930 Club / Washington, DC / July 10th, 1995 / 5:30pm.

Brian: All of your albums have your name credited as V. Harris. What does the V. stand for?

Bon: My real name's Vaughan

Brian: But they call you Bon.

Bon: They do. I haven't been called Vaughan since I was about two years old. Very few people call me Vaughan.

Brian: How did you come up with the name Nitzer Ebb?

Bon: We just made it up. We cut up a load of letters and words and rearranged it.

Brian: So do you not really care how it's pronounced?

Bon: We don't care really how you do it.

Brian: How do YOU pronounce it?

Bon: I say [night-zer] ebb.

Brian: It's been three years since your last tour. Why such a long break?

Bon: The album was a nightmare basically. We started recording it straight after we finished touring with Ebbhead, and we moved to America to start recording it to a studio in Chicago which went heinously wrong. We relocated to Los Angeles, and that went wrong too. Flood was going to come in and produce it, and he got held up so we had to wait for him. By the time he got there and we did a little bit of work, everyone was ready for a break 'cause we'd been hanging aroung for so long. Then, it just took longer to sort out the material than we thought it would. Once we had finished it, there were other problems; with the artwork, the first video, ...

Brian: What's it like working with Flood?

Bon: Perfect! He's the best.

Brian: Do you feed off of each other?

Bon: Yeah, this will be the fourth album that we've worked with Flood, and the first two, Belief and Showtime, he played a very hands-on role in the development of the tracks. He programmed a lot of the stuff and was very involved so it's like the old cliché; it's like he's another member of the band really.

Brian: All of your albums are unique; your sound is constantly changing. Do you feel like it's a natural progression, or do you force a change to occur to keep from becoming stagnant?

Bon: I think forced is too strong of a word. I think we are very aware of staying in the same place, and we've also got amazingly short attention spans so once we've done something, we move on.

Brian: I know your fans appreciate the fact that you change; it keeps your sound from getting old.

Bon: Right, so I think we are very aware of it, and we probably push that, and we push ourselves to not be the same, but I don't think it's forced. I think the changes do come about as part of the natural aging process and overall greater awareness.

Brian: Does your family lives have any strain on your music career or visa versa?

Bon: It has done in the past. Doug's probably experienced more with that. He was in a marriage with two kids, and it's got to be hard to be away on the road or during the late hours in the studio. It does have a factor; you spend a lot of time away so a lot of times it's hard to feel rooted to any one spot because it's better as a touring musician to think of yourself as not rooted to any one spot--just take every day as where you live and what you do.

Brian: How do you come up with the ideas for your songs?

Bon: Pretty much all from experience. A couple of them have been fictional; sort of tails.

Brian: Like Living Out of a Bag?

Bon: No. That was a point in Douglas' life where he was literally living out of a bag. His wife had thrown him out of the house.

Brian: A lot of the songs seem to lean more towards Doug's side; like Boy?

Bon: Yeah.

Brian: What are some groups that you like or that have influenced you?

Bon: In the early days, obviously DAF were a big influence; Birthday Party, Killing Joke, Magazine, Bauhaus, ...these were some of the bands that we were listening to.

Brian: Any American bands, or were you mainly influenced by European groups?

Bon: Real early on, we used to skateboard so bands like Devo; the early punk scene I suppose like the Dead Kennedys and things like that because it was part of the skateboarding scene. Then, later on...I think American music has become a lot more prevalent in general these days.

Brian: You probably don't like to be classified in any kind of music category like "Industrial". It seems like it's more of a commercial thing that is imposed upon bands here in America.

Bon: Right.

Brian: Tell me a little bit more about the new album [Big Hit].

Bon: Well, basically when we finished doing Ebbhead, I think we had become very aware of the boundaries of technology. I mean, we have always been pretty heavily based in technology, but towards the end of Ebbhead, we'd maybe have a guitar sample that we wanted to play at several different pitches and mess it around a bit. So you spend twenty hours in the studio manipulating guitar samples, whereas, if you put a reasonable amout of hours into actually knowing the basics of playing a guitar, suddenly, you can do that in five minutes and you've got all of the other benefits of knowing another instrument. Also, music can become very controlled when it's done on a computer and with sequencers. There's not very many spontaneous accidents or outpourings of emotion that are really captured, and we wanted to try and get back into those kind of elements as well where we were trying to get three or four musicians in the same room playing together; trying to get some kind of energy.

Brian: Do you enjoy making music videos?

Bon: No, not really. It's something that has to be done. I've got a big problem with the concept of music videos in general.

Brian: It should be based more on the sound.

Bon: Yeah, I think they are responsible for a lot of the classification that we talked about earlier. I think institutions like Mtv are inherently evil, and the concept of the music video itself is like an ad campaign for the record company that the band is paying an awful lot of money for whether they want to or not. You get this whip held over you; if you don't do a video, you won't be on Mtv; if you're not on Mtv, then you're not going to get anywhere. Well, fuck that. I hate that. Hopefully, things like the emergence of the World Wide Web and the Internet is going to break that sort of thing down.

Brian: I hope so.

Bon: I hate Mtv.

Brian: Have you seen your web page?

Bon: The one on Mute?

Brian: Yes, I've seen it. It's very informative.

Bon: No. I'm not online yet. I'm going to try to get on top of that as soon as I get home.

Brian: It's growing very rapidly.

Bon: Yeah, it is, and I think it's a good thing. I really do. I really hope that it is what it promises to be and it cuts out the middleman i.e., the record company because I hate them more than I hate Mtv.

[It should be noted that Bon's animosity towards the corporate music world is justifiable. Nitzer Ebb have recently been dropped by corporate music giant Geffen Records in the middle of their American tour. Nitzer Ebb should be commended for completing the remainder of the tour on their own accord. Nitzer Ebb are still supported by their affiliates at Mute Records]

Brian: There's a lot of red tape; a lot of money being doled out to them.

Bon: Oh, when the revolution comes, they'll all be held up against the wall and shot [laughter]. They're all rats from the same nest, aren't they?

Brian: Yeah [laughter]. So what were making the last two videos like?

Bon: The one for Kick It was kind of fun because there were a bunch of kids that came down as extras, and it was fun to watch them, but the amount of hassle that went into even getting that far in the video...it needed to be fun just to have some kind of worth put back into it. The one for I Thought was just a drag for me. It was a cold day in a warehouse, and it was one of those shoots that you knew was all in the effects and the camera work and stuff so you weren't really doing anything that you could feel was contributing towards the overall thing. You knew it was all in the lenses they used and things like that so every runthrough you did was identical; yet, you knew how it was going to look. The finished thing was going to be radically different, but you couldn't feel that at the time so it's just like endless runthroughs of the same thing.

Brian: They haven't had much airplay over here in the US. Do you feel that you should release a video compilation so that more people would have exposure to your music?

Bon: We feel like we're approaching a point in our lives where it is time somewhat for a retrospective; to comb back over the old material. I think it's high time for a re-release and a remix of the first album because it's so popular. Throughout the course of our career, a lot of what have gone on to be very influential DJs and remixers have remixed stuff for us which we've turned down and never released because we didn't feel like it was appropriate, but I think there is an alternative outlet, and, to showcase the diverse amount of people that we have worked, I think it's time, probably, for some of those to see the light of day and all the old videos and film footage that we collected from touring. I filmed a lot of the making of Big Hit on HI-8; there's Super-8 footage of us in Russia and stuff, and I think there's enough interesting material there to put together a good long form.

Brian: I was hoping some of your earlier B-Sides such as Backlash, Out Of Mind, and the Join In The Chant remixes, would come out on CD. I think there is a market there.

Bon: Yeah, and in general; I mean we've had a lot of inquiries from kids on this tour like, "Are we gonna start selling the old T-Shirts again," and things like that. There's a whole sort of Nitzer Ebb subculture of all the stuff that goes on, and it's getting towards that sort of time where we're being looked at as like the 'old men of the scene' and 'influential' and all this sort of stuff so it seems like the right time to maybe highlight that a little bit more; look back over our past.

Brian: I noticed the artwork on the new album and singles is by David Gooday. Is this the same David Gooday that helped to form the band originally?

Bon: The one, and the same!

Brian: Wow! So it seems as though Nitzer Ebb has come full circle almost, but he's not contributing to the sound at all?

Bon: No. He's just adding the artwork.

Brian: There's still a good relationship between you then?

Bon: Yeah, we're still friends, and it's kind of ironic because when we started in our hometown [Chelmsford, in Essex; just east of London], we envisaged this collective: while there are only three musicians, we had a graphic artist and a manager, but we tried to look at it as like a five-piece with only three performing musicians. With the advent of Big Hit, four of the original five people involved contributed to that record. David [Gooday] and Simon Granger, whose done all of our artwork, produced the sleeve, and Douglas and myself produce the music.

Brian: Do they ever visit you on tour?

Bon: They come to shows when we're in London, but they've got jobs and stuff so they can't really get away.

Brian: You spoke of maybe re-releasing your backcatalog. What's in store for the future? Will there be any more side projects such as Recoil, or maybe a live album?

Bon: Live stuff, we're not too sure about.

Brian: I know you've released a few on singles.

Bon: Right. I mean, maybe, those sort of projects are definitely appealing to us at the moment. In terms of side projects, I think that's very likely. There's a lot of things I'm interested in--especially with electronic music in terms of performance that I don't think anyone's doing. I think we're interested in production and maybe film soundtracks and things like that. Just kind of breaking the cycle of tour / album / tour / album and show a different side of yourself and branch out a little bit. I think that's quite an exciting thing to do, and then you can bring in fresh ideas back into the main project. I think a lot of that is on the cards. Just keep you're eyes glued to the Internet or whatever because a lot of these projects that we've talked about will probably be happening quite soon.

Brian: Well, hopefully everyone will get online and we won't have to worry with the record companies anymore! Thank you; I really appreciate your time!

Bon: You're superwelcome!