Exactly what you needed when you were an angry teen (I was never that angry..).
The songs were built on repeating, shouting, moaning and pounding things as hard as you could.
This was EBM - Electronic Body Music.
Of course I'm talking about Nitzer Ebb.
This was sooo cool!
Memorizing the lyrics was easy, shouting is what a teen does best, and lurking about in shorts, linen, suspensers (up or down) and 10 eye doc's on your feet was all you needed to nail the Nitzer Ebb look.
The real invited also had on a pair of pilot glasses, undercut (well, most had it anyway since it was the Depeche Mode hairstyle as well) and stopped wearing make up (too bad..).
This was very masculine and rough - no UCG here!
Playing the record That Total Age made my mum not so happy. She acctually liked Depeche Mode and had no problem with me listerning to the records over and over and over.
But when she heard singer Douglas of Nitzer Ebb singing "Fire, fire, fire, aughh!" She ran up to my room and told me I could not listen to music where they sang they were about to kill people!
I tried to smooth it over saying they sang about fire "fire". And burning churches...don't think that had the right effect.. thus was I forbidden to listen to Nitzer Ebb when they were at home. Bummer.....
A few of the girls in my crowd had the cool undercut, but not me, I was far too skinny to wear my hair like that. And after having boy-short hair since I was a child I had finally started to grow it out and had decided on to grow it as long as I could. Think I succeeded :)
1988, when I went to my first concert ever, the one with Depeche Mode - almost as if you can't believe it, but Nitzer Ebb was their support!
It was so agressive and mind blowing it was a hard act to follow for Depeche Mode. But Depeche Mode was best.
Last time Depeche Mode played here in Sweden (2009) they also had Nitzer Ebb as support, and this time I think Nitzer Ebb kicked the shit out of Depeche Mode!
I did miss out on a few Nitzer Ebb's concerts but I always got the full story afterwards, who f*cked Douglas, who did Bon... ;) What can I say, it was the 80's!
I've seen them lots of times since and they have always served first class EBM and Douglas is a very good performer. You can't take the eyes out of him when he moves around, he's got some very signature moves. I had the fortunate to talk with him after a concert 2009 and he was SO nice - and he still looked as if he was in his 20's.
Highlight moment:
seeing them play at the M'era Luna festival 2008 when Douglas came out wearing this (hot) outfit and for a few seconds I had to fix something with my camera, and when I looked up again his shirt was missing (!), but he still had the leather band on (what the hell is it called in english? Help, please).
Amongst Swedish synthare this is considered a very hot look, and we do like the fashion of military uniforms (without any political activity to it), me included.
I have never had a party without a Nitzer Ebb song. It's a must. They are still going SO BRIGHT, SO STRONG.
And yeah, my husband's got a perfect Nitzer Ebb tattoo <3 I just loooove it, and want one for myself, but it will look stupid if we both had the same tattoo, like some kind of trailer people.
A very typical Nitzer Ebb song that will get any party started:
This is one of my favorites: Lightning Man
