Nitzer Ebb have long been portrayed as po-faced, totally humourless bastards whose music is best described as a thunderous post-industrial cacophony. To try to uncover what truth, if any, lies behind this impression, we've locked Douglas and Bon in separate cities in America and sent each a detailed Mr. And Mrs. style questionnaire to fill in.

Bon's best moment in the US according to Doug "That would be setting up a studio in Chicago. He's got a little cupboard in the Studio X complex; I think it's for him to have something to do as much as anything else because we have a lot of time to ourselves. We finished the new LP in March and wanted to release it in October, but circumstances have held it back until February. I mean, I've had to resort to being a doorman in a club in Detroit to earn some cash and before that I was a gardener. That was quite good, but generally I was very tired."

Doug's best moment in the US according to Bon "That's a laugh; I'm sure some of his best moments recently have been when he's out of the US. I guess his wedding reception, but I'm not sure; I wasn't there. I had to stay in the studio and finish some recording."

Bon's worst moment according to Doug "That would be trying to get back into the US earlier this year when he was detained for being short and ugly and not having a return ticket."

Doug's worst moment according to Bon "He is well aware of this. We went to see EMF and he liked a drink and took it too far. Completely comatose and not in a good state. Can't really say any more."

Worst thing Bon would say Doug has done according to Doug (stop us if this gets confusing) "The worst thing I've done is be a completely irresponsible bastard and nasty to everyone. I gave up what was a fairly important aspect of my life up until two years ago; namely drinking. We were in Chicago and I had reached the heights of rock 'n' roll debauchery and I was forced to give up. I never thought I was that foul, but apparently I was. It's made me face up to a lot of stuff I was anaesthetised from. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that I'd let happen. Bon still drinks, and although he was never an animal, when things were really bad we'd get pissed together and bond and all of that has disappeared and that's laid bare the vulnerability of our relationship and it did go sour for a while. There was a point when we were mixing in London where we could barely stand to be in the same room as each other. But in the end, our professional attitude saw us through. That and the huge amount of money this album had cost. We've known each other since we were eleven and after that long, things become a bit more like sibling rivalry than real conflict, you can hate each other violently but at the same time you know you'll never let each other down."

Recording the new album according to Doug "We spent ages getting the new LP together. Bon and I started writing it in '92 and came up with tons of songs, worked in Bon's flat in Kilburn while his girlfriend was on holiday, but we became a little slack, got a crate of Beck's in every morning (this was obviously while Doug was still drinking) and took a while to get stuff done. Then we rehearsed for two to three months but while we were doing that, we had to sack our drummer and we had producer grief as both Flood and Al Clay (Pixies producer), were busy. Then we moved to Chicago, got David Lovering from the Pixies to play with us and everything went wrong. Sacked Dave to vent our frustration and finished the year seven months on with one track, loads of demos and an inloads of demos and an increasingly unhappy record label."

"So in 1993 we moved to a new studio in LA; only for Flood and Al Clay to have technical problems. Parted company with Al Clay, again for the hell of it I suppose. Then Flood had to go to Ireland to record some US stuff, which went from being a couple of quick tracks to recording the entire 'Zooropa' album. While this was going on we moved to this enormous house in LA and set up our own studio there. To celebrate we sacked our latest drummer. We knew we had lost it when we'd run out of people to fire."

"Then I bumped into this guy in a coffee shop and I thought he played guitar so I invited him over only to find that he played drums so he was in (Jason Payne is still in Nitzer Ebb). Flood still hadn't come back so we stayed in the house, played music, annoyed the neighbours and got into a lot of trouble with the police. Finally, Flood appeared one day and we recorded a few tracks. Then we took a bit of a break--instead of sacking Jason."

"When we came back, we moved to Lake Tahoe, Nevada, on the grounds that if we were stuck in the middle of America we might actually get something done. And we had really productive time recording stuff in Donna Summer's old house way up in the mountains. We didn't even have to sack anyone and came away with a pile of songs. Rushed back to London and spent a couple of months in a variety of studios and recorded the rest of the album It was expensive (very), but it's great. And Donna Summer's house is relatively cheap, even if it is filled with hideous '70s furniture."

Nitzer Ebb's sense of humour according to Doug "Perhaps the funniest thing we've done was dressing up as Nazis. I'd have thought that but apparently no one else seemed to get the joke. We did something that no one was prepared to do; that was politically dynamic and that was supposed to be funny. And I think that most of the people who were outraged were outraged because they thought that they should be rather than anything they really objected to."

Bon's influence on Doug outside of Nitzer Ebb "When I first met him, I worshipped the ground he walked on. I was incredibly influenced by him. It wasn't so much that I copied him as that I did it better. He's older than me, like two years above me and he was introduced to me by our first drummer and he was amazing. There wasn't that much of a height difference between us at that point. I felt an affinity with him; we used to be into witchcraft and shit, talked to trees because we thought they had spirits in them and collected runestones in Chesterfield and Little Baddoe (where they lived). I'd go round to his on Friday and we'd drink a lot of cheap cider all weekend and go to parties and then go out into the countryside and collect runestones."

"Looking back on it, we were pretty crappy witches. The crucial thing we failed to realize was that 99 percent of all modern witches were on a shitload of ganja. So we'd been doing all this stuff without realizing we should be full-on hippies and we were a little bit frightened of the results too."

So what are their scores? The chaps seem to have known each other for years, yet seem unable to agree on little outside music and the fact that they were crap witches. They now live in different cities. Still, there's always the benefit of the consolation Volume carriage clock take-home prize, which the pair can divide up at their leisure.