the sound techs with their lack of guitars, few probably predicted they would pioneer the genre of EBM (electronic body music) and still be going strong over three decades later.
But then, nothing about Nitzer Ebb has been predictable. As the group prepares to release a ten-LP retrospective and hit the road again in their original formation (McCarthy along with Bon Harris, David Gooday and Simon Granger) with the newly reworked material, co-founder Douglas McCarthy reflects that Nitzer Ebb was driven by two key tendencies. On the one hand, the ambitious teens followed a mantra of "next step": each time they achieved one goal, they would set themselves a higher one (play their hometown; play London; release an album). Before they knew it, they were a signed band.
On the other hand, once they were signed and releasing albums, they made each album a sort of reaction against the previous one, with the aim of avoiding predictability and pigeon-holing.
"Whenever we made an album it was normally a reaction to the previous album, in terms of our personal growth and being relatively quick to be bored with it," he explains. "As soon as we finished [one album] ... we immediately went about, not trying to discredit the previous album, but for our own enjoyment create something very different."
The band's iconoclastic approach to music-making and to challenging their own legend continues, remarkably, to the present day.
EBM Pioneers
Nitzer Ebb are often referred to as pioneers of the EBM genre. McCarthy laughs, acknowledging the technical validity of the statement, but notes that there was no coherent term or label for what they were doing when they started. When they began he recalls a music journalist describing them as "positive punk".
"Punk had kind of died a death by 1978, 1979," he explains. "It had become pretty much a cliché, but there were bands, some of which had been part of the punk scene, like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Killing Joke, Bauhaus, who were having a big influence on us, in some ways stylistically but also in the energy that they...