Starting at the end like all good things should, Nitzer Ebb suddenly begin to thaw towards the end of their interview and gaze around the cavernous interior of the café in London's Victoria and Albert Museum where they have shared various beverages. "The last time we were here," recalls Bon grinning knowingly at Ebb-partner Douglas, "was when we were still at college. We came up here and sat in the café and got pissed up on some of that disgusting old brandy old ladies drink at Christmas."

For many, the notion that Nitzer Ebb could spend their days wasting away under the influence of cheap alcohol when they could be diving into computer manuals, is faintly ridiculous. However, truth is always stranger than fiction, they say, and the two-man beat machine phenomenon that is Nitzer Ebb is surely no different.

Bon has just spent the evening in the South of England watching prepubescent dream kings EMF. His manner's haggard from the long journey up to London from an obscure South Coast town, his skatewear's causing a few heads to turn in the August surroundings, and his accent's pure Gorblimey. Douglas, more conventually clad in a leather jacket but sporting a shock of long strawberry blonde hair, has made his way over from Cambridge where he was staying with "a friend." How does Nitzer Ebb feel about bands like EMF, though? Don't Bon and Douglas look at them as merely doing a weaker, more commercial version of the material that Nitzer Ebb produced over the last few years?

"Not necessarily them in particular," decides Bon, eager not to upset his friends in the band. "We've always thought it's been feasible that we can get in the charts. I just think the music has come around to being a different thing than when we started. People have often said to us, one of our main problems was we were too far ahead of our time, which was probably true in the case of the public's taste and the charts."

"I think that's one of the things about touring America," Douglas explains. "You realize that although a chart success is a nice kind of medal to have, you don't need this massive chart success to be a successful band. When Bon was in Texas earlier this month, he caught up with the EMF boys when they played in Dallas, which was definitely the sort of place we can sell out, but we've never had number ones in America. But we can go and sell out places, and have a massive amount of interest in us without being charted."

With the release of the Nitzer Ebb's fouth LP, Ebbhead, success may not be far away. But the band have carried their thinking man's dance music around for a long time. Formed in Chelmsford, England, back in 1983 by the pair and another friend, Nitzer Ebb thought for a long time that, as Bon admits, they were creating dance music with a capital D. Now, he's not so sure.

"I think it's danceable. It depends what your classification of dance music is. I don't think it fits in with the radio category of dance music necessarily. But you can dance to it, so I guess by definition it must be dance music."

"We did, in the beginning," interrupts Douglas, "think we were very much dance music, and in a lot of ways we pioneered what is dance music at the moment. We went through a phase, I think specifically when the 'capital D' dance music scene was coming up, where we didn't really want to have anything to do with it because I felt personally it was perverting a lot of the ideas that we had. It was better to be as far away from it as possible in case we were included in it.

"That's why the Showtime album was so undancey with a capital D. But, I guess, slightly through experience of doing live shows, and through listening to ourselves again, Ebbhead is dancey without being the same old sort of bass lines and thud crash." Fundamentally different from the previous Nitzer Ebb releases, Ebbhead retains the bands's familiar sound, but with a fresh approach.

"For the first time," Douglas enthuses, "we've attempted to include melodies and song structures. We've never really bothered with any of that bullocks before."

The reasons for this extend beyond a desire for a different sounding Nitzer Ebb. The band wants their music to no longer exist merely on plastic platters, if you like, but stretch and expand into a polymorphous entity that can be better translated to a large tour.

"If we're gonna go on another tour that's going to last months on end, and this looks like it's going to be our biggest ever," continues Douglas, "you've got to have an incentive to do the shows apart from the obvious egotistical and financial incentives of playing before loads of people and getting loads of lolly for it. The playability of the songs for the album was an important factor for us when we wrote them. We wanted them to be kind of singalong. I guess, 'Singalonganebb!" It makes it much more human-sounding."

In the past, bands like Nitzer Ebb have been accused of being musical robots with no talent beyond an ability to program a synthesizer, an image that they are sick of and take pains to denounce.

"There's been a problem that people are too willing to say, 'Kraftwerk uses synthesizers and their music is inhuman. Well, Nitzer uses synthesizers. Therefore, their music must be as well,'" spits Bon. "We have had that problem in the past, where people think it's cold, that live isn't going to be exciting, etc. etc. We try quite hard to make it so that isn't the case. A lot of the bands that influence us are very much live bands; rock bands."

"There's an overwhelming amount of bands who use electronics who are as dull as dishwater," says Douglas, cutting into his unnamed contemporaries. "They revel in the idea that they are going to go around and be bleak and moody. Whereas, we don't."

Nitzer Ebb feels that they have been around long enough to be their own beast, and not get tied into any particular scenes. They bristle when asked if they think they fit into the increasingly successful Ministry, Revolting Cocks, and Nine Inch Nails category.

"Without trying to say that we're completely original," explains Bon, "I just think we're the culmination of the personalities in the band, and the sounds we choose to put across. I don't really think we model ourselves, or work towards any particular sound. We just seem to be, with the radio stations and the press people, mentioned alongside those bands. I think those sort of things are for the radio stations and stuff because they can create a little niche and a little market, and it does work. If you look at America, they try very much to lump you in, and try and create a little movement because they can then sell spin-off products from it."

"But I think even beyond that," ponders Douglas, "the punters who come to see us in the States aren't fooled by a single movement idea--'I like these bands, so I like these bands,' or 'I like these bands, so I don't like these bands.' So the kind of punters we get at our shows are just as accessible to the Red Hot Chili Peppers / Jane's Addiction rock side of things as they are to what we're doing and see no real difference in it, which I find is great."

With Ebbhead, Nitzer Ebb believe they've created their first audience album. Following the left-field antics of their previous release Showtime, the band reappraised and reconsidered their approach for this one.

"We knew that we could improve what we were doing," decides Douglas. "We just didn't particularly know how we should go about it. The song structured ideas seemed to be the best way of doing it because you can go back to original ideas. But if you mold that original concept of a sound around a song structure and a melody, all those things we never really bothered about, you can resell what you've already done."

That's a secret you shouldn't have given away!

"Yeeeah," he laughs, it makes us sound really lazy as well. It makes us sound like we looked back at what we'd done, which is true..."

"The thing is," reasons Bon, interjecting into Douglas' comments before he talks everybody out of buying the record, "if people miss the point of it in the first place, then there's nothing wrong with reevaluating it and presenting it in a different way. Just the reaction we've had from Ebbhead so far justifies the approach in a lot of ways: a) We've learned to talk to people more on their level, and b) They've learned a little bit to come more towards our level. So it only makes sense for us to veer towards communication with people that we haven't communicated with before. There's no point in us preaching to the converted."

"That's the thing that's made me feel that there's a whole new life in the old dog," concludes Douglas. "We both felt that while we were going through the paces with Showtime, we were weirding up all the old ideas to such an extent that they were completely diverted, and it lost it for some people. This way, we've gone back to be able to include everything that we first started with; to start again, almost. But we're much further down the road--we've got so much more experience."