‘The epitome of amazingness’: how electroclash introduced glamour, filth and enjoyable again to 00s music | Music

Jonny Melton knew that his membership evening Nag Nag Nag had reached some form of tipping level when he peered out of the DJ sales space and noticed Cilla Black on the dancefloor. “I think that’s the only time I got really excited,” he laughs. “I was playing the Tobi Neumann remix of Khia’s My Neck, My Back, too – ‘my neck, my back, lick my pussy and my crack’ – and there was Cilla, grooving on down. You know, it’s not Bobby Gillespie or Gwen Stefani, it’s fucking Cilla Black. I’ve got no idea how she ended up there, but I’ve heard since that she was apparently a bit of a party animal.”

It appears truthful to say {that a} go to from Our Cilla was not what Melton anticipated when he began Nag Nag Nag in London in 2002. A former member of 80s goth band Specimen who DJed below the identify Jonny Slut, he’d been impressed by a recent wave of digital music synchronously showing in several areas all over the world. Germany had feminist collective Chicks on Speed and DJ Hell together with his groundbreaking label International DeeJay Gigolos. France produced Miss Kittin and The Hacker, Vitalic and Electrosexual. Britain spawned icy electro-pop quartet Ladytron and noisy, sex-obsessed trio Add N To (X). Canada spawned Tiga and Merrill Nisker, who deserted the alt-rock sound of her debut album Fancypants Hoodlum and, with the help of a Roland MC-505 “groovebox”, reinvented herself as Peaches. New York had efficiency artwork impressed duo Fischerspooner and a group of artists centred round DJ and producer Larry Tee, who gave the sound a reputation: electroclash.

The lyrics tended to be witty, often foul-mouthed and really camp. The sound had home music, techno, 80s synth-pop and electro in its DNA, however boasted a rough-hewn, punky edge, the latter partly right down to perspective and partly right down to the period’s technological advances. “It isn’t like today, where you can take an idea to a playable version in five hours on a laptop,” says Larry Tee, “but you could record something releasable in your bedroom, you could get a Juno 106 [synthesizer] and alter the sounds and fry and burn them. I’m convinced the best electroclash tracks happened because people made mistakes, the levels were too loud or there was something wrong.”

It was audibly a response to one thing. In Britain, it felt a world aside from the more and more slick dance scene of superclubs and celebrity DJs. In New York, Larry Tee suggests it was a shift away from “trance and tribal house”. For Peaches, who had recorded her 2000 album The Teaches of Peaches in her bed room, “lying in bed, smoking weed, masturbating and making beats”, it was music made by “marginalised, queer people … who were fed up with a system that was telling us ‘rock music has to be by four beautiful boys down the line from the Rolling Stones, electronic music has to be completely serious like you’re doing brain surgery while turning buttons’. Where was the punk? And for me, I can’t think of another time in music history where women were so at the forefront – Chicks on Speed, Miss Kittin, Tracy + the Plastics. It’s always like, ‘This dude did this’, you know?”

Whatever it was a solution to – superclubs or rock’s conventional patriarchy – electroclash appeared to seek out an viewers shortly. It wasn’t the one music Melton and his fellow DJs performed at Nag Nag Nag – as underlined by a brand new 5CD field set, When the 2000s Clashed, they had been equally wont to drop outdated punk singles, early industrial music or the Neptunes’ exploratory R&B – however electroclash was the membership’s sonic spine, and the evening was a direct success. Boosted by approving evaluations first within the homosexual press, then the fashion magazines, its preliminary clientele – “a few old goths and some art students in their mum’s old curtains,” based on Melton – had been quickly joined by a succession of celebrities: Kate Moss, Alexander McQueen, Pet Shop Boys, Boy George, Björk. Perhaps inevitably, it attracted comparisons to celebrated New Romantic hangout the Blitz. “But there was no door policy, no guest list,” demurs Melton. “I didn’t want any of that exclusivity shit. It wasn’t posey at all, there was more a feeling of abandon. It was very hedonistic.”

“It was the epitome of amazingness, this incredible melting pot of every kind of character,” says Concetta Kirschner, higher often known as rapper Princess Superstar, who turned up at Nag Nag Nag whereas selling her 2002 UK hit Bad Babysitter. The membership had a direct influence on her sound. “It gave me a shot of freedom. I felt like there were a lot of tightly defined rules in hip-hop. But after Nag Nag Nag, I felt I could experiment, be whatever I wanted, rap over dance music or crazy new rhythms.”

The newly electroclash-adjacent Princess Superstar had a Top 3 hit with Perfect (Exceeder), a collaboration with Dutch producer Mason, nevertheless it was the exception that proved the rule. For all the thrill and press protection it generated, electroclash noticeably failed to provide a serious crossover star, though it wasn’t for need of making an attempt in some quarters. The Ministry of Sound’s report label famously spent huge sums signing New York duo Fischerspooner, however their debut album #1 didn’t catch mild. “Electroclash didn’t work in hygienic conditions,” provides Mark Wood, a DJ and Nag common behind the brand new field set. “It worked in clubs that were dark, hot, grubby, full of smoke, all sorts of things going on.”

Peaches, in the meantime, went out on tour as a help to arduous rock artists, together with Marilyn Manson and Queens of the Stone Age: their audiences, she says, had been “horrified”. “I think a lot of [electroclash artists] were offered these more traditional tours and thought ‘I can’t handle it’. On the Marilyn Manson tour I was spat on every night, but I rapidly developed some prank skills and some great one-liners.”

But in Britain no less than, electroclash entered the mainstream regardless, audibly impacting on the best way current pop stars sounded. Sugababes rebooted their profession with Freak Like Me, a Richard X-produced reimagining of the outdated Adina Howard hit backed by the music from Tubeway Army’s Are Friends Electric? Another Richard X mashup, Being Nobody, which melded Rufus and Chaka Khan’s Ain’t Nobody with the Human League’s Being Boiled, was a Top 3 hit for Popstars runners-up Liberty X. You might hear echoes of electroclash in Goldfrapp’s platinum-selling 2003 album Black Cherry, Rachel Stevens’ 2004 hit Some Girls and Madonna’s 2005 album Confessions on a Dance Floor. Even Fischerspooner ended up on Top of the Pops, within the firm of Kylie Minogue, performing their remix of Come Into My World.

In America, nonetheless, the motion provoked a backlash. “It was unfairly beaten up after three or four years,” says Larry Tee. “Electroclash was girls, gays and theys, the music industry didn’t really invest in those three categories, and I think they were as anxious to kill it as they were disco. I think the reason they wanted to burn electroclash so fast is that it didn’t really include that soccer bro culture, which EDM did.”

Nag Nag Nag ultimately closed its doorways in 2008 – the membership that hosted it, Ghetto, was demolished to make approach for the Crossrail improvement. It appeared symbolic of the top of one thing larger than electroclash. “It was Soho’s last stand as a grubby nightclub place – that’s all literally gone, everything moved east,” says Wood. “It was around the same time that smartphones arrived, which changed everything too. All that happened around the same time electroclash was being put to bed. Nothing lasts for ever if it’s worth having in pop music.”

But just lately, Jonny Melton observed one thing odd. He was being despatched new dance tracks that self-described as electroclash, whereas membership nights, together with London’s Shackled By Lust and Bloghouse, additionally use the time period to explain what’s on supply. “That would never have happened before,” he laughs. “At the time electroclash was like goth – no one who was in a goth a band would ever admit to being a goth band.”

Meanwhile, in 2023, Peaches launched into a tour performing her debut album: it was each rapturously acquired and attracted an viewers noticeably large on twentysomethings too younger to recollect its launch. Princess Superstar, whose “career sort of died” within the 2010s, has watched with baffled delight as her electroclash-era hits unexpectedly loved a brand new lease of life. First, Perfect (Exceeder) belatedly went gold within the US after it was used on the soundtrack of the 2023 film Saltburn. Then, final yr, her 2008 collaboration with Larry Tee, Licky, unexpectedly went viral on TikTook. “I think they thought it was by Britney Spears,” she says. “So I put a video up like, ‘Hey dudes’ and it all went crazy.”

She’s presently making new music, a few of it in collaboration with Frost Children, a US duo amongst a wave of youthful artists who bear the affect of electroclash: you possibly can hear its strains in Snow Strippers, Confidence Man and the Dare. Larry Tee, who’s presently planning an electroclash documentary, suggests there’s an affect within the music of each Lady Gaga and Charli xcx’s Brat.

The music on When the 2000s Clashed nonetheless sounds remarkably recent. Perhaps that truth that almost all of it remained underground, by no means dominating the singles chart or the radio playlists helped; so too does the truth that it’s knowledgeable by loads of concepts that had been subsequently mainstreamed: it was gender fluid earlier than anybody talked about gender fluidity, sex-positive earlier than anybody used that time period both. “I think the younger generation get it,” nods Larry Tee, “because it was like the resistance: we’ve had enough of homophobia, enough of misogyny. For a moment, the door was open.”