Jonny Melton knew that his club night Nag Nag Nag had reached some kind of tipping point when he peered out of the DJ booth and spotted 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 seems fair to say that a visit from Our Cilla was not what Melton expected when he started Nag Nag Nag in London in 2002. A former member of 80s goth band Specimen who DJed under the name Jonny Slut, he'd been inspired by a fresh wave of electronic music synchronously appearing in different locations around the world. Germany had feminist collective Chicks on Speed and DJ Hell 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 abandoned the alt-rock sound of her debut album Fancypants Hoodlum and, with the aid of a Roland MC-505 'groovebox', reinvented herself as Peaches. New York had performance art inspired duo Fischerspooner and a collection of artists centred around DJ and producer Larry Tee, who gave the sound a name: electroclash.
The lyrics tended to be witty, occasionally foul-mouthed and very camp. The sound had house music, techno, 80s synth-pop and electro in its DNA, but boasted a rough-hewn, punky edge, the latter partly down to attitude and partly down to the era'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 reaction to something. In Britain, it felt a world apart from the increasingly slick dance scene of superclubs and superstar 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 bedroom, '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 an answer to – superclubs or rock's traditional patriarchy – electroclash seemed to find an audience quickly. It wasn't the only music Melton and his fellow DJs played at Nag Nag Nag – as underlined by a new 5CD box set, When the 2000s Clashed, they were equally wont to drop old punk singles, early industrial music or the Neptunes' exploratory R&B – but electroclash was the club's sonic backbone, and the night was an immediate success. Boosted by approving reviews first in the gay press, then the style magazines, its initial clientele – 'a few old goths and some art students in their mum's old curtains,' according to Melton – were soon 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, better known as electroclash artist Peaches.
