Then, after a near ten year hiatus, we reunited and in the blink of a bleary eye we were on the road and making a new album. The tour established Nitzer Ebb as part of the history of American alternative music and sent us on a trajectory that only we could hamper. There was a magical element to it, which sounds straight out of the Rock and Roll Bullshit Handbook (I always keep a copy handy in my back pocket), but it was just a very special time full of excess, tears, and laughter. The “World Violation Tour” that took place in the US over the summer of 1990 was an incredible experience for everyone involved. This time, visas in our sweaty palms, we were actually let in. It ended up being the masterpiece Violator, and once again we were invited to tour with them. We introduced them to Flood and made every effort to get him to produce their next album. Sad though it was, the bands remained fast friends and whilst we were recording our third album Showtime, at Swanyard Studios in London, DM were mixing the 101 soundtrack in the room next door. US immigration had other ideas, and our work visas were denied, citing that we “lacked musical merit”-in some ways, a point well made.
Things went so well, in fact, that they decided the show must go on, and we were invited to tour the US, too. Not only were we blown away by DM’s stage performance and attention to detail, off stage they were extraordinarily kind and generous… and an awful lot of fun. Once on the tour the penny finally dropped: “Oh, that’s what being in a band is all about…” We actually had a genuine fear that it would ruin our nonexistent career. Being the obstinate, snotty little upstarts that we were, we baulked at the idea of doing something so ‘mainstream’ and popular’. When Nitzer Ebb first signed to Mute Records in 1987, one of the first things Daniel Miller wanted us to do was tour with Depeche Mode on their Music For the Masses European tour. McCarthy recounts why being forced to tour with them was one of the best things to ever happen to Nitzer Ebb. In the latest installment of our series assessing the impact of Depeche Mode through personal narratives, EBM innovator Douglas J.
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