Violator Is 21 Years Old. Buy It A Drink.

The date was 18 June 1988, and Depeche Mode had just performed the final show of their Tour For The Masses at the venerated Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. Thus ended their hugest tour of their relatively young career, and the obvious question on everybody's tongues was, How on Earth do they top this?


How, indeed. The tour was filmed by renowned music documentarian D.A. Pennebaker, and later released as the concert film 101. In fact, at the end of the movie, one saw a shockingly young Martin Gore backstage, sitting in the green room with a mixture of shock and elation on his face, tears streaming from his eyes, repeating as a mantra: "What now? What do we do now?" It was a fantastic moment of honesty and, yes, fear in young Gore's features.

After taking a much needed rest, the band hunkered down with their long-time manager Daniel Miller of Mute Records and famed producer Flood in May of 1989 to record what would become their biggest-selling album ever; a dark masterwork featuring some of Gore's most intimate writing to date, and three of their most ground-breaking singles ("Personal Jesus," "Enjoy the Silence," and "Halo" come to mind) that helped launch Depeche Mode into the stratosphere, cementing their place as the world's most successful (and probably only, these days) stadium-filling electronic act of all time.

I'm talking, of course, about Violator. Did you know that it was released 21 years ago, on the 19th of March, 1990? Wow, it's amazing how fast the time has flown by, isn't it? But listening to it now causes one (me, for instance) to realize how immediate and timeless this recording really is. Being the first DM album to utilize real drums (Alan Wilder's bombastic stick work in the highly spiritual "Clean") and certainly a more "rock 'n roll" sound (more guitars, for instance, and some highly stylized harmonica samples), I think Violator was quite possibly the first DM album to solidly register with the "rock kids," and, as such, spread the joy that is DM all over the proverbial map.

Which is a great thing. What's not to love? There's something for everybody here, whether it's the blistering blues influence coursing through the train-inspired "Sweetest Perfection" (sung to, er, sweetest perfection by the eternally-youthful Martin Gore); the stomping rock 'n roll fever that permeates every second of "Personal Jesus;" the haunting spareness of "Waiting For The Night, with probably the most plaintive and introspective vocals ever sung by Dave Gahan (and the twinkling stars represented by Wilder's synths are simply gorgeous); and, of course, Gore's bewitching vocals on the most lovely and romantic "Blue Dress" ("Can you believe - something so simple - something so trivial - makes me a happy man - can't you understand - say you believe - just how easy it is to please me - because when you learn you'll know what makes the world turn")

So! How about cuing up Violator (on vinyl if you got it) and toasting its 21st birthday in style? That's what I did. Cheers, kids. Here's "Halo" for you.

Wax Trax!: My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult.

And our Wax Trax! week continues. Moving along, moving along ...

My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult (or TKK, if one doesn't care to type all that out over and over again, such as yours truly) began life in 1986 when Frankie Nardiello, lighting technician for Ministry's Twitch tour (damn, what a great album that was!), sat down with Al Jourgensen himself and wrote a few songs for an independent film he wanted to make. Nothing much came of the collaboration, but one of the songs, "Thrill Kill Kult," sparked his imagination. He ended up hooking up with his buddy Marston Daley and started piecing together his ideas for the film, which he wanted to call Hammerhead Housewife and the Thrill Kill Kult. (Goddamn, I would have loved to have seen that film.) While the movie itself never got made, the soundtrack they had recorded for it proved to have such an appealing quality to it that Wax Trax! Records took note and released it as an EP (WAX 039) in 1988. Voilá, My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult was born.

Nardiello changed his name to Groovie Mann, and Daley changed his to Buzz McCoy, and they named their new band after their first EP, My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult. Their debut full-length album, I See Good Spirits and I See Bad Spirits, followed shortly after, and the rest, as they say, is history. Some Have To Dance ... Some Have To Kill, Confessions ... Of A Knife, Sexplosion!, 13 Above The Night, and many more albums and EPs were to follow - TKK is still busy recording, touring, and spreading their nasty, sleazy, psycho-sexual disco mayhem all over the place.

I would like to showcase today one of their strongest tracks, off of their 1990 sophomore album Confessions of a Knife... (WAX 7089), the one and only "A Daisy Chain 4 Satan." That's one thing I've always loved about TKK - their usage of satanic images and phrases in their music. True, the lyrics themselves were never terribly overt in their blasphemy, but that didn't stop the right-wing Christian groups from despising TKK. Which is just fine with me - it's fun to piss those people off.

Here are two versions of "A Daisy Chain 4 Satan." The first is probably the most WTF - full of violence, nudity, debasing sexual acts, and, yes, Satan His Own Bad Self. Did I mention that it's NSFW? Oh, hell yes it's NSFW. But enjoy. The version of the song is the one that appears on the album. The second version is essentially the edited version (cut down to 4:20, haha), and the video is taken from a bunch of those old educational videos from the 60's and 70's. "I live for drugs, I live for drugs ... it's great, it's great." Which video do you prefer? Let me know!

my life with the thrill kill kult

"a daisy chain 4 satan"

confessions of a knife...

Gig Review: Nitzer Ebb.

NITZER EBB

26 SEPTEMBER 2010

FOLSOM STREET FAIR

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

Do you pronounce it NIT-zer Ebb? Or NIGHT-zer Ebb? Doesn't matter, my good friends. Both are correct - just depends on the moment, really. The band says it both ways, and, by my reckoning, so should you.

On a spectacularly hot and (quite rare this year) sunny afternoon this last Sunday, Essex-based trio Nitzer Ebb was the headlining band for San Francisco's favourite BDSM festival, the one and only Folsom Street Fair. And what a day it was! A couple of friends of mine and I traversed Folsom from 12th Street to 8th, taking in the sights and sounds of a veritable shitload of gays, straights, lesbians, bears, leather daddies, tourists, locals, nudists, tops, bottoms, upsidedowns, slaves, owners, twinks, doms, trannies, transvestites, latex babes, and piercing affectionadoes (wow, could have sworn that was a word - but I like it, so I'm going to keep it) wandering around the streets and alleys of the SOMA district of downtown San Francisco ... and keeping it real, in a big fucking way.

And it was all good. We had a lovely time. Pretty much everybody under this great Sun of ours was represented, at least in some form or other. I quite like an atmosphere where everybody can be themselves, unmasked, around other like-minded folk, and in the process, everybody gets along. Isn't that the point of life? Getting along? That's what I think - but it's fucking appalling to me how many people out there just don't get it.

Where was I again? Oh yeah - Nitzer Ebb!

I'm not sure as to what exactly happened, but there seemed to have been some kind of a technical glitch that occured, so their set was delayed for 20 minutes. Which was a pretty hard-core fuckup on the part of the stage technicians, considering that all music had to cease and desist by 6 PM. This was especially bad in Nitzer Ebb's case, seeing as their set was supposed to begin at 5.05. Not good, not at all. Sure, we had San Francisco's own District 6 supervisor candidate Anna Conda (check out her site here) acting as a mildly amusing MC (think Guy Pierce in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert - but not as cute), but I think the crowd was beginning to get a little restless. A hunched-over and naked old man to the right of us began to furtively masturbate, whilst a man wearing a goat mask backwards loomed nearby.

5.25 PM, and success! Nitzer Ebb - singer Douglas McCarthy and drummers Bon Harris and Jason Payne - took to the stage and wasted absolutely no time in breaking into their first number, "Getting Closer" from their 1990 album Showtime. Damn, their music packs such a punch! Think of a tractor-trailer painted the pitchest of black hurtling down an inclined interstate with absolutely no brakes, and you have there an idea of the beats being thrown out at the audience whilst McCarthy prowled the stage right to left and back again like a caged panther in militaristic garb, barking his lyrics as if they were orders to disgraceful subordinates. "I know what you buy / And it's wall to wall! / I know what you buy / I'm not gonna - TRY!"

Absolutely brilliant - the crowd (including our masturbating geriatric) was bouncing around like crazy, enthralled with the charisma flowing from the stage like magma. McCarthy, Harris, and Payne threw out as many songs as they could with their unfortunately truncated set; 1987's That Total Age, 1989's Belief, 1990's Showtime, and 1991's Ebbhead were represented in all their electro-industrial glory - as were a couple of songs from their first album in almost two decades, this year's Industrial Complex. "Down On Your Knees" was a glorious and ingeniously ferocious nod to their early pre-That Total Age days, and "Once You Say" (backing vocals on the album provided by Martin Gore of Depeche Mode!) fucking rocked, complete with hardcore thrashing guitars that brought to mind Motörhead.

But here's where I might get a little critical. Now, I don't mind backing tapes all that much. If you're specifically an electronic band in a particularly demanding setting, then backing tapes are probably a must. This was an outdoor festival under a non-elastic schedule, so I'm not griping about the fact that it was rather obvious that, for all the flailing of drumsticks that Harris and Payne did, not once did their beating sync with what we heard (but maybe the beating-off of our old buddy) - but it was very noticeable. I've seen Nitzer Ebb a couple of times before, and they do perform the percussion live under different circumstances - but, yeah, it was hard to ignore.

However, as my friend Michael so sagely put it later, McCarthy's charisma (and his reflective policeman shades) quite literally carried the show - or what was left of it after the 25-minute delay. Enough about that; I think there's something more important to say.

One of the major themes swimming about in Nitzer Ebb's songs has always been about empowerment. Back in the mid-to-late 80's, that empowerment was being preached to the young - "Forget all that you're told / You are young, they are old / Control is all they've got to give" from Showtime's "Fun To Be Had" (which probably was going to be on the set, but wasn't for obvious reasons) is a great example. But there, on the baking asphalt of downtown San Francisco that sunny Sunday afternoon, the lyrics took on a different power - especially with a group of people who had grown up (probably in high school, no less) with their music. No, this time I reckon the empowerment Nitzer Ebb's music conveyed had less to do with authority, per se, but with the fucking dimwitted bigots and haters who would love nothing more than to see beautiful street parties like this outlawed, once and for all.

And I think that's a message that carries on, and it's a fucking great thing indeed. Goddamn, I love music.

setlist

getting closer

down on your knees

shame

hearts & minds

once you say

lightning man

godhead

murderous

And now, for your amusement, here's McCarthy and friends with the rather dark and menacing track "Lightning Man" from Showtime. Enjoy!